Photo by Patricia Pingree 2007

Film Criticism

"The Prince is Dead. Long Live the Prince"
(The American Prospect: June 19, 2000)

On multiple video monitors at his Manhattan apartment in the Hotel Elsinore, the modern Hamlet (Ethan Hawke) mesmerizes himself with his own distressed image. At Blockbuster Video he rents "Action" tapes by the dozen, all the better to create his fractured movie-within-a-movie that is his version of the play wherein he'll "catch the conscience of the king." His girlfriend Ophelia (Julia Stiles) has her own darkroom and carries around a bunch of Polaroid proofs which will scatter around her like fallen leaves, as she herself disintegrates. Typical of their generation, Hamlet and Ophelia escape into the technologies of image-making, but because this Hamlet is none other than Shakespeare's tragedy, their essential identities, and thus their destinies, are as bound - and sealed - as ever.
With any contemporized rendering of Shakespeare, there are always those who feel the plays can't be authentic if the stagecraft isn't as "Shakespearean" as the language. But we are reminded in the 1947 Revised Edition of The Yale Shakespeare that "The outline of the story of Hamlet, as we are familiar with it, is first found in the Historia Danica of Saxo Grammaticus, a Danish chronicler who lived at the end of the twelfth century." The consequent point is that when Shakespeare's play was performed by his company, it was by definition a Hamlet in modern dress.
For our time, this boldly imagined contemporary Hamlet by the film maker Michael Almereyda - who tells a preview audience that he made it "in a hurry, for very little money" - is a rich achievement. Hamlet and Ophelia are the casualties not only of fate but of an all too familiar corporate power-lust. As the Denmark Corporation's CEO/King, Hamlet's uncle, Claudius (Kyle MacLachlan), is frighteningly without conscience. He has married Hamlet's adulterous mother, "our sometime sister, now our queen" Gertrude (Diane Venora), whose own innocence and guilt converge before our eyes as she reluctantly comes to her own palpable realization of all that has gone wrong. Despite the intrinsic familiarity of the play's story line, this movie version has a momentum of its own - enhanced by the frantic and fractured nature of life in the big city - so that even though we know at the beginning that by the end they will all be dead, Almereyda generates genuine suspense as well as an active curiosity about how the film will portray the known tragic outcome. Every line spoken by the actors was written by William Shakespeare, but the busy background noise and fast-paced disjointedness of Almereyda's film version makes this Hamlet acutely expressive of our exploding culture. While the young Hamlet broods, what Claudius calls "the hectic in my blood" seems to circulate throughout.

The characters in this Hamlet are conveyed, like the members of a family, as an ensemble of complex personalities with layered histories. Here the actors display a depth of thought about the characters they play, so that it is possible to learn more about Shakespeare's play than is often given on the screen. The achievement of this director is that these actors project - and in close-up! - the fundamental interior transformations that drive the action. And, given that this play is so famously ambiguous, this clarity, while by definition provisional, is nevertheless welcome.
For example, a decision has been made here about Gertrude's intentions as she takes up the poisoned cup and drinks from it, a decision for which Almereyda credits a director's notation from a stage production in the 70's, where in the margin it was written "Gertrude knows." Others may be more comfortable with a less deliberate interpretation, but I think that this "knowing" on Gertrude's part - knowing that her new husband intends to kill her son - provides a tragic gravity that is missing when her death by poisoning is played as entirely accidental. As Gertrude, Diane Venora brings a veteran's power to this role, which she has again performed this past winter in an acclaimed production at the Public Theater, with Hamlet played by the gifted Liev Schreiber, who plays Ophelia's brother Laertes in this film version. In other words, there is a real theatrical authority invested here, and this strength seems by extension to empower those other actors - Bill Murray as Polonius, Sam Shephard as the Ghost of Hamlet, and Ethan Hawke, for that matter - who might not at first come to mind as right for those roles, but who become so. Stunning without question is Julia Stiles, who embodies Ophelia with an authenticity equal to Diane Venora's Gertrude. Now we truly experience Ophelia's madness as the high-cost consequence of her insight. In contrast to the usual more illusive representations of Ophelia, here we have a complex character whose decline is tangibly connected to Hamlet's own deterioration. According to Julia Stiles, in a brief telephone interview, her own sense of the character was arrived at once she understood Ophelia as a young woman "who was trying to please everybody, even though Hamlet and her father send contradictory messages." The popular book Reviving Ophelia was helpful, says Stiles, because it is about the tragic impact upon the self-image of young women who are "suffocated by their environment and this need to please." Most helpful to Stiles - because, as she says, "Shakespeare never writes stage direction" - was the way this director wrote into the script the "visuals" by which are conveyed, without lines, the intensity of feeling between Ophelia and the other characters. She admired the various concrete choices Almereyda made in the making of this film, and at the same time, what she rediscovered about Shakespeare is the wide open range of possibility of interpretation.

One such possibility is presented in the persuasive invention of Gertrude and Claudius, the new novel by John Updike, which tells Updike's version of the story-before-the-story told in Shakespeare's play. In his novel we are invited to imagine a Claudius who is driven primarily by his desires for Gertrude, which prompts a different interpretation of his ambitions for the throne of her husband the king, his brother. Necessarily too, then, does Updike's Gertrude gain in both dimension and sympathy. The reader experiences her, in the novel's three parts, as the daughter of a king and the wife of two subsequent kings. And as the mother of a presumptive fourth, the future King Hamlet, Gertrude is thus given the means to instruct Ophelia - with the generosity of feeling that in Shakespeare resides only between the lines - about the nature of female compliance. "Men are beautiful enemies we are set down among," Gertrude tells Ophelia in Updike's novel. "If we have been compliant with one man, they reason, we may be also with another. The wish to be agreeable we take in with our mother's milk, alas."
In his own vivid telling, Updike brings the story forward in time, beginning in the late twelfth century and moving it into Shakespeare's time and, in exploring the point of view of Claudius as a step-father, on the verge of our own. The characters are so actual - even with their ancient names and antique speech - that at the end of the novel I wished he would write on, in order to see how Updike would re-imagine the rest of the story as we know it. As with Almereyda's Hamlet, Updike's novel enlarges the conversation. And, as does any telling of this mythic story, the success is less about where in time or place it is set, but rather how psychologically complete and emotionally true is our experience of it.

In other screen versions over the years there have been various approaches and varied levels of depth. Helpful for its literal representation of the whole text of Hamlet, word for word, is the epic-length Kenneth Branagh film production, which provides background by including all the more minor "explaining" scenes that often end up, for the sake of pacing, on the cutting room floor. Playing a variety of the minor characters are a dozen superstar stage and screen actors who feature either as first-rate attractions or unfortunate distractions. Uneven too, in my view, is Kate Winslet's Ophelia, whom she represents as a Botticelli Venus, and Julie Christie's Gertrude, who is never the dramatic equal of either her husband (Derek Jacobi as Claudius) or her son (Kenneth Branagh's own Hamlet). And yet this complete version has the real advantage of displaying both of these women as the characters Shakespeare wrote, and therefore as more complex than, when edited, they are often rendered.
In Laurence Olivier's 1948 film, for instance - which like Branagh he both stars in and directs - when we bring a modern sensibility to it, the result is so melodramatic it is almost comic, an effect reinforced by the physical resemblance between the young Olivier and Steve Martin. Both Ophelia and the Queen are played with blank faces that seem rarely to crack into meaningful expression, and like Branagh, Olivier (as a Hamlet who seems too mature in his power for the part of a university student) essentially stages the play as a one man show.

