February Books

Having assured us that we are in good hands, Schwartz nevertheless warns that it will be “quite possible to read all three hundred and sixty-three pages of Butler’s book and still be unable to define exactly what the Method is. That’s not a dig. Just when you think you have the thing pinned down, it changes. A technique becomes an attitude; the attitude becomes an aura—or an affect.” Like a good number of reviewers, the Atlantic’s Jordan Kisner pulls a key quote from the book in which Butler describes the Method as “a transformative, revolutionary, modernist art movement, one of the Big Ideas of the twentieth century. Like atonality in music, or modernism in architecture, or abstraction in art, the ‘system’ and the Method brought forth a new way of conceiving of human experience, one that changed how we look at the world, and at ourselves.”

Butler’s story begins in 1897, when actor Konstantin Stanislavski and director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko met for lunch and wound up talking into the night, laying the groundwork for what would become the Moscow Art Theater. Stanislavski developed a system in which actors called up sensory memories of various emotional states they had experienced in their own lives and applied them to their performances. “Experiencing does not mean to fully become the character, or to lose sight of the self,” writes Butler. “Instead, the actor’s living consciousness and the fictional consciousness of the part they are playing meet.”

In an excerpt from the book at Vulture, Butler writes about a crucial turning point in the history of the Method when, in the public eye at least, the baton passed from early practitioners such as John Garfield and Marlon Brando to the young James Dean. “Accusations of copying Brando and Montgomery Clift dogged Dean’s brief career, in part because they were true,” writes Butler. “In both East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause, Dean copies Brando’s voice and mannerisms, sprinkling them with a tablespoon or two of Montgomery Clift. In Dean’s hands, Brando’s and Clift’s performances are distilled into stylistic tics divorced from the substance that lent them their original power . . . By imitating the actors who had come before him, he transformed the Method from an approach into a style, and his performances shifted the Method subject from adulthood to late adolescence.”

In the twenty-first century, few performers are taking lessons directly from Stanislavski, or for that matter, from his dueling successors, Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler. But as Time’s Stephanie Zacharek writes, “what we think of as modern American acting—the unruly inventiveness of Joaquin Phoenix, the introspective grandeur of Viola Davis—even if it’s not Method acting, still owes a debt to the Method and its adherents: from them, we learned to appreciate and even expect performances that feel committed and real, that breathe.”

On a recent episode of Slate’s Culture Gabfest, Butler joked that Michael Schulman’s much-discussed profile of Jeremy Strong, who plays Kendall Roy on HBO’s Succession, in a December issue of the New Yorker seemed timed to promote his book. Brian Cox, who plays Kendall’s father, Logan Roy, tells Schulman: “It’s a particularly American disease, I think, this inability to separate yourself off while you’re doing the job.” In Putting the Rabbit in the Hat: A Memoir, Cox “confides” that “he doesn’t really relate to the intense, Method-like ‘process’ that Jeremy Strong uses to get into the character,” notes Alexandra Jacobs in the New York Times. Turning to the book as a whole, Jacobs finds that Cox “can ramble on a bit,” but at seventy-five, he’s “a seasoned workhorse finally able to enjoy a victory gallop.”

In films such as Michael Sarnoski’s Pig, Nicolas Cage has given us subtly gauged performances, but over the course of four decades, he has also, of course, “delivered performances of such furious spectacle that they transcend the humanity they represent,” as Dan Piepenbring writes in Harper’s. “To see him react is to wonder if you’ve ever really felt, or could feel, anything so deeply, and if you’d want to.” In Age of Cage: Four Decades of Hollywood Through One Singular Career, Keith Phipps “eschews biography for filmography, setting the actor against the vicissitudes of an uncaring Hollywood to reveal much about both.”

Piepenbring notes that in Cage’s travel diary for Details, he “mythologized himself as ‘a heat-seeking panther,’ ‘a glow-in-the-dark rollercoaster,’ and ‘a hard-on.’ He asked to have hot yogurt poured over his toes to prepare for a sex scene, and, making The Cotton Club, he smashed up his trailer and a street vendor’s remote-control car. Cage seemed determined to turn Method acting into Method trolling . . . Self-absorption, self-awareness, self-parody: if anyone can hit the trifecta it’s Cage, who reaches for the zenith and the nadir with the same hand. Phipps has a deft sense of these highs and lows, but he doesn’t touch—and I can’t blame him—the question of what Cage stands for.”

