Barrymore Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.0

Barrymore Blu-ray Movie Review

Oh What a Noble Mind Is Here O'erthrown!

Reviewed by Michael Reuben May 7, 2013

John Barrymore was a handsome rogue, an impossible scoundrel, a habitual drunkard and one of the greatest actors that America ever produced. Equally at home on stage or screen, Barrymore was born into a famous theatrical family and, after dabbling in painting, continued what he called "the family business" as an actor. So did his brother Lionel (best known today as Mr. Potter in It's a Wonderful Life) and his sister Ethel (primarily a stage actress, but also known for winning an Oscar in None but the Lonely Heart and for Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case). Barrymore's granddaughter, Drew, continues the family business to this day.

Canadian Christopher Plummer, who not long ago became the oldest actor ever to win an Oscar, has been fascinated with Barrymore since he was a teenager. Like Barrymore, Plummer has spent his career passing easily back and forth between the stage and screen. Like Barrymore, he is a noted and highly respected Shakespearean actor, returning regularly to Canada's Stratford Festival, where he got his start, to assay one major role after another. Despite ups and downs, however, Plummer has led a less extreme personal life, which is why he's still delighting audiences at age 83, whereas Barrymore died of drink and general ill health not long after turning 60.

In 1997, Plummer scored a critical and popular triumph in an almost-one-man play—another actor is involved, but he never appears on stage—entitled, simply, Barrymore. Audiences cheered, laughed and sometimes wept, and several prizes were handed to Plummer for his evocation of the alcoholic thespian as he tries to rehearse for a backers' audition to revive his failing career, but is constantly sidetracked by memories, regrets and self-doubt. Watching Plummer rant, joke and stagger around the stage, stopping occasionally to assemble his faculties and deliver a passage of Shakespeare with the full authority that so enchanted audiences back in the day, viewers often forgot that they were watching Christopher Plummer. It almost seemed like Jack Barrymore had returned for one last performance.

Fourteen years later, producer Peter LeDonne reassembled most of the original team behind the Broadway production, plus Canadian film director Erik Canuel, to recreate the play at Toronto's Elgin Theater for a limited run, then commit it to film (or, to be precise, hi-def video). The filmed version of Barrymore played the Toronto Film Festival in 2011 and saw a limited theatrical release the following year. Image Entertainment has now released it on Blu-ray.

Playwright William Luce was steadily revising Barrymore in the years between its Broadway production and the Toronto revival that forms the basis for the film. Often in consultation with Plummer, Luce tried new interpretations, new material and new directions. For his part, Plummer was now in his 80s instead of his late 60s. As he himself says in the accompanying documentary, his own sense of vulnerability has grown with the passing years. The Jack Barrymore of the Broadway production was much more a comic and clown; the melancholy and the personal sense of tragedy erupted sporadically, almost always catching the soused actor by surprise. In the new production, those qualities are there from the outset; it's the jokes that are surprising.

Director Erik Canuel has preserved the play's basic structure, in which Barrymore has rented an empty theater for the evening, where he attempts to prepare a performance of Shakespeare's Richard III, in which he had triumphed many years earlier. Though Barrymore often addresses remarks to the "empty" auditorium, his only companion is a young prompter named Frank (John Plumpis), who greatly admires the faded star but gradually loses patience with him as Barrymore continually postpones serious work with stories, jokes and more drinking. In the theatrical version, Frank was a voice offstage. In Canuel's film, we get to see into the wings where Frank waits impatiently with his prompter's book, his face always concealed by shadows.

Barrymore arrives at the theater before Frank does, in a lovely sepia-toned introduction invented by Canuel that begins as a push-in on an old-time movie screen and fades to a period automobile dropping off the frail Barrymore at the stage door. When Barrymore first walks out on the stage, the seats are filled with patrons, as the old veteran probably imagines them in his mind's eye to help him summon the energy he needs to tread the boards once again. (In fact, Canuel staged the production specially for an invited audience to capture these scenes; the curtain call for that staging accompanies the film's closing credits.) As soon as Frank arrives and switches on the house lights, the spectators in the seats fade away. It's just Barrymore and Frank.

Canuel has "opened up" the play cinematically at well-chosen moments that crystalize some of Barrymore's most vivid memories. He sometimes appears in costume as his younger self, giving a memorable performance as Hamlet. (According to Canuel, the insert near the end in which Plummer appears as Barrymore performing Richard III in full armor is so convincing that some critics believed it to be the real Barrymore.) He appears in a full-length mirror in several guises, including that of his abusive father, who was also an actor. In an extended gothic flashback, Barrymore recalls the attic rooms he shared with his brother Lionel when they were children living with their maternal grandmother: the long, steep staircases, the old family photographs marking the climb, the fearful darkness at the top. In these scenes, the elderly Plummer looks for all the world like a frightened child.

