Bette Midler makes her long-awaited return to Broadway in one-woman show about Hollywood superagent (photo by Richard Termine)
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Friday – Wednesday, $87 – $152
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In her long-awaited return to the Great White Way, the Divine Miss M inhabits the role of Hollywood superagent Sue Mengers in the one-woman show I’ll Eat You Last. Midler, making her first nonconcert Broadway appearance since 1967, when she played Tzeitel in Fiddler on the Roof, is, well, simply divine as the aggressive, ultra-determined Mengers, who was both loved and hated while tirelessly working for such big-time clients as Julie Harris, Steve McQueen, Ali McGraw, Gene Hackman, Faye Dunaway, and Ryan O’Neal. Midler spends ninety minutes as Mengers, wearing a lovely sparkly blue caftan designed by Ann Roth, lounging on a couch in Scott Pask’s elegant living-room set, drinking, smoking, and cursing as she shares intimate moments from her life and career while waiting for a critical phone call from her number one client, Barbra Streisand. She even invites an audience member onstage to get her some booze and a cigarette, revealing her power to get men to do her bidding. Unfortunately, John Logan has not given Midler much of a play to work with. The show is subtitled A Chat with Sue Mengers, and that’s pretty much exactly what it is: a mere chat, not a Broadway production. Logan, who has penned such films as The Last Samurai, Hugo, Rango, Star Trek: Nemesis, and The Aviator in addition to Red, for which he won a Tony, was inspired to write I’ll Eat You Last after meeting Mengers at a 2008 dinner party. His script contains plenty of funny one-liners but is primarily superficial and reverential, paying tribute to Mengers, who died in 2011 at the age of seventy-nine, in a series of worshipful anecdotes that don’t quite come full circle. Midler is delightful gossiping about such Hollywood celebs as McGraw, McQueen, producer Bob Evans, and director William Friedkin, but this chat is more of a pleasing appetizer than a full, satisfying meal.
A lot of documentaries wear their hearts on their sleeves, pushing a specific agenda, but as far as agenda go, A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle for a Living Planet has a pretty good one. Directed by Mark Kitchell (Berkeley in the Sixties), the film serves not only as a history of the environmental movement around the world but also demonstrates how one person can indeed make a difference. But the hundred-minute documentary does itself no favors by using several narrators who are certain to infuriate conservative Republicans and naysayers, ensuring that the film is most likely going to preach only to the converted and not spread its vital message to a more mainstream audience. A Fierce Green Fire is divided into five thematic sections, narrated by Robert Redford, Ashley Judd, Van Jones, Isabel Allende, and Meryl Streep, respectively. Using archival footage and new interviews, Kitchell examines David Brower and the Sierra Club’s fight to prevent a dam project in the Grand Canyon; Lois Gibbs’s struggle to prove the alarming health problems at Love Canal; Paul Watson, Sea Shepherd, and Greenpeace’s mission to save the whales; Chico Mendes’s bravery trying to protect the Amazon rainforest; and the continuing controversy over climate change as seen through the work of such activist organizations as Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest. Inspired by Philip Shabecoff’s 1993 book, the film features such talking heads as Whole Earth Catalog publisher Stewart Brand, Earth Day organizer Doug Scott, NRDC founder John Adams, former Sierra Club leader Carl Pope, environmental justice advocate Robert Bullard, Greenpeace cofounder Rex Weyler, WWF conservation biologist Thomas Lovejoy, and legendary naturalist Bill McKibben in addition to Gibbs, Hawken, and Watson. While it’s fascinating to learn that the environmental movement really took off once NASA broadcast images of the earth taken from space, revealing the beautiful fragility of the planet, much of the documentary is told in a fairly stagnant manner, more like an expanded news report than a theatrical film. Still, it shares some intriguing insights and, in celebrating a group of individuals from around the world who fought the power (and sometimes even won), goes a long way in showing that every little step matters. A Fierce Green Fire: is screening May 12 & 19 at 8:00 as part of the ongoing Symphony Space series Thalia Docs.
Baz Luhrmann’s sumptuous version of The Great Gatsby is a dazzling reimagining of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel of old and new money and the American dream. The Australian director and his wife, costume and production designer extraordinaire Catherine Martin, have turned the classic tale into a lush spectacle without losing focus on the main story of life and love during the Roaring Twenties. Leonardo DiCaprio, who played the male lead in Lurhmann’s contemporary take on Romeo + Juliet, is superb as Jay Gatsby, the mystery man previously portrayed by Warner Baxter in 1926, Alan Ladd in 1949, Robert Redford in 1974, and Toby Stephens in 2000, adding a compelling level of vulnerability to the character. Gatsby has built a magnificent palace for himself on Long Island, hosting wild parties that he doesn’t care about; all he truly wants is Daisy (Carey Mulligan), a former love who has married successful businessman Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton) and lives in a mansion right across the bay. The villainous Tom is having an affair with the lower-class Myrtle Wilson (Isla Fisher), whose unaware husband, George (Jason Clarke), runs a gas station and garage in the Valley of Ashes. Although a loner, Gatsby befriends his neighbor, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), a young, innocent bond trader who rents a modest home at the base of Gatsby’s enormous estate and whose cousin just happens to be Daisy. As Carraway is sucked into this glamorous, debauched society, which also includes wild and elegant golf champion Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki), he is forced to reexamine his own hopes and dreams as he tries to find his place in the world.
Jean-Pierre Léaud gives a bravura performance in Jean Eustache’s New Wave classic about love and sex in Paris following the May 1968 cultural revolution. Léaud stars as Alexandre, a jobless, dour flaneur who rambles on endlessly about politics, cinema, music, literature, sex, women’s lib, and lemonade while living with current lover Marie (Bernadette Lafont), obsessing over former lover Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten), and starting an affair with new lover Veronika (Françoise Lebrun), a quiet nurse with a rather open sexual nature. The film’s three-and-a-half-hour length will actually fly by as you become immersed in the complex characters, the fascinating dialogue, and the excellent acting. Much of the film consists of long takes in which Alexandre shares his warped view of life and art in small, enclosed spaces, the static camera focusing either on him or his companion. Someone at BAM has a wicked sense of humor, as The Mother and the Whore is screening on Mother’s Day at 2:30 & 7:00 as part of the BAMcinématek series “Booed at Cannes,” consisting of films that did not exactly thrill the Cannes glitterati but have gone on to gain their own unique reputations, including Maurice Pialat’s Under the Sun of Satan, Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse, David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, and David Cronenberg’s Crash.