The Fault (Dear Brutus)

It's something I've talked about often, implicitly or explicitly, on this blog: the debt we owe to fictional characters. Over the next few weeks, I'll be talking about it more.

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Last week I went to see two films at the Chicago International Film Festival. Both movies were filmed on location in prison, both movies had at least a 90% incarcerated cast, and both movies concerned the life of Julius Caesar.

There the similarities ended. String Caesar was highly experimental, raw, and not at all Shakespearean. Seated in the fourth row, I had to keep my eyes closed for the last fifteen minutes of the movie because (for the first time ever) the extreme close-ups and motions of the camera were making me ill and I knew I wanted to stay for the director's Q&A afterwards. Filmed in three prisons internationally, String Caesar draws parallels between the early life of Julius Caesar in Rome and the lives led by inmates in prisons largely ruled by gangs. Some of the more successful moments of the movie came about when the line between Rome and the prison blurred. Julius Caesar is sent to talk with a powerful general and essentially warned not to "drop the soap." In another scene, (the best, in my opinion), Caesar stands on the sole working toilet and refuses to budge, deaf to Cicero's pleas to let others have a turn.

By contrast, Caesar Must Die, an Italian Golden Bear Winner at the Berlin Film Festival, did not make me want to vomit. Nor did it leave me with as many questions. Here, rather than real life bleeding over into the script, the script (Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in Italian) bled over into real life. Sprinkled throughout Brutus and Cassius' plotting, Caesar's worries, and Mark Anthony's verbal maneuvering, there were supposedly-authentic documentary moments with the cast. These moments were highly stylized and obviously far from impromptu. They were also, quite possibly, scripted, and felt far less genuine than the camaraderie and antipathy (demanded by the script but maybe also genuine) on display in String Caesar.

Julius Caesar is a favorite for prison theater instructors. They assume, possibly quite rightly, that inmates will identify with its themes and ambiguities. I like Julius Caesar for the same reason. Indeed, it is the only Shakespeare play that I feel I enjoy of my own free will. Why? Well, for one, it's a tragedy possessed of a truly tragic hero. Welcome to a new favorite quote from a new favorite author: "Stumbling heroes linger longer." Edmund Pevensie, to whom Mitchell refers, owes a lot to Brutus, and characters like him. Brutus, like String Caesar's young Caesar, stumbles on an incredible scale and is all the more relatable and--dare I say it?--likable because of it. Of course, a tragic hero takes his or her stumbling one step further in their inability to survive said stumble.

So far, the actors in String Caesar and Caesar Must Die are doing it right, unlike another of my favorite characters, Francis Crawford of Lymond, who at one point alludes to his inability to "suffer reversals." They've survived their stumbles and may prove hardier than Brutus, more discriminating than Caesar. Each actor is benefits from the bleed between fact and fiction in that they are being granted a chance to examine their own life through the lens of another's.