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      Why 'Shang-Chi' Isn't a Hit in China

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      Marvel’s first Asian superhero movie has yet to be released in the mainland amid fierce debate over its back story and star.Marvel released “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” with China in mind. Simu Liu, the film’s Canadian lead actor, was born in China. Much of its dialogue is in Mandarin. The cast includes Tony Leung, one of the biggest Chinese-speaking movie stars in history.The studio’s first Asian superhero movie is a hit, drawing praise and ticket sales in East Asia and other global markets. Perhaps the only place where the movie has not been well received — in fact, it has not been received there at all — is mainland China.Disney, which owns Marvel, has yet to receive clearance from Beijing’s regulators to show the film in the vast but heavily censored movie market. While the reasons aren’t clear, “Shang-Chi” may be a victim of the low point in U.S.-China relations.China is also pushing back against Western influence, with increasingly vocal nationalists denouncing foreign books and movies and the teaching of English. They have even criticized Mr. Liu for his previous comments about China, which he left in the mid-1990s, when he was a small child.Lack of access to the world’s largest movie market could limit how much money the film makes. But in other parts of Asia, the movie has been greeted warmly by audiences for how it depicts a Chinese superhero burdened by a racist back story.“I was really expecting the movie to be racist,” said David Shin, a Marvel fan in Seoul. “I was surprised at how well they touched upon Asian culture.” Simu Liu in a scene from the movie.Jasin Boland/Disney-Marvel Studios, via Associated PressWorldwide, the movie has earned more than $250 million, all but guaranteeing audiences will be seeing more of Shang-Chi, the title character. Big sales in Asia helped: “Shang-Chi” earned more than $23 million in the Asia Pacific region and debuted at the top of the charts in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Singapore. It also set an industry record for a September weekend debut in Hong Kong.The movie is a retelling of the story of a little-known Marvel character created in 1973 — 16 years before Mr. Liu was born — and updated for today’s audiences. It centers on Shang-Chi, a young man working as a valet who is reluctantly drawn into his father’s deadly criminal organization, known as the Ten Rings.The group is named after the magical rings that Shang-Chi’s father, Xu Wenwu, wears on his wrists and that give him destructive power that have helped him destroy and conquer empires.Xu Wenwu is played by Mr. Leung, a legend in Hong Kong cinema. His role in the film was pivotal in attracting Hong Kong audiences to the theaters, said Kevin Ma, a film industry observer and writer from Hong Kong.Tony Leung, a legend in Hong Kong cinema, plays Shang-Chi’s father.Marvel Studios/Disney-Marvel Studios, via Associated Press“It’s hard to imagine anyone who watches Hong Kong films to not know who he is,” Mr. Ma said, adding that Mr. Leung was used as the central figure in advertisements for the film in the Chinese city.To reshape the comic-book character to appeal to Asian and Asian American audiences, Marvel put the movie in the hands of Destin Daniel Cretton, a Japanese American director. In addition to Mr. Liu and Mr. Leung, the cast includes Michelle Yeoh, another major star in Asia, and Awkwafina, the Asian American actor and comedian.The strong showing by “Shang-Chi” comes after a wave of financial and critical success for recent films with Asian casts and production crews, like “Crazy Rich Asians,” “Parasite” and “The Farewell.”But for blockbusters, mainland China is the major market to win. So far this year, its theaters have reaped $5.2 billion in ticket sales, according to Maoyan, which tracks Chinese box office results. Disney has submitted the movie for release there.The director Destin Daniel Cretton, left, and Mr. Liu, far right, on the set. Jasin Boland/Marvel StudiosDespite its absence, the film has generated spirited debate on the Chinese internet. Global Times, a nationalist tabloid controlled by the Communist Party, published commentary that cited the racist origin of the character.Readers of Shang-Chi comic books in the 1970s saw Asian faces colored in unnatural oranges and yellows. They saw the main character shirtless and shoeless, spouting “fortune-cookie platitudes in stilted English,” The New York Times noted recently. And then there was Shang-Chi’s father in the comics: He was named Fu Manchu and caricatured as a power-hungry Asian man, an image that harks back to the stereotypes first pressed upon Asian immigrants a century ago.