A Samuel Beckett Docudrama

Four of us went to see Dance First, the unlikely name for a biopic of melancholic Samuel Beckett. I recommend it with some reservations.

One has to know a bit about Beckett’s body of work to be inquisitive about how he came to be one of the pre-eminent writers of the 20^th century. His plays are immediately recognizable and unforgettable, like them or not. Waiting for Godot speaks to the predicament of existence without any intervention by a supreme being. Somehow, he managed to evoke both futility and hope. I can’t go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

The task of a filmmaker is to capture a writer’s genius; an aspiration with only a slim chance of success. Yet we can be generous with the honorable failure.  One’s inner life doesn’t yield easily to a visual medium. And this movie shows just how unattainable that can be.

The first scene is so inventive and surreal as to have delighted Beckett himself. Gabriel Byrne embodies his disdain for the Nobel Prize by climbing the wall of the Stockholm auditorium into another dimension where he meets his alter ego.

Unfortunately, this level of artistry is not sustained for many of the scenes to follow. But the narrative did have enough Beckett-like vignettes to keep my attention on alert.

One such was the domestic scenes with James Joyce in which the wisdom from the master was always undercut but his wife Nora and her announcement of dumplings.                                                     

Upon reflection, the first three women we are introduced to are unloving, dominating (his mother), a house frau with no appreciation of her genius husband (Joyce) and his unconvincingly bipolar daughter; all women with no agency.

One takeaway I have come to accept is how my immediate response may not be in accord with my more severe assessment the day after. This is where the title Dance First applies. Beckett’s advice to a student was his way of asserting the primacy of sensation over the filters of the intellect. While it may seem as if his theater pieces are cerebral, he might see them as issuing from a more visceral place and the dialogue, conversational.

I note how my critical faculty shouts down the immediacy of my enjoyment. As a prescription to myself I would suggest staying with the dance of his eccentricities, iconoclasm, his dark humor and vision of life’s absurdities.  Go see the damn movie and pay no attention to the flaws inherent in such a doomed enterprise.