In The Designated Mourner, three people sit and spill out their lives to the camera -- and a marriage, a family, and Western Civilization collapse into a cosmic death rattle. Transferring Wallace Shawn's fascinating, convoluted drama to celluloid, the British playwright David Hare has barely directed it. To carry it, he relies on the virtuosity of his star: Mike Nichols. The director of comedy hits from The Graduate to The Birdcage here performs on-screen for the first time since the improv-comedy team of Nichols and Elaine May cavorted on TV. (It's his first acting at all since he co-starred with May in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? onstage in 1980.)
Luckily, Nichols does carry it. He delivers a protean portrait of an educated yet hollow and debased Everyman. In a film acting debut that makes other movie performances look like puny dry runs, he locks us into the melodious whining of the anti-hero, Jack, a "former student of English literature who went downhill from there." Jack, his wife, Judy (Miranda Richardson), and her poet-intellectual father, Howard (David de Keyser), describe both a marital and a political catastrophe -- a crackdown on dissident thinkers in the unnamed country where the piece takes place. Judy and Howard become martyrs; Jack drops them at crisis point. Together, they generate an apocalyptic heat. You may get restless, and wince at Howard's smugness or Jack's loathsomeness, but Nichols is so magnetically, infuriatingly entertaining that you can't tune out anything he says. You grow addicted to his verbal buzz.
His wife, Judy, is bleakly thinking of him when she tells us, "You have to admit that human motivation is not complex, or it's complex only in the same sense that the motivation of a fly is complex. In other words, if you try to swat a fly, it moves out of the way. And humans are the same." Judy and Howard, progressives and connoisseurs, are the exceptions who prove the rule -- they hang onto their beliefs and await mortal blows. Morally, Jack is an insect, or, as he puts it, a rat.
What makes his story stunning is that Nichols and Shawn illuminate how this ethical speck of a person can be emotionally and intellectually complicated. Jack's motivation is straightforward: He wants to survive. But the observations and gut reactions that funnel into his decision to abandon his politically dangerous wife and father-in-law are multifarious -- and on-target. He sees through the snobbery and sadism that mar Howard's intellectuality and render Judy's devotion to her dad futile and poignant. Indeed, Nichols is never more deliciously sarcastic than when Jack describes Howard's resentments: "Why, it was just outrageous! You know, a month after his very favorite little espresso bar in the park had been closed for good, they'd cut down his favorite grove of trees!"
At times Nichols echoes the querulous upper-sinus-passage symphonies of Shawn the actor. (As a performer, Shawn is beloved in art circles for My Dinner With Andre, which he also co-wrote, and Vanya on 42nd Street; in pop circles for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Clueless.) But Nichols' Jack has a unique sepulchral creepiness. Emotions fly across his chalky visage in fleeting blushes. When he smiles it's like a facial cramp; he uses dyspeptic blasts for punctuation. With every stammer and gulp, Nichols brings the script his own apt mix of flatulence and airiness: He injects a giggle- and chill-inducing ether into the words and the split seconds between words, taking their comedy and drama to the limit. The way Nichols does it, when Jack gripes about the way his wife paraded around the house topless while his father-in-law puttered around in bedclothes, Jack's capacity for complaint and self-flagellation are topless, too -- and bottomless. From the moment we hear Jack, in his first declaration of non-principles, struggle to spit out that "we ought to be precise about facts," Nichols suggests that Jack is a guy who needs facts and external outlines to define him. Jack swiftly introduces the ones he thinks are crucial: "It was a columnist for a newspaper called the New York Sun who, in 1902, first coined that wonderful pair of neatly matching phrases 'highbrow' and 'lowbrow.' "
In Howard, Judy, and their gang, Shawn memorializes those Partisan Review types who blended cultivation and left-wing politics. Then he punishes them by flinging them into a nightmare society that persecutes liberal intellectuals for their sense of social justice and for their good taste. Of course, to some extent this vision distills the rants against effete snobs that were so popular in the McCarthy and the Nixon eras. But just as obviously, this is a bizarre, stylized landscape. For example, in real life, neo-conservatives are the champions of Great Books. But in this film's social landscape, there isn't a single right-winger who loves poetry. Shawn has warped the world this way only partly to caution us about the fascism of institutionalized vulgarity; he also wants to warn us about the suicidal aridity of self-conscious elites, liberal or conservative. Howard and (in particular) his selfless, caring daughter, Judy, are heroic because they refuse to succumb to the pressure of an anti-intellectual government. But Shawn hardly puts them on a pedestal. If the patrician Howard holds genuine sympathy for the underclass -- the people who are "made to eat dirt" -- he has no direct connection to their feelings. When he calls the dispossessed "the enemy," he means it as an ironic comment on an unjust society. The arriviste Jack realizes that, short of some millennial revolution, they are the enemy, "the ones who were sitting around making plans to slice our guts out, or in other words to perform that gesture cleverly referred to by one of our enemy-loving writers as 'the disemboweling of the overboweled.' "