And if the Olivier version seems too stylized, in the Franco Zefferelli film version (1990), by contrast, Mel Gibson's Hamlet is too casual. As an actor he makes a credible impact only when interacting with others, which has the awful effect of disembodying the great soliloquies because, as interior monologue, there is too little evidence of the internal struggle that is at the heart of the play. Here in this version the effect is undermined by a cuteness on the part of Mel Gibson - as when Hamlet winks at his mother in a comic sword scene - which then makes all the more difficult the other adjoining roles, especially that of Ophelia, who is bravely played by a girlish Helena Bonham Carter. As Gertrude, who is costumed in her obscuring headgear and stiff voluminous Medieval dresses, even such a powerhouse as Glenn Close recedes. With the illumination that Almereyda and Updike have brought to the story, the lack of compelling women in other versions now seems an overwhelming gap. To know the play is to want to know it better, and yet, the one certainty in any discussion of Hamlet is that there's no such thing as a final word.

"Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story." These are Hamlet's last words and, as he dies, his charge to his friend Horatio. It is a challenge that, for centuries, the most talented and ambitious among us have been drawn to, and this in itself, I think, is really the essential thing to say about any Hamlet. To know the play a little is to want to know it better, and for this reason every interpretation of it adds to the ongoing conversation about these matters of life and death importance. And while not every act of imagination inspired by the play is as original and compelling as Michael Almereyda's new film or John Updike's new novel, with each we're also once again drawn back into William Shakespeare's play. In its telling and re-telling Hamlet holds, and unfolds, the past, the present, and the future.

Return to Top

"Word Of Mouth"
(The American Prospect: May 8, 2000)

A decade after Abby Hoffman had first set the hairstyle for a generation, he showed up on a television talk show with a radically short haircut and the explanation that, once Tab Hunter was wearing his hair long, Hoffman knew it had come time to cut his own. By this logic, now that an off-Broadway comedy played entirely in hip-hop rhyme is being raved about in The Wall Street Journal, has hip-hop also come full circle?
But "Bomb-itty of Errors" is a winningly clever reinvention of Shakespeare's comedy of mistaken identity, with the text and music created and performed by five white kids who merge hip-hop and theatre for a mainstream audience of all ages. In other words, the black hip-hop subculture which began in the mid-70's in the vast train yards of the New York subway system - as spray-painted graffiti - has resurfaced downtown, via NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, in a show produced by Daryl Roth, three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Just as from Abby Hoffman to Tab Hunter, this is hardly what you'd call a straight shot, and yet the connection is clear. As always, a generation expresses itself, and the culture contracts or expands to reject or accept it.
Still to be decided will be the reaction to the April release of the new James Toback film, "Black and White," which features real-life hip-hop stars - the impresario Oliver "Power" Grant and his group called the Wu-Tang Clan - with a mixed-bag cast that includes Brooke Shields in dreadlocks, Donald Trump's ex-wife Marla Maples as a wife and mother named Muffy, and Mike Tyson as himself. The subject of the movie is the attraction to hip-hop culture on the part of wealthy white Upper East Side-style adolescents, who are drawn less to the music than to the extracurricular sex and drugs of the hip-hop "lifestyle." Pre-release publicity has focused on a ratings controversy between the producers and the Motion Picture Association of America over a brief opening sex scene, as well as on the unpredictable dramatic interplay occurring when the actors are directed to improvise (and when, then, for example, Mike Tyson explodes). But "Black and White" is most notable for the questions it raises, if only indirectly and imperfectly. These are questions which you yourself may have been meaning to ask.

Hip-hop developed in three distinct stages. First were the graffiti artists, those adolescent trespassers into the subway yards, whose flamboyantly ubiquitous "tags" Norman Mailer glamorized in a high-profile photo book which also outraged those charged with the task of trying to constrain them. Meanwhile, as the graffiti artists came into prominence, and a form of dominance, Transit Authority security was increased and, in a dramatic turnaround, the subway cars were repainted as quickly as they could be tagged. But it was only when the new graffiti-proof trains replaced the earlier models that hip-hop style entered its next phase.
Hip-hop Part Two used movement - breakdancing - as its means of self-expression. Another public art form, like tagging, breakdancing could be performed out in the open, by soloists encircled by pick-up crowds, to the portable music of the boom box. There was the documentary film about breakdancing, called "Wild Style," but as with the graffiti, breakdancing was spontaneous art performed outdoors, free of charge, so it too was by definition non-commercial.
Next, however, according to the Chicago-based 1998 U.S. National Poetry Slam Champion, Reggie Gibson, hip-hop music became "commodified" when the rhymes were made into recordings and the clothing styles into merchandise. Welcome to Take Three: hip-hop today.
At a recent two-day Poetry Festival convened in Cambridge, MA to discuss "The Music Connection from Homer to Hip-Hop," a panel of national poetry slam winners that included Gibson argued that this "commodification" has transformed the substance of hip-hop. And, as Gibson put it most bluntly, "I don't believe in making millionaires out of sociopaths who can rhyme."
The "sociopaths" he didn't mention by name seemed to be a reference to the gunplay with which hip-hop has become increasingly synonymous. There is the current high-publicity example of the case against hip-hop mogul Sean "Puffy" Coombs (in relation to a nightclub shooting), but the panel was speaking more generally, lamenting the values - the "caste system" politics and the "gender dynamic" - of the aggressively male-dominant hip-hop culture. What began at home as "party music" - with DJs mixing up new variations and rappers rhyming their own stories - has evolved, says Gibson, into "a commodification of black anger," and the resulting violence associated with the world of hip-hop, including the music itself, is the function either of "art imitating life imitating art" or of "life imitating art imitating life."

