What I want to establish right now is that whenever I talk about something like this, I'm very rarely qualified; I plan on adhering strictly to my credo, that I'm an unqualified hack and what you see here and in other posts is my deep-down-in-mah-gut, knee-jerk take. But what I lack in smarts I makes up for in spirit. And as I'm unemployed, I have a lot of free time.
Unlike the original DS, which took its time--exactly one season--before introducing us to the only real reason anyone remembers the show, Barnabas Collins, the Revival knows what we want and WHAM! The pilot gives us Barnabas Collins, sallow and sparkle-free Vampire squire, as portrayed by Benjamin Cross.
"Hi, kids! You might also know me as Ambassador Sarek, father of that troubled youth Spock in the new Star Trek movie. Yes sir, guess I'm just a guy with a way of inserting myself into roles made iconic by great actors before me. Ha, ha! Don't look me in the eye or I'll cane you."
Cross. Hm. Physically imposing? Sure, though not as tall as you'd think, or as you might like Barnabas to be (he himself points that out in one episode). But his performance? Well, his performance to me is indicative of the principal problem behind the Revival. Both the series and Cross forget that what made the original so fun and fantastic for all its stagy awfulness was the all-out, shameless theatrical melodrama of it all. True, the show was crammed full of cheap sets and costumes, hammy actors stumbling painfully through their lines, and noxious color schemes, but by god, at least it had flair. When I watch a show centered around a gothic mansion that includes vampires, werewolves, time travel, parallel dimensions, and The Hand of Count Petrofi, I don't care about, or want, subtlety.
Nor do I want it played straight. The Revival tries valiantly to make the show less campy by upping the production value (everything's bigger!) and directing the actors to play their parts realistically. The actors are uniformly adequate performers, but by cutting down on the histrionics and hand-wringing, you really end up stifling them in this genre. Because when something outlandish does happen--like, oh, I don't know, Barnabas the vampire freaking biting somebody--the tone is thrown off completely. The camp is all the more jarring and obvious, because it just seems to come out of left field. That's what's wrong with Cross: he's very smooth and charming in his quieter, subdued moments, but he's pretty painful to watch when time comes for him to chew (heh) the scenery. Jonathan Frid, on the other hand, the original Barnabas, was a walking, talking slice of macabre. He somehow managed to play both the silky charmer and the Edgar Allan Poe melodramatic anti-hero simultaneously.
"That's right, look at me, bitches. Is it any wonder I can pull this crazy shit off? Oh, only don't look me in the eye or I'll cane you."
It's unfortunate that Cross has to follow in this guy's footsteps. Frid is physically built for this sort of role; he looks like a regal scarecrow with Rasputin's hypnotic glare. If Cross had maybe performed consistently, playing even his more volatile moments on a quieter keel to keep with the show's almost sleepy feel (which I guess they were trying to pass off as mood), he might have been more effective. However, when the hammy moments come, he's unbelievable and bellow-y. Oh, the bellowing and high school drama club president voice! It...well, it didn't completely sell me on him, let's just say that. To be fair, he was fairly compelling otherwise, and it helps that unlike Frid, Cross is conventionally sexy. Very sexy. But that's another nit-pick I have, one you'll always see from ornery fans whose old-fashioned fandoms are updated in the shiny new world: the sex.
Oh boy, is this ever sexed up. Since the days of Bela Lugosi and maybe even before, authors and movie-makers have heavily sexualized vampirism, sometimes more overtly than at other times. Here that edge is very overt. While I harp on the Revival for being too subtle in mood and acting, I really feel they should have taken all that tact and applied it to their free-wheeling, "bloody bosomy women are hawt" mentality. The original show wasn't very sexy, but it was romantic and tense. A lot of that sprang from the camp aspect of the dialogue and mood, which worked well for a daytime soap in the late '60s. However, in 1991 they might have felt above such theatrical shenanigans, but still realizing they had to hook the audience somehow, they decided sex was the very kick the show needed. Why not, sex is always hip! And vampires...piercing ladies' necks with their long, hard teeth...well! Sexy! It's actually very icky, especially if you were a fan of the original. It's like watching a beloved Disney movie from your childhood remade into a porno: Beauty and the Beast becoming Booty and the Beast (man, I should be a producer! That's gold right there). And just as Cross's over-the-top moments wax phony after establishing his Barnabas as dignified and straight-laced, Rebecca Staab moaning and gyrating in Barnabas's arms as she removes his shirt while he bites her seems very, very off.
"My chest hair will protect me from your puny cross! It's undead chest hair, after all! Ya dig? Oh yeah, baby, ya dig, donchya?"
Beyond the sex and the staging, I was primarily interested in the characterizations, believe it or not. The original show lost interest for me once Alexandra Moltke left, taking with her the clueless, vacant, one-dimensional, utterly adorable and endearing protagonist, Victoria Winters. Moltke really deserves props for what she did with Vicki. When I first started watching her, I thought, "Wow. She stinks. Is she able to register any other emotion than grave befuddlement?" But catching snippets of the other two actresses who tried and failed to play Vicki after Moltke got fed up with her character's dippy innocence and quit, the character just wasn't the same for me and I was surprised by how much I missed our Vicki, potato sack dresses and all. Something about the sincere, muted quality of Moltke's expressions and line readings made the character distinctly hers, and Victoria became the ultimate, modern, gothic ingenue. And because the show centered around her in the first season, we really related to her and started looking to her as the show's moral compass and calm in the eye of the storm. She's a very important character.