Howard lacks even a healthy impulse for survival: There's no sign that he knows he could forge bonds with those who share his artistic goals and not his political ones, or vice versa. And he shuts out those who could be on his side. Jack wants to acquire intellectual refinement, but Howard considers him lazy and reduces him to a comic foil. Jack, who believes that all humans need narrative, slakes his thirst for stories by reading newspapers; then he takes to porno mags and television. Jack may see that all literature, whether "popular" or "elitist," grows out of the same psychological and erotic core, but he, like Howard, views the highbrow and the lowbrow as opposing sides of a continental divide. Once Jack acknowledges that he is a lowbrow ("someone who you might say liked to take the easy way in the cultural sphere -- oh, the funny papers, pinups -- you know, cheap entertainment"), he tumbles down a slippery slope.
Surprisingly, when Jack scrapes bottom, he becomes lyrical as well as reprehensible; he touches whatever emotions are authentic to him. This homunculus turns into the "designated mourner" of the title, "the only one left who would even be aware of the passing of this peculiar group," the group of people like Howard, who could read John Donne. But in the play's cruelest irony, he experiences an original aesthetic moment only after he stops thinking of dead poets and appreciates the sublimity of "the sweet, ever-changing caress of an evening breeze." This isn't merely a parade of paradoxes on Shawn's part. Jack, as a character, needs categories like "highbrow" and "lowbrow" to locate himself; Shawn, as a dramatist, breaks them down. Indeed, I think what Shawn is grappling with is the overflow of art, demiart, and "media" that lays siege to our brains and causes us to retreat into "highbrow" and "lowbrow" roles. Nichols invests Jack with such a whirl of smarts, smarminess, and helter-skelter libido that he makes the man's spiritual limbo dynamic. In The Designated Mourner, he and Shawn may not achieve Robert Frost's goal -- "a momentary stay against confusion" -- but they help us get a grip on our contemporary chaos.
If there's a central weakness in the acting, it's that David de Keyser is too comfy with Howard's cerebral self-satisfaction: He's the egghead you'd love to crack. But Miranda Richardson, as Judy, has an angular, awkward sensuality; when imprisonment nearly destroys her, she embodies ravaged nobility. And Shawn's admiration for Judy is complete -- that's what makes the play a wail for decency. Its mockery of "ideas that are like formalized greetings" or reflex statements like "I like poetry" or "I like Rembrandt" jogged my recollection of what George Orwell wrote about the gentleman criminal, Raffles: "All he has is a set of reflexes -- the nervous system, as it were, of a gentleman." But Orwell wasn't pillorying Raffles: He was viewing him from the vantage point of a degraded culture. Shawn may criticize self-adoring intellectuals, but on the whole his play supports Orwell's conclusions -- that snobbishness can be a check on cruelty and corruption, that its "value from a social point of view has been underrated."
Since his credits range from an exuberant farcical turn as the voice of the dinosaur in Toy Story to confrontational dramas like this one, critics have had a hard time pinning Wallace Shawn down. So does Shawn himself. When I recently asked him whether he'd read W.D. King's provocative study Writing Wrongs: The Work of Wallace Shawn (Temple University Press), he said, "Not yet. I have enough identity problems; whatever he'd say I was, I probably would try not to be." Over dinner, Shawn confessed, "I have a respect for pornography, and I have a respect for poetry. On the other hand, I don't own a television, because I do have a fear of having my brain destroyed, and I don't feel I have enough of a brain to afford the loss of any part of it. I'm not afraid of reading too much James Merrill -- I don't think six hours of reading poetry would hurt my brain or make me a worse person in any way. But if I were watching six hours a day I think that would harm me and I'd be quite terrified about it. If I sit around preoccupied with whether somebody spent the night in the Lincoln bedroom, or whether an actor spent the night with somebody who wasn't his wife -- if they get me obsessed with these issues, they can run the world happily without my attention, my interference, my reaction."
