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We saw three plays in London last week; each had a highlight, each left me with quibbles. Grace Pervades featured acting by Ralph Fiennes that took my breath away; Inter Alia had a provocative argument (or more) with no easy answer; Les Liaisons Dangereuses was simply a spectacular production.

Grace Pervades, David Hare’s 32nd play(!), provided a history of English theater in the late 19th century through the persons of Henry Irving (Fiennes) and Ellen Terry (Miranda Raison). There was more biography than drama, which was well enough for what it was. The subplots involving Terry’s two children added flesh to the story, although I found the acting by the lesbian trio a couple notches below the stars’. When I came across Irving’s portrait by Bastien-Lepage in the National Portrait Gallery later in the week, I felt I knew him.

Inter Alia’s Rosamund Pike has been praised so widely that she won’t mind my saying that I personally found her performance off-putting. She commanded the stage every second, and if she wasn’t talking frantically she was changing her costume. After half an hour, before the play’s plot point had even been introduced, I was thinking, “enough already!” I think I could still have been absorbed in the serious issues the play raised with a lot less frenzy on stage.

We saw Liaisons after a private backstage tour of the National Theatre, which provided context for the fabulous costumes and swirl of scenery the production offered, but no hint of the swooping choreography of the 18th-century courtiers that lifted the story above and beyond its sordid liaisons. When not dancing, unfortunately, the play came down to earth, and of the seven leads I enjoyed the company of but one. I wish Valmont (Aidan Turner) had not been so slimy and resistible, Marquise de Merteuil (Lesley Manville) not so aged, and the color-blind actors better actors. I was the furthest right in the eighth row of Lyttleton Theatre and still felt I had a good seat, adding to a very positive impression of the NT as an institution if not–after watching videos of The Importance of Being Earnest and War Horse–of its acting.

Marks for message, but as cinema it was overlong, lacking drama and repetitive–too many shots of an empty school corridor. Although it won the Oscar, I can think of four or five better documentaries at the recent SB Film Festival.

“Weird” is too mild a descriptor for this Yorgas Lanthimos-Emma Stone-Jesse Plemons excursion into George Saunders-like surreality. Nothing makes sense in a very consistent way, and there is a sobering moral in a final scene that must have doubled the production budget (unless it was AI-generated, which would also be appropriate). While the film was not “enjoyable,” Stone and Plemons were admirable.

Given the critical accolades tossed at Josh Safdie and Timothee Chalamet’s film, it’s worth recalling, even a month later, the main reasons I labelled Marty Supreme “unwatchable.”
1. Marty’s character, which dominates the film, is so abhorrent any possibility of “enjoying” the movie evaporates. Yes, Chalamet does a remarkable acting job, presumably at Safdie’s direction, of making his character unlikeable. His selfishness is bad enough, but it his cruelty to others that is most repellent. (Should I overlook Marty’s ugliness and admire his creation as a work of art? Let me just note that I have the same test for paintings. I’ll take a Copley or Sargent or Velazquez portrait of a handsome man or beautiful women any day over someone plain or unattractive.)
2. The absurdity of Marty’s table tennis career. I suppose ping-pong doesn’t require the extreme conditioning of some other sports, but to be a world champion of anything one must be in good shape and practice hard and often. Marty’s irresponsible, not to say licentious and quasi-criminal, lifestyle, left no room for actually working on his game.
3. The table tennis itself. Having to film more than one match, the director seemed at a loss to differentiate the action, repeating over and over the same play of slam-and-race-across-the-room-to-retrieve. To my untrained eye, it also appeared that CGI was taking over the ball in flight.
4. To stick with the sport, Marty’s win over the Japanese champion was totally unsupported by the script. The film made a point of explaining that Marty’s loss to Endo at the British Open was due to a new kind of racket that Endo was using. And the loss was convincing. What had changed for the rematch? Marty hadn’t adopted the new racket, he was playing in Endo’s home country and he was either jet-lagged or hadn’t slept for 48 hours.
5. Then what about those orange ping-pong balls? The movie built this invention up to be a breakthrough, then it went nowhere.
6. Okay, let’s move on to Kay Stone. However tired of her marriage she is, are we to believe she would answer Marty’s cold call, then stay on the line with his rude manners, then come to his room for a quickie? And continue a relationship with nothing in it for her? Their relationship just made me squirm.
7.  Speaking of this relationship, the scene in Central Park was another head-scratcher. We learned that Safdie prides himself on using amateur non-actors; as good as Pico Iyer was in his role, the cops in the Park were embarrassingly bad. (I didn’t feel that way about Kevin O’Leary, but Siri thought him a terrible actor before knowing he wasn’t one.)
8. The dog subplot. This didn’t bother me as much as it did my friends with dogs, but it seemed to belong to another movie. What little sense it made dissipated when Marty and Rachel tried to pass off a dog that bore no resemblance to the canine in question.
9. The falling bathtub. Again, this belonged to a different movie, maybe one with the Three Stooges. It was also poorly set up by the landlord adjuring Marty not to take a shower, not a bath.
10. The ending. Were we supposed to believe that Marty has grown a heart because he coos over his newborn child? If so, it’s an undeserved ending. If not, why use it?
I’ve previously mentioned that I didn’t like any of the songs Safdie used (rare for a film), but I suppose that’s a matter of taste.

A feminist fun-house frolic and frightfest, glued together by the acting chops of Sydney Sweeney. The story makes an inexplicable 180-degree pivot midstream, but I was enjoying myself so much I didn’t mind. It was a good time at the movies, not something to analyze.