Written by Chauncey Mabe | 23 June 2010

If Harold Kushner had been a literary critic instead of a rabbi, he might have asked, “Why do bad books happen to good writers?” And if Leo Tolstoy had also been a critic, he might have answered, “All good books are alike, while every bad book goes bad in its own way.”

These bloody thoughts are occasioned by Henning Mankel and Jim Crace, novelists of proven quality who have recently produced very bad books, indeed. Of course, Tolstoy’s resonant but simplistic bifurcation is no more true of books than it is of families. So let us begin by considering what the new novels by Crace and Mankel have in common.

Each author attempts something new. Mankel, Sweden’s most famous living crime novelist, tries to cram a Micheneresque indictment of colonialism, with much globetrotting and historical backstory, into the narrow confines of a police procedural. Crace, an award-winning Britsh litterateur, assays a thriller with faint sci-fi overtones.

Mankel’s strengths include an engaging narrative voice, and he uses it to great effect in the early sections of The Man From Beijing, where we’re shown a wolf gnawing on the murdered body of an elderly man (from the wolf’s point of view!). Soon it’s revealed the victim is only one of 19 people butchered in a remote Swedish hamlet, all pensioners except for a 12-year-old boy.

It’s a splendid set-up, baroque and lurid, and Mankell keeps it grounded by his keen eye for dour Swedish character and social detail, and his way with pungent and credible characters. Indeed, in Vivi Sundberg, a stout, no-nonsense provincial detective in her mid-’50s, he has created a fascinating protagonist – who, alas, he promptly abandons.

Instead of burrowing ever deeper into this remote corner of Scandanavia, with Sundberg as our guide, Mankell supplants her with the much less interesting Birgitta Roslin, an urban judge on medical leave who takes an intrusive interest in the case even though it lies far out of her jurisdiction and despite being warned off by local and national authorities.

Worse, Mankell opens the narrative up like a Russian nesting doll. Soon he’s in 19^th- century China, with the story of three peasant brothers. Then it’s the American West, where a sadistic Swedish project manager abuses the Chinese laborers helping build the intercontinental railway – then back to China, with a band of Swedish missionaries. And there are fequent forays to modern Beijing, not to mention Africa, where the Chinese seek to secure energy and mineral reserves.

As long as Mankell remains in Sweden, his story has the ring of deep authenticity. But while his narrative verve never deserts him, he has little feel for the American West, and his presentation of Chinese characters is hackneyed to the point of racial stereotype. One villain wields a sword, like a medieval warrior, while another seeks to assassinate an enemy with ground glass hidden in food – something I haven’t seen since I read Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu novels at the age of 12.

Moreover, Mankell’s plot hinges again and again on unlikely coincidence, with the climax decided by the abrupt intervention of characters hardly hinted at before that moment. Key characters take drastic action with little coherent motivation, as when a villain murders his most loyal and effective henchman for no apparent reason. I could go on. Almost everything that happens outside Sweden is caricature.

***

A Man Booker finalist and three-time Whitbread Award-winner, Jim Crace certainly knows how to write a muscular and compelling sentence, as well as how to move a narrative forward in admirably subtle ways. But none of that saves All That Follows.

Indeed, prose quality aside, not one thing about this low-wattage thriller is authentic. Set in 2020, its hero is Leonard Lessing, a successful jazz sax player nearing his 50^th birthday. Full of self-regard, but maddeningly irresolute and timid, he’s unhappily married to a demanding woman who’s fretting about the disappearance of her estranged daughter.

On a newscast, Lessing recognizes the leader of a terrorist band who has taken hostages somewhere in suburban Britain. It’s Maxie Lermontov, an American anarchist he knew as a young man, a former romantic rival. For no good reason, Lessing visits the scene of the hostage crisis, standing behind police barricades, befriending the teenage daughter of Lermontov and his old love interest and generally behaving like a dull fictional character in an irrational search for psychological motivation.

