Did the Depression
Make Them Do it?
A&E's new version of 'Bonnie & Clyde'
explodes some myths but has trouble achieving dramatic lift-off
By Nancy deWolf Smith
in the Wall Street Journal
The new miniseries
about the ruthless Depression-era bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow
can't count on shock value to grab the audience's attention. It's not 1967
anymore, when Arthur Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde" was a genuine
revelation to moviegoers, with violence unprecedented at the time and the
convention-shattering elevation to celebrity status of a pair of garden-variety
killers.
The current version of
"Bonnie & Clyde" wisely doesn't try to compete on those counts.
True, its leads, Emile Hirsch as Clyde and Holliday Grainger as Bonnie, are
even prettier in a china-doll way than Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were. But
the blood is held to a relative minimum.
The worry during the
hype leading up to the miniseries had to be that, this being an age of new hard
times, Bonnie and Clyde would be portrayed the way some newspapers presented
the real-life couple during their fleeting notoriety—as folk heroes, people turned
outlaw by the cruelties of their era and fighting back against greedy banks and
the like.
Yet the portrait that
emerges of Clyde shows him coming from a poor family that nevertheless raised
him with tenderness and care and some erudition. The modern take on his
psychology, in a film often narrated in Clyde's voice, is that he was a guy
unlucky enough to fall under the sway of a narcissistic sociopath like Bonnie,
who lured him into a life of violent crime and who did most of the stone-cold
killing herself. If you believe that, you probably also believed Joey
Buttafuoco's version of the "Long Island Lolita" who tried to kill
his wife in 1992. But at least this film is a new way of telling an old story.
There is also a twist near the end that shows Clyde in extreme redemption mode.
Bonnie comes across as
a bad seed. Raised in a nice house and doted upon by a middle-class mother
(played by Holly Hunter), Bonnie seems not to need the money from bank robbing
so much as she hates being a waitress after her husband left her—and the
destiny she was sure she deserved as a movie star receded. All it appears to
take is one fateful rejection letter from a Hollywood studio and Bonnie spends
the rest of her life in the determined pursuit of other fame, a goal achieved
in spades after the real Bonnie and Clyde were overkilled by a fusillade of
police bullets on a road in rural Louisiana in May of 1934.
The film's soundtrack
is excellent, the costumes look authentic (Bonnie's wedding dress gleams like
silk satin should) and there is genuine tension in some of the chase scenes.
Although Clyde gets
raped in jail here, director Bruce Beresford's film for A&E doesn't hint,
as the 1967 movie did, that Clyde has performance problems with Bonnie. Even
so, the miniseries itself never quite reaches dramatic liftoff. Could be the
know-how-it-ends curse of biopics at work. Or perhaps it's because it is so
difficult to spare time and emotion for a couple of punks.
Along with his skill
and success as a composer and lyricist, Stephen Sondheim has a talent for
explaining his creative process. Despite the music in James Lapine's
documentary, "Six By Sondheim," it is archival clips of Mr. Sondheim
describing how he writes that make the film a treasure. We will never have such
abundant insights from the generation of greats, including Mr. Sondheim's
mentor Oscar Hammerstein II. So just hearing Mr. Sondheim explain that with
song lyrics, as opposed to poetry, "You have to underwrite. You have to
lay the sentence out so there's enough air for the ear to take them in" is
like finding a ruby.
Then there is the
music. "Six By Sondheim" refers to six songs. Some have been restaged
for the film—like a new rendition of "Opening Doors," which Mr.
Sondheim wrote while trying to remember what it was like to be starting out at
25 or so. There is also archival performance film. Particularly notable to
those raised on the "Munsters" is a great rendition by Yvonne de
Carlo of "I'm Still Here." Mr. Sondheim recalls that he wrote it for
her to sing in "Follies" when he realized the musical needed a number
in a certain spot that was "a meal, not an hors d'oeuvre" and took as
his career-survival model Joan Crawford.
For the easiest
listening there is a cavalcade of fragments of Mr. Sondheim's biggest hit,
"Send in the Clowns," making us miss some voices and wince at how one
singer is flat off and on. Regrettably, what must be the weirdest-ever version
of that tune—featuring the sublime Chet Baker and an off-his-game (to put it
politely) Van Morrison—is not included.
Adding icing to the
cake, Mr. Sondheim notes that many people have asked him over the years what
the "Send in the Clowns" lyrics mean. As one answer he offers the
supposed comment from Frank Sinatra, who when asked that question stammered for
a bit and said: "Look: You meet a girl, you take up with the girl, you
leave the girl. Send in the clowns."
Exactly.
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