Falstaff In Greenwich Village

Stanley Tucci is slowly carving out a niche for himself in the world of cinema as a director of thoughtful, humorous, and touching character pieces. He loves New York and its tarnished yet charming character much in the manner of Woody Allen, yet Tucci’s work always aims to be true before it aims to be clever. Tucci’s first effort was the widely praised "Big Night" (in which he starred, as well as wrote and directed), a charming tale about the efforts of two Italian immigrant brothers to open a restaurant.

Tucci’s latest film, Joe Gould’s Secret, is set in 1940’s New York, an era in which that city was seen as the mother of all metropolises, the center of Western art and culture, and the place to be to be somebody.

Through this milieu moved Joe Gould, a man who was somewhat of an outsider even to outsiders. Gould presented himself as the author of what he called the The Oral History of Our Time, a massive, ongoing, lifelong work that was purportedly a transcription of thousands of overheard conversations -- a kind of living verbal archeology of 20th century man. Always on the lookout for a new subject for one of his pieces about local characters of note, when "New Yorker" writer Joseph Mitchell (played by Tucci) encounters Gould, he immediately sees a potential story. Thus develops an unusual relationship between the eccentric Gould and his would-be biographer, which led to Mitchell’s real-life 1942 article about Gould.

Gould, played with astonishing virtuosity by Ian Holm, is a man trying desperately to noticed. Gould is, by his own account, a Harvard graduate who somewhere along the line realized that he needed to live life by his own rules. Although the story begins during the wartime year of 1942, in Gould is a microcosm of post-war Beat and Bohemian sentiment, a time when the youth of America, particularly the well-educated intelligentsia, began to question authority and embrace fringe culture through free jazz, Buddhism, poetry, and drug use. At the time, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs were still formulating their philosophies, yet Gould seems to in many ways presage them all -- a trait part deliberate, part accidental. One fascinating aspect of Gould’s character is that you never know if he truly voluntarily dropped out of the rat race, or if he retroactively justified his fall from grace with highfalutin rhetoric; it seems that the truth is a mixture of both.

Mitchell finds that Gould is a slippery character, never what he appears, shifting through a nearly endless progression of roles as huckster, poet, con-man, liar, showman, actor, drunkard, lunatic, saint, tortured artist, proto-beatnik, clown, and bum. Holm’s performance is a tour-de-force of acting-as-channeling, as he lets himself be infused with the spirit of a man long dead, a character of enormous complexity and contradiction. His performance is Oscar-level work, the creation of an actor of great experience and depth.

Both Tucci and screenwriter Howard Rodman wisely relegate Mitchell to the role of straight man to Gould’s wise fool. Tucci is content to stand back and let Holm steal every scene, to draw all attention upon himself while he mesmerizingly riffs through his many moods as easily as if sliding his finger across a keyboard. While the film is Tucci’s, the show is all Holm’s, and Holm as Gould is more than enough reason to see the movie.

Tucci is not merely second fiddle to Holm, as he is an "actor’s director" of competence and sensitivity. He allows his performers ample room to move and breathe, and doesn’t succumb to such obvious cinematic devices as the close-up in order to force his emotional moments. The atmosphere Tucci creates effectively brings to life the emotion and sentiment of an era, the neighborhood of Greenwich Village, and the personality of the riveting, engaging human cipher named Joe Gould.