The Designated Mourner

This is a very funny film, especially for anyone who has been to a University party with self congratulatory, self aggrandising pretentious smart alecs. The whole film is done in the same 'high-brow' style whether it is the weepy self pity and anguish of Judy or the prurient, ignorant, though arguably more accessible filth of Jack. This is VERY trying, it is what turns most people off the film but is also entirely the point. This film would have been better served if it had been a lot shorter as it would have made the same points and been more accessible at the same time. The main benefit of it's length is the increased time to include the snappy one liners that helped to lighten the mood of the monotony.

Three characters sit at table, taking turns speaking directly to the camera, talking of courage and cowardice in a time of repression, in an unspecified yet intuitively recognizable place and time not far from our own.

Shawn's virtuoso writing (far more nuanced than a short summary can convey) meditates on the hairsplitting liberal in us all, as 'the last people who really understand John Donne' are casually wiped out in the interest of 'fighting terrorism'.

As for the lack of action: yes, maybe it's really a radio play, but every actor or actress should *see* Mike Nichols, who gives an extraordinary, one-of-a-kind performance. Particularly, he breaks all the rules of "actor's diction," so he sounds just like a *real* person (say, being interviewed for a documentary). Not an effect you can use just anywhere, but brilliant here.

What does it mean to be an intellectual? is it a facade comprised of book-learned knowledge, some peripheral understanding of poetry, art, and literature that are ultimately the persona known to others as one's self? Or is it the inner core of a person who possesses not simply a mere knowledge, but rather engages in communal understanding with the work of art, living and experiencing it? These are some of the many questions that this film raises. What these three actors -- who sit at a table, talking into the camera -- manage to accomplish is beyond my comprehension. If you like writers like Joyce or Kafka, if you enjoy poetry and intellectual stimulation in general, you will most likely appreciate this picture.

'The Designated Mourner', a play by Wallace Shawn, is above all else an exercise in writing. Three people (in this adaptation by David Hare, sat statically throughout in one of two locations, one of which appears to be a television news desk, the other a table in a small café), discuss their relationship. But although they respond to each other in tone, they rarely directly address the subject material that the others refer to; and the wider backdrop to their personal story, a crypto-fascist coup, is mentioned only elliptically by all three participants, just as it might be in real conversation where certain things would be taken as known. But there's little that's naturalistic or conventionally conversational about these carefully constructed interlaced monologues; they better represent the inner voices of self-justification (or alternatively, the voices of published autobiography). In spite of the artifice, one does develop a sophisticated sense for the nuances of the trio's characters; everyone has an agenda, and deciphering the three unreliable narrators is exactly the point. Thi particular film of the play is well acted, and it's probably sensible that Hare has chosen to add very little to the basic script (having made this decision, almost his only work as director is to choose when to cut between alternative close-ups). But while theatre has to work within certain intrinsic limitations (and offers you the benefits of live performance as a compensation), cinema does not and in this sense, this seems a strange work to put on screen. Nonetheless, it's still an interesting experiment, and worth watching if you like your drama wordy and cerebral.

"The Designated Mourner" is obviously not a cinema film in any meaningful sense. It is a play staged for cinema recording. Three characters and a table; that is the amount of it. None of the characters interact, instead directly addressing the camera. Perhaps this is boring, if visual stimulation is a requirement of cinema, but yet it seemed utterly compelling to me.

The performances from all three of the cast are riveting, but it is Nichols who raises this above the usual public-subsidised arty nonsense. He is quite simply revelatory. As a man whom most know for his directorial work, the depth of the performance is a great surprise. Very possibly his almost "non-acting" style could be attributed to the fact that he is not a professional *film* actor, but the naturalistic style he employs lends his character such a gravity. It is almost documentary in it's sincerity. Jack is a deeply flawed man, in many ways a reprehensible man, who merely assumes the intellectual values of those around him while in fact cultivating considerable distaste for his high-brow friends. He is, though, often a very funny man and it never becomes impossible to understand or empathise with him. His epiphany at the climax of the film, surrounded by cheap magazines and pornography, is completely heart-breaking. As the title of the film begins to make a terrible, Orwellian sense, we are left with nothing but this broken man, lamenting unavoidable actions in which he seems almost complicit.

This is certainly an important piece of work, if perhaps not an important *film*, if nothing else, it will give people who may never have the chance to see the play staged the opportunity to see it performed.