MOVIE REVIEW : In Street Clothes, ‘Vanya’ Invites You In

“Vanya on 42nd Street” is an afterthought to be thankful for. A movie version of an exploration of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” that was not originally intended for an audience, let alone film, it is that rare melding of cinema and drama that does honor to both disciplines.

If movie stars fantasize about Oscars, theatrical actors dream of playing Chekhov and inhabiting his sensitive and complex characters. The Russian dramatist, who died in 1904 at age 44, wrote four remarkable plays in the last decade of his life: “The Sea Gull,” “The Three Sisters,” “The Cherry Orchard” and “Uncle Vanya.”

Theatrical director Andre Gregory (known to film audiences as the title character in “My Dinner With Andre”) decided in 1989 that he wanted to work on a production of the play using a contemporary adaptation by David Mamet.

After gathering his cast, which included “Dinner” co-star Wallace Shawn as Vanya, Gregory and company worked on and off on the piece for four years, first in a New York loft space and then, in 1991, before small invited audiences of 20 or 30 in a decaying movie theater near Times Square.

In 1992, the company’s oldest actress, 89-year-old Ruth Nelson, died, and the performances stopped. Then, a year later, there was an urge to begin again, and, with Nelson’s Group Theater colleague Phoebe Brand joining the cast, Louis Malle, the director of “Dinner,” agreed to film it.

In keeping with the spirit of the original workshops, Malle and Gregory made a number of smart choices. They reproduced the atmosphere of the invited performances by filming in front of a small audience in the crumbling interior of Times Square’s once-glamorous New Amsterdam Theater.

Everyone ambles into the theater, director Gregory and the audience exchange greetings, the actors chat as they gather on the stage and, unless you’ve read the text the night before, the opening lines of the play blend so seamlessly with the conversation that it takes a minute or two to realize the action has started.

As with many of Chekhov’s plays, “Vanya” concerns an extended family, and is set on the estate of Serybryakov (George Gaynes), a retired professor who gained control of the land when his first wife died.

In the past Serybryakov has been an absentee landlord, content to live off the revenues and allowing his daughter, Sonya (Brooke Smith), and his brother-in-law, Vanya (Shawn), to run the place for him. But now, at the play’s opening, financial difficulties have forced him to return to the estate, bringing with him his young and alluring second wife Yelena (Julianne Moore).

The presence of this couple stirs up a lifetime’s worth of resentments not only for Vanya, who is in love with Yelena and has begun to fear his years of toil have been for nothing, but also for the local doctor Astrov (Larry Pine), whom young Sonya has innocently had her eye on.

To watch this “Vanya” is to marvel, as always with Chekhov, at his insights, at how rigorously and effortlessly non-judgmental he is, at how much empathy he has for all his characters, for the resentments they feel at being trapped by the frustrations of their idle, often squandered lives.

Under Gregory’s and Malle’s direction, the actors captivate. Shawn is strong as the prickly, ironically self-deprecating Vanya, but the surprise of the production is Julianne Moore’s Yelena.

Moore, who got her role in Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts” after the director saw her in one of the “Vanya” run-throughs, shows us that the Raymond Carver adaptation used only a thimbleful of her abilities. Here the actress utilizes all the opportunities this role provides, and her Yelena understandably intoxicates and frustrates every male she encounters.

Malle has used his documentary background to unobtrusively serve and enhance the production. “We all want to talk,” Vanya says at one point, and this version of the play underscores once again how sublime it is when Chekhov’s characters unburden their souls and do just that.

* MPAA rating: PG, for thematic material. Times guidelines: It is suitable for any age that would be interested.

‘Vanya on 42nd Street’ Wallace Shawn: Vanya Julianne Moore: Yelena Brooke Smith: Sonya Larry Pine: Dr. Astrov George Gaynes: Serybryakov Lynn Cohen: Maman Phoebe Brand: Marina Jerry Mayer: Waffles Released by Sony Pictures Classics. Director Louis Malle, from Andre Gregory’s “Vanya.” Producer Fred Berner. Screenplay based on Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” adapted by David Mamet. Cinematographer Declan Quinn. Editor Nancy Baker. Costumes Gary Jones. Music Joshua Redman. Production design Eugene Lee. Running time: 1 hour, 59 minutes.

* In limited release at the Sunset 5, Sunset at Crescent Heights, West Hollywood, (213) 848-3500, and the Monica 4-Plex, 1332 Second St . , Santa Monica, (310) 394-9741.