2018.03.19 阿瑟-米勒的爱的画像

shiyi18

阿瑟-米勒的爱的画像
由剧作家的女儿丽贝卡执导的一部新的HBO纪录片，是对一位凶猛的天才的亲密观察。

苏菲-吉尔伯特报道

HBO
三月 19, 2018



电影制片人兼作家丽贝卡-米勒对与剧作家阿瑟-米勒有关的事件有着不亚于任何人的感觉：他在戏剧界的飞速发展，他与众议院非美活动委员会的纠葛，以及他与玛丽莲-梦露五年的婚姻。但人们对阿瑟-米勒的普遍看法与丽贝卡作为他的女儿对他的了解不一致。"她在《阿瑟-米勒。早期，"她在《阿瑟-米勒：作家》中叙述道，"我认识到他的公众形象与我所认识的那个人是如此不同。

这部周一晚上在HBO播出的纪录片是一部真正的爱的作品--一部迷人的100分钟的影片，提供了一个复杂生活的内部记录。米勒没有回避她父亲传记中比较混乱的时刻，包括他最小的儿子丹尼尔被送进医院，他出生时患有唐氏综合症。但她也并不打算剖析他。阿瑟-米勒。作家》是一部以与主题的亲密关系来定义的家庭画像，由电影制作人在20多岁时开始拍摄的镜头捕捉。这部电影最吸引人的地方在于，它解析了与一个如此著名的人密切相关的奇怪之处，这个人把自己的生命投入到他的作品中。丽贝卡的妹妹简回忆说，她年轻时与父亲交谈时，"有些时候，他对某些东西感兴趣只是因为他可以使用它"。

推荐阅读
琼-迪迪安，摄于1979年
琼-狄迪恩不欠世界任何东西
梅根-加伯

追寻棒球成绩的 "圣杯
本-罗文

赞助内容
为实现更清洁的能源未来提供动力
壳牌
不过，令人惊讶的是，米勒在与女儿相处的场景中是如此的热情和呆萌，因为她捕捉到了他在康涅狄格州的工作室里从事木工项目或在厨房里回忆往事的情景。丽贝卡-米勒，当镜头转向她时，她专注地看着他，带着可感的感情。她按时间顺序介绍了他的生活，从他的出身开始，他是一个几乎不识字的波兰移民的儿子，但他在制造女装时发了财，他在1929年的华尔街崩溃中失去了这笔财富。他的父亲随后受到的羞辱和地位的下降似乎激发了米勒1949年的剧本《推销员之死》，这是他的第二部大作，也是对美国梦的虚幻本质的一种大刀阔斧的反思。

制片人就他们的父亲采访了她的家庭成员，但她也与托尼-库什纳和迈克-尼科尔斯交谈，后者认为《推销员之死》从作者那里拿走了一些他永远无法恢复的东西。尼科尔斯说："有些东西被烧毁了"。"它是如此接近于悲剧。它是如此的有生命力"。在随后的几年里，米勒的密友和原《推销员》的导演伊利亚-卡赞被迫在他向国会提供的证词中指认共产党员--这是另一件让米勒深受震动的事情。这一时期激发了他的戏剧《坩埚》，该剧通过塞勒姆女巫审判的寓言故事探讨了麦卡锡主义的本质。该剧在1953年首演后，米勒本人被要求向HUAC作证，尽管该委员会的负责人，即电影文件，提出如果他能与 "玛丽莲 "合影就取消听证会。这是政治和好莱坞的融合，米勒在影片中把这种融合描述为典型的美国特色。他说："我们是一个演艺人员的国家，"他说。"你必须要有娱乐性。即使是法西斯分子也要有娱乐性"。


