A Master Builder

It's neat to see Jonathan Demme's direction of this, which was five years after the last feature film he made (Rachel Getting Married). It's still very good, as are his recent documentaries like My Cousin Bobby. You can tell this is a play adapted for the big screen but Wallace Shawn is amazing and as far as plays go you can't do much better than Ibsen. It's a great play and the adaption is good.

Halvard Solness (Wallace Shawn) is a successful architect on his sick bed. Aline (Julie Hagerty) is his long suffering wife. He tells Dr. Herdal (Larry Pine) about how he kept his worker Ragnar Brovik (Jeff Biehl). He hired Ragnar's girlfriend Hilde Wangel (Lisa Joyce) to keep Ragnar working for him. Hilde comes over to visit Halvard. She reminds him about their first meeting ten years ago as a fourteen year old.

This is based on Henrik Ibsen's play. There is a weird unrealism by keeping all the Norwegian names. It's strange to see this exercise and a somewhat effective one. Lisa Joyce's overacting only adds to the otherworldly feel. Wallace Shawn is brilliant as always and keeps the audience's attention. Julie Hagerty does her most powerful work. It has tension from dancing on the edge of madness but it never escapes its play origins.

Wallace Shawn plays the role of Halvald Solness in this adaptation of the Henrik Ibsen play.

Shawn wrote the script. It was first staged by his friend and frequent collaborator Andre Gregory, and finally directed by Jonathan Demme for the screen. It is a portrait of peoples' misery and how a young visitor, Lisa Joyce, shakes things up. When it's a fascinating story, Demme seems uncertain of how to translate it for the screen. There are long close-ups of the performers, varied by moving the camera a bit. As a result, while it remains good, the visuals stop it from being a superior movie. Still worth a look.

This is a powerful adaptation of a great Ibsen play. And by "adaptation," I mean there's an interesting little spin that, while faithful to the original, gives this version a bit of a twist. I'm sure Ibsen would approve. But I can say no more about that without getting into spoilers.

Like everything written by Ibsen, this movie is dialogue-heavy. It's not for lovers of fast-moving flashy special effects or loud background music. You can't really watch it while surfing your cell phone; almost every line of dialogue teaches you more about the character and pushes the plot forward. Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn are both in this film - veterans of another dialogue-heavy film, "My Dinner With Andre." Every single member of the cast is very strong. "A Master Builder" is the first Ibsen play that I ever saw, forty years ago, and it got me hooked on Ibsen for life. Check this one out and see if it hooks you, too.

I can't help but feel that this will definitely be the kind of film that sort of warrants a rewatch in the future, especially because it just comes across as pretty complex, maybe too much so. It seems like a complicated play, but all I know is that the acting is outstanding. It has the sortof very dreamy, airy atmosphere that one wants out of a film like this, since it's the atmosphere that really help carry it even when the dialogue seems a bit puzzling. Overall, definitely has many admirable qualities, certainly not your run-of-the-mill stuff, but then again being based on a play one expects that. Many probably won't like it, but as far as I'm concerned, it's a definite winner.