Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, as adapted by David Mamet, as staged by Andre Gregory, as filmed by Louis Malle. The key features of the theatrical production, along with the complete cast minus the late Ruth Nelson, are preserved on screen: no artifices of costume and décor, just ordinary modern-day dress and utilitarian props. Yet the movie, for someone unfamiliar with the stage original, misleadingly creates the impression that this is only a "rehearsal," as if there were to be a traditional full-dress treatment somewhere down the line. The movie also adds a few Pirandellian trimmings to, or rather around, the play, to remove the spectator further from an illusion of fiction: shots of the actors emerging from the pedestrian mass at Times Square, of Wallace Shawn polishing off a knish on the sidewalk outside the theater, and of bits of stilted casualness between the arriving actors and their director -- Gregory, not Malle -- before the play gets underway. One glaringly fictional, and filmic, device, however -- a single passage of voice-over interior monologue, while other characters on other occasions must content themselves with standard soliloquies -- capriciously violates the "rehearsal" premise. That last conceit aside, the movie, as its title forthrightly announces, is more documentary than fiction, a continuation of the theatrical run for one final performance, a filmed record of it. Or in other words, it's still more a play than a movie. Malle's little additions do not in the least alter Gregory's vision, but neither do they add a lot to it. They are little indeed. With Julianne Moore, Brooke Smith, Larry Pine. (1994) — Duncan Shepherd
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