it’s hard to get a sense of what sidney lumet’s legacy is, and i think it’s because he left us a handful of widely beloved movies that only make up a tiny fraction of his entire filmography (he’s not even a director like francis coppola where you could name a handful of those other movies). i’ve never met anyone who’s claimed him as their favorite director, and as much as i love dog day afternoon and network they’re never the first movies that come to mind when trying to list my favorites. he gives the impression that he’d get referenced a lot during criterion closet interviews, though oddly the collection has only ever released a fairly bizarre assortment of four films from him. it seems like he got a bit of a boost in the late 1990s when two of his films were remade for TV, and while both established filmmakers assigned to those projects seemed heavily indebted to him, neither production explicitly credits itself as a remake, but rather another adaptation of lumet’s source material.
that said, it was a little tough to pull titles for this postscript. in addition to those two pseudo-remakes, i included one movie that sort of feels spiritually tied to lumet’s 1970s output, as well as two deeply personal works created by other filmmakers: one a fiction film that was emotionally informed by its writer’s (and, to a lesser extent, its director’s) relationship to its subject, the other an extended interview that mostly serves to summarize lumet’s career shortly before he died. altogether with lumet’s own movies it’s still a very incomplete portrait of someone who did a very good job of maintaining a private life, which in its own way may serve as his legacy.
postscript
the hospital dir. arthur hiller (1971) marathon of malpractice cases serving as an indictment of the overly complicated modern medical industry that can best be summed up by a scene of an irritated nurse repeatedly asking a corpse for his BCBS number. seems like this was trying to draft off the success of the surprise hit that was M*A*S*H, though the various scenes of furious monologues addressing ludicrous situations, militant leftist causes being reduced to set pieces, age-gap romances being squashed by the world-weary if not also deeply depressed older male faction, and dispelling of the capitalist notion that bureaucratic/economic progress equates to human progress together suggest it was chayefsky’s test run for network. less surprised by the ultimate reveal of who done it than the reveal that this movie ultimately is, essentially, a whodunit.
12 angry men dir. william friedkin (1997) 12 even angrier men than the last time around, with reginald rose’s original teleplay being tweaked slightly to account for inflation and the yankees’ then-current roster (there’s also a line about “big ol’ booty with no drawers on,” which i don’t recall being in the original). feels true to lumet’s spirit as a faithful adaptation that relies on its actors and camera work to define it, even if several of those actors feel way out of place (e.g. tony danza focusing too hard on playing “jack warden” that he never really inhabits “juror #7”) and the handheld camera movement likely made it so that they required a bigger room to shoot in, which reduced the sense of claustrophobia that defined the original. additionally the juror room reminds me of the corroding interiors of the verdict (for what reason, though?), and the casting features past (ossie davis), present (gandolfini), and future (george scott) lumet collaborators. the cast is much more diverse, though the racial politics are fairly iffy, and as much as i like spider-man’s landlord as a bond nemesis here, he and the other two holdouts each feel like different movie villain tropes, which detracts from the sense of commonality everyone but henry fonda exudes in the original. would also classify this as a mystery given that there’s a whole extra 30 minutes here somehow despite nothing really being added to the story?
fail safe dir. stephen frears (2000) yet another made-for-TV adaptation that feels more inspired by lumet’s own take on it than by their mutual source material, despite his name feeling oddly absent from the credits (they even enlisted walter cronkite to introduce the feature in a way that recalls his work on you are there, the ’50s CBS drama series that gave lumet his start). like friedkin’s 12 angry men, modern retelling of this story feels pretty far removed from the context the original version existed within (mccarthyism and the cold war, respectively) without bringing too much else to the table besides a fresh cast of familiar faces. there’s really nothing to take away from this live teleplay, though, as it feels like a husk of the novel, a sparknotes version that oversimplifies the text in a way that explicitly dumbs it down for a TV audience. both from a technical standpoint and from an intellectual one this is entirely neutered of what made lumet’s adaptation work—most notably, 30 minutes of backstory gets lopped off, preventing any of the character depth that fuels the novel’s humanity. plus, i think we can safely blame this for encouraging clooney to make goodnight and good luck.
rachel getting married written by jenny lumet (2008) i’ve seen this movie at least half a dozen times—first as an interchangeable entrant within the dense filmography of mid-aughts dysfunctional-family indie dramedies, then as a jonathan demme movie—and as comfortably as it fits into both categories with its cringe spectacles and unparalleled sense of warmth, respectively, it’s fascinating to revisit it as perhaps the most honest look at sidney lumet’s personal life we ever got. seems like no coincidence that his daughter’s screenplay focuses on a family undergoing the painful fallout of one member’s period of addiction and the slow process of reconciliation, with the two sisters interchangeably standing in for jenny and amy lumet (the latter of whom became the family’s black sheep after seemingly falling into a period of heavy drug use only to straighten out and become a pro bodybuilder and staunch conservative).
in the eye of the storm is their goofy, weepy, loving, good-intentioned, yet distinctly distant remarried father clumsily playing peacemaker—a role so deeply buried in career-best performances from oscar nominees intermixed with demme’s typical blend of friends, family, musicians, mentors, and other non-actors matching their jarring sense of realism (even tunde’s awkwardness is used to shape his performance into something completely natural) that you miss bill irwin’s tragic role as the liberal patriarch whose sense of guilt in the familial disorder is so imperceptible that it took me reading some 400 pages of the character’s real-life inspiration’s biography to pick up on it.
this is also my first time noticing that sebastian stan is in this movie twice. i guess they weren’t banking on him becoming one of those aforementioned oscar noms, because now we’re left wondering if we’re ever gonna see him again after he gets the first line in the movie as hathaway’s character leaves rehab and then vanishes until the final act when he’s inexplicably also a guest at the wedding.
by sidney lumet dir. nancy buirski (2015) career-summary doc landing somewhere between the memoir lumet never wrote, his movies’ audio commentary, his book making movies, and a masterclass session on ethical filmmaking, as a whole demonstrating how he avoided autobiography in his work and instead favored emotional responses to headline-news stories and infuriating lived experiences. falls a little flat in being nothing but talking-head interviews with its subject mixed with liberally extracted scenes from his movies, but at least it side-steps the all-too-common heaps of praise any additional voices might add, especially considering lumet died a few years before this was released. also curious about the decision to avoid the structure of chronology or even the obvious groupings his movies fell into and instead to weave together something so…impressionistic?