In perhaps the most colorful of Canuel's additions, when Barrymore recalls a joyful trip to Florence with his playwright friend, Edward "Ned" Sheldon, a wall in the theater opens to reveal a vivid tableau of the Italian city at night (thanks to the miracle of computer graphics). Barrymore gazes and travels back in time as he talks, but eventually he must return to the present and the stage where Frank is losing his patience.

At its core, Barrymore is equally about regret and defiance: regret over opportunities lost, talent squandered and times that will never come again; and defiance in the face of what he calls "the man in the bright nightgown". When he exits the stage, he does so reciting these lines from Robert Browning:

I was ever a fighter, so—one fight more, the best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore, and bade me creep past.

Barrymore Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Shot on hi-def video by cinematographer Bernard Couture, a frequent collaborator of director Erik Canuel, Barrymore arrives in a first-class 1080p, AVC-encoded presentation from Image Entertainment that captures the tiniest flicker of star Christopher Plummer's precisely calibrated performance. The blacks in this image are deep and solid, and the shadow detail is precisely delineated so that Canuel's and Couture's artful use of shadows in the wings—which is crucial to the expanded function of the prompter, Frank—registers perfectly. Whether in long shots showing the entire stage or in close-ups on Plummer, details of costumes, props and the theatrical machinery surrounding the stage are readily discernible.

When the image occasionally fades to black-and-white, the effect has been achieved in post-production); the shades of grey don't have quite the depth of old-fashioned Hollywood cinema, but the contrast with images in color achieves the necessary effect. Other digital tricks, such as the view of Florence, are obviously artificial, which gives them an appropriate theatricality. Colors are soft but rich. The image has none of the harshness often associated with digital photography.

Banding or other artifacts, including compression issues, did not appear.

Barrymore Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Barrymore's original 5.1 soundtrack is provided as lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1, and it's a far more active affair than one might expect from such a dialogue-driven film. Because Frank's lines are delivered from the wings, good stereo separation is essential. Depending on the perspective of the moment, his voice issues from either the left or the right, while Barrymore remains in the middle. In one memorable sequence, Barrymore insists that Frank switch to the other side, and we hear him move. The live audience that Barrymore imagines in the theater when he first enters laughs gently at his opening jokes (and, of course, there really was an audience there for this portion), and later the massive house lights rumble through the soundfield with tremendous impact as they switch on and off.

Of course, there's Plummer's wide array of vocal acrobatics as Barrymore, ranging from the quietest murmur to violent fits of anger to eloquent oratory. Plummer alone gives the audio track's dynamic range a thorough workout.

The discreet score by Michel Corriveau (another frequent collaborator of director Canuel) plays gently and often so unobtrusively that it's easy to finish viewing the film without ever noticing that it had music.

Barrymore Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Backstage with Barrymore (1080p; 1.78:1; 58:53): This substantial and detailed documentary covers two subjects. The first is the history of the play and film Barrymore, from its initial Broadway production through its Toronto revival and filming. Included are extensive interviews with the entire creative team, including Plummer, Canuel, stage director Gene Saks and playwright William Luce. The second subject is an artistic biography of Plummer himself, for which the documentary interviews three of his most famous leading ladies: Julie Andrews (The Sound of Music ), Helen Mirren (The Last Station) and Zoe Caldwell (several Shakespeare plays at Stratford).
  
  A minor video note: During the last fifteen minutes or so of the documentary, owners of LCD and DLP sets may become concerned over the appearance of what appears to be dead pixel in the bottom right corner of the screen. Do not be concerned; the flaw was in one of the cameras used to shoot the documentary and is part of the image. Your set is fine.

Barrymore Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Rarely has a singular theatrical performance been translated to the screen and preserved with such care as in Barrymore. The usual method of setting up multiple cameras to record a live performance is better than nothing, but seldom does one experience such care in redesigning the makeup, sets, costumes and even the performances for the camera so that the drama can unfold cinematically with an effect that approximates its live impact. In this instance, such a record is especially critical, because Barrymore is not a play that is likely to be revived and restaged with another actor. The role is uniquely identified with Christopher Plummer, and it would take an actor of his experience, stature and temperament to play the part. We may not see another one of those for a very long time. Highly recommended.