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The Broadway Bomb: 200 skateboarders have a death wish on Saturday
Published on 10/10/08
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Who knows if Liam Neeson spends his free time rescuing kittens from trees or cooking meals for housebound senior citizens, but he seems like an awfully decent guy. Reviewers attach the adjective “saintly to him regularly. So it takes an extra effort of the imagination to buy this lovely actor as an emotionally stunted wretch with a guilty conscience in Samuel Beckett’s Eh Joe. In this 1965 piece, originally written for television, the title character sits in his cramped, shabby flat and hears a disembodied voice tauntingly rehashing his past, which includes a brutish father, religious hypocrisy, weekly sex with a prostitute and a lover who killed herself. As the voice knifes deeper into Joe’s psychic wounds, a camera slowly dollies close in nine incremental moves.
Director Atom Egoyan delivers an impeccable, visually arresting production, with huge, luminous video projections on a scrim that envelops Neeson. The actor, no stranger to close-ups, silently and masterfully runs through a stirring gamut of emotions, culminating in a choked-off silent scream, hands clawing his mouth, as he realizes the gaping horror of a wasted life.
That gesture is not in the script, which calls for Joe to be nearly impassive in the face of his tragedy. It’s unclear if Egoyan or Neeson came up with the move, but it indicates that these men have more sympathy and human feeling for Joe and his bleak situation than perhaps even Beckett did.
