pie in the sky
by
Douglas Messerli
Wallace
Shawn (writer, based on the play The
Master Builder by Henrik Ibsen), Jonathan Demme (director; after the
unstaged direction by Andre Gregory), A
Master Builder / 2013
Adapted from
Ibsen’s late play by Wallace Shawn, directed for years in workshop productions
by his often time collaborator, Andre Gregory, and directed for film by
Jonathan Demme, A Master Builder, as
critics have noted, demonstrates the influences of not only these three creators, but of the brilliant acting throughout,
particularly by Shawn as Halvard Solness, Julie Hagerty as his long-suffering
wife, Gregory as the elder architect whose career Solness has destroyed, and,
most notably, Lisa Joyce as Hilde Wangel, the young woman who expressly
remembers Solness’ promises from 10 years previous, when she was just 12 years
of age.
Ibsen is one of my very favorite of 19th-early
20th century playwrights, but his plays, if not carefully directed,
are often talkative and stagey, with their realist conventions not always
making a perfect fit with their often shockingly didactic explorations into
everything from inherited syphilis, rising feminism, and, in this play, a
series of egotistical and manipulative actions, including what today we would
simply describe as child abuse, by the play’s presumed “hero,” Solness.
Like many plays, however, Ibsen’s hero is
a terribly failed man, even a scoundrel who has made himself wealthy not
necessarily through his great architectural achievements, but for his
careful
recreation of towering “castles” for upper class families. These often
fantastical museums to nostalgia might today be compared to the projects of
mansionization that are crumbling many well-to-do neighborhoods from New York,
Chicago, to San Francisco and, particularly, Los Angeles. The goal is to
destroy perfecting charming, “ordinary” homes—the kind of “box” in which Solness’
wife grew up—and turn it into a kind of fairy-tale villa (which even the
“master builder” mocks) where the residents can live out lives of fantasy
wealth, wealth alone, apparently, not being enough.
Yes, the beautiful 19th
century mansions of Nyack which the movie presents as stand-ins for the
Norwegian turn-of-the-century creations, do look, today, quite impressive. But
even at the time of their building, they were already privately-built museums
dedicated to the past.
As Shawn’s version begins, we see the
“great” Solness suffering what we might think as a heart attack, hooked up, in
a grand but purposeful anachronism to a modern heart monitor. Nurses, dressed
of the period, move in and out of what appears to be part bedroom and part of
his architectural offices. Evidently, the suffering builder will survive, so
suggests Dr. Herdal (Larry Pine), also a regular confidant to Solness’ wife.
A former architect, Knut Brovik
(Gregory), whose son, Ragnar (Jeff Biehl) works for Solness as a draftsman,
visits him, along with Ragnar’s fiancée, Kaia Fosli (Emily Cass McDonnell), who
works as Solness’ bookkeeper, descend upon him, trying to get the master b uilder to
allow Ragnar to design a lake-side villa, helping him to establish his own
career and to be able to finally marry Kaia. But Solness, putting down Ragnar’s
accomplishments, will have no part in it. He, like so many a bitter old man, is
terrified that the “younger generation” will do the very same thing that he has
to Brovik, ending his career.
What he doesn’t know, nor do we—at least
immediately—is that Solness is truly on his death bed, and that most of the
rest of the play will consist of his own personal wrestling with a guilty
conscience for his most definitely evil ways.
Both Ibsen’s and Shawn’s versions,
despite evidence to the contrary, are really plays about the three beautiful
women in Solness’ life: his more than loyal bookkeeper, Kaia, his beautifully
aging wife, and the soon-to-be interloper, Hilde, who after waiting for 10
years for Solness’ promise to return to her provincial home and take her way
into a castle, decides to visit him and his wife—in this instance dressed in a
pair of white shorts with other clothing to her possession.
To make all of these females’ attentions
to the elderly master builder believable, I suspect, the role should be
entrusted to a still handsome agèd matinee idol, someone like Clark Gable in 
The
Misfits or, at least, Humphrey Bogart, despite his whistling dentures, in Sabrina—or better yet, Harrison Ford in
the remake of that film. The short-statured, slightly pixie-like, now elderly,
Shawn cannot quite convince us that he might be so very attractive to any of
these women, even if, 10 years earlier, he might have cut a more-dashing
figure. But then Ibsen, himself, who based some of his play on his own
infatuation with a young 18 year-old Austrian-Tyrol girl, was never a beauty
either—at least to my knowledge. And Shawn gives the role his all, imbuing it
with a kind of straight-forward commitment to both his delusions and his guilt
that does great justice to his character and material. After all, he has gotten
where he is by guile, smarts and celebrity, never by true sexual appeal.