At the opposite end of the scale, Sarah Polley, who launched her acting career at the age of four, has won accolades not only for her measured performances in such films as Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter (1997), but also for directing Julie Christie in Away from Her (2006) and Michelle Williams in Take This Waltz (2011) and for exploring her family’s convoluted history in her 2012 documentary Stories We Tell. If Polley ever felt the need to call up a traumatic memory, she wouldn’t have to reach far.

For the New York Times, Dave Itzkoff talks with Polley about her new collection of autobiographical essays, Run Towards the Danger. The title is taken from the advice a doctor gave her when she was recovering from a severe concussion. Rather than avoid the pain and nausea caused by normal levels of light and noise, she was to seek out and embrace the discomfort. Six years on, “I’m better than I was before the concussion,” she tells Itzkoff.

In Run Towards the Danger, Polley writes about the terror she experienced as an eight-year-old actor on the set of Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) and escaping an abusive relationship with a radio host when she was sixteen. “To be reintroduced to her world with such detail and such a brilliant sense of self-observation, so many years later, was really shocking,” Egoyan tells Itzkoff. When Polley was seventeen, she asked Margaret Atwood for permission to adapt her 1996 novel Alias Grace, a project that was finally realized in 2017. “I think actors are trained to go to the emotion in them that is most suitable for their character at that moment,” says Atwood. “But being candid doesn’t mean that you always know what the truth is. Being candid can also mean, I’ve got no idea. Did I really feel that? What was really going on?”

Writing for the London Review of Books, David Trotter practically ignores Robert Gottlieb’s Garbo, the latest biography of the “iconically iconic” Greta Garbo. Instead, Trotter elaborates on his own theory: “When Garbo withdrew from the star system, withdrawal became—for a time—the definition of stardom.”

For Vanity Fair, Hadley Hall Meares revisits a slew of memoirs written over the years by the “Barrymore clan, stars of the stage and screen since the eighteenth century . . . Incorrigible hams, deeply intellectual, and full of exaggerated self-loathing, their numerous autobiographies make two things clear: They have and had enormous pride in their family’s history, but fully recognized that their genius came at a steep price.”

British actor Herbert Arthur Chamberlayne Blythe, known to the public as Maurice Barrymore, and Georgiana Emma Drew, the American star of several Broadway hits, had three children: Lionel, Ethel, and John. Lionel’s We Barrymores “proves to be the most revealing and sensitive of the family’s autobiographies,” finds Meares, noting that “he spends much of the book trying to unravel the tragedy of John, his frequent partner in drinking and onscreen one-upmanship.” John’s Confessions of an Actor “reveals nothing profound but his own self-loathing.” Ethel’s “delightful” Memoirs “focuses primarily on her glory days as a Gibson Girl fashion plate, when it seemed everyone—including Winston Churchill—was madly in love with her.”

John’s daughter Diana wrote a “legendary tell-all” in 1957. “Half Peyton Place, half Go Ask Alice, Too Much, Too Soon unfolds like a Douglas Sirk melodrama on steroids,” writes Meares. In 1990, Drew Barrymore, John’s granddaughter, wrote Little Girl Lost, a self-portrait that is “worlds away from the wholesome, effervescent Drew of her most recent memoir, 2015’s Wildflower.”

For the New York Review of Books, Andrew O’Hagan writes about Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna, a collection of Wilder’s early journalism edited by Noah Isenberg and translated by Shelley Frisch, and Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge, the latest book from film historian Joseph McBride. “When considering Wilder’s evolution, the journey from interwar stylist to hard-bitten realist, from European idealist to American social critic, one has to follow what happened to the writers in his head,” writes O’Hagan. “Not only the writer and journalist he was himself—it was Truffaut who said that you can tell a lot about directors from their first jobs—but also those professional wordsmiths who appear, at least theoretically, to be so crucial to the business of democracy. Wilder portrays such ugliness as he can imagine, and he plays, in many of his films, on the mass audience’s capacity for enjoying the squalor of high-minded intentions.”

