Historic Moments in Indie Filmmaking

In “The Importance of Being Earnest” (currently in theaters), writer-director Oliver Parker subdues the legendary satire of playwright Oscar Wilde to unleash a quieter, gentler energy about the role of fantasy in our lives. In “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” based on Simon Leys’ delightful novel about the reinvention of Napoleon (opening Friday), writer-director Alan Taylor stresses the importance of relinquishing unrealistic dreams and embracing who we really are.

And in “Possession,” the adaptation (opening Aug. 30) of A.S. Byatt’s Booker Prize-winning romantic novel about the differences between Victorian society and ours, writer-director Neil LaBute explores emotional disconnection.

These films are the epitome of summer counter-programming, indie-style: wit, nostalgia and serious soul-searching.

“Wilde was at his best when revealing the hypocrisy of the upper classes,” Parker observes. “His ambiguities and paradoxes about identity are very modern. But after 100 years, the target has slightly changed, and I drifted more toward the universal. Through the benefit of time, Wilde comes across as a more compassionate figure, so we’re tapping into the humanity in our own lighthearted way, while abiding by his code of the comedy of manners.”

After tuning up with Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband” in 1999, Parker felt more confident tackling this more daunting iconoclastic classic. Set at the start of the 20th century, “Earnest” stars Colin Firth as Jack Worthing, a bored English country bachelor, who invents a more roguish identity when staying in London. Together with his ne’er-do-well partner in crime, Algy Moncreef (played by Rupert Everett), they try to pull off a romantic deception to win the hearts of a rebellious aristocrat (Frances O’Connor) and Worthing’s romantically sheltered niece (Reese Witherspoon).

“I kept thinking about ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ with its mistaken identity and incredible revelations--how people are much more uninhibited in the country. In the theater, the play’s performed too arch,” he contends. “It’s lost some of its irreverence and outrage. And the original 1952 film version is a bit stuffy. I wanted to shake it up and blow off the dust, which is hard to do because the Wilde purists refuse to cut you any slack.”

While trying to remain faithful to the spirit of Wilde, Parker has definitely added some modern touches that have ticked off Wilde fans, such as the use of jazz music before its time and having O’Connor and Witherspoon behave progressively ahead of their time as well. “Funnily enough, the more I worked on it, the more I focused on the metaphor of women obsessed with finding a man named Ernest. Women still fantasize about their ideal man, and I explored the older generation being more repressed and institutionally disconnected from the younger.

“I also went back to an earlier four-act version of the play to develop the romance” between the niece’s tutor (Anna Massey) and the local clergyman (Tom Wilkinson), Parker says. “It’s an eclectic bunch to break up the theatrical English stranglehold, and everyone shuffles to find their place in the balance of the ensemble.”

Meanwhile, Taylor (“Palookaville,” “The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City” and “Six Feet Under”) and LaBute (“In the Company of Men” and “Your Friends & Neighbors”) digress from their usual urban angst to explore the lost art of romanticism.

In “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” Napoleon (Ian Holm) trades places with a double and returns to France, only to be denied his destiny when nobody believes who he really is. He then falls in love with an impoverished widow (Iben Hjeile). It’s a fairy tale, pure and simple, but one that poignantly punctures the myth of Napoleon and presents him as a redeemably humble man. “It was an odd choice for me as a very New York indie director,” Taylor says. “But what I liked about Leys’ novel [“The Death of Napoleon”] was its dreamlike quality and poetry. Unfortunately, it was something that was lost in the painful process of translation with [screenwriter] Kevin Molony. But I attempted to retain the flavor of the book by including a scene where Napoleon winds up in an asylum filled with lunatics who think they’re Napoleon. But most of all, I deepened the romance and resolved Napoleon’s personal dilemma.”

Taylor, who earned a master’s degree in European history from Columbia University before becoming a filmmaker, refuses to apologize for “hijacking Napoleon and the 19th century” for his own fanciful purpose. He sees Napoleon as a figure living in a glorious past and an imaginary present who ignores the real world around him.

“I always had Ian in mind,” Taylor says of the actor who has played Napoleon twice before, in “Time Bandits” and in the British TV series “Napoleon and Love.” “He looks great in that uniform and is so good at undercutting his grand gestures. The big lesson here and in all of my films is learning to be at peace with the small world that you have.”

By contrast, “Possession” is one of the few films these days that doesn’t try to contemporize the past to make it more accessible, recalling that memorable opening line from “The Go-Between” (1971): “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” A pair of contemporary scholars (Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart) stumbles upon a cache of secret love letters of two Victorian poets (Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle). As they follow a fascinating trail of clues across England to the Continent, the detached Paltrow and Eckhart echo the romantic journey of the impassioned couple more than a century earlier.

“The biggest concern I had from the start was how to make the modern couple as interesting as the Victorian couple,” LaBute says. “When my collaborator, Laura Jones, and I put it side by side, there is more attention paid to the modern couple, yet all they talk about is the couple from the past. They are the ones saddled with finding all the clues and traveling from place to place. There is precious little time for them to fall in love, and they’re so reticent about it.

“Our guiding spirit was that in this very staid and restricted society, these two poets dared to be messy and let their emotions overtake themselves for a period of time, whereas this couple living in a completely permissive society have been hurt and are afraid to dive in again.”

Creating those romantic sparks in “Possession” was a personal challenge for LaBute, who is known more for the fireworks he has set off in his previous work as a playwright and screenwriter. LaBute says, “Some people are in relationships they’re trying to get out of or cheat on--something other than first romantic sparks between a man and a woman. This was about the first steps that we take ... [toward] courtship.”

So how did LaBute come to tread in such foreign terrain rather than other previously interested directors, including Sydney Pollack and Gillian Armstrong? By insisting that as a purveyor of troubled relationships in his own work, he understood what these people were feeling.

Yet he still wanted to please the author, if not her devoted fans, because he loved the storytelling and its poetry, with its haunting denouement. So he consulted Byatt during the development process. “Byatt was incredibly reasoned in her objections,” LaBute says. “She’d reel off five intellectual arguments why we shouldn’t do something, and we’d realize she was right. There were threads that we created in paring down the material, and it was important that they were dramatically satisfying as well as economical.

“I read her notes about previous drafts,” he says, and he felt “that gave me license to make the changes that were important to me.” Among the changes were making Eckhart’s character a brash American in contrast with Paltrow’s icy Briton, and creating such visual clues as an underwater cave to prove that the Victorian couple actually met. At the same time, LaBute retained the spirit of the novel by conveying the same space and lineage of both couples.

“The parallel stories help explain why romantic love is in such disarray today. One hundred fifty years ago they took a chance and were burned, but realized that it was worth the risk. The modern couple is too desensitized to even try again. It took poets to make that romantic leap, because they understood its power and passion, whereas ordinary people today have lost the courage to take that risk. So we bury it away. It’s like not wanting to talk about our dysfunctional family, allowing the dysfunction to fester until the curse is lifted with an understanding of what happened in the past.”

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Bill Desowitz is a regular contributor to Calendar.