“How can Chinese people be insulted like this,” the Global Times commentary asked, “while at the same time we let you take our money?”Some critics in China have also pointed to Mr. Liu’s previous comments about China. One nationalist account on Weibo, the popular social media platform, posted several screenshots from a previous interview with Mr. Liu in which he talked about how his parents left “Third World” China where people “were dying of starvation.” (The video is no longer online. A spokeswoman for Disney declined to comment on the remarks.)Mr. Liu has been critical of China before. In 2016, when he was starring in the television show “Kim’s Convenience,” he wrote on Twitter, “I think countries that try to censor and cover up dissenting ideas rather than face them and deal with them are out of touch with reality.” When a Twitter user replied, “sounds like America,” Mr. Liu responded: “I was referring to Chinese gov’t censorship. It’s really immature and out of touch.”Others, including some who said they had seen the movie, leapt to its defense.“There is nothing wrong with the film and half of its dialogue is in Mandarin Chinese,” wrote a Weibo user. “Those who said it insulted China before were too irresponsible.”A marquee for the movie in Los Angeles.Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesStill, the movie has found some resonance with Chinese audiences who have managed to see the film. Jin Yang, 33, a Chinese film producer based in Beijing, praised the film after watching it in a theater in Hong Kong, which despite its own rising censorship operates under different rules.“It’s a bit regretful that the film has not been released in mainland China,” Ms. Yang said. “It’d be great if Chinese audiences could see this film that combines Chinese and Western cultures so well.”Debate about “Shang-Chi” predated the movie’s release, as China’s voluble online audience debated Mr. Liu’s looks, an argument that the actor himself noted with amusement. Some claimed to see a passing resemblance to a young Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, leading to Photoshopped images that others predicted might hurt its chances to pass muster with Chinese film regulators.The trouble in China may have unintentionally helped sales in other markets in Asia, where Beijing’s increasing bellicosity with its neighbors has hurt public perceptions of the country.“I thought that the movie might not be well received in South Korea because of the protagonist being Chinese,” Kim Hanseul, 31, a Marvel fan in Seoul, said. But, he said, the movie’s absence in China “has actually led to more Koreans watching the film.”The movie’s fans said they hoped Chinese audiences would be able to see it eventually.“It’s amusing,” said Ms. Yang, the film producer, “that it’s Americans’ turn to read subtitles in a Marvel film.” More

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      Jane Powell, Hollywood’s Girl Next Door, Is Dead at 92

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      Typecast from the outset, she was a star of movie musicals before she was out of her teens. But her big-screen career peaked when she was in her 20s.Jane Powell, whose pert good looks and lyrical soprano voice brought her Hollywood stardom before she was out of her teens — but whose movie career peaked when she was still in her 20s with a starring role in one of the last great MGM musicals, the 1954 extravaganza “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” — died on Thursday at her home in Wilton, Conn. She was 92. Susan Granger, her friend, confirmed the death.Ms. Powell, who was just over five feet tall and retained the guileless features of an innocent teenager well past adolescence, found herself typecast from the outset.Ms. Powell in Los Angeles, in 1944, the year her first film, “Song of the Open Road,” was released. “I should have been the happiest girl in the world,” she said of becoming a movie star in her teens. “Well, I wasn’t.”Associated PressShe was only 15 when her first film, “Song of the Open Road” (1944), was released. She played a disenchanted young film star who finds happiness when she runs away from home and joins a group of young people picking crops while adult farmworkers are at war. The film is noteworthy mostly because the name of the character she played, Jane Powell, became hers as well when the movie was released. She was born Suzanne Lorraine Burce. Ms. Powell had already been signed by MGM, but the studio lent her to United Artists for “Song of the Open Road.” Her first several MGM movies were mostly forgettable musicals, with slender story lines that were little more than frameworks for the songs.In “Holiday in Mexico” (1946), she played the daughter of the American ambassador to that country (Walter Pidgeon), while the piano virtuoso José Iturbi, the bandleader Xavier Cugat and Ms. Powell provided the music. In “Luxury Liner” (1948), she was a stowaway on a cruise ship captained by her father (George Brent), with Mr. Cugat and the opera singer Lauritz Melchior among the passengers.Her breakthrough was “Royal Wedding” (1951), the first movie in which she played an adult. This time Ms. Powell had an outstanding director, Stanley Donen; an outstanding score, by Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner; and, most important, an outstanding co-star: Fred Astaire.Set just before the wedding of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, “Royal Wedding” centers on an American brother-sister song-and-dance act (Astaire and Ms. Powell) on tour in London. Cast at