So then what does it say about "Black and White" that, in presenting this world as alluring, the film could seem to honor those values; does it mean that, at least here, James Toback does believe in making millionaires out of sociopaths who can rhyme? The private school kids who affect the "commodified" styles of speech and dress - the gold tooth cap, the big jacket, the "why you always gotta fuck with me?" - can easily evade their ignorant families in favor of following after the hip-hop rich and famous. But, without even trying to penetrate the music, they instead go behind it and into the criminal behavior, both petty and grave, which drives hip-hop's, as well this movie's, rather unsavory subplots.
So superficial is the engagement with hip-hop on the part of the white kids, one girl named Charlie, played by Bijou Phillips, tells Sam, the documentary filmmaker played by Brooke Sheilds, "We're not imitating. We're into it." But it rings truer when she then admits, "It's a phase," and says tartly, "I'll get over it soon. I'm a kid. In A-meric-a." As then her point seems proved when the credits roll at the end of the film and, in addition to the soundtrack credits, there is a very long list of product trademark credits that illustrates the movie's reliance - the Wu-Tang Clan has its own clothing line, for instance - on hip-hop style over substance.
Ironically, because as a filmmaker James Toback is himself famous for his reliance upon improvisation, it could have been a great match-up for him to focus on and better explore the powerful attraction of those white kids to the music made - rather than the "lifestyle" adopted - by these hip-hop artists who represent, after all, the main thing all adolescents want. What they want, as an act of creative rebellion, is a distinct way to tell their own stories and make their lives rhyme, by some means of expression which differentiates them from the previous generation.
And in hip-hop music, where there exists both the energy of spontaneity and the assurance of form, improvisation (called "freestyling") occurs within the fixed structure of versification. This is what makes it an art form - think of jazz - and this is presumably what Norman Mailer saw to celebrate, way back when, in hip-hop's graphic incarnation. If only James Toback, who is likewise notorious for going against the grain, had more thoroughly entered into the creative spirit of hip-hop in his attempt to bring it to the attention of the more mainstream culture, the film wouldn't impress, as I think it does, as a missed opportunity.
Another failure in addition to what is missing in "Black and White" is Toback's all too concrete imposition of subplot after trite subplot, which only bog down the action with such predictability as cop corruption as an outlet for the revenge motive of a rejected lover, when instead a winning performance by the New York Knicks' Allan Houston might have been left to its own, promising devices. And as for Mike Tyson's appearance in the brief out-of-nowhere scene that has earned a lot of off-screen publicity (where an improvising Robert Downey Jr. plays Brooke Shields' husband, a gay guy who provokes Tyson until he explodes into a homophobic rage, which sexually stimulates the Brooke Shields character), the word that comes to mind is random.
But various kinds of randomness could seem to be James Toback's signature as a filmmaker, because even his Oscar-nominated script for "Bugsy," the sultry 1991 Warren Beatty-Annette Bening mafia romance, is undermined by its meanderingly indulgent duration of three-plus hours. Twice as compact as "Bugsy," but only half as believable, is his 1998 movie about sexual infidelity, "Two Girls and a Guy," which uses as its theme song "You Don't Know Me," as if to acknowledge with a shrug the movie's own lack of focused self-understanding. More charming is Toback's first film starring Robert Downey Jr., "The Pick-Up Artist" (1987), which has the definite advantage of being about an improvisator, so as to create a light-touch fusion between form and content.
In other words, as Toback might argue in his own defense, just sit back and relax. And if it seems like you're only getting part of the conversation, then maybe that's the point. Think "Saturday Night, Live" in all its trademark unevenness. Think big risk with no apparent insurance against failure. A James Toback film retrospective is scheduled for the Screening Room in Manhattan and timed to coincide with the release of "Black and White," to honor Toback's status as a Hollywood outsider-insider who is known for pushing limits as well as the consequent effect that, for one reason or another, a James Toback film's reputation often manages to preceed it.

And in the case of his "Black and White," what in my view most distinguishes both the film and its filmmaker (notwithstanding the broad reservations of the slam poets about celebrating hip-hop "commodification"), is that Toback's comfort with improvisation permits Power and the Wu-Tang Clan to literally speak for themselves, often ad-libbing, which is what then allows the film's viewers to appreciate their linguistic gymnastics.
There is a telling line near the end of what is by contrast to "Black and White" the tightly scripted "Bomb-itty of Errors," which sums up that experience of the thrilling elasticity of language. "I don't remember what happened, I was too busy elabbing it," goes the refrain, which is also the bottom line here, because hip-hop is all about elaborating, with syncopated stacks of rhymes being connected by rapping performers who, in this case, as storytellers - and re-tellers, of Shakespeare - are absolute magicians.
And if you remember the Beatles song "Hey, Jude," you too know the power of the impulse to "Take a sad song and make it better," and so you understand why hip-hop matters, and why both "Bomb-itty" and James Toback's flawed attempt to portray it deserve attention. These days, when as a culture we are at last beginning to turn our sympathetic attention toward an educated understanding of the pressures and expectations we place on our male children - black and white, white and black - we could benefit from learning why hip-hop offers so much to so many of our kids, who are like every generation, after all, in their fierce yearning to take a life and make it rhyme. And make it better.

Return to Top

"Inside John Malkovich"
(The American Prospect: January 3, 2000)

Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness was forecast by his 1938 novel La Nausee, where a solitary named Antoine Roquentin, in the privacy of his journal, analyzes the agony of his existence: "La nausee … c'est moi." It is with a similarly pain-infused intimacy that the film "Being John Malkovich" opens, with a stunning solo "Dance of Despair and Disillusion" performed with a marionette by a down-and-out puppeteer named Craig Schwartz. For Craig, there is no question: Being IS Nothingness.
We know this because the puppet is modeled on the puppeteer, with his acrobat's body but the hurt eyes of a professional failure. His longing for escape combines with his longing for erotic love in a painfully hilarious rendition of the love story of Abelard and Heloise, a performance that will end his career on the street - "consciousness is a terrible curse," he laments with his enduring wit - and force him to seek work in the real world. Fortunately, his being "a short-statured man with nimble fingers" qualifies him for a filing job in a "low overhead" office located in a bit of space between the two regulation floors of a skyscraper. With the help of a crowbar we enter this truncated world with Craig, and now begins the serious fun.
The Heloise puppet gets her toenails painted red and is recycled in silver sandals as a co-worker, Maxine, whose deadpan is deadly enough to enthrall the precariously balanced Craig, who falls. But if there is no surprise here, there are many to come while our hapless hero journeys out of himself and, literally, through a portal, into the otherworld of John Malkovich's brain. Needless to say, motion-sickness is not what Sartre meant by Nausea, but as a queasy audience discovered with the return to hand-held camerawork in "The Blair Witch Project," this lurch between worlds manages fleetingly to simulate the experience.
"It's better than your wildest dreams," is the marketing angle for this journey into the "being" of John Malkovich, but the point of it is that "being inside another's skin" is about "moving differently, thinking differently, feeling differently." The mechanics are too zany and convoluted to explain with a straight face, but the effect is definitely worth the price of admission, so to speak, because, as Craig's wife Lottie says after trying it out for herself, "Being inside did something to me. It made sense." As it does for the audience too, absurdly.

Mostly, the movie functions best when the audience is allowed to intuit its meaning without requiring the laws of art and nature to dovetail too precisely. "The Dance of Despair and Disillusion" reverberates precisely because it's unclear whether the word is intended as "disillusion" or "dissolution." Realities dissolve and characters dissolve into each other in this film, and never more brilliantly than when John Malkovich himself becomes the puppet/dancer. When at last the word appears on the screen in written form it is clarified as disillusion, but the effect of the uncertainty has already been achieved, by which time this ambiguity has become its own interesting experience.
In other words, this filmmaker, Spike Jonze, can't be pinned down as closely as might be desired, and although in every art form this will almost always create problems, "Being John Malkovich" succeeds overall as an original concept imagined in inventive ways and realized in an unusual blend of farce and tragedy. The boundaries of these characters are blurred so as to make them fluid, and so they flow in and out of each other in a series of agile stunt-like interactions, inviting us to wonder "Who's Who?" and "What's What?" while simultaneously laughing-out-loud.

There is precedent for this stylized blend of the real and the unreal asserted in action and emotion, and this argument is offered in the fascinating new book Silent Stars, published by Knopf and written by Jeanine Basinger, who is a Professor of Film Studies at Wesleyan University. About Pickford and Fairbanks - and the lineup of silent stars to follow them in that famously brief but everlasting era - Basinger writes, "Sometimes they played ordinary people like their fans and sometimes they played fantasy figures who were rich and royal; but always they connected. And as the fan magazines promoted them, the myth was born that they were special, yes, but also just like the audience. The implication was clear: You, too, could be a star."
The premise of "Being John Malkovich" is that Craig Schwartz can have everything at once by becoming a celebrity and thus "being" both a success and a puppeteer. Like Basinger's silent film stars - "doubly powerful, both as objects of desire and as role models" - Malkovich holds out the mythic promise that we can escape the quotidian; while we, in fact, are what fills up his own void. Or so the movie seems to be saying. As commentary on celebrity and the marketing of personality, it leaves a lot to the imagination, since this "metaphysical can of worms" (as Craig calls the portal into John Malkovich's brain) is definitely not dumped and sorted.