Lessing is the single most irritating aspect of All That Follows, but by no means the only one. His approach to the teenaged girl is supposed to be ill-considered and wreckless, but it’s actually creepy, with Lessing no less despicable for not acting on his dirty-old-man impulses. When the action goes back in time, to 2007 and Austin, Texas, the narrative enters a bogus fugue. Crace is as awkward and unconvincing in Bush’s America as Mankell is in modern Beijing.

Crace’s decision to cast All That Follows as a near-future thriller is profoundly misguided. Really, I’m heartily sick of serious novelists playing with genre tropes as though they can be picked up and put down at will. On the contrary, sci-fi, fantasy and crime fiction require total commitment, just as serious literature does.

Not for one instant does Crace make us believe that by 2020 we’ll have solved the energy crisis, while his 2007 radical political operatives are actually cut-and-pasted from the Vietnam War era. All That Follows would be far more convincing if it were set in the present day, with Lessing’s youthful Texas sojourn taking place around 1967.

But even then, the novel would still have this limp dishrag of a main character. His arbitrary heroics in the final act would remain ludicrous, and the happy ending, with none of his stupid and selfish actions reaping the consequences they deserve, would still be risible.

The Man From Beijing, by Henning Mankell. Translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson. Knopf. $29.95. 366 pp.

All That Follows, by Jim Crace. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $25.95. 223 pp.

Written by Hap Erstein | 20 June 2010

There’s Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. There’s Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. And on the female side, there’s Nicole Holofcener and Catherine Keener: Film directors and the actors with whom they frequently collaborate.

Keener has been in all four of Holofcener’s films -- Walking and Talking (1996), Lovely and Amazing (2001), Friends with Money (2006) and her latest, Please Give, which opened over the weekend. In March, during the Miami International Film Festival, the two women sat down with Hap Erstein to talk about the film and their long-running collaboration.

Erstein: How did this collaboration begin for you two?

Holofcener: I saw her in a movie and I kind of stalked her, found her agent and gave her my script. She responded to it, we hit it off right away, but it took many years to get the financing. Then when we made the film, we became friends. I never planned to put her in all my movies, but I just couldn’t not.

Erstein: So as you gather material for the next movie, do you now think, “How can I make this a Catherine Keener character?”

Holofcener: Actually, if it’s a character that‘s somewhat based on me, I generally think of Catherine, because she’s definitely played me, as much as a person can play me in a movie. But I don’t start out that way. I definitely go with thoughts and themes that are important to me and then see who fits.

Erstein: Catherine, when you first read her script for Walking and Talking, you didn’t know her at all, did you?

Keener: Nope. But I was drawn to the writing and it made me think: I would love to hang out with this woman.

Erstein: So you certainly did not think this would become a long-term collaboration.

Keener: No, she didn’t have the movie financed or anything. She just said, “I want to make this and I want you to be in it if it happens.” And it wasn’t until a couple of years later that it happened. And it was quite a struggle to get me, to convince investors to go with me.

Erstein: What makes Catherine an ideal actress for your films?

Holofcener: It’s a really hard thing to describe, but, first and foremost, she’s really natural. She doesn’t have a movie voice, or a movie face, nothing’s fake. Of course she has good takes and bad takes like everybody else, but generally she is really natural, no mannerisms. She really listens, to me and to the other actors. She’s very present, she’s got a great sense of timing and humor, which is really imperative, because the material can be so serious and self-involved and self-conscious, but if the actor has a sense of humor, it gives it so much more.

Erstein: Do you think of her as a muse?

Holofcener: Yeah, sure, absolutely. I mean when I’m writing something and I hope that she’s going to be playing it, I think it helps make me a better writer, when I think about how she would say it.

Keener: And she is a muse for me as well, because when I’m reading (a script of hers) and I’m working for her, it just takes me to more creative places in my head.

Erstein: Do you feel more proprietary about making a film of Nicole’s, that you are more than just a hired hand in a movie?

Keener: No. I don’t feel any ownership at all. I’m still just her minion. (Laughs)

Holofcener: She still absolutely looks for my approval. She wants to make sure she’s doing it the way I want her to do it. She could have a lot more freedom than she takes.

Keener: I’m not interested in that, though. I like it this way. I think actors need directors. I know that I do.