the last minute to replace Judy Garland, who had been fired (and who herself had replaced a pregnant June Allyson), Ms. Powell had almost no time to learn her dance routines. But she acquitted herself well, notably in a knockabout vaudeville-style number with Astaire, “How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Love You When You Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life?”Her movie career appeared to be gaining steam. In fact, it was halfway over.After “Royal Wedding,” Ms. Powell, to her frustration, found herself once again cast as the girl next door in lightweight musicals like “Rich, Young and Pretty” (1951) and “Three Sailors and a Girl” (1953). It would be three years before she had another role of substance — but it was a memorable one.Set in a pioneer community in 19th-century Oregon, “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” told the story of newlyweds (Ms. Powell and Howard Keel) whose first order of business as a married couple is to find wives for the groom’s six rowdy brothers. Directed by Mr. Donen, with a lively score by Gene de Paul and Johnny Mercer and acrobatic choreography by Michael Kidd, it earned a place on many lists of the greatest film musicals of all time. It was, Ms. Powell later said, “my last really wonderful role in a film.”Suzanne Burce was born on April 1, 1929, in Portland, Ore. An only child, she was still a toddler when her parents — Paul Burce, who worked for a bread company, and Eileen (Baker) Burce — began grooming her as a potential successor to Shirley Temple.By the time she was 5 she was taking singing and dancing lessons and appearing on the radio. When she was 14 her parents took her to Hollywood, where her performance on a popular radio talent show led to an audition for Louis B. Mayer of MGM and, in short order, a seven-year contract.Looking back on that time in her 1988 autobiography, “The Girl Next Door and How She Grew,” Ms. Powell wrote: “I should have been the happiest girl in the world. Well, I wasn’t.” All she wanted to do, she said, was return home, go to high school and make friends. Her parents’ relentless efforts to make her a star had made for a lonely, artificial childhood. Despite her almost immediate success, she wrote, “Sometimes I just wanted to run away from it all.”Ms. Powell in performance at a nightclub in Las Vegas in 1957.David Smith/Associated PressWith musicals beginning to fall out of fashion, she had few film roles after “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.” (“I didn’t quit movies,” she once said. “They quit me.”) Two middling musicals followed: “Hit the Deck” (1955), her last film for MGM, and “The Girl Most Likely” (1958), in which she was courted by Cliff Robertson and two other men.Her big-screen career came to an anticlimactic end in 1958 with the dramas “The Female Animal,” in which she played the alcoholic daughter of a fading movie star (Hedy Lamarr), and “Enchanted Island,” in which she was improbably cast as a Polynesian islander. (“It was a terrible movie,” she said. “The best thing about it was that it gave the family a great vacation in Acapulco.”)Ms. Powell found a new home on television. A 1961 pilot for a sitcom, “The Jane Powell Show,” was not picked up, but she appeared regularly on dramatic anthology series, variety shows and musical specials, as well as in a recurring role as Alan Thicke’s mother on the sitcom “Growing Pains” in the late 1980s and in a long-running ad campaign for denture products. Her last TV appearance was on an episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” in 2002.She also performed in touring productions of musicals, including “My Fair Lady,” “The Sound of Music” and “Carousel.” She made her Broadway debut in 1974, when she replaced her friend and frequent MGM co-star Debbie Reynolds as the title character in the hit revival of the 1919 musical “Irene.”Ms. Powell in 1984 with Dick Moore, who, like her, had been a child star, and whom she would marry four years later.G. Paul Burnett/Associated PressShe never returned to Broadway, although she played the queen in a 1995 New York City Opera production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella” and occasionally appeared Off Broadway. She seemed headed back to Broadway in 2003, when she played the mother of the entrepreneurial Mizner brothers in the Stephen Sondheim musical “Bounce” in Chicago and Washington. But the show was poorly received and never made it to New York. (It was later reworked, retitled “Road Show” and staged at the Public Theater in New York in 2008, without Ms. Powell in the cast.)Ms. Powell’s first four marriages ended in divorce. In 1988 she married Dick Moore, whom she met when he was writing a book about child actors. Although, as Dickie Moore, he had once been a child actor himself, their paths had never crossed until he interviewed her for his book.Ms. Powell at her apartment in New York in 1996. She appeared frequently on television until 2002.Jack Manning/The New York TimesMr. Moore died in 2015, and Ms. Powell died in the home they had shared. She is survived by a son, Geary Anthony Steffen III; two daughters, Suzanne Steffen and Lindsay Cavalli; and two granddaughters.Looking back in 1988 on her youthful stardom and her place in the Hollywood studio system, Ms. Powell was philosophical.“I get angry when I hear other actors blame the studios for all their problems,” she wrote in her autobiography. “It really bothered me when Judy Garland used to say, ‘The studio made me do this, the studio made me do that.’“Nobody makes you do anything. You make your own choices.”Alyssa Lukpat More

