Vincente Minnelli’s Two Weeks in Another
Town might seem overly self-referential in numerous respects: it’s a risk
inherent in movies about movie-making, amplified here by the use of Minnelli’s own
The Bad and the Beautiful to denote former and perhaps no longer
attainable glories. The film transcends that trap partly because its love of
the cinematic process is so palpable, immersing us in the atmosphere
around the set and such things as the mechanics of dubbing; more broadly in the way that even a
once-great filmmaker might lose his way with actors, with the cinematic
apparatus itself. Minnelli himself of course evidences no such decline here, generating
one amazingly expressive widescreen composition after another, culminating in a
wildly self-purging nighttime car ride staged as a deliriously abstracted,
swirling spectacle. It’s a work built on multiple personal fragilities, Kirk
Douglas’ Jack Andrus leaving a high-end clinic (shades of Minnelli’s earlier The
Cobweb) and coming to Rome (depicted here as a site of churn and displacement
and shifting relationships) in the hope of resurrecting his Oscar-winning but
now devastated acting career under the guidance of Edward G. Robinson’s legendary
director Maurice Kruger. Virtually from arrival, Andrus is taunted by actual or
metaphoric reminders of past traumas; the elements aligning, as if guided by a
therapeutic universe, to allow him a chance of comprehensive personal and
professional renewal, before further setbacks point the way to a final
equilibrium. The Andrus-Kruger interactions provide a memorably toxic central
plank, the two men loving and resenting each other in roughly equal measure,
Kruger’s outreach at once redeeming and destructive – he’s last seen in bed
staring off into space after delivering his final blow, like a man imploding from
the force of his own impossibility (and left under the thumb of his wife, with
whom he has – if it’s possible – an even more spectacularly passive-aggressive
relationship).
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