Bonneville, Hugh

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    My Life With Uncle Vanya, the Self-Pitying Sad Sack We Can’t Quit

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    What is it about Chekhov’s melancholy inaction hero that makes him, and the play he stars in, so meaningful at all ages?Why can’t we ever get enough of Uncle Vanya?What is it about Anton Chekhov’s incessantly complaining, self-pitying sad sack that makes him return anew to the theater more than any other dramatic protagonist maybe short of Hamlet, that other great melancholy inaction hero?The question has grown more pressing in the last two years, since there have been four new revivals of “Uncle Vanya” in New York alone and another starring Hugh Bonneville that finished an acclaimed run at Shakespeare Theater in Washington earlier this month.Last year, the playwright Jon Robin Baitz argued that the play was in vogue partly because it was a “study of post-Covid paralysis.” But “Uncle Vanya” is always in fashion. I have seen 15 different versions in the last three decades, and I have come to believe that its enduring popularity is because of its flexibility.In the one-man show “Vanya,” Andrew Scott plays the title character as a man stuck in arrested development.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe old argument about whether “Uncle Vanya” — which follows a series of emotional disasters that occur on a Russian country estate run by Vanya and his niece, Sonya — is a comedy or a tragedy misses the point. There’s no one right way to perform it. I’ve seen it done funny and gloomy, cerebral and physical, small scale and broadly theatrical. What’s most remarkable about the play is how it can sustain so many different approaches and still move audiences.Look at the actors who have played the title character in the past year. There’s a world of difference between Andrew Scott, the star of the series “Ripley,” and the comedian Steve Carell; between the defeated, passive man played by the Tony-winning theater director David Cromer and the aggressively cranky Bob Laine from the Brooklyn adaptation by the “Dimes Square” playwright Matthew Gasda.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Everyone Is Still Talking About ‘Paddington 2’

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      With the third movie now in theaters, let’s look at how the 2018 film became a sleeper hit, thanks to Hugh Grant’s villain and its showstopping end credits.“Paddington 2 is the greatest film ever made,” one user posted on X in 2022.This tweet was not ironic.In the seven years since its release in January 2018, the film about a marmalade-loving bear’s quest to find the perfect gift for his beloved aunt has become an internet phenomenon, spawning memes, think pieces and an endorsement from Nicolas Cage. For a time, it was the best-reviewed film ever on the aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes.“A very eclectic group of people respond to it in the way that they do,” David Heyman, a producer on “Paddington 2” and its 2015 predecessor, “Paddington,” said in a recent phone conversation from his home in London. The Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, for example, confessed to Heyman he was a fan.Now with the third feature-length installment in the franchise, “Paddington in Peru,” in theaters — and already having passed the $100 million milestone at the international box office — it is hard to imagine that when “Paddington 2” first arrived in theaters stateside, it was only a modest box office success. Since its DVD and streaming releases, a devoted community of online fans has sprung up around it, evangelizing about the outsider bear who brought joy to their lives.“There’s humor in it for adults; there’s humor for children,” said Heyman, who grew up reading the Paddington books, written by the British author Michael Bond. “It never feels patronizing or like it’s talking down to its audience. It has a big, beating heart.”All three films are based on the children’s books about the duffle-coated, hard-staring bear, first published in 1958. In the first movie, Paddington emigrates from Peru to London in a story inspired by the World War II rescue operation that brought nearly 10,000 children from Nazi-occupied Europe to England. The second film, directed by Paul King, who wrote the script with Simon Farnaby, is an action adventure with stunning set sequences, following Paddington through a court trial, a prison escape and a daring pursuit by train.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Downton Abbey: A New Era’ Review: Gilded, Aged

