This So-Called Disaster

by Shari L. Rosenblum

In this age of reality programming, where TV fare consists of real world average joes exposing their reasoning power and egos for the camera’s eye, and cable channels use garrulous filmmakers in “making of” and “behind the scenes” videos as ubiquitous filler, the great fascination to be found in Michael Almereyda’s This So-Called Disaster may not be readily apparent. All it offers is an inside look at one of contemporary theater’s most laconic playwrights (the brilliant Sam Shepard) directing some of the acting world’s most enigmatic performers (the difficult Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, and Woody Harrelson).

All it offers is immeasurable insight into artistic process and artists’ personalities.

Shepard, who played the Ghost in Almereyda’s tragically overlooked Hamlet, returned the favor by inviting the director into his own personal haunts – the stage and the psyche – to watch the birthing of his most recent play, The Late Henry Moss -- and to capture his conscience and those of the players. The result is not only more subdued than one might expect of the combustible personalities at work here, but also more intelligent, more intellectual, even, and more profound. No grand-standing or attention-grabbing antics, no celebrity sense of entitlement interfere with the action -- it’s just bad boys being impressively good.

Cheech Marin, Shepard regular James Gannon and Sheila Tousey join Penn, Nolte, and Harrelson in the cast, while T-Bone Burnett, another Shepard staple, provides the musical backdrop. Almereyda seems to hover above them, behind them, unseen – an observer, a note-taker, an absent presence. When they speak to the camera, as they sometimes do, it is to us, not him, that they seem to be directing their words. They introduce themselves politely; speak almost shyly, tell us as little as they want us to know about how they became who they are (Penn was looking for coolness in “zippered boots;” Nolte found salvation in Stanislavski; Shepard wanted to move his mouth like Burt Lancaster). It is as the Nolte character says in the play, “People are always making up stuff.”

Compared unfavorably by at least one critic to Mike Leigh’s unbearable Topsy-Turvy and Louis Malle’s intriguing-on-first-viewing Vanya on 42nd Street, This So-Called Disaster is distinguishable from both of these works because it lacks their self-consciousness or surtextual intent. It is not a film about the creative process of theater, it is a filming of the creative process. A real space rather than a recreated fiction. Its insights are natural, not nuanced for effect.

And if The Late Henry Moss is unremarkable compared to works such as Buried Child or True West, retreading as it does the familiar Shepard territory of brothers (Penn and Nolte) pitted against each other, dealing with the death of their father (Gammon), fighting each other to find themselves -- it is nevertheless a perfect platform for the documentarian’s task: to reflect the reflection that is theater, to engage the engagement of writer and text, actor and text, director and actor, and to explore the artist’s exploration of his craft. Watching the performance take shape, we watch artists who define for us the darker, odder, inscrutable side of manliness; invert themselves to question the essence of manhood in an art-imitates-life world where (as Penn says in an interview) “being a man has no definition.” Pride and passion, macho and vulnerability, competitiveness and exhaustion all intermingle on the stage. It is remarkably mundane and infinitely mysterious.

The more commonplace the description sounds, the more profound the observations. There is work going on here, not glamour. Almereyda lets us spy Shepard the director annoyedly critiquing Shepard the writer’s style ("..this is too literary . . . get rid of all this Joseph Conrad shit..."), and then at other times sipping his wine or swaying to show the way he wants the dialogue to flow, as the actors listen, struggle, stress, and doubt themselves. Penn seems most self-assured, teasing Harrelson ("...maybe you can get away with that shit on White Men Can’t Jump...") and getting Nolte to bite into a jalapeno pepper. It is he who sits beside Shepard as the director does the interviews. Nolte seems the closest to the edge, his voice gravely, his beat perfectly off-tempo. Harrelson seems the most insecure as an actor ("I know I’m just a peripheral character, but . . ."), yet spars with confidence ("You were underrated in Shanghai Surprise," is his retort to Penn.) Marin is easy, smooth, natural; Gammon an obvious old-hand.

Shepard, with the cast, talks about theater and life, about audience and consciousness and Brecht and Artaud, about writing as catharsis, and words that take no form until the actors give it to them. When he opens up to the director from a rocking chair in a separate space unlike his recreated claustrophobic worlds, he speaks of things his theater reveals: the true stories of his father -- a presence in Shepard’s theater no less powerful than the Ghost of King Hamlet himself -- his identities and the relationships that marked his consciousness (an anecdote about Shepard Sr. heckling the players at a performance of Buried Child for inaccuracies in the family portrait is telling in a thousand little details).

It becomes clear early on that the disaster reference in the title of Almereyda’s documentary does not point to the play or the performance in question. But clarity comes only at the end, when we learn that it comes from words spoken by Shepard’s father to describe the family structure, the personal background that forms the prima materia, the base matter, from which Shepard spins his oeuvre. How much of his work is autobiographical? Shepard sheepishly throws out a number . . . 80%? The so-called disaster his father left to him, that’s the autobiographical substance. The rest, as Cocteau once wrote, is literature.

©2004 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene