2 out of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Poor interpretation of a great play.
A Customer from Exeter,
8th November, 2008
I rate 'Death Of A Salesman' as one of the great plays of the 20th century. It's not easy to bring off; one performance can capture the tragedy of the little man in America, which is what it's about, another can only concentrate on Willy Loman and leave you feeling that he's weak and the architect of his own ruin. It's a fine line. I think one of the problems of this film is that the play works far better on stage, where , for instance, the see-through walls of the set, prescribed in detail in Miller's stage-directions, immediately indicate and constantly remind us of the symbolism underlying the action. We are accustomed to film presenting us with realism and the film-makers had a difficult balance to strike. On stage, the flash-backs are clear, with the flute music and lighting changes; on film, they were semi-real and lost some of the poetry of Willy's adoring expectations for Biff. And, as regards poetry, much of the greatness of the play is Miller's use of language, which sounds naturalistic but is, in fact, heightened, as with Linda's '...attention, attention, must be paid...', the repetition adding huge resonance to the words. Miller is a master of this heightened language and it is important in raising the action from the mundane to the level of tragedy. Kate Reid captured the language superbly in the vital scene when she defends her failure of a husband to their two sons. This is, perhaps, the pivot of the whole play, demonstrating that it is not just about Willy Loman but about Everyman deluded by 'The American Dream'; not everyone does, or can, make it in America. Alas! Hoffman failed to give weight to the language (and was often impossible to hear through his trade-mark mumbling of the lines) and, although his Willy Loman was an adequately shambling figure at the end of his career, he was not the tragic figure representative of all the failures underlying the aura of 'success' in the American Dream. I don't want to be too hard on the film-makers. I think it is very difficult to translate this play from the stage to film. But I repeat that it is one of the great plays of the 20th century, especially relevant at the moment as a critique of the jungle of Capitalism, and I would hate viewers to judge 'Death Of A Salesman' by this production.
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