Erstein: Is Catherine playing a role that represents you in Please Give?

Holofcener: That character is definitely the closest to me compared to any of the other characters. I struggle with being a successful person with lots of money compared to everybody else.

Erstein: You don’t feel you deserve it?

Holofcener: It’s a struggle. It’s not that simple. Yes, of course I deserve it. If anybody deserves it, why not me, right? But the way it works is just so crazy and wrong. There are so many starving hungry people everywhere. I live in L.A. and they’re everywhere.

Keener: We live in expensive houses, but we can look outside and see so many people who are poor, disenfranchised.

Erstein: But you chose to set the film in New York, which is almost one of the characters.

Holofcener: I did that because the city was an important part of the story when I first created the characters and the situation. I really couldn’t imagine it anywhere else. I wanted that elevator, I wanted them to have to get in the same elevator, to have their doors right next to each other.

I tried to figure it in my mind in L.A., because I didn’t want to leave my kids, but it just wouldn’t work. It had to be New York. And I grew up in New York and that’s where this part of me came from.

Erstein: That reinforces a comment I’ve often heard, describing you as a female Woody Allen.

Holofcener: Y’know, I think it’s because I’m a New York Jew. Seriously, I think if I wasn’t those two things, you wouldn’t hear those comparisons. But then, I would be a very different person, and maybe I’d make different movies. I mean, if I were Cybill Shepherd, so many things would be different.

Plus I grew up watching and revering his movies. I remember seeing Manhattan and Annie Hall and Stardust Memories so many times, they have to be an influence, consciously or unconsciously. And having such neurotic, but really sympathetic, deep characters in everyday life. They have such problems in Manhattan, and it’s so absorbing.

Erstein: How do you develop a film? Do you collect ideas and characters until you have enough?

Holofcener: Pretty much. I have an idea, and then I think I have an idea for a couple of characters and if it lasts more than a day, I’ll sort of expand on that the next day and then after a few weeks if it still seems interesting to me, I just start writing.

And I don’t really know where it’s going to go when I start writing, but I like to have some idea of maybe the first few pages.

Erstein: The movie opens with shots of women having mammograms. That’s as close as I’ve ever been to seeing the test given.

Holofcener: Well, let me tell you, it’s really a G-rated version of a mammogram. They really flatten the boobs like a pancake. It’s so weird. I really wanted to do that, I wanted to show that it really hurts, but I couldn’t let that happen. In retrospect, I wish I hurt a couple. So you haven’t really seen a mammogram.

Erstein: Were those professional actors?

Holofcener: Those were actual, real boobs. They were extras, and they got paid as extras. I signed a thing that said their heads would not show in the same shot as their boobs. Like we might have used them again later that day on the street. The call for those extras asked for all shapes and sizes, mostly 50 and over.

Erstein: What ties all the characters in Please Give together?

Holofcener: I think that Catherine’s character and Amanda (Peet’s) and Rebecca (Hall’s) character have a similar theme, that they all want to be good and what that means for each of them is different. Because (Amanda and Rebecca) had a mother who abandoned them by killing herself -- I think children feel that that’s their fault that there’s something wrong with them -- and Catherine’s quandary is more contemporary, it’s more in her life right now, not necessarily a childhood wound. But the fact that they are going to be the people they want to be, sort of let off the hook.

Erstein: On behalf of pudgy men everywhere, I’m so glad that Oliver Platt (Keener’s husband) has an affair with Amanda Peet. But what is her motive?

Holofcener: I think that Amanda Peet’s character instantly envies Catherine’s character and looks up to her. Catherine has whatever Amanda does not have. Husband, children, money. Amanda doesn’t feel beautiful, although she is very beautiful. And I think having Catherine’s husband hit on her is the ultimate compliment. She’s desperate and lonely and insecure.

Erstein: Why do so many of your characters have self-image and assurance issues?

Holofcener: Characters that don’t have them are probably not very interesting. I mean, everybody has self-esteem issues in some areas, don’t they?

Erstein: Talk about the involvement of Sony Classics Pictures.

