Jonathan Demme, who directed the new screen adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder, is 70 years old, with a filmography that includes such notable features as Melvin and Howard (1980), Stop Making Sense (1984), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Philadelphia (1993), and Rachel Getting Married (2008). Seventy-year-old Wallace Shawn, who stars as Ibsen’s protagonist and scripted the film from his own translation of the play, has an acting resumé as long as your arm, dotted with such beloved movies as Manhattan (1979), The Princess Bride (1987), and Toy Story (1995). Eighty-year-old Andre Gregory, who nurtured the Master Builder project for years and appears onscreen in a supporting role, is one of the most highly regarded experimental theater directors in the country, his career stretching back to the early 1960s. (He also costarred with Shawn in the films My Dinner With Andre and Vanya on 42nd Street.)
Ibsen had already been recognized as a master dramatist by the time he wrote The Master Builder (1892), and the play has inspired a fair amount of tongue wagging from critics who consider it a thinly veiled autobiography. Three years before it was published, Ibsen spent the summer in the Tyrolean village of Gossensass, where he was feted by the villagers and became intimate with an 18-year-old girl named Emilie Bardach. “What tempted, fascinated, and delighted her was to lure other women’s husbands away from them,” the German writer Julius Elias remembered Ibsen telling him. “He had studied her very, very closely.” Ibsen had no shortage of groupies; that same summer he met Helene Raff, who later quoted him as saying, “You are youth, child, youth personified—and I need that—for my work, my writing.” But more serious than these dalliances was his intimate friendship with Hildur Andersen, whom he first met in 1874, when she was only ten years old, and who became his frequent companion beginning in 1891.
This dorky Wizard of Oz conceit introduces a number of logical and thematic problems into Ibsen’s carefully wrought play: it transposes the action to the modern age, creating various social incongruities, and it makes a hash of the subplot in which Knut Brovik is dying. (If Brovik is near death himself, what is he doing at Solness’s bedside? And what happens to Ibsen’s notion of the younger generation vanquishing the older if mentor and protege are racing each other to the grave?) More unfortunately, it literalizes what Ibsen took great pains only to suggest: that Hilde shows up at Solness’s door not to restore his lost youth, but to spur him on to his next one.
Directed by Jonathan Demme 130 min. Actress Lisa Joyce attends the Friday and Saturday and Sunday screenings. Fri 8/8–Thu 8/14 Gene Siskel Film Center 164 N. State 312-846-0000siskelfilmcenter.org $11
