Now and Yesterday (42 page)

An assistant slipped into the green room to tell Aldebar that everyone was seated. Aldebar told Jonathan, who in turn said to Peter that he was “ready to roll.” Graciously, since Peter was officially Jonathan's date for the event, Aldebar was keeping himself in the background, handling the wheelchair and its occupant in the manner of an employee, though he was also clearly the evening's supervising producer.

They went through a door and a small hallway, then mounted the shallow stage. Houselights were on, and applause erupted as Jonathan and Frankel reached center stage. Peter and Jonathan stood to one side as the assistant adjusted a microphone that had been preset on a stand for Jonathan and gave Connor a handheld one.

“Welcome,” said Jonathan, in a small voice that amplification made sound only smaller. The crowd became instantly silent. “Thank you all for coming. I'm touched that you all came out to see a movie that's basically just two old men talking.” Audience laughter. “I hope nobody was expecting Spielberg.” More laughter.

From where he stood, Peter could see that there were no empty seats. It was a nicely designed room, he thought: simple blond wood panels, discreet lighting, nicely arced rows that raked upward at a gentle angle. Then he saw what Jonathan meant about the upholstery. The seats were covered in a ghastly purple plush that was splotched with yellow suns and white crescent moons. At least the room's sightlines were good. Peter spotted Will and Luz sitting in the middle of the room, near the back. When he caught their eye, he smiled, and Will saluted back.

“Most of the time, a film set is like a reactor,” said Jonathan—“a hundred people running around like mad, trying to make a place where this nuclear fuel, the performances, can combust. In this case, it was just Connor and me. But I think we combusted a few times, didn't we?”

Laughter, as Jonathan turned to Frankel.

“We're still friends,” said Frankel, smiling but not elaborating.

Jonathan, his comedic timing intact, gave his friend a second, then moved on.

“Well, he says it all in the film,” said Jonathan. “Just remember, folks, it's a wo-or . . . wo-or . . .”—he stopped, then regrouped—“a
wo-ork
in progress. God—like my ability to speak, apparently.”

The audience's reflexive snicker in response to the wisecrack was dampened by the shock of seeing him falter.

“OK. So please enjoy,” said Jonathan. “And then we'll have some supper, after. I hope you'll stick around.”

The houselights dimmed as Jonathan and party left the stage and were shown to a VIP box on the side of the room. The film started not with titles but a close-up of Frankel sitting silently, apparently thinking about a question he'd been asked, then beginning to speak: “I always knew I was an artist, since I was three. . . .”

The look and grammar of the film was richer and more elegant than Peter had expected. Passages of Frankel speaking, and of him and Jonathan in conversation, seated next to each other, were interspersed with the still photos that Jonathan had collected. Now and then the strains of a Bach partita, played on a classical guitar, would enhance the mood. And those shots of Frankel and Jonathan in conversation were anything but standard talking-head stuff. Jonathan had used not one, nor two cameras, but many. Some shots focused closely on a face, or part of a face, or a hand or gesture, in sequences that seemed to reveal a hidden choreography of emotional “tells”—each moment being the portrait of a thought or a feeling. And the lighting for these shots came from all around the men and was so bright it could almost have been coming from the sun. It was as if their conversation were taking place in heaven.

But the real surprise, for Peter, was that the film's theme was adulthood, rather than age, or coming out, or modern times
per se
—adulthood as a phase of personal fulfillment that Connor contended Americans had been drifting away from since World War Two. It began to come into focus after a question from Jonathan.

Something about the film's sound design, too, was heavenly. Each of the men's voices was richly textured and utterly resonant, affording full enjoyment of Jonathan's lively New York-Jewish inflections and Connor's muted New England ones. These were voices one wanted to listen to.

A snapshot from the mid-1930s of Connor at the “big house” in Bar Harbor, during his family's last summer there. The house, a mass of porches and gables and big windows, is in the background. In the foreground, on the lawn, stands Connor in a summer suit with his regally outfitted mother and his four sisters, all of whom are wearing similar white frocks with oversized bows in their hair.

In the photograph, Connor looks a bit dreamy, despite his very proper attire, while his mother looks proud of her neatly put-together flock. Fanny, the oldest sister, is posing hard; Olive, the youngest, appears to be squirming a bit in her fine garb; the middle girls, May and Elizabeth, seem natural and relaxed. May's smile, which looks illuminated from within, as the camera draws in close on it, says everything about the carefree world that had already been lost.

And what helped a viewer see beneath the surface of the photo was the use of the Ken Burns effect, as the film's editor had explained to Peter and Will on their weekend in Hudson—the strategic panning over or zooming into or out of a still shot, which subtly shifts the focus of an image as it successively recrops it. Used with the right stills, the editor said, the technique can unlock vastly more information per frame than a viewer usually takes in. In a film by Ken Burns himself the technique might reveal, in just a few seconds, the grief of a Civil War soldier whose friend lies dead at his feet, as well as the horror of war itself, as the camera pulls back to reveal an entire battlefield of such losses. And then the shot goes further, and we notice there's snow on the ground and smoke coming from the chimney of a house on the hill, in the background. Who lives there, we think, and what was the nation like for
them
on that day in 1864?

Peter looked around. Did anyone know who Andy Hardy was? The audience was rapt, becoming immersed in the world of the film—a world in which ideas were lovingly exchanged, examined, evaluated. One obvious comparison was to
My Dinner With Andre,
though Jonathan's film seemed to slip the viewer even more effortlessly than Malle's into a state of mind in which thoughts can be as compelling as movie stars.

Fascinating
.

 

A snapshot of Connor in the early 1940s: He's standing in back of the garage that served as his art studio, at his family's new house in Bar Harbor; he's dressed in baggy pants and a T-shirt, and holding an abstract painting that shows the strong influence of Paul Klee.

The audience giggled—as much at Connor's disdainful tone as at the idea itself. Peter giggled, too, but when he glanced over at Jonathan, to see if he was enjoying the screening, he saw that his friend had fallen asleep.

Poor dear
.

 

A photograph taken from a magazine, from the mid-1950s, of Connor and a fellow painter, now also quite well known, who was rumored to be Connor's lover at the time. They're sitting at a table improvised with a plank and some cinder blocks, sharing a glass of wine in a studio in lower Manhattan that they occupied together for two years. On the table is an Indian brass candlestick caked with the melted wax of several candles. It's a staged shot, taken by a friend of theirs, and the two are in mid-conversation but the look between them is unmistakable.

In the VIP box, Peter noticed that Wallace bumped shoulders privately with Frankel as they sat there and heard the line.