The Unbearable Lightness of Seeing: Linklater Pays Homage to a Broken Hart
Lorenz Hart was a lonely hunter. If you believe you haven’t heard of him, you’ve definitely heard lyrics he wrote for some iconic songs from when he was part of the Broadway songwriting team, Rodgers and Hart. Director Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon is so named for what stands as his most successful hit, even if the film asserts he had a contentious relationship with its popularity. Reuniting with his Me and Orson Welles (2008) scribe Robert Kaplow, Linklater recreates one consequential evening in the last year of Hart’s life—a night which cements his descent into being a has-been. If you still believe you haven’t a clue about the man, it’s because his name was overwritten when Rodgers and Hart became Rodgers and Hammerstein and the film depicts this transition occurring when Oklahoma! opened on Broadway in 1943, the first musical Rodgers made without Hart. And as the night of March 31, 1943 moves along, we come to understand why. But it doesn’t make this portrait of Lorenz Hart any less potent as a bittersweet tribute to a struggling, imploding genius.
Attending the opening night party to celebrate Oklahoma!, the first Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Lorenz Hart (Hawke) arrives with all the best intentions to reconnect with his creative partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott). Arriving early to the venue, Hart commiserates with the bartender (Bobby Cannavale) and the piano player (John Doran), sharing his authentic sentiments about his rift with Rodgers and his critique of their overly sentimental new production. Hart also enthusiastically raves about Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), the young woman scheduled to meet him at the party, with whom he professes to share a romantic connection. As the night progresses, it would seem Hart is the faulty narrator of his own experiences, his future collapsing in real-time before his eyes, sabotaged by his own inner demons.
Taking place almost entirely within the confines of Sardi’s bar, Blue Moon is, at times, a claustrophobic film, a feeling enhanced by the loquacious tidal wave of Hawke as Hart, a man in full blown manic phase who’s in denial about the writing on the wall. He’s an infectious energy, but long desensitized to social cues, making him something of a black hole.
Kaplow’s script expertly dances between these complexities of character, building to painful peaks of emotion as the dialogue ripples outward with repeated sentiments, when initially innocuous passages return with a haunting glory. One of these regards an opening discussion on the dialogue in Casablanca, the 1942 Michael Curtiz masterpiece. One of Bogart’s lines, “No one ever loved me that much,” becomes the refrain with which we come to understand Hart’s eternal loneliness, whose relationship with booze outranked the human relationships he established. He sees a glimmer of hope in a young ‘protege,’ the description of whom is questionable even to Bobby Cannavale’s affable bartender, apparently used to having his ear pulled by Hart’s penchant for misrepresentation. Hart’s brought a first edition of W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage as a gift for Elizabeth, though this hardly seems a gift suggesting reciprocated love. Rather, it’s a complex metaphor which channels a club-footed Leslie Howard pining for Bette Davis in the 1934 film version (i.e., doomed). Likewise, the metaphorical physical affliction of the character is a more coded version of how Hart’s sexual orientation is discussed in Blue Moon. Clearly, everyone else believes Hart to be gay, but he claims different people make him feel different things. And how does one write about the human experience without contemplating emotional and romantic potential beyond the yoke of heterosexuality?
If the first act of Blue Moon takes on a suffocating feeling, slightly alleviated by the appearance of another bar patron, a depressed E.B. White played by Patrick Kennedy (who, in this film, finds his Stuart Little classic inspired by conversing with Hart), the arrival of Andrew Scott as Richard Rodgers spikes the tension considerably. In one of two extended conversations, Hawke and Scott waltz impressively through a dizzying exchange of barbs and authentic endearments, as if they were a recently separated married couple. Hawke somehow becomes increasingly diminished in these moments, his earlier mischievousness sneaking shots at the bar suddenly evolving into an emptiness he can no longer conceal, which makes him suddenly resemble Lon Chaney at the end of his life. Margaret Qualley provides superficial solace as the much discussed Elizabeth, relaying a J.D. Salinger-esque escapade of a one-sided love affair at university, wherein Hart finally seems to perceive her ‘love’ as merely platonic.
Rodgers and Hart would work together once again, as is made mention of at Sardi’s, for a revival of their earlier musical A Connecticut Yankee, for which Hart wrote six new numbers in 1943. Shortly after the revival’s opening that same year, he collapsed in a drunken stupor only to die in a hospital four days later. Blue Moon provides us with a myriad of its own words with which to approach the essence of Lorenz Hart, who it would seem, died much too young and without a love of his own. But the lasting impression of the film and its subject is, indeed, ineffable.
Reviewed on February 18th at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival (75th edition) – Main Competition. 100 mins.
★★★★/☆☆☆☆☆