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      The latest entry in the “Downton Abbey” franchise is amiable enough — though despite its subtitle, it rests most of its extravagant weight on cozy familiarity.The title of “Downton Abbey: A New Era” pledges that change has arrived at the Grantham family’s mansion after six seasons of television, a previous film and a zeitgeist shift that has caused a chunk of the show’s original audience to start regarding its characters’ generational wealth with disgust and relish, as though it were a wheel of rotten Stilton. The stately series that began its story with the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 has now arrived at the tail end of the 1920s. The choppy waters of modernity are materializing on the horizon. To stay afloat, this amiable sequel decides to ever so slightly democratize itself: The upstairs-downstairs division that has long separated the estate’s masters from their servants begins to leak.So does Downton Abbey’s roof, which motivates Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) to rent the cash-poor estate to a team shooting a silent film — makers of “kin-ema,” as Lady Mary’s father, Robert (Hugh Bonneville), calls it, disdainfully mispronouncing the name of the art form. (The moviemaking plot point may have been inspired by real life: The franchise’s shooting location, Highclere Castle, which resembles a vampire bat’s underbite, opened its doors to the show after Geordie Herbert, the Eighth Earl of Carnarvon and Queen Elizabeth II’s godson, realized that dozens of its rooms were rotting.)Simon Curtis, the director, and Julian Fellowes, the “Downton Abbey” creator who also wrote “A New Era,” proceed to have their own actors compete to see who can land the best meta-zingers about the profession. “I’d rather earn my living down at the mine,” Maggie Smith’s sniffy Dowager Countess quips. The obvious rebuttal is that her bloodline hasn’t earned its living at all — a dig that Fellowes is finally comfortable alluding to, if not saying outright, as when two newlyweds, Tom and Lucy (Allen Leech and Tuppence Middleton), vow to prevent their children from turning into the idle rich.Actors are just the people to upset the centuries-old social order. Two fictional movie stars, Myrna Dalgleish (Laura Haddock) and Guy Dexter (Dominic West), dress splendidly and command deference, even though she was born to a fruit seller and he pops down to the servants quarters to hit on the butler (Robert James-Collier), albeit with such sexless decorum that the target of his affection barely notices. While the lower classes flirt with upward mobility, the Dowager Countess inherits a villa from a Frenchman she briefly knew in 1864. What did she do to earn it? The grande dame is irked by the innuendo those around her express (tactfully, with widened eyes and bitten lips) — though she’s more aggrieved that everybody seems to reach for their funeral hats whenever she yawns. “I feel like Andromeda chained to a rock with you hovering,” she groans.Fellowes’s screenplay seems antsy to usher its characters to either the morgue or the wedding chapel, lest they start rotting, too. Four couples partner off, their rushed romances giving a jerky momentum to a pace that otherwise bobs along like a canal ride at an amusement park, gliding past pleasant scenes of children playing croquet, cooks readying feasts and women beaming graciously in glittering dresses. The sequel still rests most of its extravagant weight on cozy familiarity. Not only does the film copy-paste an entire subplot from “Singin’ in the Rain,” its opening aerial shot of pennant-bedecked white tents could have been lifted from “The Great British Baking Show,” that other pinnacle of British comfort-food entertainment. Yet, Fellowes manages to navigate “Downton Abbey” to charm both reactionaries and revolutionaries, finagling a sequence that allows the staff to usurp the formal dining room while the rich serve themselves at a buffet. The inversion gently rocks the boat, with no threat of tipping it over.Downton Abbey: A New EraRated PG for genteel allusions to adult situations. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘To Olivia’ Review: Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal Cope With Tragedy

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      This drama about the author and the actress is poignant, elegant and aggravating.A child’s outstretched hand ignored as she stands at her sister’s grave makes an indelible image in “To Olivia.” This drama, often touching but also vexing, recounts the lives of the children’s book author Roald Dahl and the actress Patricia Neal when their 7-year-old daughter, Olivia, died of complications from measles in 1962.Dahl and Neal — portrayed by Hugh Bonneville and Keeley Hawes — are raising their children Olivia, Tessa and Theo in rural England. The book “James and the Giant Peach” has little traction and Dahl is at work on “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Neal has a Tony and impressive film credits. Soon she’ll be mulling the script that will lead to her Oscar, “Hud.” There is tension.How parents mourn a child’s death together — or apart — is among life’s aching mysteries. The director John Hay plumbs the poignancy well but avoids any tussling with Dahl’s legacy, tarnished by antisemitic statements. In 2020, Dahl’s family posted a public apology for the author’s bigoted comments, many of which occurred after the period covered here. That a film intent on depicting Dahl’s humanity — made jagged by grief — might steer clear of his antisemitic views disappoints but hardly surprises. So it’s dumbfounding that the filmmakers take the opposite tack with another famous figure.When Neal and Paul Newman (Sam Heughan) meet before the “Hud” shoot, Newman is reminded that Neal lost a child. His reply — a cinematic fabrication — is terse, coarse and cruel enough to make one think less of a legend. Just the wrong one.To OliviaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More