Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

I wish my brain had an OFF switch.

There are times when it just gets in the way. I mean it’s thinking. All. The. Time. Thinking thinking thinking. Every damned minute it’s filled with thoughts, memories, comparisons, evaluations, judgments, decisions.

And there are times when it’s a real pain in the ass.

One situation in which it really gets in the way is when I’m watching actors do something I know in great detail. You know what I mean. It’s that part of the movie where the star sits down to a keyboard and supposedly starts typing in code/prose like a savant, but you know–from the position of their hands or the regular stadium-wave pattern of their fingers–that they’re just frobnicating, mindlessly tippy-tapping the keys while they utter their lines.

I have the same problem with actors who “dance” ballet or “play” a musical instrument. Few actors can fake it well enough to fool me. Hell, few can fake it well enough for me to suspend my disbelief. Especially painful (for me) is when actors pretend to play a violin, viola, or cello. My decades as a concert violist and my knowledge of the instruments make the tiniest misstep a glaring error, and it just pops me right out of the story (like when a character in a story set in Victorian England says “Okay.” Arg!)

And so, it was with great trepidation that I queued up A Late Quartet, the story of which centers on the members of a world-famous string quartet.

I put the movie on my queue last year because of its cast. I mean, come on…Christopher Walken, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Catherine Keener? How can you go wrong? At least the acting would be good.

The story starts with Christopher Walken, the cellist of the quartet, discovering he has a debilitating, possibly career-ending disease. Don’t worry. This isn’t a Brian’s Song of classical music. There’s actually very little in the plot that is directly related to the cellist’s growing infirmity.

The title, A Late Quartet, refers specifically to Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 in C# Minor, Opus 131, which is one of the quartets he composed late in life, and thus, one of “the late quartets.”  But what the story concentrates on is the members of the quartet, the people, and the delicately balanced dynamic that exists among this intimate group of musicians. It is the first movie I’ve ever seen that really explores this type of relationship. I’ve played in quartets/quintets, rehearsing for months, discussing the nuances, arguing over bowings and fingerings. Attacca. Staccato. Sforzando. Tenuto. Slurred or separate? Up-bow or down-bow? First position or third?

As a member of a string quartet, you work with (and often recreate and relax with) the same three people for months, even years. Frictions come and go. Spats can inflame into sundering arguments. Love between members can bloom or wither with identical ease. It’s a complex relationship unlike any other, and this movie captures it perfectly.

The 1st violinist (played by new-to-me actor Mark Ivanir) starts out as a stereotypically twitchy violinist whose complexity is hidden by a facade which crumbles bit by bit as the story progresses. Hoffman and Keener’s characters (2nd violin and viola) are married, have a daughter, and deftly portray the difficult roles that “supporting” voices have in a quartet: never in the spotlight, rarely given the melody, and always overshadowed by the other two members. Walken, as the cellist, is older than the others and, unlike most Walken roles, he is the rock, the stability of the group, and this is why his crisis so unsettles the rest of the team.

The writing is real, honest, emotionally raw at times, and the performances of all the main actors are exemplary. Even Ivanir, who seemed a blank, a cypher to me at the beginning, reveals more with each scene, drawing back the curtain a bit further each time. The musical score, of course, is perfectly suited, filled mostly with the music on which the quartet is working.

So, how did they do with the “playing” of instruments? Remarkably well. They were all faking it, of course. The bow arm is the giveaway, and they were all just sawing away with stiff hands and crooked bows, but here’s where the director, newcomer Yaron Zilberman, saves us by framing tight shots that concentrate on the actor’s face, so that neither finger hand nor bow arm can distract us.

This is a fine movie about a small group of intimate friends dealing with a major crisis that affects them all. Some members it as an ending, others as a chance for renewal and change. None of them are happy about it, but they do their best and, as in most things human, their best is often far from perfect.

Yes, sometimes I know too much, but in this case, it worked out fine.

k

PS. If you want to see the difference between someone faking it and someone who knows what they’re doing, watch the scene where Nina Lee plays. Nina Lee is a cellist with the Brentano Quartet, and she has a brief role (as herself) in this movie. –k