When it comes to interpreting The Designated Mourner, isn't High Art vs. Low Art one of those false issues, too? "It's not really the important distinction. You could say the Pet Shop Boys are disco music rather than symphonic work, but I find it smart as well as beautiful; it's making you smarter as you listen to it. When I'm in L.A. and driving around, I go through strange crises of playing the rock station until that drives me nuts with the self-pity and stupidity that you hear. Then I turn to the classical station and in some ways that's worse, because they only play the stuff that's soothing, mindless." So why, in The Designated Mourner, are the benchmarks of true art John Donne and Franz Schubert? "Because this is a strange dream; Howard is the sort of man who would listen to Schubert; and the film is really about Jack."
At one point, Shawn leaned in close to me and said, "I think if you sort of actually knew the way I thought about the whole thing you might think I was quite disturbed." To which I replied: "Try me!" It turns out that Shawn simply believes, "Certain things are just meant to be in there and I don't think I'm capable of telling you who it is that means them to be there, but I don't feel that I'm just talking about myself." You could say he has an animistic approach to writing: "Certain sentences that you see look like they're alive. To use a gross, unpleasant metaphor, it's like you see a litter of puppies in the corner of a barn, and most of them are dead, but you go to the ones that are alive and crawling and wriggling, and you feed them and bring them into the house. And they grow up and get bigger. In the two things I did before The Designated Mourner -- The Fever and Aunt Dan and Lemon -- I did think about what I was saying, and how the points could be made immediately clear. I didn't want to shape this one that way. This one, like a dream, has a lot of shadows in it, there are things in it I can't explain. I allowed myself to use everything I knew or felt without worrying what someone might say about it somewhere down the line."
That included not worrying about the resemblance between characters and people in Shawn's own life, including his father, William Shawn, who worked at The New Yorker from 1933 and edited it from 1952 to 1987 (five years before his death), years when it published an extraordinary array of thinkers, fiction writers, and critics, including Hannah Arendt, J.D. Salinger, and Pauline Kael. But William Shawn's background differed from Howard and Judy's. Born in Chicago to scantly educated parents, he left college apparently without a degree and started his career as a reporter on the Las Vegas Optic. "It's true," says Shawn, "that my father, like Howard and Judy, both had sympathy for the oppressed, the needy, and loved to read poetry -- and that wasn't true for many people in New York, it wasn't even true for many at The New Yorker. And my father was someone who could read the way Howard reads, as if he opened a book and it said to him, 'Come in, sit down.' But he was quite grown up before he heard a symphony. He felt awfully ignorant around someone like Hannah Arendt -- she could read Greek. And he felt at home in the world of popular music. He loved musicals in their heyday, the later ones he found harder -- he went for Rodgers and Hart, not Rodgers and Hammerstein. He was into the High and the Low."
If anything, Howard and Judy are closer to the pedigree of Wallace Shawn, who did go to Dalton, Putney, Harvard, and Oxford. What permeates this movie is his ongoing odyssey as a paid denizen of popular culture who continues to roam through avant-garde theater and poverty-stricken countries. Critic John Lahr characterizes Shawn's wandering through wrecked or undeveloped nations as "corrective behavior." Shawn told him, "In the face of enormous suffering, humorous detachment is too grotesque even for me." The Designated Mourner intertwines Shawn's fierce self-deprecation and covert idealism. It came out when he talked to me about the character of Judy and the acting of Miranda Richardson: "One can make fun of me and my silly attempts to escape the silly person that one probably would conclude that I am, but in my few moments of traveling to dangerous places I did meet some people who actually did live on the basis of their principles, which I suppose almost inevitably means a risk of death, and I tried to write that and Miranda is one of the few people who could really play it.