From the opening scene - the dancer/marionette controlled by the intricate manipulation of strings - I found myself thinking about the trademark flamboyance of a yo-yo in similarly dextrous hands. Yo-yo tricks can be safely tried at home, but when performed in school yards or street corners, crowds will gather with palpable attraction. The reason for this is that nothing can go too dangerously wrong - the spool is tethered, after all - but still, if there isn't enough play remaining in the string to bring the yo-yo back in, the trick fails. After the yo-yo is flicked out, in the compelling suspense of the experience there are two questions being asked: How fancy is the trick? And then, once it's over, can the yo-yo be brought back in?
In "Being John Malkovich" the trick is challenging and captivating. Craig (John Cusack), his wife Lottie (Cameron Diaz), and his co-worker Maxine (Catherine Keener) are each, as characters, quite peculiar but very endearing, and Malkovich plays "himself" as passionately enigmatically as any of his other best roles. This is ensemble work, where these fine actors are dancing with each other in ways beautiful to behold. For this reason there is occasionally a noticeably improvisational feel to the interaction (not to mention the dialogue), but this is a small price to pay for the privilege of watching. As they play with the issues of gender-bending (and blending), of aging and rebirth, of celebrity and entrepreneur-ship, and of the ambition for both "success" and basic human happiness, they are dancing around the essential questions and eagerly exploring the possibilities of answers. Even richer as an experience is that they are enabling within the moviegoer an individual version of this opportunity to toy with life's big questions, which we will not answer. It is a quirky film in this way, and - beyond hilarious - quite satisfying.
So does it matter that the yo-yo doesn't snap back? My own experience during the course of watching the film was in itself a progression. First I wondered, once the premise was laid out, how it could possibly be resolved. Then I became curious - and like Alice in Wonderland "curiouser" - about the life within that alternative reality. This then firmed my commitment to it, and my consequent wishing that a satisfying epiphany might be achievable. When the film then ended with an unfortunately lame double fast-forward, I decided that the stunt of the film, in hindsight, would probably dissolve under scrutiny.
But does it dissolve? With the privilege of time, what I remember are the glorious moments of exuberant invention, where nothing is made of Lottie and her pet chimpanzee sharing a juice box, or - equally - of John Malkovich lining up with all the other hopefuls to experience himself too. Written by Charlie Kaufman, the dialogue is cinematic in its efficiency: "Are you married?" "Yeah, but enough about me." And the physicality of the movie is both antic and controlled, fearless and tender, wildly comic and bittersweet, not unlike Jeanine Basinger's description of the silent stars: "In their world of silence, these actors and actresses use their complete bodies in performance, treating the self as a single expressive unit."
In an echo of Sartre's definition of "existence" as what you create for yourself, in "Being John Malkovich" the world is divided into "those who go after what they want and those who don't." The "essence" which follows as a consequence of that "existence" is a mystery in this movie, but at least the question is explicitly asked: "What is this strange power that Malkovich exudes?"
The actor is himself an accomplice to the theft of his very being, in 15-minute increments, by random others who are in flight from their own lives. By their entering his body and maneuvering him with the same sole control as a puppeteer's, his strange power increases, as does theirs. But at last Malkovich insists that the portal must be "sealed forever" - "It's my livelihood. It's my head!" - notwithstanding his fame as an international Star Puppeteer. Ironically, back on that New York street corner, with his makeshift puppet theater and the grave intensity of his longing, a modestly successful version of this is all Craig Schwartz was trying to achieve in the first place.

Return to Top

"What's Wrong With This Picture?"
(The American Prospect: December 6,1999)

I'd been waiting for "American Beauty" since one day last summer, in West Hollywood, when I first saw that now familiar woman's torso on a billboard dominating the Sunset "Strip." The adolescent hand intrigued me, and the single long-stemmed dewy dark red rose was like an arrow across that torso, with its keyhole-like navel in the shape of a question mark. "Look closer," the promotion said, along with the names of the film's two superstars - sophisticated, sexy, contemporary - Kevin Spacey and Annette Benning. By now, of course, the advertising is also able to invite "look closer at the best reviewed movie of the year."
And I've come to see "American Beauty" in that other cultural capital of America, Harvard Square, where it's currently running, in two theaters, practically every hour on the hour. The full-house audience is clearly engaged, and the movie ends to the voluntary applause of hundreds of individuals - for this is still only a film, not live dramatic performance - but which in itself is a show of approval that is rare for Harvard Square.
Needless to say, the reviewers loved it first. The New Yorker's David Denby has proclaimed it "by far the strongest American film of the year," and he makes a sustained and passionate argument for the picture's "appreciation of the vagrant beauty hidden behind the surfaces." The movie's ads quote the New York Post's Rod Dreher ("A flat-out masterpiece … one of the most artistically accomplished, truthful and altogether breathtaking motion pictures I have ever seen."), along with The Boston Globe's Jay Carr ("The first Hollywood movie of 1999 that deserves to be taken seriously. Dazzling."). Roger Ebert calls it "One of the strongest and most penetrating films of the year," while Gene Shalit goes one better by judging it "A triumph … it ranks with the finest movies of the 90's."
So, as Paul Simon sings, "Who am I to blow against the wind?"

But, for "American Beauty" to even rank as a film of the 90's, I have to wonder why it so powerfully evokes the past fifty years without seeming to have evolved along the way. Early on, when Ricky (the boy-next-door/drug dealer) informs Lester Burnham (his girlfriend's father) that first-rate - "no paranoia" - marijuana goes for $2000 these days, Lester notes cheerfully that "things have changed since 1973." But no, the problem in this movie is that things really haven't changed since 1973, and not since 1953 either, judging by Lester's Esquire-throwback sexual fantasies of the doll-like cheerleader floating in syrups of deep red velvet rose petals. These strike me as unsophisticated, unsexy, uncomtemporary. Am I the only one who is uncharmed?
This picture reminds me instead of the 70's equal-opportunity joke series about how many whatevers it takes to screw in a light bulb, specifically the version about how many feminists it takes. Naturally, the punch line - "That's not funny." - was to prove that, as usual, feminists always ruin all the fun. But the reason I am reminded of these jokes is that in "American Beauty" there's full equal-opportunity offense. In other words it's not only the women, but everyone, reduced to mere caricature.
That's is, you could be a Colonel in the Marines and ask when that "Great Santini" sadistic child-berating brute stereotype will ever be decommissioned. Or you could be a homosexual and worry that your options still remain either to be a cute little Bobbsey Twin or a raving maniac. You could be Lester's wife, Carolyn Burnham, and wonder whether you'll ever stop being blamed for your husband's puerile, plagiarized fantasies - a blond girl and a red sportscar, neither of which make it out of the driveway - along with every other unrealized wish. More destructive yet, you could be any one of the three teenagers in this movie who - so what else is new? - always succeed in frightening the hell out of the grownups, who then give themselves that excuse for parental failings. You could be, even, Our Hero, and feel sorry for yourself for what you've been made out to be. Why aren't you?