Holofcener: They financed the movie. They also financed Friends with Money. They didn’t even come to the set. I say, “Aren’t you guys interested?” They said, “We trust you. It’s all right.” And they don’t tell me what to cut or anything. It’s amazing.

The movie only costs $3 million, and it’s not my first film. My last film made them some money, although they were very hands off on the last one, too. I think once they decide to trust you, they just trust. And it wasn’t a great deal of money. I’m very, very lucky. I think I’m in a very rare situation.

I wish I could have shown more of the city. With more money and time, I would have more exteriors. I would have seen that the art department had a lot more money and time. To go really nuts on the furniture store. Or the apartment. But everybody was limited. But in the end, I don’t think it really mattered.

Erstein: Do you think of Please Give as a departure for you?

Holofcener: No, a departure for me would be a movie without a joke. Or a thriller. A highly stylized movie, something like that.

Erstein: Is it getting any easier to get your films financed and distributed?

Holofcener: No. But it’s still difficult. A lot of studios tell me they want to make my next movie, but when they see the script, they say, “Maybe not this one. We mean the next next one. The one that‘s going to make a lot of money. The one that I can really see on the page better than this one.”

You know, they want me to make a thriller.

Written by Greg Stepanich | 19 June 2010

Over the years I’ve seen a number of ballet companies that feature a large contingent of children, and usually that means there’s a good deal of wiggle room for the kids in the presentation, which allows things to be not-so-precise but irresistibly crowd-pleasing.

But Colleen Smith’s company, the Florida Classical Ballet Theatre, doesn’t do things that way. In a Wednesday afternoon performance at the Eissey Campus Theatre in Palm Beach Gardens, the troupe – including all its younger and older members – demonstrated a thorough, deep discipline that let viewers take in the broader visual aspects of its work: precisely designed, colorful costumes, plenty of movement without mania, and smart bits of stage business with simple props such as old-fashioned beach parasols.

The FCBT also showed that it’s possible to create a thoroughly entertaining afternoon of traditional dance with relatively modest means if your dancers are talented enough and your choreographic planning is carefully thought out. Which they are, and which it was.

The major work on the program was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which Smith patterned after Sir Frederick Ashton’s The Dream, but the afternoon opened with two original ballets, the first of which was From Head to Toe, a six-person interpretation of Eric Carle’s 1997 book by that name for toddlers. Set to three movements from Shostakovich’s Jazz Suite No. 2, Smith’s ballet played two principals – Lily Ojea and Marshall Levin – against four supporting women, all of the dancers dressed in late 19^th-century on-the-town style.

Carle’s book is about motion, and getting its readers to imitate the actions of the animals within, such as a gorilla thumping its chest. Smith translated the actions in the book into the ballet, but it wasn’t noticeable in a didactic way: at one point, the four women did a kind of shoulder and body shimmy, and at the end, they lay down on the floor and wiggled their feet, as Carle calls for in his final pages. But it was the total effect of this slight but well-crafted piece of dance that was most memorable, with its green-and-pink color scheme, its carefully calibrated movements, and its sense of smart fun.

The second original ballet, Tidbits and Doodles, is unfortunately named for such an expertly designed piece, one that could profitably be exported to other youthful classical companies (maybe it needs a punny name, something like Taking It Littorally). It’s a 1920s-era beach scenario choreographed by Smith and the dancers to ballet sketches by Mozart (K. 299c), and it was nothing short of delightful. Three tiers of dancers in different age groups from teens down to elementary school moved in and out like cheerful platoons, with the older girls making good use of white parasols, opening and shutting them quickly at one point as they exited the stage.

There were all the clichés of the boardwalk of a distant day, such as striped cabanas, bodybuilders (a funny Eric Emerson), multiple beachballs, and seaside hucksters, such as in the main event of the dance, which had to do with a showman (Levin) offering $1 views of a live mermaid (Ojea), to the gullible astonishment of the crowd. Like From Head to Toe, this ballet also had lots of fourth-wall shattering as dancers routinely engaged the audience with direct looks, especially here, when the whole company offered a collective mouths-agape as they discovered that the mermaid and her handler had slithered away.