That connection is missing here.
At least she still stares glassy-eyed into the distance like a champ.
The rest of the Revival's characters were a mixed bag of good and not-so-good portrayals. Jean Simmons was vastly underused as both Liz Stoddard and Naomi Collins; my homie Pauline Kael once called Simmons "one of the most quietly commanding actresses Hollywood ever trashed," and you get a similar impression here. She does have a great moment toward the end, when her husband realizes Naomi's mind is lost. She's very touching in a simple, straight-forward way. However, because of her limited screen time, she never flourishes like Joan Bennett did when that legend played Collinwood's matriarch.
The sniveling Willie Loomis is hands down my favorite character from the original, and for a long, long time I nursed a quiet crush on John Karlen. They pretty much ruin his character in the Revival, taking his backwoods yokel shtick way, way too far. Jim Fyfe is certainly no eye candy either, and they go all out in making him physically repulsive, with greasy teeth and scruffy face. Another sad tendency of the Revival is to make certain parts too damn sentimental, and it's shameful what they do to the Willie and Barnabas relationship. The original show took its time in laying the groundwork for the fragile camaraderie between the two of them, and in turning Barnabas from a flat-out antagonist to a tentative hero. The Revival, in speeding the plot along, has no idea how to reconcile their dynamic, and the evolution of Barnabas's character. One minute he's caning Willie with abandon, as is always Barnabas's wont, and the next Willie's tenderly nursing him back to health after a brush with sunlight, assuring him he'll "take him fishin' out on the lake, just you an' me, buddy!" Whaaaa? But for all that, I found it impossible to actively dislike this version of Willie. Though not a good performance by any stretch of the imagination, maybe Fyfe's outrageously cartoonish portrayal was a breath of fresh air when compared to some other performances, that were held back by the stolid direction.
One portrayal I was actually quite fond of, and that I might even prefer to the original (scandalous!), is Maggie Evans. I'm guessing that turning her into a hardbitten, lackadaisical psychic is mighty unpopular with most die-hard DS fans, but I think it's great. Ely Pouget is wonderful in a slinky, Lauren Bacall, whisky-and-soda sort of way, giving a very frank and stylized performance. Another flaw of the original is that in the wake of losing Vicki, the writers simply morphed Maggie into the role Moltke vacated, and gone was the wisecracking waitress who served as a jolt of working-class reality in snooty Collinwood. By making Maggie so markedly different from Vicki, the Revival's writers restore Maggie's individuality, in a big way. However, I am not at all a fan of the queasy affair she has with Roy Thinnes' Roger Collins. Mostly because Thinnes is too smarmy as Roger; he lacks Louis Edmond's piquant, elegant buffoonery. He fares much better in the role of oily Rev. Trask, though his monotone yelling during the scene where he gets his comeuppance gets old, and you wonder just how the reincarnation thing works in his case. Barbara Steele is in fine form as Julia Hoffman, bringing more sex appeal to the role than the great Grayson Hall did. Hall, I hate to admit, was always the most cringe-worthy actor for me to watch in the original; not because she was a bad actress, but because she was a good actress who simply did not know how to work with learning her lines at a lightning-fast pace, and you could tell she was suffering (you get that occasionally from Bennett, as well. It's hard seeing greats struggle).
Lysette Anthony as Angelique is another actress who's obviously very good but not given enough time to shine. But really, why bother? Maybe even more than Frid with Barnabas, Angelique belonged to Lara Parker. Anthony may drip with sensuality from top to bottom, but all you need is one glance into Parker's cat eyes and you see it all: the insane, malicious power and the hyperbolic charm.
Shizam! 'Nuff said.
Michael T. Weiss was handsome and meaty as Joe Haskell, and that's all I can say about that; I did have a split second where I thought he was a rustic Jon Hamm when I first saw him. He floundered sadly in the role of Peter Bradford, since a meat-and-potatoes guy like him obviously don't belong in the 1700s. I did find him unexpectedly effective in the scene where he loses it watching Victoria head to the gallows, though.
The only other notable member of the cast I can think of is Barbara Blackburn as Carolyn. I wasn't a fan. Carolyn is one of those characters easy to pick on, since she's a flighty rich blonde, and everyone is supposed to hate the flighty rich blonde. What Nancy Barrett did so well in the original is never once playing down Carolyn's spoiled brat traits, but still revealing the vulnerable, good girl hidden away behind the scathing wit. Blackburn doesn't do that. Frankly...she's sleazy. And too consciously husky-voiced. We never warm up to her, partly because nothing is mentioned about Paul Stoddard, so we have none of Carolyn's abandonment issues or Liz's inner torment. And without that emotional baggage, they're both uninteresting enigmas here. Plus, before we can really figure out if this Carolyn has any soft spots at all, Barnabas puts the hypnosis jazz on her and she becomes his femme fatale slave, very evil and conniving. No sympathy.
However, there is something crucial I must note: why is it that no matter in what version, Carolyn always, always has the best hair? Lookit:
Seriously! Look at them manes! Okay, so maybe the 'dos themselves are dated, but c'mon!
Oh, and a very young Joseph Gordon Levitt plays David Collins. You hep cats probably recognize him from recent films like Inception and (500) Days of Summer. Me, I associate him with his work from his teen years, when he played Tommy in 3rd Rock From the Sun. Either way, he's in this show, too. Yessir, yes-a-reeno.
Burton, you getting all this?
0 Yorumlar