THE POETIC ESSENCE OF AN UNUSUAL ‘BIOGRAPHY’

Biographical movies are always something of a pain for reviewers. To begin with, there’s our own guilt. If these people, from Salvatore Giuliano to Patsy Cline to the Birdman of Alcatraz to the Little Flower of Jesus, are notorious and/or celebrated enough to warrant an entire movie, shouldn’t we here at the writing end know book, chapter, verse and most of the good gossip about them already? Absolutely.

It feels pretty bad, let me tell you, to face up to your own ignorance and the need to write semi-intelligently about your subject at one and the same time. My solution is a panic call to our absolutely unflappable reference librarians and a quick game of catch-up.

Of course, the screen biography as such has changed utterly even within my own moviegoing memory. The earliest movie biographies I saw were Important Figures: Woodrow Wilson, Lou Gehrig, Mark Twain, Stanley and Livingstone, Scarface Al Capone, Dr. Ehrlich and his magic bullet. If you didn’t know about ‘em, you certainly should have.

Next came a second wave: Sgt. York, George M. Cohan, Bernadette of Lourdes, the seven little Foys. If I suspected dramatic license, I also preferred these movie versions to any other source material, with the possible exception of Eddie Foy himself.

When the lives of the noble and the notable were finally exhausted, movie biography struck a vein of melodrama that threatened never to run dry. In a mix of murder and music, we ran through the lives of Ruth Etting, Lillian Roth, Barbara Graham, Joseph E. Howard, the Boston Strangler and the Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, hardly household words to begin with.

Noble subjects have gone with Caligula--in this decade we have kitchen-sink screen biography: such regular down-homey guys as Jake LaMotta (“Raging Bull”), Shirley Muldowney (“Heart Like a Wheel”), Ruth Ellis (“Dance With a Stranger”), Loretta Lynn (“Coal Miner’s Daughter”) and even Sid Vicious (“Sid and Nancy”). They’ve turned out to be crackerjack subjects for movies, but to judge them as biography is hard; somehow, you just have to have been there. To struggle with the truths of the story or the historical period becomes a question of newspaper clippings, not judicious biographies.

But I still like to struggle, grasping for some sense of whether or not the movie did well by its subject. All of which brings us to “Waiting for the Moon,” a feather-light and inspired portrait of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, played unerringly by Linda Hunt (Toklas) and a film-debuting Linda Bassett (Stein). As written by Mark Magill and directed by Jill Godmilow, the film manages to be faithful to the spirit while playing hob with strict chronology.

When you deal with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and their singular literary and artistic salon, it’s nice to have a few facts at hand . . . even though you might think you knew something about the period to begin with. It’s especially nice when you have as free-form a biography as this one (the French have quite aptly called it “an imaginary biography”) and feel the need to counter any squawks that might arise.

Well, Godmilow and Magill have beaten any pedantic questions to the draw with two pages of notes appended to the press kit, “an account of what in ‘Waiting for the Moon’ is fact and what is just plain poetic license.” What makes these notes remarkable as well as invaluable is their charming tone. I quote: “FACT

“Gertrude Stein existed.

“Alice B. Toklas existed.

“They had a house in Bilignin and a salon at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris.

“They lived together for 39 years.

“They were friends with Hemingway and Apollinaire.

“They knew Fernande Olivier and Picasso.

“Gertrude always did the driving.

“Alice did the typing.

“They did the proofreading together.

“They liked to gossip.

“They picked up hitchhiking soldiers.

“ ‘The Trail of the Lonesome Pine’ was Gertrude’s favorite song. She learned it from a soldier. . . .

“FICTION

“None of the events in this story ever really happened, although they might have happened.

“All of the dialogue is original, not quoted from any source, except for the line ‘What’s the question?’ in the ‘waiting for the moon’ scene. They are Gertrude Stein’s last words.

“The film is circa 1936, although not specifically so. Stein and Toklas were in their late 50s/early 60s at this time. We have them looking around 40.

“Apollinaire died in 1919 from war wounds, not mushrooms in 1936. But he was a poet and would probably understand.

“Gertrude may have been ill in 1936, but she died in 1946.

“They kept a couple of dogs in their time but no fish.

“No one knew if Gertrude could play the comb.

“Apollinaire never had a kid named Willi (that we know of) and Stein and Toklas never took charge of this imaginary infant although it is nice to think so. . . .”

In one deft stroke, Magill and Godmilow have armed the reviewer, disarmed the picky and established their film’s method of attack, which does let us feel that we have eavesdropped on the day-to-day gossip of this remarkable pair. The film also manages to capture the nicely ironic air of the French, especially in Alice’s scene in the confessional. There, a young country priest answers her request for “a sort of general-purpose absolution” by saying with puckish gravity, “We like to reserve those for large crowds and train wrecks.”

Now, if you know that Alice became a Catholic after Gertrude’s death, asking her priest anxiously whether “this will allow me to see Gertrude when I die,” then this scene, years before she converted, has an extra resonance. And if you don’t, its tone is the purest French banter and works anyway. The collection of Toklas’ letters, “Staying on Alone,” that “quick debilitating” portrait of her last, empty 20 years, might give you more facts about these women. But you don’t need them--with a poet’s gift of choosing between the essential and the merely real, Magill and Godmilow have given us the essence of these intertwined lives and their incomparable times.