| Poignant and funny, Blue Moon re-teams filmmaker Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke for a highlight of both of their illustrious careers. Set during just one night in March 1943, Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) is at a bar drinking his troubles away while right across the street is opening night of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! before all the dignitaries pour into the bar for the afterparty. And, oh boy, does Hart have a lot to say about that. | | 2025
Directed by: Richard Linklater
Screenplay by: Robert Kaplow
Inspired by the letters of Lorenz Hart and Elizabeth Weiland
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Andrew Scott, Bobby Cannavale
|
Lorenz Hart is busy drinking himself into an early grave. He may not realize it, but the audience does (he ends up dying 8 months later), and all of his friends and colleagues certainly do. Even though it’s already pretty obvious, when Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) shows up, he makes it clear that his creative partnership with Hart ended entirely because Hart drank too much and was unreliable. Hart is still celebrating their last play By Jupiter, but Rodgers insists Hart didn’t actually write any of it because he was always drunk and never there.
The movie is essentially one long monologue since he barely allows the bartender (Bobby Cannavale), fellow writer E.B. White, or Oscar Hammerstein to get a word in; the only other person he allows to talk is Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), a young woman he’s in love with, even though as everyone alludes to, women are not his primary interest.
Through Hart’s long-winded musings on his own genius, Blue Moon is a very funny and poignant examination of an artist who let his internal struggles destroy his career. He’s well aware of how talented he is: he talks about how his songs will stand the test of time – and he’s right, more than 80 years later, many of his songs are still extremely well known. He’s also aware why his career is coming to an end: as he says “They should put my face on this bottle – ‘the bourbon that made Lorenz Hart unemployable’.”
He’s acutely aware of who he is, the problem is, he doesn’t like himself very much. He’s short, (and comments on Hammerstein’s height), he wears a comb-over to cover up his lack of hair, and he chases after unattainable women, clearly covering up that he’s a homosexual.
Throughout all of this, Hart is also very funny. Richard Linklater has been praised for his dialogue throughout his career, arguably, it was his dialogue for Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Sunrise that first made him famous, and it is so sharp and witty and insightful and poetic here. It has to be because it’s a movie that is carried by its screenplay, but it is so well written, with endlessly quotable lines and remarks that ring true.
Linklater has also crafted a painting with this movie more than any others in his career. Sitting in the corner of a smoke-filled bar, Hart is simultaneously trying to be unnoticed and be the loudest person in the room. He can’t bear the spotlight not being on him, but when the spotlight is on him, he can’t live with all of his shortcomings. There is one scene where the dialogue creates this image so perfectly in line with the central character: Margaret Qualley’s Elizabeth is detailing a frat boy she liked and twice commented on his lamp with horses on it, Hawke’s Hart is listening intently to every word she says, unaware that she doesn’t like him the way she likes the boy in her story. Horses, as so brilliantly illustrated by Ken in Barbie, are the quintessential image of the male patriarchy. Hart, as intelligent as he is, never realizes that Elizabeth is drawn to the masculinity of the boy in her story, a masculinity that he does not have. Which fits into one of Lorenz Hart’s many internal struggles with how much he hates himself.
Writing this out, it makes Blue Moon sound way more tragic or heartbreaking than it actually is. But Lorenz Hart has a way with words that we focus on his creativity more than his failures.
|
