DAN WEBSTER:
During the 1920s, few writers enjoyed more success than Lorenz Hart. Thanks to his partnership with the composer Richard Rogers, Hart provided the lyrics to a wave of hit Broadway musicals such as Pal Joey and Babes in Arms.
The two also paired up to create such unforgettable songs as “My Funny Valentine,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” “The Lady is a Tramp,” and—maybe most important—the dreamy melody “Blue Moon.”
The importance of that final song is paramount to director Richard Linklater’s film of the same name, which is streaming on Netflix. Some of the song’s lines, courtesy of Hart, reflect how Linklater portrays Hart on screen: “Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone, without a dream in my heart, without a love on my own.”
That the song ends hopefully doesn’t make its initial yearning any less sad. And sadness is at the center of what Linklater, working from a screenplay by Robert Kaplow, gives us. Since Kaplow was using letters exchanged by Hart and Elizabeth Weiland, the young woman Hart was enchanted by, what we end up seeing—though fictitious—carries the ring of truth.
The facts are these: On the night of March 31st, 1943, the groundbreaking Broadway musical Oklahoma! opened. And the rave reviews that it received acted liked darts in the heart of Lorenz Hart (played by Ethan Hawke) because his longtime partner and friend, Rogers (played by Andrew Scott), had created the musical not with him but with Oscar Hammerstein II—the lyricist with whom he who would go on to make such hits as South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music.
That, though, was all in the future. On the night of the Oklahoma! premiere, Linklater puts us in the bar at the legendary Manhattan restaurant Sardi’s. It is there that Hart, having left that initial performance early, regales the room in a manner reminiscent of Truman Capote with his snide remarks about how hokey Hammerstein’s lyrics are and how shallow the whole production is.
Those who make up his audience include a friendly bartender, Eddie (played by Bobby Cannavale), an off-duty solder moonlighting as a lounge piano player (played by Jonah Lees) and the New Yorker writer E.B. White (played by Patrick Kennedy), as well as anyone who happens to walk by.
Over the next couple of hours, which are telescoped into the film’s 100-minute running time, Hart pours out his feelings, much of it snide and cynical, yes, but a good portion of it bearing the same kind of hope contained in the title song. Because as he talks, waiting for the show to conclude and the bar to be filled by Rogers and the rest of the Oklahoma! cast and crew, he also discloses the affection he has for the 20-year-old university student Weiland (played by Margaret Qualley).
The fact that he is 27 years older than she is, is a diminutive 5-feet tall and tries to disguise his baldness with a bad comb-over, doesn’t matter. Like a character in one of the musicals he wrote, Hart is at the mercy of his dreams.
We know from the very first scene of Linklater’s film, one in which a drunken Hart collapses in a rain-swept alleyway, that Hart’s dreams won’t come true. And in real life, Hart did die barely eight months after the Oklahoma! opening.
But on this night, based on Kaplow’s screenplay, we get to see Hart engaged in one last mighty performance. Fighting his urge to drink, the newly sober Hart entertains everyone with a soul-bearing fervor. And with Hawke—a 5-foot-10 actor cleverly shot to look 10 inches shorter—pulling off the performance of his career, it’s hard not to feel the character’s longing for… well, something he’s never going to obtain.
That’s apparent in Hawke’s scenes with the equally talented Scott, when Hart both compliments and insults Rogers on his new success. Even more, it’s apparent in one long scene with Qualley in which Weiland lets him down with the standard line that she does love him—just “not in that way.”
Most of us have endured similar experiences. That’s why we adore songs such as “Blue Moon.” They represent for us the fantasy of what might have been.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for spokesman.com.
