Beckett on Film

"You're on Earth; there's no cure for that." "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness; I'll grant you that." "We always find something to give us the impression that we exist."Ah, there's nothing more metaphysically bracing than a good stiff shot of the comically despairing fatalism of Samuel Beckett, the Nobel Prize-winning 20th century Irish novelist, critic and playwright, best known for Waiting for Godot--a two-act play in which, as one literary wag put it, "nothing happens…twice."The impressively ambitious Beckett on Film, a four-disc DVD boxed set bundled with a 42-page color souvenir booklet, features all 19 of Beckett's dramatic works (excepting Bill Irwin's recent one-man show Texts for Nothing, based on sketches that Beckett never formally shaped into a play) shot on film by 19 different directors (including Atom Egoyan, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Neil Jordan, David Mamet, and Anthony Minghella) and starring, among others, David Thewlis, John Hurt, Jeremy Irons, Julianne Moore, Alan Rickman, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Sir John Gielgud (in his final role).Also included on the disc are interviews with the producers, directors and cast, as well as the 52-minute documentary, "Check the Gate--Putting Beckett on Film," in which purists argue that filming Beckett amounts to literary sacrilege, while others extol the extra layers of meaning (close-ups, various camera angles, etc.) that cinema brings to the table, so to speak. As is often the case, the truth lies somewhere between these extremes: the starkness of Beckett's sparsely staged plays is somewhat lost on film (especially so in Anthony Minghella's consciously cinematic Play, which is one of the coolest looking yet least effective adaptations in the set), but there's also a welcome conversational quietness on film that the stage--with its requirements for projecting the voice--cannot provide.The best pieces here, by and large, are the full-length plays--Waiting for Godot, Krapp's Last Tape (with a wonderful performance by John Hurt, who appeared in the recent stage version), Happy Days, and Endgame--while the shorter pieces (many of which are rarely performed, often with good reason) range from surprisingly good (Rough for Theatre II, with Timothy Spall) to deadly dull (Rockaby, in which a woman sits in a rocking chair and repeats her stream of consciousness dialogue over and over for 16 minutes straight). Academic, high school, and public libraries with strong drama collections will definitely want to pick up this uneven but one-of-a-kind collection, which is also recommended for general literature collections. Aud: H, C, P. (R. Pitman)