Yes, for sure, Kevin Spacey and Annette Benning bring an absorbing and winning cleverness and heart to their roles, but what if their characters had actually been imagined in a way that had made them true-to-life? If characterization were a value in this film, for instance -as opposed to mere vivid caricature - there would be no pistol (Carolyn's "empowerment" out on the firing range but brought home, out-of-character, in her ladies purse) whose sole function, to move the plot, is to fool you into pretending she'll use it, even though, because of that other cliché (the self-hating closet killer whose fate is sealed with a kiss) "who done it" couldn't be more obvious. And this is a movie being hailed as a masterpiece of irony? Could someone please explain that to me?
For irony to be irony, something gets transformed - tilted, pivoted, reversed - in order to become, it is to be hoped, fresher. So, for instance, how about - for a change - a film where it's the guy who gets fed up with being controlled by those with power over him, and so he then decides to take his life into his own hands? "It's never too late to take it back," Lester deadpans, mocking, by imitating, every woman who ever claimed such freedom. Interesting idea? Absolutely. But then why not make it true by letting it seem real?
"Welcome to America's Weirdest Home Videos," says Ricky, who is also the film's teenaged kinky videographer, but in fact it's the very banality of his vision that impresses. Except for the fact that it is the plainer Jane he sees as beautiful, rather than Lester's more predictable ideal, his digitized images are as flat and derivative as the dialogue: "I refuse to be a victim," complains Lester, and "I'm sick and tired of your treating me like I don't exist," "like I'm this gigantic loser." Well?
"Please pass the asparagus," Lester is forced to ask a few times, until finally, fed up with being ignored, he walks around the table and gets it himself, and throws the plate against the wall, saying, "Don't in-ter-rupt-me, hon-ey." In particular he accuses Carolyn, "You haven't spoken to me for months," but his real criticism of his wife? "You're so …joyless."
Not so. As a real estate agent Carolyn may not sell any houses, but - remember that 70's mega-hit book, The Joy of Sex, which came into our 60's-primed world as a culturally sanctioned sex manual? - with Carolyn's Barbie-legs flung back against the headboard as her hero gives her his "royal" treatment - "Who's king?" "You are! You are!" - she at least temporarily gets what passes for release, and relief. Still, however, because "American Beauty" is both the land of opposites and of utter predictability, it is all too clear that this king will reveal himself to be a coward, while then enabling Lester the meek to crown himself king - "I rule!" - for winning at the movie's shamelessly contrived Gotcha set-up. And yet, still, the crowd loves it.

What's worrisome about the power of re-glorified throwbacks like these, and especially if this were to be the very reason this movie is so popular, is that it invites the imagination to seek that extreme. Consider, in this context, for example, Philip Wylie's sensational (and sensationally successful) 1942 book Generation of Vipers, not because the point of view in "American Beauty" parallels Wylie's berserk theorizing, but because, oddly, this movie isn't different enough so as not to bring Vipers to mind. In particular, Wylie's rant against the disastrous "megaloid momworship" visited upon his generation of innocent men is hilarious, sort of, precisely because its shrill tone is so, well, hysterical. Whose fault is everything? "Mom got herself out of the nursery and the kitchen. She then got herself out of the house. … No longer either hesitant or reverent, … the damage she forthwith did to society was so enormous and so rapid that even the best men lost track of things. Mom's first gracious presence at the ballot-box was roughly concomitant with the start toward a new all-time low in political scurviness, hoodlumism, gangsterism, labor strife, monopolistic thuggery, moral degeneration, civic corruption, smuggling, bribery, theft, murder, homosexuality, drunkenness, financial depression, chaos and war. Note that."
And so Lester Burham thinks of himself as "just an ordinary guy with nothing to lose" because he too has already lost everything. "Could he be any more pathetic?" asks his daughter, Jane, as she suggests to Ricky - "But you know I'm not serious, right?" - that "someone should put him out of his misery." Jane's complaint against her mid-life dad is sparked by his adolescent courting of her friend Angela, who has the benefit, at least, of chronological adolescence. In flight from their overt flirtation, Jane complains with an educated smirk that her father is "doing massive psychological damage" to her. But it is with an all too matter-of-fact hurt that she says, "I need a role model."

Instead of a security provided by her father, Jane's future seems to hold an escape to New York with Ricky, whose own father has kicked him out of the house, but who has $40,000 in drug earnings. However, since we know that at least 10% of that amount - it could be more - has come from Lester's own pocket to fund his new "no paranoia" habit, is there not a problem, at least, here? Or, if perhaps the filmmaker does intend this moment to be a cautionary tale about parental narcissism - a new 90's form of "laundering" parental responsibility? - what could possibly then justify the movie's uplift ending?
It is fair to assume there's no problem here because Lester says as much. When Angela asks him, "How are you?" he answers, "It's been a long time since anybody asked me that. I'm great." Alone for a moment then, and seemingly, too, a bit sadder-but-wiser, he studies the framed photo at his elbow: of himself with Carolyn and their Jane as a little girl, on an amusement park ride, all three of them with exhilarated panicky grins. And he says? "Man-oh-man. Man-oh-man, oh-man."
And from there, after the messy interruption of his actual death which had been foretold by the voice overlay in the movie's opening shots, we return to that disembodied voice, which manages, after all, to have found in his life "so much" beauty. The beauty is in all the most obvious places, we are to learn, such as a sky full of falling stars, and yellow maple leaves - also falling - and the aged papery skin of a grandmother's hands. And - at last, yes, too late - "and Janie." And then finally, also, he's willing to admit, even Carolyn.
And now I'm the one who's feeling "man-oh-man," only it's as in "get me out of here!" Because this is what makes him feel great? "I feel like I've been in a coma for twenty years," he has said when he wakes up to enjoy his mid-life diversions of sex-drugs-and-rock & roll. But isn't he, still?

Is the power of the film, then, in its ability - by means of "Oscar-caliber" performance and consistently idiosyncratic image-making - to distract from its very content? And is this, finally, what characterizes - or, rather, caricatures - the 90's? There have been other films over the past twenty years which also take up the darkness at the core of American family life, and which also illuminate the consequences born of that scary rigid Mom made famous in all her fury by Philip Wylie. There is the honestly and truly ironic "Welcome to the Dollhouse," and the brittle but fluid "The Ice Storm," and "Ordinary People," where the subject is the revelation of character which, like the score (the melody of Pachelbel's "Canon in D") evolves in minute and illuminating variation. There is compelling surface beauty in each of these other films too, but, unlike "American Beauty," there is a human beauty that isn't only skin-deep.
Here in "American Beauty" there is a small empty white plastic bag which features at first as the aimless, random subject of Ricky's favorite video - as it twirls and dives in a restless wind on a day just before it will snow - and again at the end of the movie when it reappears as the filmmaker's own signature. This is a symbolic argument against the value of "structure and discipline," which has been exposed in "American Beauty" as cruel, at worst - by putting the Marine in charge of that mission - or, at best, mocked by the kids, as irrelevant. But what of the structure and discipline necessary to family life? To meaningful work? To all fully realized art?
To me, the "beautiful" plastic bag is a dispiriting image - so literally without grounding or purpose, just somebody else's trash, a weightless object manipulated by a breeze into what passes for acrobatics - but it represents all the more heartbreaking a belief: that in America in 1999, this should be as beautiful as it gets.

Return to Top

Articles

"Marriage and Death; wishes and fears"
(The Boston Globe: September 5,1997)

In our family it had already been a wedding day, the night the princess died.

Just in time that morning, the sun burned its way through the persistent fog, and, in a grove of mature white pines, a perfect couple married each other, passionately. Their intense premarital deliberation yielded a pair of love letters, from each to each, and their own words about each other sounded truer than their more familiar, solemn marriage vows did. They know what they're getting into without the benefit of a failed first marriage. They've been paying close attention.

And so we assembled witnesses were able to play our parts confidently, and under a perfect blue sky our opened hearts promised our combined, wholly devoted support. Yes, we could be counted upon; and vice versa. The day almost ended on this euphoric note, but for the then still "breaking news" from Paris. An hour later, "ever after" was forevermore foreshortened. Before our eyes, best wishes converged with worst fears.