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      Joan Washington, Dialect Coach to the Stars, Dies at 74

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      She taught Barbra Streisand, Penélope Cruz and countless other performers how to sound like someone else.Joan Washington, an acclaimed dialect coach who taught Penélope Cruz to sound Greek, Jessica Chastain to sound Israeli and an entire cast of British actors to speak like Brooklyn Jews, died on Sept. 2 at her home in Avening, England. She was 74.Her husband, the actor Richard E. Grant, announced her death on Twitter. He later said the cause was lung cancer.In a career spanning four decades, Ms. Washington developed a reputation as a sort of reverse version of Henry Higgins, the elocutionist who taught Eliza Doolittle the King’s English in George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion.” She instructed actors to speak not just in national dialects but also in regional and local lilts, even historical ones.She taught actors for most of Britain’s leading national and regional theaters; if a British performer appeared onstage speaking a thick American patois — say, in Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” — there was a good chance it was Ms. Washington’s handiwork.She also worked on a steady stream of films. She teamed up with Ms. Cruz for “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” (2001), Ms. Chastain for “The Debt” (2010), Kate Beckinsale for “Emma” (1996) and the British actress Thandie Newton for “W.,” Oliver Stone’s 2008 take on the life of George W. Bush, in which she played Condoleezza Rice, the former U.S. national security adviser.Jessica Chastain in a scene from “The Debt” (2010). Ms. Washington trained Ms. Chastain to sound Israeli for that movie, in which she played a secret agent.Laurie Sparham/Focus FeaturesDialect, Ms. Washington said, was not just about mimicry, about reading a script with an accent. It had to be built into the core of a performance.“A dialect coach must be there from the start,” she told the British newspaper The Independent in 1991. “Otherwise the bad habits are set; it becomes just a bandaging job. There’s enough undoing as it is.”Ms. Washington was something of a performer herself, though never onstage or onscreen. She could instantly adopt whatever dialect she was teaching, and she claimed to have mastery over 124 vowel sounds — just six shy of what Professor Higgins boasted.Though she was born and raised in Scotland, Ms. Washington employed a standard English accent when teaching Americans. She said they brought too many assumptions about what “proper” English sounds like and might be confused by her natural Scottish elocution.“The problem for Americans doing English is that they pronounce their consonants too precisely, which makes it sound rather acquired and middle class,” she said in a 1986 interview with The Sunday Telegraph. “The grander we are, the less we rely on consonants.”Ms. Washington came about her talent thorough research. Before working with actors, she had taught standard English pronunciation at the Royal College of Nursing, whose students arrived from all over Britain and the Commonwealth. Her recordings of their accents formed the basis of a vast library of tapes she kept as reference.She interviewed and recorded older Britons to capture what Liverpudlian or Geordie — an accent from Tyneside, in northeast England — might have sounded like decades ago. To show what English sounded like in the 1910s, she relied on recordings of British prisoners made by Germans during World War I.Her instructional methods were intense. She would often begin by interviewing performers to gauge what they thought a Boston Brahmin or a Warsaw Pole might sound like. She took notes, reams of them, and then handed them to the actors along with copies of her tapes.Over a series of sessions, she would tweak Rs, adjust inflections and suppress unwanted sibilants until an American actress like Emma Stone sounded like an authentic 18th-century English courtier, as she did in the 2018 film “The Favourite.”Barbra Streisand in “Yentl” (1983), the first film on which Ms. Washington worked. She taught Ms. Streisand how to speak like an Ashkenazi Jew in early-20th-century Poland.MGMMs. Washington always worked freelance, but she was most closely associated with the Royal National Theater, where she worked on more than 70 shows. Her first film was “Yentl” (1983), for which she taught the star and director, Barbra Streisand, how to speak like an Ashkenazi Jew in early-20th-century Poland.Ms. Washington had her own theories about accents and where they came from. She said that Britain’s plethora of dialects and accents, all crammed onto a medium-size island, derived from its varying geography and climate.