And as in the first ballet, Tidbits featured a constant variety of dance steps as groups of performers moved in and out of the scene; you noticed the pliés and en pointes, but they came across as natural, not fussy, and in the service of a general style of movement across the stage that was busy without being hyperkinetic or aggressive. It all flowed like the water near the imaginary shore, testament to how the formal language of ballet can bring a sense of grace and control to what in several cases here had to be ideas generated by youthful dancers who didn’t want to stand still.

After intermission came A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which like Ashton’s version focused on the forest magic of Shakespeare’s play. Ensemble work here from fairies to rustics was uniformly good, and there was fine dancing from the lovers’ couples – Jared Jacoby and Jessica Haley as Lysander and Hermia, Ben Slayen and Cassie Robinson as Demetrius and Helena – and from Levin as Bottom, who offered charming business while wearing his donkey head, scratching his back on a tree and munching food from an outstretched hand.

Katherine Davis made an excellent Puck, nimble and light-footed as she could be, perfectly underlining the quicksilver nature of this character with athletic but delicate steps. Rogelio Corrales made a strong Oberon, and Ojea a splendid Titania, especially in the climactic pas de deux to the celebrated Nocturne from Mendelssohn’s popular score. Ojea ended the duet with three perfect, elegant splits, a coda of sheer loveliness to the one major moment of old-fashioned balletic high style on the program.

Written by Palm Beach ArtsPaper Staff | 18 June 2010

Art: Painters, sculptors, photographers and other artists in this state look forward every year to the All Florida Juried Competition and Exhibition, and next week, the 59^th edition of this oldest such Florida contest opens at the Boca Raton Museum of Art for a run of seven weeks.

This year, almost 1,400 entries were received for the contest, which was judged by New York-based curator Linda Norden, whose CV includes stints at Bard College, the City University of New York’s James Gallery and Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum. Norden chose 91 artworks by 80 artists for the exhibition, which opens Tuesday and runs through Aug. 8 at the museum in Mizner Park.

Opening along with the juried show is the biennial Boca Raton Museum Artists’ Guild exhibition, which will feature work by 50 professional artists who are members of the guild. Paper sculptor Francene Levinson won first place in the exhibition, which was judged by Carol Damian, curator of the Frost Museum of Art at Miami’s Florida International University.

Admission to the museum is $8 for adults, $6 for seniors, and $4 for students. Hours are Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. For more information, call 392-2500 or visit www.bocamuseum.org.

Film: By the time a movie franchise is on its third installment, the creativity and quality have usually disappeared. But Pixar Animation, which is generally resistant to sequel-itis, waited until it had a strong script and a reason to make Toy Story 3 and the difference in their approach is evident throughout the funny, yet dramatic, exhilarating and occasionally tear-jerking computerized tale of growing up and moving on. You see, Andy, the owner of Buzz Lightyear, Woody the Cowboy and all the other playthings, is now old enough to head to college, and his toys become endangered when they are accidentally sent to a day care center where the tots manhandle them badly. OK, you’re right, they have to band together to make their great escape, but the way it is done – in relatively subtle 3-D – has to be seen. It’s early, but it looks like the animated feature Oscar has just been won in a lock. At area theaters now.

Theater: Florida Atlantic University’s Festival Rep is a local summer tradition that can be erratic, but usually features some emerging talent worth watching and professional guest performers like Bruce Linser, who are always assets. This season’s menu will feature Shakespeare’s audience-friendly comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream (opening next weekend), Donald Margulies’ less-well-known comedy adventure Shipwrecked, and it kicks off this Saturday with And the Tony Goes To… a revue of songs from Tony Award-winning shows, from 1947’s Kiss Me Kate to 2009’s Billy Elliot. The rep runs through July 25. Call (800) 564-9539 for tickets and info.