This convergence of wishes and fears is what a fairy tale is, and yet, as in his book "Fairy Tales and After," Roger Sale writes, "No fairy tale I know distinguishes real from unreal, to say nothing of fantasy from fact." With the graphic news from Paris, fact and fantasy are suddenly made distinct from each other. This can't happen. In a fairy tale we're not required to imagine dying.

It would be our task, more simply, to put ourselves into the place of, for example, a rather ordinary girl chosen to be the prince's princess But now here's the very problem: In addition to our having put ourselves in her place, she proved to be uniquely capable - unprincess-like - of putting herself in our place. Like those photos of her, stolen from miles away with weapon-like lenses, the distinctions are blurred. The fuzzy images could be anybody's, even our own. What we weren't prepared for were the consequences of this identification.

Yes, I watched Lady Diana marry Prince Charles, and, on our couch in the middle of that long-ago night, I had tucked under my arm - it was his request to be wakened for it - a little boy whose father had died recently. We two attended the royal wedding as if we were personally invited, and, I sensed at the time, it served as an act of consolation for a boy whose own worst fears had been realized, so who was in desperate need of some new wishes. Even with the worldwide demand for renewed hope, there seemed to be plenty to spare. Nor was it a fatal problem, seemingly, that the royal marriage was arranged to provide for a next of kin, but of course this was because we didn't know it was also pre-arranged, to fail. That boy and I were happy to link our own hopes to Merrie Olde England's, and did.

But perhaps because a story always has to fold back in on itself to generate meaning, as it happened it was that same boy, now grown, who escorted his sister - the bride - down the aisle,into her own profound desires. Watching his face, I found myself thinking, therefore - only hours before Diana's death - about a fairy tale wedding and famously modern aftermath. Here's my question: Are marriage and death, deaths and marriages, fated to intersect?

Once, in a public discussion, the writer-scholar Carolyn Heilbrun wondered aloud why it is that, in novels, the women characters always either die or get married. I admitted, shocked, that I was guilty of this in my first two novels (where the first dies and the second one relents to marriage), so I promised myself I'd try to do better in my next two. In my next two you could say I did worse, and for the obvious reason. I'd come to understand that, for women and men both, the future hangs exactly in that balance between our fears and our wishes, between the real and the unreal, in the blur of fantasy and fact. We're not sure which is which. It doesn't matter.

Our hearts opened. "That could be me," we half-believed, no matter that in a million years, we actually couldn't ever be that ruffled, ribboned couple gliding down the cathedral's red-carpeted aisle. Why such power, then, in the fantasy? Because, to our credit, we'd all prefer to be - not smaller than life, but - larger than life. The complete surprise was in this princess demonstrating with the example of her entire life, "It's more than that you could be me. I could be you."

In this death of hers, we understand that, after all, she was us. No wonder we can't be consoled.

Return to Top

"All The Right Moves"
(The Boston Globe: November 26, 2000)

The school corridor is a maze of arms and legs as the dancers prepare themselves for the first class of the morning. "Please be mindful to leave enough space for Faculty and Staff to walk through when stretching," reads one sign at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center on West 61st Street behind New York's Lincoln Center. Though these are mostly college-age students, their hair is impressively natural - kept either long enough or short enough so as not to distract - and their street clothes and jewelry, the jeans and earrings appropriate to their age group, are stashed in their backpacks. Some are dressed in layers, their black barefoot tights for the Graham-based technique class worn over rolled-up classical pale pink tights required for the ballet class to follow immediately. And when the door to the studio is opened, like swimmers entering the sea, they slide across the linoleum floor and take their places. The accompanist sits attentively behind his three cylindrical drums in the front corner of the room, and I arrange myself on the floor next to him. I straighten my back and try to suspend my own body on a breath as deep as I can produce. This posture seems to be the best I can achieve. As a former dancer myself, this wasn't always the case.

A basic principle of the dance technique devised by Martha Graham is the contraction and release of the spine. Beginning seated on the floor, the 27 dancers in this class are guided through a series of interconnected exercises, reaching beyond themselves as if their limbs, extending and retracting, are elongating with each breath. The drummer-accompanist is so in synch with the teacher that she only needs to lift her chin to cue him, and as his hands move across the surface of his drums, there is only the steady pulsing rhythm to suggest exertion.

Teaching this class is the director of the Ailey School Denise Jefferson, whose own muscular body - like those of students less than half her age - has neither the stringy nor the bulky muscles of the recklessly overexercised. Dressed in ivory leotard and tights, she arches her upper body to demonstrate a stretch, with the liquid grace of a fountain. Her voice is gentle as she coaxes the dancers through their exercises while walking among them, only having to place a hand here, a hand there, to align them perfectly. The dancers' faces betray no strain, either, and yet during the class, the enormous windows that look out over the neighboring housing project gradually become opaque with the steam from their effort. For these 90 fluid minutes in a studio with no clock, I watch these accomplished dancers move through their incrementally more complex patterns of movement with only a few words of advice from "Ms. J."

"Keep stretching the chin up to the ceiling," she says, and "Never feel like the head is resting on the back of the neck." Or "I want your face to disappear. I want to see your nose, maybe your chin." And then, "See if you can find that energy flow." As the dancers progress across the floor in pairs, in increasingly more rigorous combinations, she encourages: "Don't be afraid of it. Do it as if this were your audition step. To show how fabulous you are. What power you have."

Denise Jefferson joined the Ailey School faculty in 1974 and has been its director since 1984. But in 1961, when we met as freshmen at Wheaton College in Norton, she was new to - and suspicious of - the range of varied techniques known collectively as "modern" dance. We relax after class in the school's cozy library, where awards fill the wall space over the shelves of books and dance magazines, where there are videotapes and a VCR, and where, on the large reading table, a sewing machine can be hastily set up for last-minute costume adjustments. Over coffee and a muffin that she barely breaks into, Denise describes her roundabout path to the position she now holds.

Growing up in what Denise calls a "charmed childhood" in upper-middle-class Chicago, the first of two daughters of parents who gave them an early introduction to the arts, Denise had begun her ballet training with a dynamic teacher named Edna L. McRae. But then this initial experience of herself as a promising dancer became, at a crucial point in her development, the opposite kind of formative experience, of an opportunity denied her. "Well, I didn't plan to dance professionally," she tells me. "I had gotten ..." she says, and hesitates. "I - " and then she begins again. "Well, what really happened was that when I was about 12, my ballet teacher took my mother and me out to lunch to talk about my career. And she said that I had enough talent to be a ballet dancer, but it was going to be very difficult, because there were virtually no blacks in white companies. There was a small black ballet company, but I'd never seen them. I'd only seen the New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, and so the thought, at 12, of fighting my way into a hostile environment was terrifying."

Denise's experience of the restricted world of ballet paralleled that of the legendary dancer Judith Jamison, who succeeded Alvin Ailey 11 years ago as artistic director of the dance theater Ailey founded. Two seasons ago, the company performed "Echo: Far From Home," an autobiographical ballet choreographed by Jamison. It begins as the curtain opens onto an empty, darkened stage, with a disembodied amplified voice booming into the void: "No black girl can do ballet."