“Cornish is harder and more nasal than Devon because it’s a windy peninsula,” she told The Sunday Telegraph. “If you’ve got the wind in your face, you’ve got to speak without giving much away.”Joan Geddie was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1946. Her father, John, was a doctor, and her mother, Maggie (Cook) Geddie, was a nurse.When she was 18 she moved to London to attend the Central School of Speech and Drama. After graduating, she taught speech, first at a reform school for girls and then at the Royal College of Nursing.In 1969 she married Keith Washington; they later divorced. Along with Mr. Grant, she is survived by her son, Tom Washington; her daughter, Olivia Grant; and her brother, David Geddie.While teaching, Ms. Washington also picked up side jobs as a dialect coach. In the class-conscious England of the postwar decades, millions of Britain’s expanding middle class sought to erase any trace of their proletarian origins, starting with their accents, which provided her with an abundance of work.Her clients included doctors and clergymen as well as actors — the only ones, she said, who went the opposite direction, seeking instruction on how to sound less posh.She was teaching at the Actors Center in London in 1982 when she met Mr. Grant, who had been born and raised in Swaziland (now Eswatini), in Africa, and was taking her class to sound more like a native Englishman.Mr. Grant was smitten, he later recalled, and he asked if she could give him private lessons. She said yes, at £20 an hour — about $43 in today’s dollars.“But I can only afford £12,” he replied.“All right,” she said, “but you’ll have to repay me if you ever ‘make it.’”The two married in 1986, a year before Mr. Grant made his film debut in “Withnail and I,” which overnight made him one of Britain’s most in-demand actors. He later won acclaim for his performances in movies like “Gosford Park” (2001) and “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” (2018), for which he received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor.Ms. Washington learned she had lung cancer late last year, and the disease advanced quickly. She did have one final assignment, though: Mr. Grant had been cast to play Loco Chanelle, a drag queen, in the film version of the stage musical “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” and he needed help with his character’s Sheffield accent.A few days after her death, Mr. Grant posted a video on Twitter that Ms. Washington had made of him practicing for the role, with her, offscreen, giving instructions. More

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      ‘Saint-Narcisse’ Review: A Classic Romance Between Twin Flames

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      In this Bruce LaBruce melodrama, two twins, both alike in indecency, fall in love.The Canadian filmmaker Bruce LaBruce is best known for his provocative spins on modern sexuality, but his latest is a semiclassical affair. The melodrama “Saint-Narcisse” presents an interpretation of the Greek myth of Narcissus, the beautiful youth who pined after his own reflection. Of course, this is mythology by way of 1970s pornography; incest and Catholic perversion abound.Felix-Antoine Duval plays twins, Dominic and Daniel, who were separated at birth. In 1972 Quebec, the adult Dominic finds a letter from Beatrice (Tania Kontoyanni), the mother he assumed was dead. He seeks out her forest hideaway, where the witchy, lesbian Beatrice explains her lifelong absence. She doesn’t mention if Dominic had siblings — a curious omission, given that Dominic has seen a doppelgänger in his travels.Dominic finds his twin brother at a monastery, where Daniel is the petulant prey of a perverted priest. Dominic stalks his sequestered reflection, and when their eyes first meet, it’s love and lust at first sight. Dominic is determined to save his brother-lover from the clutches of the dirty Father, so that they may return to the sanctuary of their lesbian earth mother.“Saint-Narcisse” is a handsomely produced film with sincere performances, lush cinematography and a classical score. Anarchic energy zings out in moments of overemphasis — when the music swells too loudly, when the dialogue comments too closely on the themes. But for the most part, LaBruce tries to maintain fidelity to the idea that camp is best performed straight. If keeping up the pretense of unwinking entertainment causes the pace to drag at times, at least this movie never fails to follow through on its scandalous promise.Saint-NarcisseNot rated. In English and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. More

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      ‘In Balanchine’s Classroom’ Review: Teaching the Ineffable

