Right Beckett, wrong poet with little to say
Meetings With a Young Poet is like an absurd literary cage match where only one of the fighters is participating. The other just sits there looking stunned.
In this corner, you have a very game Stephen McHattie playing the late Samuel Beckett, the Irish modernist playwright, novelist and poet who is considered one of most influential artists of the past century.
And in this corner, you have a very dull Vincent Hoss-Desmarais as Paul Susser. He’s the fictionalized and terminally depressed young poet of the title, who has long dreamed of speaking with his hero Beckett — but when given multiple chances to do so, doesn’t really know what to say.
The metaphorical bell rings, the two meet . . . and not much happens.
There you have the conundrum that is Meeting With a Young Poet, a lumpy and overlit Canadian film by writer/director Rudy Barichello that mistakes tedium for profundity.
It’s not enough to have McHattie just sitting there in a French café delivering bon mots by Beckett, although Lord knows, it’s almost good enough. McHattie clearly knows and loves the man’s work, and that comes through in a performance and look that is accurate right to the last sip of whisky, drag of tobacco and squint of an eye. But his Beckett operates in a vacuum, because Susser doesn’t really engage with him, in meetings set between 1968 and 1989 (the year Beck- ett died). The film is bookended by more modern events and characters. Susser is a blank slate behind dark shades and mumbled inanities. How appropriate the one book of poetry he managed to pen, before writer’s block stilled his clunky manual typewriter, is titled Dialogues of Silence.
This is not entirely the fault of Hoss-Desmarais. The script by Barichello, co-written with Marcel Beaulieu, doesn’t give him much to say or do. It really takes to heart the Beckett line that, “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness,” at least as far as Susser is concerned.
And it gives too little screen time and emphasis to a third important character, Beckett-obsessed actress Carole Thomas (Maria de Medeiros). She wants to take on the title role of Krapp’s Last Tape, the oneman and one-act play considered to be Beckett’s most personal work.
Note the “one-man” designation, not “one woman.” Thomas doesn’t care and doesn’t think it matters: “I want to really do Beckett, whatever it takes.”
But Susser does care, and a script contrivance puts him in the absurd position to be able to block her dreams.
How much better Meetings With a Young Poet would have been if the feisty Carole could have replaced the morose Paul in those café debates with Beckett. Judging by McHattie’s portrayal of the legendary man of letters, he probably would have enjoyed it more, too.