In Suite for Barbara Loden, Nathalie Léger “desperately needs Wanda-who-is-Barbara to reflect on her own life and, turning her into an insubstantial being, she makes her opaque,” writes Adèle Cassigneul for the Los Angeles Review of Books. With Still Life: Notes on Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970), Anna Backman Rogers “pushes back against that kind of obsessive and sentimental reading to offer an invigorating reviewing of Loden’s film. When Léger seems only interested in the psyche and interiority she seeks to decipher, Rogers holds on to a meticulous analysis of Loden’s radical cinematographic gesture.”

Last month, we took a look at early reviews of Dana Stevens’s Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century and James Curtis’s Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life. Both writers “have done well to bring the boy with the funeral expression back from the dead,” writes David Kemp in the New York Times. Buster was the son of vaudevillians Joe and Mira Keaton, and Curtis, “who has also written mighty biographies of Preston Sturges, James Whale, W. C. Fields and Spencer Tracy, does a delightful job of capturing the old, weird America in which the Keatons plied their trade,” writes Kemp. Literary Hub has an excerpt from that early chapter.

Slate, in the meantime, is running a generous excerpt from Camera Man in which Stevens writes that “when I think of the female talent that was draining from the film business just as Keaton was entering it, the face that comes to mind is Mabel Normand’s: that cameo-ready oval with huge dark eyes; a nervous, gummy smile; and the mobile features of a born comedienne who, if things had gone differently, might have had a life as long and a filmography as lasting as Keaton’s, Chaplin’s, or Lloyd’s.” For more on Camera Man, see Seth Katz’s review of this “disarmingly personal book” at Slant and Nell Minow’s for RogerEbert.com, where Sheila O’Malley interviews Stevens. And at the Ringer, Larry Wilmore talks with Curtis.

In the Washington Post, Wendy Smith calls Charles J. Shields’s Lorraine Hansberry: The Life Behind A Raisin in the Sun “a solid introduction to this important American artist and social critic.” Hansberry, the first Black female writer to have a play on Broadway, was also a journalist and activist whose To Be Young, Gifted and Black was, as Shields notes in an excerpt at Air Mail, an “informal autobiography” assembled from notes and diaries after her death in 1965 by her husband, Robert Nemiroff. The book, which became a play, inspired Nina Simone’s 1969 song, and of course, Daniel Petrie directed the 1961 adaptation of A Raisin in the Sun starring Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee.

Erich Schwartzel’s Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy is “the story of the nexus that formed when Hollywood realized it needed China’s cash, and China realized it could first manipulate—and then appropriate—Hollywood’s special gifts for enchantment, coercion, lifestyle control, and inducing audiences to tear up,” writes James Parker in the New York Times. “This is a fascinating book. It will educate you. Schwartzel has done some extraordinary reporting, and a lot of legwork.” Air Mail has an excerpt from this one, too: “In 1997, Richard Gere made a movie that would, more than a decade later, kill his career as an above-the-line star.” When he testified before Congress in the summer of 2020, Gere said: “Imagine Martin Scorsese’s Kundun or my own film, Red Corner, being made today. It simply would not happen.”

The recent passing of Peter Bogdanovich has prompted John Bleasdale to call up Ben Slater to talk about his 2006 book Kinda Hot: The Making of Saint Jack in Singapore. Ben Gazzara starred in Bogdanovich’s 1979 film as an American hustler with plans to strike it rich by opening a brothel.

At the Film Stage, Christopher Schobert talks with New York Times awards season columnist Kyle Buchanan about his new book, Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road. Buchanan has stories to tell about interviewing George Miller and Charlize Theron, and he’s already looking forward to Furiosa, a prequel starring Anya Taylor-Joy. “And one hopes that this time, because of what they delivered with Fury Road,” he says, “there won’t be this feeling that they have to be on the defense as much as they had to be during Fury Road with executives and actors who didn’t understand the vision. The vision is clear now, so they deserve to have that wind at their backs. I’m excited to see what they can do with it.”