As Good As It Gets

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

The acting in this movie is really good.

This is a filmed play; one must judge it as such. Minghella's rapid reaction camera takes the place of stage direction for a spotlight. But that's about it. The full 16 minutes (8 mins of script with the instruction to repeat) are played out with little intervention from the director, save cutting or inter-focusing between the three talking heads and mixing head-shot with super-closeup.The three characters live out a collapsing love-triangle. Is it happening now? Are they living over what has already happened? Is this a dramatised overview of what always happens? These are all valid questions as the script is delivered, overlapping, at barely digestible speed. Juliet Stevenson (the mistress) is the most interesting, allowed a full expressive range throughout her role, including a flash-dispatched orgasm. Most hilarious is Rickman's man-at-the-centre (literally as well) who retreats into talk of tea when he's not got the hiccups - an important element, this impediment, as it has the same worth of content given the monotone delivery. Kristin Scott-Thomas' trademark 'disinterest' makes up the trio.I like Minghella's top-n-tail affectation of the rushes cards, which brings into relief the 'play' suggestion of the title. Is this a record of the consequential comeuppance coming for the characters? Or is it simply as valid a circumstance as the next for working out the old rite of cheating relations? 6/10

Anthony Minghella follows much of Beckett's stage directions with his filming of "Play", but he also takes some pandering liberties that hurt the internal logic of the piece. In a stage production, we would see three characters in urns: from left to right, W1, the wife; M, the husband & lover; W2, the mistress. (This, by the way, was not Beckett's published arrangement, but one he chose when he directed "Play" some years later.) They are in urns, and we can see only their faces, covered with some of the same material as the urns. They speak only when a light, shone from below, is upon them, and the light flits from face to face, fragmenting each monologue, so that we slowly pick up the thread of the love triangle & that each of them is now in some afterlife, not knowing that the other two are beside. They speak rapidly and in a monotone, and the entire play is repeated.Minghella changes the light to a camera. He places these urns in a larger field of many urns, each babbling its own story, and he gives the feeling of old film, with the sounds of film rattling in the projector in the start & snapped off at the end. These are intelligent means of adapting the play to a film. He, however, cannot keep the camera still, so that we see the characters from the side, not merely from the front. This lessens the intensity & the logic of the questioning coming from a single point. Part of what makes "Play" effective theater is the strong sense of confinement. This is more difficult in a film, and even more difficult on video, but it loses even more of that sense when the camera cuts from one angle to another.The play is well-cast & well-acted. The actors keep to the rapid-fire rhythm & the flat voices. Minghella's rhythm gives nothing to an audience. We must pick it up on the fly, very quickly. If he could only have kept the camera still, close up, face front, then it would've been perfect.

One would think that three people sitting in urns, not moving, telling the same story twice would be dull and boring, but its not. Using cross cutting and cinema tricks to make what on stage is a very static, very dull and over rated piece of twaddle, Anthony Minghella had fashioned an interesting and quite stimulating piece of film. What the point of it all is or is not I will leave up to the viewer. The real achievement of this film is how it makes essentially a play where nothing physically happens into a movie with motion and movement and excitement (of a sort). Film students would be hard pressed to find a better example of what it means for the cinema to be in motion.

Almost impossible to understand for a non-native speaker (I bet even native speakers would have difficulties). But worth seeing. Thrilling, in some way. I didn´t understand much of the story (if it has one) and would need to see it again and again, but it is impossible to get it in Germany (lucky I´ve seen it at all!). It´s a shame, because "Play" is just fascinating.