The
Misfits or, at least, Humphrey Bogart, despite his whistling dentures, in Sabrina—or better yet, Harrison Ford in
the remake of that film. The short-statured, slightly pixie-like, now elderly,
Shawn cannot quite convince us that he might be so very attractive to any of
these women, even if, 10 years earlier, he might have cut a more-dashing
figure. But then Ibsen, himself, who based some of his play on his own
infatuation with a young 18 year-old Austrian-Tyrol girl, was never a beauty
either—at least to my knowledge. And Shawn gives the role his all, imbuing it
with a kind of straight-forward commitment to both his delusions and his guilt
that does great justice to his character and material. After all, he has gotten
where he is by guile, smarts and celebrity, never by true sexual appeal.
He has used the devoted Kaia to keep
Ragnar close to him, the assistant he insists has no natural talent, but upon
who real talents he relies. He has used his wife, perhaps even unintentionally,
as a tool to begin his career, selling off the vast property on which her
family home once stood—after a fire has destroyed it along with their two baby
sons—in order to create many of the middle and upper-class properties upon
which he built the houses that made him famous. And he has used the young Hilde
for his sexual desires—even if he was not able to consummate that relationship.
Certainly, he now is intrigued by that possibility. Solness is a kind of
monster who explains the strangely fortuitous events that have occurred as
emanating from a kind of strange mental power to make things happen: the
destruction of his early competitor, the fire of his unloved home, the
servitude of Kaia and Ragnar, and, now that she has reminded him, the seduction
of the young Hilde.
Coincidence has been converted by the
egocentric master builder into a kind of mysterious will-power, a calling up of
the supernatural that fascinates him, while haunting him as well. Like
Strinderg’s Spöksonaten (The Ghost Story), Ibsen’s earlier Bygmester
Solness of 1892 is a play of spooks and ghosts that now haunt the
architect’s mind.
Yet despite the symbolic gestures of both
Ibsen’s plays and Shawn’s adaptation, this work is very much in the
psychological tradition in which most of Ibsen’s later works functioned. As
critic Michael Sragow, writing in an introduction to the Criterion edition,
notes, Ibsen’s play and this film rendition is perhaps closer to Bergman than
anyone else. Despite its dream-like quality, the truth is that Solness is
suffering the guilt that many fear just before they are about to leave the
living. And, although Hilde might appear to him as a teasing female
magician—Joyce has a marvelous ability to convert every serious accusation
about the past into a suddenly delightful giggle of conspiracy—she is, most
definitely, also the angel of death come to visit Solness, helping rectify his
former behavior, just as Sragow argues, like the ghosts come to save Ebenezer Scrooge.
She alone helps him to realize that
instead of closing the door to the young, that he must open it; that he must
sign his approval for Ragnar’s designs, thus allowing him a possibility,
despite his assistant’s seeming passivity, to create his own business. He must
let go of Kaia she convinces him; and most importantly, and despite his
acrophobia (an extreme fear of heights), he must allow himself to climb the
highest steeple of his newly conceived home built for his long-suffering wife and missing children (for
whom, a bit like George and Martha in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, they still maintain empty spaces)—the
steeple from where, we now know, he has fallen and is dying from the results.
This angel even attempts to redeem the
life of Mrs. Solness, attempting to help her understand how to move on with
life, despite her husband’s obvious daily failings, something Julie Hagerty
conveys in her every movement, even as she cuts fruit for her husband’s morning
breakfast.
Throughout this film, Demme allows his
roving hand-held camera to zoom in and out of rooms, focusing on the easy
excuses for Solness’ own behavior while seeking out any sunny corner wherein
the inhabitants of this house of subliminal horrors might find a sunny space in
which to sit out their remembered past terrors: a front lit-up room where
Solness excitedly rediscovers his almost forgotten past, a kitchen where Mrs.
Solness finally gets up the courage to tell her husband of her own suffering,
and a sunny window seat where she and Hilde sit for a few seconds to discuss
the endless failures of her husband.
If Joyce is a wonder simply for her
constantly shifting expressions of the tragic and a giddy wonderment, Hagerty,
in her last film role to date, is a marvel in her subtle portrayal of a woman
who has lost everything but her own self-respect. Let us hope she soon returns
to stage or film again.
Los Angeles,
April 29, 2017
