The Nelligan Variations, CBC Radio Two "OnStage" (Note: See follow-up to this review on page "Aug 2/10")

This seemed ideal for listening to while lying in bed on a Sunday afternoon, laid low by a mild flu. The Quebecois poet, Emile Nelligan has always held a special spot in my heart. One of my professors in the seminary used to stand at the front of the class and intone Nelligan's poetry in such beautiful French that I still remember some of the lines. And there's a kind of mythic, heroic/tragic aura about this doomed young man who had written all his poetry by the age of 19 and who spent the next 40 years of his life in a mental hospital, dying in 1941.

At first, the choice of La Bottine Souriante to provide the music for this drama about Nelligan's life struck me as wildly inappropriate. Granted, there's the Quebec connection but the sensibilities of the forlorn poet and this toe-tapping kitchen band could not be further apart. Surely Chopin would have been more to the point? Well, we did eventually get a few plaintive Chopin preludes in the background and occasionally La Bottine struck the right note -- for instance when Nelligan was living it up with his buddies -- but the band's presence in the program seemed  yet another instance of the CBC's insistence on popularizing arts programming in some bizarre ways.

Rejean J. Cournoyer as Nelligan chanted his role in a breathy flight of passion, which, arguably, suited the material, but I would have liked his feet to touch the ground now and then. In any case, there was far too much of the purple poetry and not enough of the life. Maybe it's the problem of translation, but the effusively narcissistic poetry was not as appealing as I'd remembered it. Marie-Helene Fontaine and Dennis O’Connor as Nelligan's mother and father cut through all the rhetoric with welcome doses of common sense.

It was a clever and economical device for writer Michel Basilieres to choose to tell the poet's story through just three voices. Except that M. Basilieres didn't tell the story! As I have long understood it, the main reason for Nelligan's incarceration in the asylum was his family's and the Church's horror of his homosexuality. Granted, there were other reasons: he did apparently have some psychotic episodes. But the whole point of the story of his life, as I understand it, is that the conflict over his sexuality was what led to his breakdown and his banishment. M. Basilieres may have felt that other dramatizations made too much of Nelligan’s sexuality; fair enough, but why skip over it so lightly?

In this dramatization, we were left to infer the whole business. (Unless I dozed off at the crucial moment.) There were hints about Verlaine and Rimbaud, and complaints about Nelligan’s spending too much time with his pals. Oh yes, there were his parents’ mutterings about his shameful behaviour and the effect it might have on his sisters. But we are left pretty much to guess what was going on. This is like giving Hamlet without the regicide that launches the tragedy.

Apparently, this is what passes for political correctness at the CBC these days: not to mention someone's sexuality, presumably on the grounds that it's irrelevant. That would be defensible if someone's sexuality were truly irrelevant to the matters at hand, say, in the case of some gay politicians today. But in Nelligan's case, the conflict over his sexuality was very relevant to his tragedy, as I understand it. Maybe the CBC's mandate for revamping everything is to do drama with the drama excised.

The Assassination of Richard Nixon (movie)

Let's say you've been finding life far too pleasant and enjoyable lately. You’re looking for something to kick the happy out of you. This could be the movie you need. Based to some extent on actual events, it charts the machinations of one Sam Bicke, a loser-ish, would-be salesman who comes up with a grandiose scheme (check the title) to prove that even "one tiny grain of sand on the beach of life" can have an huge impact.

What makes this story so depressing is that Sam, as played by Sean Penn, isn’t your average wacko. He’s essentially a decent guy – not to say that he’s over-endowed with charm or intelligence – who can’t understand why he keeps losing out on the American dream. There’s a kind of innocence about him. For instance, the thing that gets in the way of his being a good salesman is that he can’t stand the lying. (Mind you that doesn't preclude a bit of larceny on his part.) You can see that he’s still torn apart by love for his estranged wife and kids. The whole movie unrolls in flashback as Sam's narration of his story into a tape that he’s sending to Leonard Bernstein. Why him as confessor? Because Sam finds Maestro Bernstein’s performances of Beethoven so pure.

