Anton Chekhov’s THE SEAGULL is great material for a first-rate film. Director Michael Mayer’s screen adaptation of Chekhov’s 1896 play is a visually lovely production with a top-tier cast with wonderful locations, sets and costumes. “The Seagull”was the first of Chekhov’s four great plays, a work full of human meaning, and one of the great classics of literature. Sadly, “great classic” does not describe this film.
Michael Mayer’s THE SEAGULL is not so much a bad film as a deeply disappointing one. It should have been a great film – it has all the lavish trappings of a great film, fabulous cast included, yet it is a hollow shell, all surface with little underneath. The problem seems to be two-fold. First, Stephen Karam’s script does violence to Chekhov’s work, reducing the 3-hour play to a mere 99 minutes. Then, director Michael Mayer hurries the cast through mechanical, emotionless readings of this truncated material, allowing for little room for development of characters or relationships between.
Which is really a shame. It is a waste of a terrific cast, an ensemble cast that seems perfect, and includes stars Annette Bening, Saoirse Ronan, Brian Dennehy, Corey Stoll, and Elisabeth Moss, and other gifted actors. The cast does manage to sneak through some good moments but not enough to salvage the film entirely. One often feels as if the director is deliberately holding them back, forcing them to rein in the emotion.
The story takes place at a stately lakeside Russian estate in the late 19th or early 20th century. Annette Bening plays Irina, a famous but aging actress, who is the center of this story, and as often as she can manage it, the center of attention. Irina is visiting the country estate she owns with her brother Sorin (Brian Dennehy), with an entourage that includes her ailing but charismatic brothern, her lover Boris (Corey Stoll), who is a famous writer of middle-brow works, and Irina’s son Konstantin (Billy Howle), who has ambitions to be a playwright. Konstantin is in love with Nina (Saoirse Ronan), the beautiful daughter of a rich neighboring landowner, who has her own ambitions to be an actress. Meanwhile, Masha (Elisabeth Moss), the daughter of Irina’s estate manager Shamrayev (Glenn Fleshler) and his wife Polina (Mare Winningham), is in unrequited love with Konstantin. Also on hand are Medvedenko (Michael Zegen), a teacher who is in love with Masha, and Doctor Dorn (Jon Tenney), Sorin’s doctor and a family friend. The story takes place in two parts, a few years apart, at the same country estate.
With all its conflicting romantic interests and ambitions, it is easy to see why Chekhov described his play as a comedy. But there are grand themes of human life at play in this story. but if fact it is an ensemble drama of human longing, flaws, jealousy and ambition. The center of the action is Bening’s Irina, who has both money and ego, and uses both to control on those around her. Irina is both in denial and seized with fear as her great beauty fades in middle age, making her volatile.
Both Irina’s lover Boris and her brother Sorin are caught in her gravitational pull but the one who is most affected is Konstantin, who seeks his mother’s approval. With the innocence of youth, Nina and Konstantin seek encouragement in their theatrical ambitions from Irina and Boris. But Irina cannot bear not to be the center of attention and admiration, and jealously lashes out at both her playwright son and would-be actress Nina. Boris has his own flaws and demons, just less obvious than Irina’s. Irina’s brother Sorin is in poor health and in physical pain, while most of the other characters suffer their own emotional pain.
Bening is wonderful as this egotistical character, driven to cruelty by her fears, but the rest of the cast is excellent as well, doing as much as they can to develop both character and relationships within the compressed script. Billy Howle and Saoirse Ronan recently appeared together as star-crossed lovers in ON CHESIL BEACH, and their romantic chemistry works well here also. Corey Stoll is notable as Boris, who keeps his thoughts hidden around others but whose complex emotions play across his face is solitary moments. Brian Dennehy is good as undemanding Sorin, Irina’s beloved brother, and Elizabeth Moss just drips disappointment as romantically-frustrated Masha.
This cast is so good, that they still occasionally sneak through a nuanced moment or a compelling scene. But mostly they seem constrained to running through scenes in a mechanical fashion, as if some ticking clock is forcing them to get through it all quickly. In many scenes, one can feel the actors straining to stick to a mechanical reading of their lines. This is emotional stuff, touching on deep aspects of what is means to be human, yet the emotion is often subdued. Even if one is not familiar with Chekhov’s play, you can sense something missing and that a lot of material feels compressed into the brief running time. The question, of course, is why the hurry?
A film that looks this good should have been better. Mathew J. Lloyd’s cinematography is gorgeous and all the production values and visual aspects of the film are all so perfect and obviously costly. Not just its excellent cast, but the stunning locations – a stately stone mansion, lush green woods, fields, and lake – with period-perfect interiors and beautiful costumes. With all this care put into the production and casting, THE SEAGULL should have been a great cinema classic of the play. Instead it offers meager enjoyment, and it teases us with expectations that are dashed with its restraints on its gifted cast and a hurried abbreviated version of the great play.
It is hard to see how this script, which strips so much out of the original classic, will appeal to those who should be the core audience nor how this mechanical run-through of events will win over those who are not already Chekhov fans. Sadly, film distributors may read its failure as a rejection of the classic material, and be hesitant to take a chance of another Chekhov film adaptation, instead of the correct conclusion that a script that mangles that classic is the problem. Such a waste of talent and effort.
THE SEAGULL opens Friday, June 1, at Plaza Frontenac Cinema.
RATING: 3 out of 5 stars
