Download - Yuval Sharon

Review for the Wagner Society of New York:
Same Plot, Different Music
Tristan and Isolde, a film by Kevin Reynolds; James Franco, Sophia Myles, Rufus Sewell. Released by 20th Century Fox, 2006.
Right at the height of the holiday movie crunch, imagine my surprise to see a poster from across
the hall of a suburban Cineplex advertising “Tristan & Isolde.” From far away, and with the ambiguousness of the ampersand, my jaw dropped and my mind started racing: could there actually
be a big-budget film adaptation of Wagner’s opera planned for a wide release coming soon?
Could audiences on this side of the Atlantic have an opportunity to see Bill Viola’s widely
praised video for Peter Sellars’ Paris production? Or, with the recent Hollywood fervor for musical adaptations, is someone finally bold enough to translate Wagner’s cinematic score into the
medium it seems to have prophesied (and maybe in a more accessible way than Syberberg’s Parsifal)?
Of course, by the time I got within 20 feet of the poster, I realized that sweet little word
“und” was actually “and,” and someone named Ann Dudley got the music credit instead of Wagner. And the release date was not promising—less for it being Friday the 13th than for it occuring
in January, the month studios traditionally designate as the dumping ground for movies they
thought could have been Oscar contenders but turn out to be duds. Regardless of the signs that
pointed to disappointment, I knew I’d have to see this film, Wagner music or no.
Kevin Reynold’s movie turns out to be perfectly decent in its Hollywood way, with period action and romance that reminded me much more of Braveheart than Wagner. It’s enjoyable
much in the same way that most period films are in revealing the unmistakable signals of contemporary fashion, the way Julie Christie’s hairstyle exemplifies that snapshot of the ‘60s that is
Doctor Zhivago, no matter how hard the film tries to hold up an illusion of the Russian Revolution. Here, Tristan’s shaggy mop must have been a repulsive anomaly in 5th-century Cornwall,
but actor James Franco would blend inconspicuously among a Saturday night’s crowd on Bedford Avenue. The way he struts through the film and plays in the ocean’s waves like the premonition of a surfer makes you expect him to turn to his equally grungy Melot and say, “Dude,
where’s my love potion?”
Isolde, too, as portrayed by Sophia Myles, seems like an Ally McBeal character who
wandered into a Celtic costume shop. Goethe’s ideal of the ewige Weibliche has certainly
changed over the centuries, and now Myles’ Isolde offers what Hollywood obviously wants us to
believe is the perfect woman: she’s cute but not sexually threatening, smart but not an intellec-
tual, and speaks her own mind without her voice swaying anything that “the men” decide. Her
protest against her father’s arranged marriage reads as sarcastic acceptance of his authority; and
as she heals Tristan’s wounds, she brushes off her growing feelings with a faltering smile, a
blush, and everything but the “um.” She’s clearly a master of potions and herbs, but it comes
across more like a hobby to wile away her unmarried hours than a gift she inherited from her
mother—like Ally McBeal, she’s unnaturally good at her job, but she’d give everything up if
only she met the right man. To call the portrayal of Isolde “regressive” is no surprise considering
its forerunners in American mass culture over the last decade, but it is surprising and rather embarrassing that an audience would have to look to an opera written more than 140 years ago to
get a more liberal view of women.
That, in fact, is what is most revealing about a comparison between the new film and the
opera: the new film is downright reactionary in social and political outlook compared to Wagner’s opera. Take the private scene between the lovers on the ship to Cornwall, the setting for
Wagner’s Act I climax. Isolde is a force to be reckoned with, a rock of royal strength almost bullying her captor. In the film, this scene plays out as a typical “Don’t leave me” scene, with Isolde
pouting and pleading and nearly throwing herself at Tristan’s feet. It all feels quite a bit more
stock operatic than the volatile, unpredictable scene and intense characterization that appears in
the actual opera. While the Isolde in the opera spurns Tristan as “sittsam” and mocks his stubborn adherence to social custom, the film’s Tristan shakes his head at his irrational, emotional
lover who can’t understand the greater good of an enlightened State. What appears so politically
radical in the opera is how little a role politics actually plays; the outside world constantly melts
away, leaving the lovers in an almost terrifyingly abstract world. But in the film, the political
tensions between England and Ireland plays a much larger part of the narrative than the love
story itself; Tristan ultimately sacrifices himself and his affair to fight for the honor of King
Mark. Loyalty to government is posited as a higher good, even if it results in unfortunate collateral damage in your personal life.
The ending, of course, is another key place of comparison: the cinematic Isolde ends the
film with the line, “Life is greater than death, but love is greater than both.” Reynolds could not
come up with a line that contradicts Wagner more blatantly than this, as Wagner’s celebrated
conclusion to his opera, if it were to be similarly formulated, would read, “Love is greater than
life, but death is greater than both.” The movie is certainly built in the “feel-good” formula of all
standard post-Titanic historical melodramas—it even has its own bland and somber love song
trying to make its way up the charts like Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.” But like the majority of Wagner’s operas, Tristan is practically a “feel-bad” evening. There is release—most famously of its initial harmonic discord—but specifically little catharsis on the viewers’ end. We’re
still stuck with the politics, jealousy, and pettiness that Isolde has just transcended, and with the
return of the house lights in the auditorium, we are forced back into the dreadful, artificial light
of day. Our time has not yet come to follow the lovers into the void.
But where the film falls most dramatically short in comparison to Wagner’s version is,
not surprisingly, in the music. Any composer who scores a film of Tristan and Isolde without
ever alluding to Wagner is either very bold or very stupid. Ann Dudley’s score makes me think
the latter is appropriate in her case, for Wagner is left as the elephant in the room while generic,
sappy strings set an elegiac tone to the entire film. Percussion is used occasionally to accompany
action in an unspectacular way, and traditional Irish music appears every once in a while, just in
case something else in the movie hasn’t reminded you of Titanic yet. Even as the lovers consummate their physical attraction, the violins saw away in long and characterless lines that I suppose are meant to tug at your heartstrings but instead make you ponder the sorry state of original
film scoring. Ironically, it’s an art that is almost unthinkable without Wagner, and one of its finest
composers, Bernard Hermann, made use of Tristan’s sonorities to convey the supernatural obsession in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Now more and more films use scores as mere Gebrauchsmusik, inconspicuous wallpaper to add an inoffensive layer to an equally innocuous visual. (Wagnerites
should, however, take in Terrence Malick’s The New World, where the opening of Rheingold is
employed to spectacular effect.)
In short, Wagner used the Tristan and Isolde legend to convey radical, dark messages and
transmit Schopenhauerian philosophy with music unlike any the world had heard before; Reynolds uses the myth to tell a conventional, politically conservative tale with all the conventions
established by recent Hollywood successes. The film generated little in the way of any critical or
public excitement and had a short life-span in the Cineplex. It may find a second-life on DVD
among the numerous recorded performances of Wagner’s opera, an adaptation of the legend that
remains one of the composer’s most-performed works.
Yuval Sharon, 2006