Sean Penn has some great scenes as this frustrated little guy. The routine that he performs to get a loan from a skeptical bank manager is a virtuoso bit of shtick. His final encounter with a boss who fired him is mesmerizing. And yet, I can never quite forget that I'm watching the great Sean Penn. He never seems to fade into the ordinary guy the script calls for. Maybe that’s because he sometimes seems to be acting a bit too much: too many ticks and mannerisms. That cagey, revealing smile comes just when you think it should, rather than when you're not expecting it.

Some of the actors in smaller parts are terrifically convincing. Jack Thompson plays Sam's boss, a beefy heart-attack-waiting-to-happen, a guy who's not particularly honest or well-meaning, but not an especially bad guy either -- in other words, a very real person. I didn't catch the name of the actor who plays Sam's older brother. He has only one scene but he brings to it a complex but entirely credible bundle of feelings: thwarted affection, regret, and, ultimately, contempt.

The movie re-creates the ambiance of 1974 Baltimore with lots of authentic detail (rotary phones, gawdawful clothes, big-boat automobiles) with a few exceptions. Did people who had very little income actually inhabit such expansive houses and apartments in those days? Also, in the 1970s people had not yet developed the habit of prefacing hostile remarks with "Y'know what...." And the expression "Get a life" had not yet got a life.

Those quibbles aside, you want to give this movie high marks because it's so relentlessly honest and unsentimental. There's no pandering to the Hollywood market here. But it's so damned bleak. With a really great tragedy, you come away feeling that you've learned something, that you've had a healing catharsis. I can't say that happens here. It all feels so hopeless; the violence of the ending is brutal and senseless.

You keep wondering why everything had to go so badly for Sam. Could anything have been done to stop his downward spiral? At one point, his brother says that Sam always was strange. Is that all there was to it? Maybe there aren’t any satisfying answers, but the fact that the movie makes you ask those questions counts for a lot with me.

Rating: C

The Red Queen (Novel) by Margaret Drabble, 2004

This sounds like a terrific idea for a novel. You discover the translated memoirs of an actual Crown Princess of Korea who lived about 200 years ago. The first part of your book will be an interpolation and expansion of those memoirs. The second part of the novel will focus on a female British academic who reads the memoirs while on a flight to Korea for a conference. She becomes obsessed with the Princess and visits various locations associated with her life.

Surely the account of the Princess' life will make for exciting reading, what with all the intrigue at court, the arcane customs and the fact that her husband went mad and was killed by his father? Not necessarily. In Ms. Drabble's rendering there are some interesting details about court life but, after a while, the Princess’ voice gets a bit tiresome. She is really not a very good story teller. Maybe she never heard Ernest Hemmingway's "show, don't tell," dictum. For instance, there's hardly any dialogue. Another problem could be that the Princess was, inescapably, rather passive. Given the strictures of court decorum, she could hardly lift a finger to change her fate, so we feel as if we're watching everything from behind a thick glass wall. The story never really engages us.

The second part of the book reads a little better, partly because the contemporary context feels a bit less contrived – except for the hokum the British woman’s being inhabited by the spirit of the dead Princess. Although the book ends with a "life affirming" message, there isn't a whole lot of point to the British woman's wanderings and musings. Maybe some middle-aged female readers will find more to identify with here but, for me, this section of the book reads as not much more than a high-brow travelogue, with a bit of flutter about a brief love affair.

 In a prologue and various notes at the back of the book, Ms. Drabble makes it clear that she was mightily excited on discovering the memoirs of the Crown Princess. Somehow, her enthusiasm hasn't translated very well into a novel. To me, this says something about the process of writing and publishing today. You're a big name writer, you get an idea for a book, a few months later, there's the manuscript, sometime in the next year there's the book, out it goes to the stores and your public snaps it up. Does anybody along the way stop to ask whether the book works or whether it has anything worthwhile to say? Apparently not. All that matters is that it will probably sell well enough because you're a big name.

This is not to dump on Ms. Drabble whose books have given me great pleasure in the past. She is undoubtedly doing her job the best she can; I'm not implying there's any charlatanism involved. But sometimes even a good writer's sincere effort isn't good enough. In this case, thankfully, we don't have to lament the trees chopped down because the book, at least the Canadian edition, is published on paper that is "ancient-forest friendly, 100% post-consumer recycled".