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      Former ballet dancers grasp at words to describe the genius of George Balanchine in this charming documentary.In mathematics, there was Newton; in psychology, there was Freud; and in American ballet, George Balanchine was a foundational genius. He was a Georgian choreographer born in Russia who found prominence with the Ballets Russes in Paris, and moved from Europe to the United States in 1933. There, Balanchine helped to found the highly influential School of American Ballet and New York City Ballet, and he used those institutions to revolutionize the style of dance that was performed in the United States.Every day, Balanchine taught a class for his New York City Ballet company, and it was there that he demonstrated his vision of what dance should be. The documentary “In Balanchine’s Classroom” pairs archival footage from Balanchine’s studio with present-day interviews with the dancers who attended. They describe the experience as akin to being a pupil of Einstein.There is a beautiful act of translation that this documentary observes, as Balanchine’s former students — now wizened teachers themselves — attempt to render his movements into speech. Their failures to find perfect equivalents between these two languages indicate the choreographer’s plight: “Do it this way” is a meaningless directive if the mysterious “it” cannot already be done.In one amusing sequence, the director Connie Hochman shows the master at work. When describing dance, Balanchine grunts and seizes, and his bewildered apostles must turn his verbal and physical contortions into perfect pliés and pirouettes. Decades later, his students sigh, hum and gesticulate much like their instructor did. The archival footage of Balanchine’s company in its prime becomes the visual relief to their verbal frustration, the magnificent evidence that it is possible to master an indescribable method.In Balanchine’s ClassroomNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Little Girl’ Review: Growing Up and Seeking Peace

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      This sensitive documentary by the French filmmaker Sébastien Lifshitz naturalistically explores the struggles of a 7-year-old transgender girl.“Little Girl,” the French filmmaker Sébastien Lifshitz’s disarmingly sensitive documentary about a 7-year-old transgender girl, understands the power of close-ups. The camera often lingers on the face of our fledgling protagonist, Sasha, not to gawk at her appearance, but to challenge whatever moralizing preconceptions one might have with emotion laid devastatingly bare.One could easily mistake “Little Girl” for a fictional drama that tends toward observation and realism. Lifshitz follows Sasha and her family over the course of roughly a year, homing in on her mannerisms and means of play with naturalistic camerawork that heightens the idyllic splendor of rural France, while framing her home life as a kind of safe haven away from the cruelties of the outside world. Beautiful as it may be, the French countryside remains a stronghold of rigidly traditional values.Sasha’s mother, Karine, often takes the spotlight: We see her struggle to convince dismissive school administrators to correctly identify Sasha as a girl and, in direct interviews, witness the emotional toll of such perpetually thwarted efforts as she verbalizes her frustrations and insecurities.There are no rubbernecking, pity-provoking scenes of Sasha being bullied or spurned; perhaps more affecting are the images we do see: Sasha miming the movements of a girl in her ballet class, delighting in what it feels like to move her hands with feminine softness and grace.In conversation with a psychiatrist, Sasha hesitates to respond to a question about her treatment at school. But the proof is in her face, which twists, flits and goes blank before capitulating to tears. It’s in simple moments like these that Lifshitz invites us to consider Sasha’s feelings: the stark reality of her despair, the depth of which only images can communicate, asking us to reconsider what exactly is fueling our ideological fights.Little GirlNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Max Harwood Steps Up in 'Everybody's Talking About Jamie'

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      Two years ago, Max Harwood made a video in his bedroom.A second-year student at a musical theater school in London, he introduced himself and said where he was from. He talked about how, as a child, he would don a bouffant wig and perform Rizzo’s songs from “Grease,” making his grandmother laugh so hard that she nearly wet herself.That minute-long video was Harwood’s first audition for the movie “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” an adaptation of the sparkly West End musical about a teenager in the north of England with dreams of being a drag queen. Seeking new talent, the producers held an open call, which yielded thousands of tapes. Jonathan Butterell, the film’s director, watched nearly all of them, and Harwood’s stood out immediately.“He had this kind of magic about him,” Butterell recalled. “He is fabulous without being arrogant.” He called Harwood back six more times, for dance calls, for recording sessions, for chemistry reads, for drag challenges. The magic didn’t fade.So now Harwood — who had no professional credits, couldn’t get into a first-class drama school and had been told that he should aim for ensemble parts — is filling some very high-heeled shoes. His ice-blonde crop and princeling looks occupy nearly every frame of “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” which premieres on Amazon Prime Video on Friday.