A new film by Patrick Wang is always a cause for celebration and his latest—A Bread Factory, Parts One and Two (2018)—makes up for his absence since The Grief of Others (2015) by providing a four-hour narrative bifurcated into two independent acts, each roughly two hours. By necessity, each act requires treatment as a separate film. Fans of duration will attend all four hours when A Bread Factory opens at the Village East Cinema in New York and at the Laemmle Monica Film Center in Los Angeles on Friday, October 26, with other cities to follow. But those with half the attention span will not be disappointed by only catching the first two hours (subtitled For the Sake of Gold), which—of the two acts—is the most cohesive and satisfying in its narrative thrust and trajectory, perhaps for providing at least a temporary sense of remedy to a complicated social issue.
After being around for 40 years, the Bread Factory—Checkford's local community arts center run by partners Dorothea (Tyne Daly) and Greta (Elisabeth Henry)—comes under seige from the May Ray Foundation, which purports to spread a message of global culture (most notably China, front and center), but is actually a financial ruse to siphon money away from the children's art program of Checkford's school system. To save the Bread Factory from financial ruin, Dorothea and Greta rally the community to defend their funding, which the school board is proposing to reallocate to the May Ray Foundation's FEEL Institute. For the Sake of Gold begins with the community's protest (scored to the Greek wind of tragedy and orchestral strings), then proceeds to a sequence where Dorothea and Greta escort guest filmmaker Jordan (Janeane Garofolo) to the Bread Factory where she is scheduled to show a retrospective of her films and teach a class on filmmaking to the students.
One of Wang's recognized directorial strengths is his rapport with actors and—most notably in A Bread Factory—he directs an immense ensemble of more than 100 actors to create a cultural imaginary in which an independent art organization argues for its right to exist against a school board seeking to reallocate its funding. The intricacy of Wang's script elicits the best from each of his actors to specific purpose as their performances steer the script—through humor and pathos, through metaphor and farce—to Act One's heartbreaking finale. It's on the strength of his actors' performances that multiple themes are introduced, addressed, and articulated, themes that are ideas full of blood, so many ideas in fact that—in some ways—Act Two feels like Wang's surfeit of ideas requires complication and reiteration to achieve any sense of completion or resolution. I'll attempt to focus on how these performances provide nuance and tease out the script's tangled ideas.
Not only is A Bread Factory brimming with ideas, but the script is rich with chiseled lines. "You can always count on the Italians to be sensible," newspaper editor Jan Barley (Glynnis O'Connor) quips. Her intelligence is given a slight southern drawl as she questions the tax exemptions granted the May Ray Foundation and as she seeks to mentor her young intern Max (played earnestly by In the Family alumni Zachary Sayle, whose striking talent shines with natural delivery and enthusiastic charisma). Not knowing any better, Max is taken in by Man Ray's self-congratulatory press releases, as members of the school board are likewise fooled into believing that Man Ray's flaccid artistic experiments—intended to shock audiences with their incomprehensibility—are genuine art. The built-in applause and self-affirmation of May Ray's performance pieces discount valid criticism and discard critical rigor. They might as well be shouting, "Fake news!" May Ray's ridiculous performance piece of encouraging their audience to walk in hats, instead of shoes—with the calculated intention of selling photos to the participants of their feet in hats—represents the commercial justification for allowing affect to replace substance and artifice to stand in for art. Janet Hsieh (May) and George Young (Ray) represent compromised performances, and Act Two provides evidence for how disingenuine they truly are.
Jan warns Max to always be on the lookout for what he doesn't know and, as a journalist, to not rely on press releases since they are only trying to tell people what to think and are, in effect, selling a perspective. "Words have to mean something," Jan tells Max. "If words don't mean anything, then conversations built on those words can't possibly mean anything." This is as transparent a critique of the Trump administration as one might hope for in a film.
Another of Wang's directorial strengths is knowing how to balance farce with depth; in fact, how to use farce to accentuate depth. Jan's interview with visiting poet Ted Hugo (Noah Averbach-Katz), for example, is near slapstick in how the poet passes out and clunks his head on the table when he learns that Jan has actually read his volumes of poetry in order to prepare for their conversation. "Memories can be bad poetry," Ted states (in yet another lapidary line). Ted's interactional session with the students reveals the importance of different types of teachers to elicit different learned responses. His gondolas poem indirectly inflects the overall theme of the film: "Though we sink, we do not fall." Again, I may be reaching, but I can see how the film speaks to our current national crisis.
