...
home
| art & architecture | books & cds | dance
| destinations | film | opera | television | theater | archives
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
.. |
Four centuries after it was written,
Shakespeare's tragedy, King Lear, continues to have a powerful impact on modern
audiences. Its ultra-bleak view of misguided, domineering parents, and alienated,
unprincipled children is grounded in universal commonalities of family experience. Ripe
with ironies and propelled by a complex story of greed, revenge, and internecine conflict,
Shakespeare transformed sordid events into great drama with the beauty of his poetry and
the keenness of his psychological insight.
As with so many of Shakespeare's plays (and aside from contemporary
productions of the original text), the temptation to recycle the work has inspired a
variety of reinterpretations, including an effective opera
by Aribert Reimann and a loose (and dreadful) 1987 film adaptation by
Jean-Luc Godard placing the story in a Mafioso family. But it is the 1985 Akira
Kurasawa film, Ran, that sets the standard by
which others must be judged. Kurasawa placed the story in Japan and changed Lear's
daughters into sons, but, for all the changes, he remained remarkably faithful to the
source material in meaning, in spirit, and in unsurpassed filmic poetry.
TNT's new film, King of Texas, places the Lear tale
into the classic Western film genre, setting it in the new Republic of Texas, after the
battle of the Alamo. The plotting is reasonably faithful to the original, if occasionally
streamlined and toned down--especially the ending.. The central story remains that of the
powerful father, John Lear (Patrick Stewart), demanding of his daughters testaments of
their love as the price of succession to his empire. Two daughters, Susannah (Marcia Gay
Harden) and Rebecca (Laurel Holly) comply, but the third, Claudia (Julie Cox) refuses and
is banished by her father. Hardly have Susannah and Rebecca moved in than the greedy
scheming (and sexual philandering) begins in earnest. In a test of authority, Susannah
banishes Lear, who is accompanied by his confidant, Rip (David Alan Grier), a former slave
and a veteran of the Alamo.
The subplot of a neighboring family headed by Westover (Roy Scheider)
is also faithful to the original; here the favored son frames his innocent brother of
horse theft. Both fathers misread their children, both will go through tragic events
before they understand the cost of their misjudgment and pride.
Stephen Harrigan's screenplay is cogent, motivations are made clear,
and the Southwestern topography (filmed in Mexico) is both handsome and a reasonable
conceit. Stewart (X-Men, Star Trek: Insurrection) moves from all-powerful King through
madness and loss with conviction, Scheider (The Rainmaker) is particularly sympathetic as Westover, and
David Alan Grier (Return to Me), in the
Fool's role of Rip, creates a memorably complex characterization.
For all that, King of Texas never rises to Shakespearean
heights. It is sorely missing the rhythm and cadence of Shakespeare's poetry which
transmutes human frailties into moving tragedy. Shakespeare knew how to please his
Elizabethan audiences with cruelty and gore, but he took it to the next level. King of
Texas doesn't get beyond the narrative. When Lear is in a desert storm howling his
rage, lightening is substituted for poetry in an attempt to inject some drama, but instead
the scene devolves into mere noise, with little impact. Genuine emotion is elicited in the
scene when Lear finds Claudia dead, but that is the exception to the overall emotional
flatness of the film. King of Texas does not attain the catharsis of the great
tragedy it uses as its model, but manages to deliver only melodrama.
- Arthur Lazere