But whereas Judith Jamison persisted in her ballet training and was famously "discovered" in a 1964 master class with Agnes De Mille, debuting in New York with American Ballet Theatre, Denise's ballet teacher's warning instead caused her to reassess. Recalling it today, she says that she decided she "didn't love ballet. I liked moving, but I didn't really enjoy pointe, so I began to take fewer classes, and I became a teenager, et cetera. So then when I went to Wheaton, I was not thinking about dance at all. I thought, I love foreign languages, I want to travel, I want to see the world, maybe I'll join the UN. My head was there."

As she explains it, it was essentially to fulfill the college gym requirement that she returned to dancing. "I hated gym, and I didn't want to do basketball, so I thought: Oh, God. Well, dancing's OK. I've done it for a long time. I can do it. I'll do that." But Denise remembers her audition for the Wheaton dance group as "horrible," since she was asked to improvise, and in ballet, she'd always been told exactly what to do. And now she was supposed to sit on the floor in a dance class "for the first time ever! It just didn't make much sense to me."

Then one day in dance class we were shown the classic film A Dancer's World, and Denise learned that the Martha Graham Company was racially integrated. More specifically, she saw, and identified with, the lead dancer, Mary Hinkson. "I said, 'Wait a minute. This is real technique. There's something really quite beautiful in here.' And I thought, 'If I'm going to do this at all, I want to be like her.'"

A second pivotal experience occurred the following year in a master dance class taught at the New England Conservatory by Donald McKayle. By the mid-'5Os, he had established himself in New York as the leading black choreographer, "carving a niche for himself with dances on social themes, performed by racially mixed casts," as the New York Times dance critic Jennifer Denning writes in her biography of Ailey. The way Denise remembers it, I had gone into Boston for a master class at the conservatory taught by McKayle and had told Denise she should come with me next time. In her precise memory of that class, she describes the "thrill of walking into that huge room, and there was this tall, beautiful African-American man teaching the class!" And whereas in ballet, as she says, "you're always fighting your body because you're not turned out enough - or you're not this, you're not that - and you can't do enough turns, in that class I could do everything. Or I felt I could. It just worked."

Following McKayle, she went to the intensive summer dance program held at Connecticut College in New London, where she also took classes from Donald Wood (he was teaching for Martha Graham) and Jose Limon. "And that did it. There were performances every night, and I was taking five technique classes a day. And was hungry for it."

After that summer of 1963, she'd felt she was ready to move to New York and dance, but her mother told her, "No, you finish Wheaton, and then you can do whatever you want." So in the meantime she took more master classes in Boston while educating herself by attending dance concerts by Donald McKayle's company and other choreographers, like Merce Cunningham (his lead dancer, Carolyn Brown, had gone to Wheaton, too). After graduation, Denise did move to New York, where she spent about a month "just kind of shopping around." McKayle's company wasn't in the city at the time, so she took herself over to the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, where she found the door to the main studio slightly ajar. The company was rehearsing, and there was Mary Hinkson, and so Denise told herself, "I am in the place. This is it."

She was awarded a scholarship to study at the Graham school, and because all the students were given free tickets to the company's concert season, Denise saw her favorite teacher, Helen McGehee, performing in "Cave of the Heart," a dance about the legend of Medea. This was an experience that Denise says "wedded" her to the Graham technique, because what she saw was "technical perfection," an important component for her because of all her ballet training.

"And yet," she continues, "there was also this dark passion. I mean, Helen was killing people onstage, being absolutely ferocious in showing that side of the human spirit, and doing it with an artistic instrument that was so beautifully trained. And I thought, that's it. I want to be able to express all these feelings - the dark ones can come out there as well as the sunny ones - and to have a technique that is beautiful and perfect enough to be able to do it. Because I could never, after all those years of ballet - and I liked the formality of it, I 1iked the discipline of it, I liked being clear about what my goals were for my body - go into some kind of 'flip-flop' dance. For me, that just wasn't going to work."

The contrast she is making is with "release technique," a dance form that Denise says "can work very well once a dancer already has a strong technique but which doesn't train sufficiently for beginning dancers." She feels that the additional value of a formal structure - ballet as well as the codified modern techniques of Graham or Cunningham or Lester Horton, who was Ailey's own mentor - is that the specific movement "becomes embedded in the dancer's bones."

During her second year in New York, when Denise was taking advanced-level classes at the Martha Graham Center, a former Graham Company member, Pearl Lang, was one of the school's guest teachers. Lang liked Denise's dancing and asked her to join the company Lang had founded to showcase her own choreography.

This was the beginning of Denise's professional career, but it was interrupted that same year, 1967, when she married John Roy Harper II - she still refers to him as a "lovely person" - and followed him back to his home state of South Carolina, where he would attend law school in order to fulfill what Denise calls "his destiny," as a civil rights lawyer in the South.

In 1969, their daughter, Francesca, was born, but after three years in Columbia, South Carolina, Denise took Francesca to her own hometown of Chicago for a year. Then, in 1971, she and Francesca moved to New York, where she had found a "greater variety of experiences and better education." Once there, Denise returned to the former settlement house on East 59th Street that still housed Lang's group and reestablished herself as a dancer.

In the meantime, Alvin Ailey had received a $37,000 grant from the Rockefeller Fund that enabled him to move his relatively new dance company into a renovated studio and performance space upstairs from Lang. Denise doesn't recall her very first experience of the man whose vision of dance would soon come to define the rest of her own career. But she vividly remembers the honor of being invited by him to perform, although knee surgery ultimately prevented her from dancing.

After her recovery, Denise contacted Pearl Lang and "picked it up again," but it was here that she began to shift away from performance into teaching. By l974, her daughter was 5, and because it had become more difficult to tour, Denise accepted a position on the faculty of the Ailey School, where she has remained ever since.

In effect, then, whether it has been despite or because of her own lost years before rediscovering herself as a dancer, Denise has made a career out of providing opportunities for others. And for today's aspiring dancers who have both the exceptional talent and the necessary will, the wide-open premise of the Ailey School - that dance should be available to everyone - is a reversal of the "hostile environment" of ballet confronting the adolescent Denise. Today's young dancers are instructed and inspired by the Ailey vision. Always in collaboration with Judith Jamison, it is Denise's purpose to ensure open access to each new generation.

And at home too, in fact, Denise has raised a professional dancer. Her daughter, Francesca Harper, now 31, began her own ballet studies early, and at age 7 she attended the Joffrey Ballet School in Greenwich Village. At 10, she moved to what Denise terms the "more intensive experience" of the School of American Ballet, which included performing in the New York City Ballet's Nutcracker on the stage of Lincoln Center's New York State Theater.

"Because ballet was Francesca's dream," Denise says her support took the form of "You can do this." Also, since the world of professional ballet is now more inclusive, Francesca's career in dance has already included eight years in Germany with the Frankfurt Ballet. Recently, too, Francesca has been one of six dancers working with a choreographer as a sort of "physical laboratory" for the Glenn Close television version of South Pacific. And this past summer, as part of the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue at Harvard University stimulated by the work of the playwright and actress Anna Deavere Smith, Francesca Harper performed a work-in-progress created in an improvisational collaboration with her aunt, Margo Jefferson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic for The New York Times. The Boston Globe's reviewer experienced the piece as "provocative" and detailed its powerful impact upon the audience.

In that same audience, Denise says, she was made "tremendously excited and proud" by their combining dance, slides, and text to form a three-generation family narrative told in the voices of four women. Along with Margo's and Francesca's stories of their lives, the story of Denise growing up in dance is conveyed in pictures, and Denise and Margo's mother is also represented, as the fourth voice and the third generation, by means of letters she had written when she was about Francesca's age. Behind this joint exploration of the impact of gender and race is their concrete and shared devotion, to one another and to the arts. According to Denise, as she describes her childhood, this was always the case.