Quite brilliantly, Wang also exhibits a gleeful genre-within-genre abandon—he offers a staged play within a film; a film of a staged play—and he artfully maneuvers the connective tissue between stage and screen. Ted's poetry reading, in turn, is recognized as a staged performance and emphasizes the importance of a local arts organization to provide as many different types of staged performances as possible.
A "little movie theater play humor" comes in the guise of the dashingly handsome Hollywood actor Trooper Jaymes (Chris Conroy) who sees these various genres as all being "in the biz." In his introductory café scene with Julie (Erica Durham) where they're talking about "craft", he knocks the table and spills her drink, then takes off his shirt to wipe up the mess, causing everyone in the café to do a quick take as he grins sheepishly and winks at the camera in direct address. Conroy's performance is exactly what it critiques: the prurient interest of the average audience member in fantasized sex. It's a comic bit, but a brilliant bit, not only in itself, but for setting the stage for increased naturalism as the film evolves away from such artifice towards the community's confrontation with the school board. In his testimony at the town meeting, Trooper's artifice speaks for the opposition. His earnest emotionalism—as moving as it first appears—reveals itself to be a bought and ill-learned script. He needs to ask for his final, most important, line (which concerns the future welfare of Checkford's youth). This is when Sir Walter cuts him down to size: "That," he pronounces, "is not an actor." Which is to say that so many contemporary performances by young hunks displaying their vulnerabilities belies shallow sentiment and the lowest denominator of audience expectation.
Tyne Daly (as Dorothea) excels as a woman frustrated by the evident political maneuverings that seek to rob her beloved Bread Factory of its funding. In the face of members on the school board who think "it's time" to accept new trends and who—by saying so to her face—demean decades of effort and achievement, Daly is disillusioned to realize her years of involvement at the Bread Factory are seen as "bumpkin" efforts and not high art. The heirarchy of "high" and "low" art is as vapid as Man Ray's rant: "Down with the hierarchy of furniture!" Or—as in the case of Pat (Kit Flanagan), board chair—Dorothea is startled and saddened to discover that Pat's vote to reallocate funds away from the Bread Factory is cored on a smoldering need for personal revenge. Whereas Jan, for me, represents the film's moral compass from an intellectual and critical perspective, Dorothea represents the film's moral compass from an emotional and frustrated perspective.
It's always a pleasure to watch Trevor St. John (the love interest from In the Family), whose handsome countenance is put to good use here to guise the charismatic lure of unchecked hypocrisy and unbridled threats via his character Karl Muller. He threatens to bring the Bread Factory to the attention of the Department of Labor because Simon is underage and "working" all the time as a projectionist. Muller is confident they will shut the Bread Factory down. Simon overhears this conversation and it is heartbreaking the sacrifice he makes to insure that Muller cannot achieve his end. Clearly, Muller displays a heartless lack of regard for why Simon is so often at the Bread Factory. It is Simon's place to be himself, to learn, to participate and feel useful. Worrying why he is staying away, Greta comes to visit him and to affirm that he is missed and that he is loved for being such a good friend to artists and that—whatever his decision—their good time together will always be remembered. Elisabeth Henry's performance in this scene is particularly poignant, showing—by contrast to Muller—how invested she is in Simon, how much she cares about him, but how she is willing to grant him the sovereignty he needs to make his own decisions.
The tender naturalism of Henry's characterization of Greta is contrasted against the broad gestures of Tessa (Elaine Bromka) who is introduced as a drama school chum of Greta's. At surface, somewhat like Sir Walter, Tessa exemplifies the cliché of the exaggerated personas of theater actors; but, when Tessa performs Yelena's (purported) soliloquy from Chekhov's Uncle Vanya (presumably as a guest piece at the Bread Factory), she is breathtakingly articulate and beautiful. What I need to point out here is Wang's adept usage of so many different approaches to acting and his facility for reconciling them into compatibility and continuity. Again, Wang is not only showcasing the remarkable talent of Elaine Bromka but exercising a genre-within-genre technique to texture and strengthen his narrative.