“I’ve had a process with this film where I’ve stepped into my queerness and my comfortability,” Harwood, 23, said on a recent evening while lolling on a sofa at the Crosby Street Hotel in New York. “This is who I am.”“I’ve had a process with this film where I’ve stepped into my queerness and my comfortability,” Harwood said.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesHarwood had arrived in the city the previous day, driving in from the Hamptons on a whistle-stop press tour for the film. The tour had taken him across America — which, mid-pandemic, mostly meant airports and hotels. He has louche, generous features, the outsize eyes of a startled deer and an unforced warmth. He wore a spotted T-shirt. And if his Converse sneakers lacked the pizazz of the glittery heels that Jamie covets, they did have platform soles. He carries himself like the dancer he trained to be, which makes him seem taller than 5 feet 10 inches.He grew up in Basingstoke, a town in south central England without a professional theater company. He knew he wanted to act, even if the drama schools that he applied to didn’t see it the same way. But his local theater society gave him a scholarship for a one-year course at the Guildford School of Acting. The teachers there weren’t entirely encouraging.“I was told that if I wanted to do musical theater, because of how I looked, I would be typically cast in the ensemble, and I needed to get my dancing up,” Harwood said. What exactly was wrong with his looks? “I’m not, like, the strapping leading man.”A scene from the film, an adaptation of the stage musical about an English teenager with dreams of being a drag performer.John Rogers/Amazon StudiosHe was directed to the Urdang Academy, a musical theater training program in London. Although he enjoyed the classes, he struggled there. He wanted to stand out, and the work of an ensemble member, who has to look and dance just like everybody else, never suited him. He wasn’t supposed to audition during the program, but he had seen “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” onstage, and had loved the sight of a story centered around a young gay man that didn’t depend on trauma.“He didn’t die at the end,” Harwood said. “He wasn’t comic relief. He didn’t come in for two scenes to be the gay best friend. And that was really nice.”So, when a friend told him about the open call for the movie, he put himself on tape. During the months of auditions that followed, he kept up with his schoolwork and his part-time job as a supervisor at a sneaker store. He never really thought that Butterell and the producers would cast him, but when he was called back for a day that involved a full drag makeup test, he let himself dream.Butterell had conceived the musical after watching the BBC documentary “Jamie: Drag Queen at 16,” which followed Jamie Campbell, an English teenager who wanted to wear a dress to prom. “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” opened in Sheffield, in the north of England, and quickly transferred to the West End in London. In The New York Times, the critic Ben Brantley called that production a “determinedly inspirational show.”In adapting the musical for the screen, Butterell and the other creators, the writer Tom MacRae and the composer Dan Gillespie Sells, didn’t want a strapping leading man to play Jamie. “Because what’s radical about Jamie is the fact that you’ve got an authentically effeminate male hero,” Gillespie Sells said in a phone interview. “That’s something you don’t see very often.”The creators saw it in Harwood. When Butterell told him that he had the part, Harwood screamed, swore and asked if he could call his mother.“Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” isn’t a coming out story; Jamie is out already. Instead it’s a tale of stepping confidently into your identity, in appropriately glamorous footwear. Jamie’s story isn’t really Harwood’s. Though Harwood liked playing dress-up, he never felt compelled to perform drag. But then again, maybe it’s everyone’s story: Doesn’t everyone want to be seen for who they really are?The dancing came easily to Harwood, and so did the songs, which are mostly pop- and R&B-inflected. Gillespie Sells praised his voice: “It was exactly that thing, that very pure, young male, perfect pop voice that was so good for Jamie because Jamie is pop personified. Everything about him is bright and hopeful.”Harwood didn’t always feel hopeful. Butterell, however, never doubted him. Neither did his colleagues, including Richard E. Grant, who gives a moving performance as Jamie’s drag mother. “He looks very young, sings and dances to the manner born, is emotionally open and giving, instantly likable, and of course, has talent by the bucket load,” Grant wrote of Harwood in an email.“I’m really happy to be a voice for my community,” Harwood said. “But there are so many more stories to be told.