My Night With Reg, 28.8.14

Robert Hastie's well-performed twentieth anniversary Donmar production of Kevin Elyot's 1994 landmark gay comedy set in 1985, a 1950s parlour drama with added profanity, was played through without intervals.  The play had created a stir back in 1994 as the first "out" gay drama to hit the West End.  Is it picky to think it might have worked better if it had been a little more "in"?  Comic toasts ("Gross indecency!") exemplified a tendency to banality, while the play helped initiate the tendency of every subsequent 'gay play' to throw in some arbitrary full-frontal nudity to pull in the punters. 


Lewis Reeves' butt enlivened an otherwise
less than enthralling trip down memory lane

Elyot (who died in June, just before this production opened) dallied in the over-familiar territory of the English inability to communicate or engage emotionally.

Most of the characters, with the exception of the youngster, were stereotypes, exiled from youthful dreams of David Bowie by fear of imminent lonely middle-age, or worse.
 

Jonathon Broadbent's apron-clad Guy

Jonathon Broadbent was heavily-bespectacled and repressed Guy, the recipient of multiple well-intentioned cookbooks for one, ever the hostess and never the bride.  Floppy-haired Geoffrey Streatfeild was Daniel, Reg’s dandyish widow, forever running off to hop on planes to the other side of the world.  Old-Etonian Julian Ovenden (better-known from “Downton Abbey” and the son of HMQ’s former chaplain, no less) was public-school drifter John, one of Reg’s many bits-on-the-side, and the object of Guy’s excruciatingly undeclared affections. 
 
Relief from the tiresome Oxbridge-ness of these three came from Matt Bardock as Benny, a priapically blunt Cockney bus driver, and from Richard Cant's Bernie, a classic bore who banged-on about conservatories with an impressively nasal whine.  Twinkly-blue-eyed twenty-five-year-old blond Lewis Reeves was ingénu Brummie painter Eric, the least damaged and most appealing character (as well as the least clothed). 
 

Geoffrey Streatfield's flighty Daniel and
Julian Ovenden's vulnerable John

The central conceit was, of course, that the eponymously absent Reg had slept with them all (bar Eric) and had just been carried off by AIDS.  The unexpected plot twist was that it was the gentlest and least promiscuous character (given to donning Marigolds before any intimate encounter) who was unexpectedly next in line for the Grim Reaper.
 

Lewis Reeves as Eric, the one point of optimism
in a play misleadingly labelled a "comedy" 

Motley's feelings about the play were strangely unchanged from twenty years ago.  It was quite hard to stomach the depressing mixture of unfulfilled men, mundane text (characters constantly being offered refills) and low comedy ("Nuts anyone?", asked the gauchely 'Carry-On' host at his breathtakingly dull soirée), even without the looming threat from an unnamed killer virus.  It was also too well-manneredly English, summoning up little of the rage of Larry Kramer's "The Normal Heart", another early AIDS drama.
 
Elyot’s rancid view of gay men was unsentimental and reductive in more or less equal measure (though not entirely unfair, judging by post-production chat-room comments on the size of Mr Reeves’ equipment).  Improved social and medical conditions have fortunately allowed most gay men to move on from those terrible mid-Thatcher years – and not before time.  

Boyhood, 20.8.14

Mason Jnr (the 6 year old Ellar Coltrane) as we first saw him

Richard Linklater’s Berlin Silver Bear winner was a Bildungsroman examining how “time’s winged-chariot” deals with both children and parents.

Media coverage rightly focused on the extraordinary feat of filming the same fictional family, in cinema verité style, over twelve years. 

We watched Patricia Arquette (Mom) and Ethan Hawke (Dad - Mason Snr), unmarried American parents of modest means, split, move, marry, divorce, remarry and divorce again, while bringing up two children through this maelstrom of changing relationships.  Arquette was particularly impressive at conveying the low-key decency of a Mom who’s serially disappointed by men (“I thought there would be more”, she concludes - about life rather than men).
 

Mason Jnr's Mom (Patricia Arquette), who matures 
as much as either of her children

The eponymous boy Mason Jnr (Ellar Coltrane) went from six to eighteen before our eyes, in tandem with his slightly older sister Sam (played by Linklater’s own daughter Lorelei). 

Yet while we saw Mason Jnr grow up, for him, as for many teenagers, life was always elusively in the present tense (“It’s like it’s always right now”). 

Linklater’s typically Texan-set film was a languorous moody affair, more interested in the mundane realities of relationships and family life than broader social issues.  There were a few topical references to Iraq and the 2008 Obama campaign (Dad swiped some McCain billboards).  Many of the rites of passage were specifically American: baseball and bowling with Dad and a, to European eyes, creepy vignette where Mason Jnr was given a shotgun for his fifteenth birthday by doting bible-bashing hick step-grandparents.  A few more troubling episodes apart (for instance when Mom was beaten up by her alcoholic second partner), the focus of the movie was on showing children's personalities developing - not least in opposition to adults’ frequently cack-handed attempts to guide them.

Finally accepting responsibility:  Dad (Ethan Hawke)
takes his son away for one of many single-parent weekends

Linklater ‘s trademark mood of slightly bemused directionlessness, memorably essayed in “Dazed and Confused” as long ago as 1993, was repeated here at deliberate length.  The pace of the 2 ¾ hour screen time occasionally flagged but the film worked far better than Terrence Mallick’s “Tree of Life”, which tried to cover similar territory more impressionistically.

The universality of the theme, despite the particularities of the American setting, virtually guaranteed a positive audience response, helped by Linklater’s refusal to sensationalise.  Motley had two main cavils. Firstly, with the exception of one Hispanic, there was no attempt to represent America as the melting-pot that it is, with African-Americans in particular conspicuously absent.  Secondly, as many others have commented, flick was mis-titled and should have been called “Family” or “Motherhood”, since it was as much about Mom, Dad and the Sister as about the Boy. 

"The Three Ages of Boy":
Mason Jnr at 6, 14 and 18

That said, compared to the pap that Hollywood generally churns out, kudos is due to the “auteur of Austin” for a sensitive, acute and authentic portrayal, from admirably multiple perspectives, of the transfer of the baton between the generations.