Still Crazy After All These Fears

By RICHARD CORLISS

Artists are crazy, the rest of us like to think. And great artists are emotional idiots savants, charting the terra incognita of human experience by going over the edge. It is a lovely delusion. It excuses so many excesses and failures, gives rise to so many cautionary legends. George Gordon, Lord Byron incarnated one such fable: the poet as demon lover. He was dead at 36. Joe Orton, the English playwright who died in 1967, lived out another. He cruised danger as if it were a cute trick in a public gents', and was murdered at 34 -- for love! Nice work, guys. By your example you spread the word: art is supposed to show us how to live, and artists are supposed to show us how not to.

Nothing in Orton's life became him like his leaving it. His lover, Kenneth Halliwell, took a hammer and smashed the snide poetry in Joe's brains to pulp, then swallowed 22 Nembutals and died. If Orton had lived a bit longer, he might have done justice in his work to the themes that informed his 16 years with Halliwell: love vs. jealousy, career vs. home life, husband vs. wife, son vs. mother. As it was, he wrote three full-length plays (Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Loot, What the Butler Saw) that subverted old genres and modern society with a cheekily amoral wit. Now Alan Bennett has dramatized Orton's life in Prick Up Your Ears, based on John Lahr's nifty biography. Both works take their title from a farce Orton planned to write. The title was Ken's.

All the titles were Ken's. When they met in 1951, Ken, seven years older, was the voluptuary eager to instruct his new roommate in the love of art and the art of love. Ken would be Oscar Wilde, and Joe his protege and best beau. Then a funny thing happened: Ken may have wanted to live like Wilde, but Joe learned to write like him. And believing that "anything worth doing is worth doing in public," Joe shared his sexuality with all comers, while Ken was left at home to stew in his rancor. He was the "first wife," the spurned mother, and bound to take revenge.

Gary Oldman looks spookily like Joe, with that puckish smile that told the world, "You want me to get away with it." Vanessa Redgrave has, and deserves, many of the best lines as Orton's sardonic agent. Bennett's script is a mine of epigrams and a model of construction (except for a framing device that portrays Lahr as an Orton manque and his wife as a pathetic Ken doll). But the workmanlike style of Director Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Laundrette) emphasizes the drab and the obvious. Frears cannot match the script's sleek malice, so he gets his laughs with eccentric casting; most of the actors have faces that are their own caricatures, particularly Alfred Molina as Ken. Molina commands the screen with the round face, hulking frame and liquid loser's eyes of the young Peter Lorre. But as photos prove, Ken was physically attractive; it was his manner that repelled people. And now he is memorialized as the haunted child molester from M. Joe would have appreciated the joke anyway.

Prick Up Your Ears is a view from outside, cool as Orton's craft. But Ken Russell has always been caged inside the beautiful mad creatures he imagines artists to be. No distance, no irony, no coherence, no prisoners. And no surprise that Russell now turns to Gothic, Stephen Volk's script about the famous night in 1816 that Byron (Gabriel Byrne) spent with his mistress Claire Clairmont (Myriam Cyr), his lover John William Polidori (Timothy Spall), his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley (Julian Sands) and Shelley's wife-to-be Mary Godwin (Natasha Richardson). From that spectral evening emerged Mary's idea for her novel Frankenstein.

Frankenstein was a modern horror story; Russell means Gothic to be the last horror show. Byron is Count Dracula, feeding on his guests' dreams and demons. Shelley is every weak hero, Polidori every mad doctor, Clairmont every wench whose lust turns her into a succubus. And Godwin, racked by visions of her stillborn child, becomes the cursed mothers of The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby. From the labor of her nightmares, she gives birth to literature's most enduring monster.

Working from the principle that too much is never enough, Russell unloads his inventory of weird imagery. Candied corpses and puddles of rancid goo. A woman's nipples that open to reveal eyes. Claire, filthy and feral, a dead rat in her mouth. Stuff like that. In such films as The Devils and Altered States, Russell found a conjurer's balance between sense and surrealism. But with this catalog of chic atrocities he cannot shock, he can only embarrass. For an artist as canny as Russell, that's crazy.