precious, self-indulgent, and dull

timgr

I'm baffled by all the praise this film has received.

I'm guessing the director's choice to forego sets and costumes was intended to enable the actors and audience to focus in on and explore the inner world of the characters. But that's just wrong-headed. Human beings aren't fully alive unless they are interacting with (or passionately rejecting) the world around them. What would Neil Simon's characters be without New York, New York?

Without the sets and costumes, this production of Uncle Vanya has an airless quality to it that eventually leads to a suffocating case of boredom. There is no sense of time or place (at least not in the first half hour I watched before giving up on it), so the behaviour of the characters seems to be severely stifled (and not merely by whatever social mores the characters are supposedly constrained by).

Contrast this with the wonderful My Dinner With Andre, which had a very specific time and place, and which the director regularly reminded us of with interruptions by waiters. Imagine what that production would have been like if Gregory and Shawn had performed the entire thing on stools against a black backdrop, with no interruptions. Yikes!

score /10

timgr 23 July 2001

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0351801/