'The Seagull' struggles to take flight
Michael Mayer takes Anton Chekhov’s 1896 play The Seagull from stage to screen with his 2018 adaption. An all-star cast, beautiful cinematography, and a timeless tale may have audiences expecting magic, yet the film’s romantic and artistic conflicts feel dull and flat storytelling leaves much to be desired.
The Seagull follows a Russian family during the summer of 1905 as fading actress Irina Arkadina clashes with her son Konstantin over opposing artistic views and their romantic partners. Taking a page from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the entanglement of every romance in Chekhov’s play may make wonderful theater but something feels lost in translation with this film adaption. None of the supporting relationships feel as realized as the main romantic conflict and Mayer struggles to connect the audience to his characters.
Mayer fumbles with pacing during the latter half of the film, focusing too much on the last summer days before jumping ahead two years to the film’s tragic end. Poor character development causes a lot of supporting characters and their storylines to feel half-alive, only existing to add more confusion to the story instead of being fully-fledged individuals.
Mayer, recognized for his Tony Award-winning direction of the musical Spring Awakening, made the jump from Broadway to Hollywood in 2004. He directed two films before The Seagull, each met with average reviews. Mayer focused on theater during the 12-year-gap between his second and third films, receiving his fourth Best Direction of a Musical Tony Award nomination in 2014. But like other renowned theater directors who recently dipped their toes into filmmaking, he has yet to replicate the magic his stage productions have within his films.
“You keep talking in symbols,” Nina states after Konstantin kills the titular seagull, showing how low the conflicts within his life made him sink. The symbol returns at the film’s end when Nina refers to herself as the seagull during her battle with inner demons. Yet the haphazard handling of Chekov’s symbolic text in the film feels as if each subtext-laced line was sprinkled in with little care.
As part of the emerging Russian symbolist movement, Konstantin represents the new “high art” movement sweeping the country while his mother represents traditional theater. A deeper exploration of the clash between new and old art forms may have strengthened this adaption. With the film’s 2018 release date, this storyline could represent the shift within Hollywood and its archaic institutions from the old to the new. Diverse voices are starting to be heard in the entertainment world, allowing for the creation of new, innovative art. The old ways still exist, but like Irina’s career, they are fading away.
The women of The Seagull are its strongest piece, each one turning out a superb performance even if the script fails to flesh them all out. Annette Bening stars as Irina and has fun with the complexity of her character, always deliciously deceitful and undeniably charming. Saoirse Ronan gives a sincere performance as Nina, breathing new life into a stereotypical ingénue role. As heartsick Masha, Mayer gives Elisabeth Moss almost nothing to do besides cry, drink, and cry some more, but she digs her nails into every second of screentime she’s given. These three actresses give it their all, pumping life and emotion into an otherwise lackluster film.