梦露，米勒的第二任妻子，是影片的一个重要部分，尽管不是一个压倒性的部分。几乎就像丽贝卡-米勒觉得不愿意太深入地探究她父亲的浪漫生活一样，尽管他自己在1964年的剧本《堕落之后》中把很多东西都暴露出来了。(米勒在一次采访中说："任何人写的最好的作品都是即将让他难堪的作品"）。当米勒和梦露在1951年第一次见面时，他回忆说，他告诉她，她是他见过的最悲伤的女孩--这句话后来被他写进了《乱世佳人》，一部由他为她主演的电影。他们的婚姻吸引了美国人，因为一个聪明才智的人和一个炽热的电影明星不可能结合。但米勒似乎理解梦露内心的痛苦，她与她的新公公建立了一种纽带，一直持续到她去世。米勒告诉他的女儿："她无法真正为自己赢得她必须拥有的自信，"。然后他静静地坐着，感觉像是几分钟，他的脸因痛苦而扭曲。"太可怕了，"他说。"好吧。"

1962年，米勒与奥地利出生的摄影师Inge Morath结婚，她是丽贝卡-米勒的母亲，他们的婚姻一直持续到2002年Morath的去世。阿瑟-米勒。作家》提供了他们轻松、温暖的关系，以及莫拉斯自己的才华和野心的一瞥。但它也处理了他们的小儿子丹尼尔这个不可能的困难问题，2007年发现他从出生起就被送进了福利院。丽贝卡说："如果不谈我的弟弟，我不知道如何完成这部电影，"尽管她拒绝采访他或包括他的照片以保护其隐私。丹尼尔出生后，医生建议米勒和莫拉思，他最好在远离家庭的地方成长。莫拉斯每周都会去看他，但她的丈夫不在。这是家庭历史中深刻的悲哀和痛苦的一页，丽贝卡-米勒显然对此感到挣扎。在她父亲去世前，他提出让丽贝卡采访他关于丹尼尔的事情，但她对这样做犹豫不决，而且从未发生。"现在，"她说，"我们永远不会知道采访中可能会说什么。

这一刻让我们对家庭式纪录片的局限性有了一些了解，因为它们是由根深蒂固的关系和偏见所决定的，而在这个案例中，是由尊重所决定的。丽贝卡-米勒并没有像其他更公正的电影制作人那样有审问父亲的本能。但这并不是《阿瑟-米勒》的重点。作家》这部电影的任务是分享一位凶猛的天才的内部人士的观点。"艺术是漫长的，"米勒在他后来的一部戏剧被恶评之后告诉他的女儿。"生命是短暂的"。他的作品将永远为自己说话，但正如这部电影所证明的，通过更亲密的镜头看到他有一种不同的清晰度。

苏菲-吉尔伯特是《大西洋》杂志的一名工作人员。她是2022年普利策批评奖的入围者。
推特



A Loving Portrait of Arthur Miller
A new HBO documentary, directed by the playwright’s daughter Rebecca, is an intimate look at a ferocious talent.

By Sophie Gilbert

HBO
MARCH 19, 2018
SHARE

Rebecca Miller, the filmmaker and writer, has as good a sense as anyone of the events associated with the playwright Arthur Miller: his meteoric rise in the theater, his tangles with the House Un-American Activities Committee, and his five-year marriage to Marilyn Monroe. But the common perception of Arthur Miller didn’t square with how Rebecca knew him, as his daughter. “Early on,” she narrates in Arthur Miller: Writer, “I recognized that his public perception was so different from the man I knew.”

That documentary, which airs on HBO Monday night, is a true labor of love—a charming 100-minute film that offers an insider’s account of a complicated life. Miller doesn’t shy away from the messier moments in her father’s biography, including the institutionalization of his youngest son, Daniel, who was born with Down syndrome. But it isn’t her intention to dissect him, either. Arthur Miller: Writer is a family portrait defined by intimacy with its subject, captured in footage the filmmaker first started shooting in her 20s. The movie’s at its most intriguing when it’s parsing the strangeness of being closely related to someone so celebrated, who put so much of his life in his work. Rebecca’s sister, Jane, recalls how, conversing with her father when she was younger, “There were times when he was only interested in something because he could use it.”

