“No one ever loved me that much.”
Humphrey Bogart says this line in Casablanca at the height of his character’s cynicism -after his lost love has shown up again with another man, after a painful truth of their liaison has been revealed to him, and as the world itself appears to be closing in. He says it to a young Bulgarian woman desperate for his help in escaping the Nazi-occupied territory with her new husband, ashamed that it might mean sexual favours yet steadfast in her love and devotion even through that potentiality.
Lorenz Hart sees himself in Bogart when he quotes this line twice in Blue Moon, aware that a comment of seemingly insensitive despair is paired with an act of pure selflessness -Bogart does rig the husband’s roulette game in his favour. But Hart doesn’t have so readily available a noble victory at hand. He’s only got his liquor.
That Hart’s is an obscure name today in spite of a twenty-five year modestly successful partnership with composer Richard Rodgers, prior to Rodgers meeting and linking up with Oscar Hammerstein II, is itself a fairly sad fact. That here was a guy so tightly linked for a considerable time with one of the most famous names in American musical theatre, but whose legacy has been that of a footnote in the story of his far more successful partner. Richard Linklater and his writer Robert Kaplow (whose novel Me and Orson Welles was previously adapted by the director) recognized that Hart’s story is actually more interesting than Rodgers’. It is a tragedy.
Kaplow’s script condenses that story into a single night -the premiere of Oklahoma! that Hart leaves early out of dismay and disinterest at the material his former partner is working with. In pretty close to real time, the film keeps close on him hanging around in the theatre bar, drinking shot after shot and making dirty jokes and innuendo to the bartender and piano player, as gradually the show lets out and attendees loiter about in the foyer -including both Rodgers himself and the college student Elizabeth Weiland whom a love-struck Hart is endeavouring to have an affair with.
Hart is played by Ethan Hawke in his ninth collaboration with Linklater and first in eleven years (almost a whole Boyhood span of time), and though it isn’t a Linklater script he is working with there is nonetheless a tangible warmth in the reunion of one of the great cinematic partnerships. Hawke was not exactly made for this role -he looks nothing like the short, balding Hart, and considerable make-up and in-camera scale shenanigans are needed to transform him into the crude, depressed, possibly bisexual 1940s songwriter. But once there his commitment is exquisite, he takes to the character and his various foibles with great naturalism. Of all the previous team-ups between Hawke and Linklater the one this movie feels most a kinship with is Tape -perhaps the most obscure film in Linklater’s catalogue and almost certainly the cheapest. Both are real-time dramas set in a single space -Tape actually was based on a play while Blue Moon would make an incredibly easy theatrical adaptation. And both are essentially carried in dialogue by Hawke, virtually on-screen for the whole duration.
Here it is segmented among various conversations, with Bobby Cannavale’s bartender and Jonah Lees’s pianist, with E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), and most dramatically with Rodgers, played by an Andrew Scott perfectly encapsulating a subdued impatience with Hart’s disingenuous fawning while genuinely trying to bask in the success of what he feels is his most meaningful show. In their conversation about a future revival of their earlier show A Connecticut Yankee as the next project to work on together, Rodgers shows some remaining goodwill towards Hart by essentially offering him this olive branch for a continuation of their partnership. It is clear that his joining with Hammerstein was not out of bitterness, but was driven by Hart’s increasingly erratic personality and alcoholism. You feel the tragedy on both ends -that Rodgers had to, at least temporarily, let it go of this partnership for his own sake, and the self-admitted bitterness on Hart’s part that very clearly his partner’s greatest reception is coming with the project done without him. And Hart is a lot -Hawke plays his ebullient overcompensation with an unflattering hint of worminess, his desperation palpable and likely on some level intended to come across.
But he is a poetic and empathetic character too. He expresses himself in charismatic ways with an affectionate cleverness and a sharp tongue for metaphor. A coping mechanism perhaps, and everyone may be aware of it, but one that has been carefully modulated and perfected. We don’t learn the exact cause of his alcoholism, beyond perhaps a suggestion of severe loneliness -why he puts so much irrational stock in this new affair, framed as his last shot at something happy in his life in this moment. And that is why when Elizabeth, played by Margaret Qualley, does come to him at the end, the stakes over simple conversation are that much higher, even as you know the direction it is inevitably going to take. Qualley and Hawke play it with great earnestness.
Linklater’s filmmaking is very subtle here. Unlike in Tape there’s no gimmick in the presentation style, rather he is drawn to simply following the characters and diversifying as much as possible his presentation of the set, while never doing so in such a way that distracts attention or even diminishes its sense of theatricality. Indeed, it perhaps feels the closest to him directing an actual play. But he still allows the movie a cinematic feel -particularly in the editing, not adopting the long take approach of many play-to-film adaptations. The scale effects that render Hawke notably shorter than all his co-stars appear to be achieved practically, and though there is a tenor of humour to it in some places, it ultimately just refracts back into a picture of the character. One of the touches of the script, and admittedly a cheap one are the references and coy insinuations of Hart’s influence on other points of pop culture -it is implied his story to White about a mouse in his apartment inspires Stuart Little, nebulous bits of future Rodgers & Hammerstein productions are alluded to by Hart in his talks with them, and he even meets a child Stephen Sondheim -several “Johnny B Goode” from Back to the Future bits dropped as cute winks. They are eye-rolling, but the purpose of them, to imbue a little more influence to this figure who would die not long after these scenes are set, is modestly wholesome.
There’s an interesting modern commentary running through Blue Moon: Hart’s preferred brand of political satire through songs is in the war years fast going out of style in favour of a kind of rousing jingoism that Oklahoma! emphatically represents. It is not the cause of his grief but it is a mitigating factor. And once again we are now in a time where art with political purpose is being subtly discouraged over broad run-of-the-mill flights of empty escapism. I wonder how much Linklater and Kaplow were thinking about that, and how much it informed their empathy towards Hart, being left behind by a world no longer craving his kind of art. In any case the sadness of Hart relates to the audience, but so too does his personality in spite of his deep flaws. The man did not deserve to be forgotten. Blue Moon does an apt job remedying that, a little at the very least.
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