It's perhaps important to note Chekhov's plays—now recognized and accepted as permanent fixtures of international theater—met tepid reviews when first performed. It took audiences some time to understand Chekhov's emotional nuances. Wang has applied Chekhov's aimed philosophy of challenging actors and audiences by replacing conventional action with what Chekhov himself termed a "theater of mood" and a "submerged life in the text." He is, in effect, providing Ariadne's clew (i.e., clue) to guide us through the labyrinth, by placing this piece of Chekhov seemingly out of place and yet absolutely essential and appropriate to the narrative's traction. But most importantly, as far as I am able to determine, the soliloquy Tessa performs is Chekhovian, though not actually Chekhov. It appears that Wang has written a soliloquy adapted from Chekhov. Now why would he add this scriptural complication to a script already heavy-laden with ideas?
It's perhaps of further importance to note that—though Chekhov himself described his infamous quartet of plays (The Seagull, Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard) as comedies with farcical elements, directors such as Konstantin Stanislavski elected to present them as tragedies, spotlighting the dual nature of the texts themselves. By including his Chekhovian soliloquy within Act One, Wang is perhaps speaking to the dual nature of his own text, which as noted earlier is at times absurd and comic before plunging into relevance and depth? I may be wrong about this presumption, but I could find no credit referenced to Chekhov at film's end, nor could I locate this particular soliloquy when I re-read Uncle Vanya. It is this kind of ingenuity that identifies Wang as one of contemporary film's most remarkable screenwriters working today. And again I may be presuming too much when I suggest that his tip of the hat to Chekhov also addresses the increased social stratification of our current moment when "peasants are falling out of the trees."
But Wang doesn't stop there with his genre-within-genre scriptural device as throughout Act One the characters are in rehearsal for a staging of Hecuba at the Bread Factory. Wang's script for the Bread Factory production of Hecuba has been compiled, with permission of the publisher, from Euripides' classic plays Andromache, Hecuba, and Trojan Women. Again employing Chekhov's technique of submerging life within a text, the Bread Factory production of Hecuba mirrors the central social issue plaguing the Checkford community (encapsulated in Act One's subtitle For the Sake of Gold), namely that the adults who are supposed to responsible for the welfare of the young abandon that responsibility in pursuit of personal financial gain. Instead of allowing the Bread Factory to continue in its rightful education of the community's youth, Checkford's school board becomes complicit with efforts to do away with what the children truly need.
Elsa is also a character whose integrity struggles to find itself beneath the weight of self-abnegation and denial. Her husband Jason (James Marsters)—presented as a local hero arguing for teachers' rights against the school board—is, at the same time, having an affair with the board's secretary, Mavis (Nan-Lyn Nelson). Mavis bolsters Jason's resolve to fight for their mutual concerns, and then Jason returns home to browbeat his wife Elsa and his son Max. What's said here about the hypocrisy of men who take their families for granted while promoting their stature within the community speaks to the psychological flaw that is corroding the American family unit.
Act One concludes with Max despondent over Julie's decision to leave for Hollywood with Trooper. Though his failure to show up at the board meeting to help out with the vote is distressing, Max nonetheless arrives at the Bread Factory for solace, where Sandra is waiting for rehearsal to begin. When Dorothea arrives and assesses the situation, she uses the ritual of theater itself to help Max find expression (and catharsis) for his conflicted feelings. She brings him onto the stage and turns him towards the empty auditorium, noting, "Things look different from here" and then has him cold read a soliloquy from the script for Hecuba. The soliloquy is that of the ghost of Polydorus, the Trojan prince entrusted by his parents to be protected by a king who, instead, kills him to steal the gold his parents have sent with him. Polydorus, standing in for the youth of Checkford, as well as the youth of America, is killed for the sake of gold. He has no peace in his death. He has not been buried but thrown into the sea. His ghost arrives to the tent where his mother and sisters have been taken as slaves. "You're the ghost of Polydorus trying to find peace," Dorothea directs Max and walks away leaving him alone on stage.
Though protesting that he is not an actor, Max nails the narrative thrust of the soliloquy in his cold reading and the power of this, the power of his identification with the text, is amplified by the sure and steady camera work of cinematographer Frank Barrera, which glides in on Max slowly, intensifying his recognition of the relevance of the words he is reading aloud. Then suddenly Sandra joins him on stage, embracing him and singing about the poor prince who has been killed for gold and—despite the gravity of the moment and the script—Max giggles and smiles. It is an incandescent moment that illuminates the value of the Bread Factory, as well as the efforts of Dorothea and Greta, as champions of youth.
