R.I.P. Douglas McGrath

[dws1982]

I think he was a talented director. Emma and Nicholas Nickleby are both good, entertaining adaptations of novels that could easily be gutted when they get pared down around the two-hour mark, but I think they both hold up to the novels as well as you could expect any feature adaptation to. When This Had Oscar Buzz covered Infamous a few months back, too much of that episode, as I'd feared, turned into a discussion about how Capote was better. I'm no longer a person who wants to argue about which movie is better (I still prefer Infamous), but I do think Infamous, having the misfortune of coming second, may have hurt his career, and I do want to talk a little about what I like about it. It was the louder of the two movies, the flashier of the two, it leaned into things that Capote seemed to be leaning away from. It was a meaner film, and it indicts the audience from the opening scene where Gwyneth Paltrow's lounge singer seemingly has a near-breakdown onstage in the middle of "What is This Thing Called Love?". It pulls you into the conflict right away--you're both sympathetic to someone having such a public breakdown but also halfway hoping to see the full breakdown. Casting Gwyneth Paltrow is crucial for this to work, because McGrath understood that she was sold to us as America's sweetheart but that by that point in her career plenty of people were actively hoping for her to fail. (Now we may still hope that for her in her more recent career ventures, but for different reasons.) That scene plays out hugely against expectation, making us call into question everything we had thought about it, the character onstage, those in the audience, and about the movie that we have only watched a few minutes of and what it is asking of us and how we should watch it. It's one of the great opening scenes of a movie in my opinion. Infamous has some misses, specifically in the bluntness with which it portrays Capote's relationship with Perry Smith, but it takes some real swings as well, and I think a lot of them do pay off. No, it doesn't seem "real" in the way that Capote, in its portrait of this same world, does. But I think it's going for something different--Infamous is a movie about an eccentric person in an eccentric world. Everyone who fits into Capote's world play their characters at a slightly heightened level; It's notable that John Benjamin Hickey as his romantic partner and Sandra Bullock as his writing partner are two of the most grounded performances as they both come to realize how little they have in common with Capote and how little they actually do fit into his idea of the world. McGrath's only other fiction film after this was what seemed to be an assignment job, a Sarah Jessica Parker vanity project. I know he had other projects he did in the years since, but I wish he had a chance to make a few more movies.

[Jefforey Smith]

Douglas McGrath, the Tony nominated book writer behind Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, has died at the age of 64.

https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/O ... 4-20221104

It's interesting to note he and Woody Allen were both Oscar nominated for Screenplay for Bullets Over Broadway. In 2014, McGrath was nominated for a Tony for the book of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical and one of his fellow nominee was...Woody Allen for the book of the stage version of Bullets Over Broadway. Funny how that works out.