Image Entertainment
Christopher Plummer as John Barrymore, staging an imaginary comeback.
A one-man spectacle, “Barrymore” doesn’t involve that blond charmer, Drew, she of the sunburst smiles and a production company called Flower Films to go with it. No, this Barrymore is her paternal grandfather, John (1882-1942), a theater star turned silent-screen Great Profile turned — depending on who tells the tale — legend, boozy washout or self-defeating tragedy. In 1963 Orson Welles, who knew of the burdens of fame, said that Barrymore’s Hamlet was the greatest he had seen, characterizing it as “a man of genius who happened to be a prince” and was “tender and virile and witty and dangerous.” The movies, alas, only gave us a screen test for that Hamlet.
The New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson was equally forceful in his appreciation, writing in 1940 that Barrymore was “no broken-down hack” but “a wit in his own right” who can “laugh at himself or a play without condescending.” Barrymore had gone Hollywood, making his first film in the teens, but he remained a superb actor. His older brother, Lionel, was the first to make the leap from stage to screen, and John and their sister, Ethel, soon followed. It took John a while to find his way in movies, and one of his earliest successes is the 1920 version of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” for which he metamorphosed from man to monster with minimal makeup, a threatening chin and crazy eyes. Films like “Grand Hotel,” “Dinner at Eight” and “Twentieth Century” followed.
Jekyll and Hyde seems an apt metaphor for an actor whose catastrophic transformation was written on a body and face that were as softened — pummeled really — by alcohol as by time. That wreckage is at center stage in “Barrymore,” Érik Canuel’s screen version of the William Luce play. The conceit of the drama that Christopher Plummer first performed at the Stratford Festival in Canada in 1996 — it moved to Broadway the next year — is an imagined Barrymore comeback. The time is 1942, right before his death, and he is struggling to stage “Richard III,” his first Shakespearean triumph. He is a physical wreck, though he puts on a surprisingly good and vigorous show as, without an audience, he staggers about a stage delivering songs, limericks, innuendoes and reminiscences.
Barrymore’s memory sometimes fails him, but the words never do, or rather he never fails them: he grabs at their prose and poetry with force, flinging away some, caressing others. The words, drawn from his biography and some of his roles, are fine and even better when Shakespeare is the author. Mr. Plummer stumbles beautifully, poignantly and often, leering and searching through a haze of memory or, with concern edged with panic, calling for “a line, a line” much as Richard III calls for a horse. From smile to sneer he captures Barrymore’s majesty and grandiloquence, recites his triumphs and humiliations. Now 82, he is possibly too old to play even a dissipated Barrymore, and the difference in age alters the play’s meaning because it is age that has most obviously taken its toll.
Mr. Canuel avoids close-ups of Mr. Plummer, although it’s unlikely he was trying to mask the actor’s years. Instead he leans heavily on medium close-ups, interspersing the kind of head-and-shoulder shots that are common on television with punctuating long shots of Barrymore portentously alone. The closer shots let you intimately scan Mr. Plummer’s face, to watch the smiles bloom and fade and the cheeks tremble in rage, fear and regret. Occasionally a prompter, Frank (John Plumpis, who unwisely has been directed to shout his lines at the last row rather than Barrymore), tosses out a line or a reproach, and Mr. Canuel folds in archival footage or introduces a dreamlike glimpse of the outside world. This all adds little. The performance is the thing.
Barrymore
Opens on Thursday in New York and Los Angeles.
Directed and written by Érik Canuel, based on the play by William Luce; director of photography, Bernard Couture; edited by Jean-François Bergeron; music by Michel Corriveau; production design by Cameron Porteous; produced by Garth H. Drabinsky; released by BY Experience and Image Entertainment. In Manhattan at the Village East, Second Avenue at 12th Street, East Village. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Christopher Plummer (John Barrymore) and John Plumpis (Frank).
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