RECOMMENDED READING
Joan Didion, photographed in 1979
Joan Didion Doesn't Owe the World Anything
MEGAN GARBER

Chasing the ‘Holy Grail’ of Baseball Performance
BEN ROWEN

SPONSOR CONTENT
Powering Progress toward a Cleaner Energy Future
SHELL
It’s a surprise, though, how warm and goofy Miller is in scenes with his daughter, as she captures him working on carpentry projects in his studio in Connecticut or reminiscing in his kitchen. Rebecca Miller, when the camera turns to her, watches him intently, with palpable affection. She proceeds chronologically through his life, starting with his origins as the son of a Polish immigrant who could barely read but who made a fortune manufacturing women’s clothing, which he lost in the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The subsequent humiliation and reduced status of his father seems to have inspired Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman, his second major hit, and a magisterial reckoning with the illusory nature of the American dream.

The filmmaker interviews members of her family about their father, but she also talks to Tony Kushner and Mike Nichols, the latter of whom posits that Death of a Salesman took something from its author that he could never recover. “Something burned out,” Nichols says. “It’s so close to the tragedy. It’s so alive.” In the years that followed, Miller’s close friend and the director of the original Salesman, Elia Kazan, was forced to identify Communists in testimony he gave to Congress—another event that shook Miller deeply. The period famously inspired his play The Crucible, which explores the nature of McCarthyism through the allegory of the Salem witch trials. After it premiered in 1953, Miller himself was asked to testify to HUAC, although the head of the committee, the movie documents, offered to call the hearing off if he could have his photograph taken “with Marilyn.” It was a confluence of politics and Hollywood that Miller describes in the film as characteristically American. “We’re a country of entertainers,” he says. “You’ve gotta be entertaining. Even the fascists have to be entertaining.”


Monroe, Miller’s second wife, is a substantial part of the film, although not an overwhelming one. It’s almost as though Rebecca Miller feels reluctant to probe too deeply into her father’s romantic life, even though he himself laid much of it bare in the 1964 play After the Fall. (“The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him,” Miller says in one interview.) When Miller and Monroe were first introduced in 1951 he recalled telling her that she was the saddest girl he’d ever met—a line he later put into The Misfits, a film he wrote for her to star in. Their marriage captivated America, given the unlikely union of a brilliant intellect and an incandescent movie star. But Miller seemed to comprehend the pain within Monroe, who forged a bond with her new father-in-law that lasted until her death. “She couldn’t really gain for herself the confidence she had to have to do this,” Miller tells his daughter. Then he sits, silently, for what feels like minutes, his face distorted with pain. “Terrible,” he says. “Well.”

In 1962, Miller married the Austrian-born photographer Inge Morath, Rebecca Miller’s mother, and their marriage endured until Morath’s death in 2002. Arthur Miller: Writer offers glimpses of their easy, warm relationship, and of Morath’s own talent and ambition. But it also tackles the impossibly difficult subject of their younger son, Daniel, whom it was revealed in 2007 had been institutionalized since birth. “I didn’t know how to finish the film without talking about my brother,” Rebecca says, although she declines to interview him or include photographs of him to protect his privacy. After Daniel was born, doctors advised Miller and Morath that he’d be better off growing up away from his family. Morath visited him weekly, without her husband. It’s a profoundly sad and painful page in family history that Rebecca Miller clearly struggles with. Before her father died he offered to let Rebecca interview him about Daniel, but she was hesitant about doing so, and it never happened. “Now,” she says, “we’ll never know what the interview might have said.”


It’s a moment that offers some insight into the limitations of familial documentaries, informed as they are by deeply rooted relationships and biases, and in this case, by respect. Rebecca Miller doesn’t have the same instinct to interrogate her father that another, more impartial filmmaker might have. But that isn’t the point of Arthur Miller: Writer, a film whose mission is to share an insider’s perspective of a ferocious talent. “Art is long,” Miller tells his daughter, after one of his later plays has been badly reviewed. “Life is short.” His work will always speak for itself, but as this film proves, there’s a different kind of clarity in seeing him through a more intimate lens.

Sophie Gilbert is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism.
Twitter