Her Chicago-raised mother was an English major who was a social worker before settling into her life as wife and mother. Denise and Margo went to the highly regarded University of Chicago Lab School and both took extra music and dance lessons from about age 6. As a family, they regularly attended plays at the Goodman Theater and concerts by the Chicago Ballet and the Chicago Symphony. "Dad was a very good jazz trombonist," Denise says, "but he set aside whatever professional ambitions he may have had in music in order to attend medical school. From his home in Mississippi he went to Denver and then Los Angeles, where he was denied entry to UCLA, so instead attended a black medical school in order to become a pediatrician."

Along with other members of Chicago's affluent black community, Dr. and Mrs. Jefferson enjoyed a cabin cruiser on Lake Michigan and provided their two daughters with frequent opportunities for travel. But as Denise puts it, when it came time to choose a college for her - and because in Chicago an Eastern women's college had cachet - the family made the selection (as casually as many families did then) on the basis of a conversation at the A& P that her mother had with a friend whose daughter was enrolled at Wheaton College.

It was Mrs. Jefferson's simple misunderstanding that day that at Wheaton there were five blacks in each class - not five in the whole college - and so Denise came, unprepared, from being one of 15 black students in her high school class of 127 to the "shock" of being the lone African-American in the Wheaton class of '65.

Imagine her experience now, though, when at this year's commencement, where Denise was awarded an honorary doctorate of fine arts, the newly invested chairwoman of the board is Patricia King ('63), who back then had been one of those very few others. The ceremony's invocation was delivered by a young African-American woman, president of the Student Government Association. And among her now coed classmates there were a comfortable number of graduating seniors wearing festive kente-cloth stoles over their black academic gowns.

In Denise's remarks to this audience that also included her mother, her sister, and her daughter- as well as many of her proud classmates at our 35th reunion - she credited her college experience as having been "a process of learning to compete with that person we wanted to become, rather than, more narrowly, with each other." It prepared her, she said, "to trust my instincts, my brain. To prepare myself."

Alvin Ailey had also been headed to college, to study Romance languages, when, in 1947 in Los Angeles, he was introduced to the dance pioneer Lester Horton, a film choreographer whose Dance Theater was the first exclusively modern dance theater (and the first multiracial troupe) in the country. Ailey watched Horton teach for six months before taking his first class and becoming irresistibly drawn into the "freewheeling, encompassing artistic atmosphere that existed only in [Horton's] studio and theater," says Ailey's biographer. To this day, the Horton technique is taught at the Ailey School as the modern-dance counterpoint to the Graham based technique. Ailey created an eclectic dance environment in which art and social concerns are joined, just as Lester Horton did in West Hollywood. But it was toward his own African-American traditions that Ailey had turned - the way Martha Graham looked to ancient Greek mythology for her themes - for what have become his most enduring dances. As Ailey once wrote in a program note about the cultural heritage of the American Negro, "I and my dance theater celebrate this trembling beauty."

And to witness the power of the beauty of it, you only had to be in the audience for the Ailey School 2000 Spring Performance. The program was designed to showcase the students, although - according to Judith Jamison's wishes - "not to make it like a recital," where there is a long sequence of pieces without any unifying thread. To this end, there were six bold new dances created by this year's Ailey School guest choreographers, each performed with vigor and precision by the most advanced-level students. In addition, this new work was bracketed by excerpts of Ailey's two most famous pieces ("Cry," and "Revelations"), which have always been performed exclusively by members of the first and second companies. For this night, however, these professional dancers all of whom had come up from the Ailey School - were joined onstage by students from the junior division.

In a segment from the solo "Cry" at the beginning of this program, nine young girls performed steps from the signature piece Ailey choreographed in 1965 for Judith Jamison, and they were performing alongside a principal dancer from the company. Then, in the "Rocka My Soul" selection from Ailey's most popular dance, his 1960 "Revelations," the women dancers were joined by a girl from the junior division. With choreography adapted by Hope Clark, Ailey's last performing partner, the young dancer India Smith embodied onstage what Denise calls the "talent, coordination, musicality, and confidence, the steadiness of spirit" necessary to dance performance.

The next night's program is the annual gala, which finishes with a reception back at the Ailey School, where the students have transformed the studios into spring gardens decorated with deep buckets of peonies and lilies and huge sprays of dogwood and apple blossoms. In that audience are the benefactors who sustain the work of the school and the company, and onstage Judith Jamison presides, in all her trademark elegance, as artistic director of the company she joined 35 years ago.

That year was 1965, when Ailey dedicated "Cry" for "all black women everywhere - especially our mothers." And it was the same year that, on the insistence of her own mother, Denise Jefferson graduated from college first, before beginning to find her own way into the professional dance world of which Ailey would come to be at the center.

On this next to last night of the Ailey School year, it is Denise who welcomes the audience, along with Sylvia Waters, the former Ailey principal dancer who has been the artistic director of Ailey II for the entire 25 years the second company has existed. Denise praises the accomplishments of the emerging dancers, who have been selected by audition and whose friends and families have come from everywhere to celebrate them. And thus it is made clear that, while the durable continuity of the Ailey legacy resides in the deliberate joining of the past with the present, the Ailey ideal has also always looked to the future.

"When he got older, he turned to the little ones" was how Denise described Alvin Ailey to me the morning after the performance. "He'd buy their raffle tickets and enjoy coming to the studio and having them all around him, but he always had two sides. So while he'd love having the little girl dance, he'd still have said, 'A little girl? In my dance?' And then he'd have said, 'Well, OK, go try it. I'll decide.'"

Since Ailey's death 11 years ago, his successors have had to decide, but they are all rigorous guardians of his legacy. Dances from the Ailey repertory are performed only with permission, and only lately have the most advanced students been taught portions of the dances, specifically those students in the new bachelor of fine arts program offered jointly by the Ailey School and Fordham University. Enrollment in the Ailey School has expanded from 125 students in 1969 to its current 3,500. For 16 years the entire range of study has been directed by Denise Jefferson, whom Ailey himself chose to carry forward his mission to make dance instruction available to everyone. Today's Ailey School runs 160 classes a week, beginning with a junior division that offers seven levels of training for children as young as 3 and a professional division with four opportunities for concentrated study.

In a nice symmetry, a student from Wheaton College who last spring successfully auditioned for the summer intensive program completed the session and, according to Denise, performed well in the West African dance on the final program. Nicole Rodriguez is now in her senior year at Wheaton, and as she determines her future, whether in dance or not, I am struck that Denise's choice of words to describe her - "focused, energetic, clear, a lovely mover" - is exactly the way I remember Denise herself all that time ago, at that same point in her own life.

The continuity is not only pleasing but gratifying. In the world-famous dance company known as the Alvin Ailey American dance Theater, more than 75 percent of the current dancers have come from the school, as have all the dancers of Ailey II. This deeper continuity is as deliberate as it is effective, which is why it is evident that though Alvin Ailey died the very week of his dance center's move uptown from Times Square to just behind Lincoln Center, his ideal is not only alive but thriving.

Ailey articulated his vision the year before his death in a New York Times tribute by the dance critic Anna Kisselgoff, on the occasion of Ailey's being awarded the nation's highest arts honor at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.: "I am trying to show the world we are all human beings, that color is not important, that what is important is the quality of our work, of a culture in which the young are not afraid to take chances and can hold onto their values and self-esteem, especially in the arts and in dance. That's what it's all about to me."