Barrymore

Christopher Plummer, what a great actor, he is known mainly to the world as Capt. Von Trapp in the Sound of music. It seems as though he has heightened his acting skills on film since he has reached his early eighties, with a 2011 Oscar for Beginnings and his touching role in Millennium, among others. This filmed One man show gives him the opportunity to show us the scope of his titanesque talent. His subject: John Barrymore, from a family dynasty (his parents, his brother Lionel and his sister Ethel) that marked the classical theatre and cinema of the late 19th century through to today, with grand- daughter Drew. Plummer takes us along the route this person who tasted inaccessible glories and a proportionate decline. This is theatre on film. Definitely not for everyone. Excellent on the other hand, for those who have some knowledge of classical Shakespearian theatre and the golden age of American cinema.

Unless you have seen John Barrymore perform, then you probably won't want to see this one. That's because today, very few even know exactly who Barrymore was. Practically everyone who saw him on stage has since died and unless you are an old movie fiend (like me), then you've probably not seen him in films. As for me, I am very familiar with him and his life--so it was natural that I'd get this DVD. But for the average person, I just can't see it being of a lot of interest.

Christopher Plummer plays the great actor in this film. As to the style, it really looks like a one-man play (with a second person offstage speaking a few lines) that has been filmed and released on DVD--and that's exactly what it is. Back in 1997, Plummer starred in the play "Barrymore" and he received the Tony Award for this performance. The play is set just before Barrymore's attempted comeback in 1942--the same year he died from the effects of alcohol.

As to whether or not this seems like John Barrymore, Plummer really doesn't look much like Barrymore. However, he does act like him--with some of the same mannerisms as well as the ability to play a genial drunk--which was what Barrymore generally was. But it's also very sad seeing a man playing a guy who WAS a great actor but who is only a step away from the grave due to his heavy drinking. Memory lapses, an inability to function without liquor and many reminiscences, this is basically what you'll see.

So is it any good? Well, if the film was about 30 or even 45 minutes, it would have been excellent. However, seeing a ruined, drunken wreck of a man talk and talk for 83 minutes is simply too much--even for a John Barrymore or Christopher Plummer fan. It becomes depressing and a bit tedious after a while. Worth seeing for the right person but difficult at the same time due to the subject matter. It's really a shame--Plummer is great in the role and should be commended for his performance.

I saw this at TIFF last Fall and was very disappointed. Although Plummer was wonderful, the film is an overproduced mess that never gets past its bad writing. The choice of director was wrong versus some one that had the biopic chops. The use of flashbacks and added film montages makes the film look cheap and takes away from Plummer. My sense is that this film will not find a distributor as it is sadly boring, slow and dull. This was a case of leave a good Broadway one off alone. Why Plummer would do this is puzzling. He won the Tony and now this is a sluggish tarnished effort. I wanted to like the film given Plummer's ability to command a stage but would bogs the film down is the pacing and cliché dialog. The other problem is that approach and art direction looks like they threw anything they had from the "theatre warehouse" at the film. Producer Garth Drabinsky (now in jail)has the theatrical chops but his return to the dated material and a subject long forgotten was a bad mistake.

As John Barrymore (Christopher Plummer) reckons with the ravages of his life of excess, he rents an old theater to rehearse for a backer's audition to raise money for a revival of his 1920 Broadway triumph in Richard III.

I am not as familiar with Plummer's work as I should be, or the work of John Barrymore for that matter. But this (almost) one-man show with dirty jokes and running commentary is great. Few films feature just one person (the only other jumping to mind right now is Robert Altman's film on Nixon), but sometimes these are the most powerful, letting the actor test their range.

More people should see this... and I should make a point to see more of Plummer and Barrymore's work.

In BARRYMORE, Christopher Plummer, one of the greatest stage actors living, essays the role of John Barrymore, one of the greatest stage actors of a previous generation. Delicious, I thought. I can't miss this.

I've been a fan of Plummer forever, seeing him in minor films and minor roles in major films, and always wishing to see more of him. I'm also a fan of Ethel, Lionel, and John Barrymore, and have read a great deal about their lives. I read Plummer's memoir a few years back and enjoyed it immensely just to learn of the verve with which he approaches life, however alcohol-induced that verve may be; and also to read the tidbits about famous actors he has known and worked with.

The movie should be of interest to fans of old-school theater, but I suspect it will leave most audiences cold, or at least more than a little confused. Plummer is excellent--squeezing the juice out of every second he is on stage--but I was never convinced he was John Barrymore, even though he was telling me stories as if he was. I never heard how much young John hated his father, and somehow I cannot quite believe it. He saw the man's descent into hell through syphilis and was probably too young to understand or forgive it, but I never read that he was the one walking the old drunk into whorehouses. It may have happened, and it would have been traumatic, but I hadn't heard that one. I'm certain he would have treasured memories of his mother as he was 11 when she died, but in this play he says he hardly remembers her. It has often been stated how devoted he was to his grandmother, Mrs. Drew, until the day she died. This play doesn't capture that, but maybe I'm asking too much. To be as complex and confounding as John Barrymore was, one could not have had good memories of childhood, could one?

John Barrymore was indeed a garrulous drunk, and probably a fiercely angry one, which we didn't see. Somehow there were too many digressions to silly songs like "I Got a Gal in Kalamazoo," and "When the Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves for Alabam", getting in the way of the picture of the classical actor we know he was. One silly song, I could have accepted, but two is one too many. The real John Barrymore did refer to his marriages as bus accidents, and his grandmother did call him her little Greengoose. She also is known to have said she loved him so much because he was "a bad boy--like my husband." The script is interesting, but it doesn't quite capture the bad boy, or the madness, or the self-loathing that caused Barrymore's retreat into the bottle. And Plummer is missing the main tool Barrymore had in his actor's bag of tricks--his magnificent, multidimensional voice. I was aware every moment that I was hearing Christopher Plummer relating Jack Barrymore stories, and it only made me want to find a DVD of a movie with John Barrymore.