Music: The Chameleon Musicians series at Fort Lauderdale’s Leiser Opera Center has been going for eight seasons now, and now it’s starting to branch out into the summer. Founder Iris van Eck, a Dutch-born cellist, offers a Chameleon recital on Monday night at the Broward Center for the Arts’ Abdo New River Room. Joined by Serbian-born pianist Misha Dacic, van Eck will present an all-Chopin concert in honor of the Polish composer’s 200^th birthday.

On the program are the Introduction and Polonaise Brillante, Op. 3, the great Cello Sonata, Op. 65, and the Grand Duo Concertant, written by Chopin and his French cellist friend, Auguste Franchomme, on themes from Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le Diable, which at the time (1832) was a popular sensation.

The concert is set for 7 p.m. Monday in the Broward Center’s Abdo New River Room. Tickets are $30, and can be had by calling 954-462-0222 or visiting www.browardcenter.org.

Written by Greg Stepanich | 18 June 2010

A violist for the Cleveland Orchestra made a persuasive case for the power and versatility of his instrument Tuesday night during a performance of a Telemann concerto at Palm Beach Atlantic University.

Stanley Konopka, who has been assistant principal viola of the Cleveland since 1993, was one of two members of that orchestra featured in Tuesday’s concert, the second program of four with faculty members of PBAU’s Stringendo School for Strings summer music camp. Konopka played the German Baroque master’s concerto in G major (TWV 51: G9) with an 11-piece string ensemble as the final work on the concert at Persson Hall.

Konopka has a big, beautiful sound, and he plays with force and verve, which might be one of the reasons his viola speaks so well. His digital technique is impressive, too, with the fiddle-style patterns of the second movement clean and right in tune, and the rushing scales of the finale properly joyful and athletic.

The familiar third movement showed off the loveliness of Konopka’s tone, and the Stringendo faculty string players accompanied with a gratifyingly full sound that avoided the overly restrained approach you sometimes hear in performances of Baroque music.

The concert opened with another Cleveland player, cellist Alan Harrell, in the early Introduction and Polonaise Brillante, Op. 3, of Frédéric Chopin. Most of the Polish composer’s music was for piano, of course, but through his friendship with French cellist Auguste Franchomme, he wrote a handful of cello and chamber works, including a fine Piano Trio and the great but neglected Cello Sonata at the end of his composing career.

Harrell, accompanied by pianist Liera Antropova, brought a large, intense tonal quality to the playing of this flashy showpiece, even giving the pizzicato accompaniments under the pianist’s statement of the main theme a noticeable flourish. Harrell has plenty of technique and interpretive panache, and that came across well, but in the trickiest higher passages, his footing was less sure.

Antropova played the virtuosic piano part ably and accurately, if not with a great deal of sparkle. Both musicians gave the Chopin a strong performance, though I’m guessing it was probably a rehearsal or two away from the thoroughly polished reading it might have received.

The other piece on the program was one on of the chamber music masterpieces of the 20^th century, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 57. Antropova, Harrell and Konopka were joined by violinists David Mastrangelo and Renata Guitart for this work, which has all the dark lyricism, bumptiousness and dramatic punch of Shostakovich’s best music.

At their best, the four string players blended lusciously in the slower pages, and in the rough-and-tumble scherzo they gave their repeated, hammered chords plenty of firepower. In the fourth-movement Intermezzo, though, which is in large part a violin solo, first violinist Mastrangelo had some intonation trouble in the final moments, which took away from the sorrowful effect of the movement overall.

Still, the five musicians had a good handle on the quintet’s many moods, and judging by their smiles, seemed to particularly enjoy the fifth and final movement, which fades away in a serene, major-key, almost offhand manner before expiring in a plucked-string whisper. If it was an unremarkable rendition of the quintet, it was nonetheless solid, and the players managed to get Shostakovich’s message across capably and effectively.

The Stringendo chamber music series continues with another faculty concert at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Persson Hall on the PBAU campus. Members of the Atlanta Symphony will be on hand for music by Paganini (a viola arrangement of the Rondo from his Concerto No. 2), Prokofiev (the Sonata for Two Violins) and Brahms (his String Sextet No. 1 in B-flat, Op. 18). Tickets are $15. Call 803-2970 for more information or visit www.pba.edu.