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesBut there were moments — such as a scene between Jamie and his best friend, Pritti (Lauren Patel) — when Harwood worried whether he could deliver the right performance. He felt frightened. He felt vulnerable. Butterell took him aside and told him to breathe. Maybe in these moments Jamie felt vulnerable, too, Butterell suggested.The day they shot Jamie’s drag performance was even more anxiety-inducing, but Jamie Campbell, the musical’s inspiration, happened to be on set that day. “And I said to Jamie, ‘I’m so scared, I’m so scared,’” Harwood recalled. “And he was like: ‘You’re in exactly the right place. And if you weren’t in that place, you would not be human.’”So Harwood’s anxiety became Jamie’s anxiety, which layers the musical’s sequins and chiffon with a febrile authenticity. If the film is about Jamie coming into his own, it’s also about Harwood doing the same. “Max went on a similar journey to what Jamie’s going through,” Butterell said. “Max went looking for who he was in this. Where Max and Jamie meet is in this duality of sheer joy and the fear that you have to step through to maintain that joy.”Starring in a movie musical as your first professional gig is one more joy. But even a decade ago, young queer actors might have fretted about being birthed into the industry in a role like Jamie, because it could lead to a typecast future. That doesn’t bother Harwood. He believes in Jamie’s story, which he describes as “a little beacon of light and hope and joy.”Sprawled on that couch in New York, he said that story, however universal, is only one story — and queer youth deserve more. “I’m really happy to be a voice for my community,” he said. “But there are so many more stories to be told.” More

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      ‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye’ Review: Fall From Grace

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      Tammy Faye Bakker gets the celebrity biopic treatment in a new movie starring Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield.If you were watching television in America in the 1970s and ’80s — the old three-network days that now seem as distant as the horse-and-buggy era — you could hardly miss Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. Upbeat evangelists with the upper Midwest in their voices, they helped expand Christian broadcasting from a niche into an empire via their PTL satellite network.Even if you missed them in their prime, you couldn’t avoid the spectacle of their downfall — an end-of-the-80s tabloid scandal involving adultery, hypocrisy and financial shenanigans. In 1989, Jim Bakker was convicted of fraud and sentenced to federal prison. His wife (who had divorced him a few years later) was razzed by talk-show hosts and standup comedians across the land for her gaudy makeup, her big hair and her full-throated singing voice.“The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” directed by Michael Showalter from a script by Abe Sylvia, tells this story dutifully, following the familiar showbiz biopic sequence of rise, ruin and redemption. We start out in Eisenhower-era Minnesota, where Tammy Faye (Jessica Chastain) grows up in the shadow of a pious, unsmiling mother (Cherry Jones). When she meets Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield) at Bible college, it seems like a providential match.Jim preaches a version of the prosperity gospel, insisting to his flock that God wants them to be rich. This optimism, and the worldly ambition that comes with it, appeal to Tammy. A natural performer onstage (and later, on camera), she brings maternal warmth, wholesome sex appeal and relentless good cheer to their itinerant ministry. And puppets, too.Showalter’s film shares its title and its plot with a 2000 documentary by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, and also sympathy for its subject. Tammy Faye (who died in 2007) may have been an over-the-top spendthrift and an exhausting media personality, but she was also, these movies insist, sincere in her faith and generous in her view of humanity. Unlike the reverends Jerry Falwell (Vincent D’Onofrio) and Pat Robertson (Gabriel Olds), powerful allies of her husband, she resisted mixing religion and politics, and defied their anti-feminist, anti-gay culture-war ideology.The documentary version, which includes voice-over narration by RuPaul, understands Tammy Faye as a camp figure, earning both sympathy and ridicule, and emerging with a measure of dignity intact. Showalter and his cast lack the style and the nerve to convey either the wildness of the character and her milieu or the pathos of her story.The narrative beats — Tammy Faye’s temptation (in the presence of a hunky record producer played by Mark Wystrach), Jim’s betrayal, Falwell’s treachery — seem almost generic. The performances, while hardly subtle, feel smaller than life. Garfield mugs and emotes with sketch-comedy abandon, and while Chastain tries for more depth and nuance, she is trapped by a literal-minded script and overwhelmed by hair, makeup and garish period costumes.The Bakkers were many things to many people: appalling, inspiring, laughable, sad. This movie succeeds in making them dull.The Eyes of Tammy FayeRated PG-13. A handful of commandments violated. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters. More