Month: September 2012

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Robot & Frank

In theaters.

Despite the whole robot-home-healthcare-worker premise, nothing about Robot & Frank feels particularly far-fetched or sci-fi. It's quite easy to imagine a sophisticated but narrowly focused robot like the unnamed one here. In fact, I'm quite certain that that kind of thing is already in development, in one form or another. Christopher Ford's gentle, domestic screenplay barely qualifies as speculative fiction.

And that, I think, is why it works. Robot & Frank isn't sci-fi (nothing against sci-fi, for the record). It's a thoughtful, playful look at how we relate to technology—and to one another—right now, not in the future. The human performances are delightfully expressive, and the robot honestly isn't, though that doesn't prevent us from growing fond of it, which is sort of the point. As an examination of how people map our own emotions onto other entities, Robot finds one of the shrewdest, most subtle takes I've ever seen.

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Peter and the Starcatcher

Now playing at the Brooks Atkinson Theater on Broadway.

Swamped by a deluge of freelance work plus a family visit (which was delightful, of course), it's taken me an embarrassingly long time to finish writing about this play. But honestly, there's probably more at work in my tardiness than that standard excuse of not enough time. The fact is that I've never known quite what to make of the whole Peter Pan myth, which Peter and the Starcatcher freely adapts, so how am I ever to write about it?

As far as I can tell, the Peter archetype is an indulgent romanticization of a particularly boys-will-be-boys sort of childhood, not innocent so much as amoral, selfish and bullying and callous and cliquish and arrogant. If that were the point, I guess I would admire how coolly the tales depicts just how cruelly narcissistic children can be, but instead, the Peter Pan stories typically take on a strangely nostalgic sheen, and I just don't get it. I don't. I often enjoy the world-building—the pirates and mermaids, Hook and Tiger Lily—but Peter himself never resonates with me. He leaves me cold.

So perhaps inevitably, Peter and the Starcatcher works much the same way. The production and stagecraft are charmingly imaginative. The many allusions to Barrie's work are fun and cheeky, and most of the performances are so spiritedly energetic as to be irresistible. But in the end, it all comes down to the irritating Peter and his dramatic arc, which is emotionally unfathomable to me. So what do I say but that I suspect the problem may be as much with me as anything else?

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Monet’s Garden

Special exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden through October 21.

It never occurred to me to wonder about all the flowers Claude Monet painted, and in retrospect, that seems like a real failure of imagination. Surely the artist's affinity for florals was worth pondering. How could I have gazed at the massive Water Lilies triptych at the MoMA some six, seven, eight times and never once reflected on where an elderly turn-of-the-century Frenchman might have found a massive Japanese-style water garden to paint?

The explanation, as it turns out, is that Monet himself created his splendid gardens at Giverny—one in a traditional French style, the other inspired by Japanese water gardens—and used them not only as subjects for his paintings but also as creative media in their own right, experimenting with different color combinations and varieties to stunning effect. Much of what he wrote indicates that he thought of himself as a gardener as much of a painter and considered his gardens some of his greatest work.

The New York Botanical Garden's exhibit on Monet's gardens seeks to celebrate the eminent painter's perhaps underappreciated genius as a gardener, re-creating his "paint box" flowerbeds, his use of wildflowers alongside more cultivated species, his iconic Japanese footbridge, and, of course, his dramatic pools of water lilies. The result is tantalizing—no doubt an exceedingly poor substitute for Giverny itself but a lovely botanical experience even so.