Review: In ‘Dance First,’ a biopic of Samuel Beckett, Gabriel Byrne portrays the man, not the myth

It would be hard to imagine a genre more antithetical to the modernist sensibility of Samuel Beckett than the biopic. The Irish writer who relocated to Paris, found inspiration in the French language and became one of the most innovative literary artists of the second half of the 20th century, was allergic to the uplifting pieties and sentimental profundities that are the mainstay of screen biographies.

Publicity and self-promotion were anathema to this most private of authors, who died in 1989. It’s safe to say that he wouldn’t have relished being the subject of a movie. When Beckett learned that he was the recipient of the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature, he took refuge in a hotel in Tunisia out of fear of the celebrity circus. In short order, he let the Swedish officials know that he was honored by the award but wouldn’t be able to attend the ceremony.

“Dance First,” James Marsh’s film about Beckett’s life shot in sharp black and white by cinematographer Antonio Paladino, doesn’t let this detail stand in the way of a conventional opening. The film begins with Beckett (Gabriel Byrne), dressed as though for a funeral, at the Nobel Prize event celebrating him in Stockholm. “Quel catastrophe!” he mutters to his wife, Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil (Sandrine Bonnaire), as his literary praises are sung from the podium.

Credible biographical sources attribute the catastrophe comment to Beckett’s wife, who was equally averse to the spotlight. But the setup by screenwriter Neil Forsyth boldly swerves from phony realism to unabashed surrealism.

In a break with verisimilitude, to say nothing of decorum, Beckett storms the stage, grabs the check and starts noisily climbing the side wall to escape public scrutiny. Making his way to an archaic locale that might be the setting for a Greek tragedy or even one of his own plays, he engages in a purgatorial dialogue with his alter-ego.

Fionn O’Shea in the movie “Dance First.”

(Magnolia Pictures)

Byrne, playing opposite himself, brings these sides of Beckett’s consciousness to dialectical life. Somber and remorseful, his Beckett in formal attire explains that he has accepted the award so that he can give the money away. But his tweedy and serenely skeptical Beckett double pointedly inquires, “Whose forgiveness do you need the most?”

The film is divided into retrospective chapters on those loved ones with a claim on Beckett’s conscience. This framing device, which has the clunky air of a middlebrow play, provides a convenient if stagy way of breaking down his biography into manageable parts.

The film’s title invokes a line in Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” that gives dancing natural precedence over thinking. But “Dance First” has otherwise little in common with Beckett’s absurdist aesthetic.

With his ruthless dedication to minimalism, Beckett reinvented whatever artistic form he happened to be working in. In plays such as “Waiting for Godot” and “Endgame,” novels such as the Beckett trilogy (“Molloy,” “Malone Dies” and “The Unnamable”) and even “Film,” his 1965 foray into screenwriting, he divests the work of all inessentials, spurning conventional expectations and discovering what can be communicated when all the window dressing has been swept away.

Meaning isn’t imported into Beckett’s work but enacted through a perfect alignment of style and content. By contrast, Forsyth’s screenplay for “Dance First” serves as a container for biographical reportage and interpretation. There’s a journalistic quality to the movie, which delivers a readily digestible summary of Beckett’s life, with all the important moments neatly enumerated.

What redeems the film is the humane attempt to reach beyond the myth to access the man. Byrne’s Beckett may be less austere, outwardly and inwardly, than the author’s prevailing image. Exuding a weary melancholy, the actor betrays an incongruous longing for the confessional, unflinchingly depicting the elderly Beckett stoically dragging his carcass to the finish line. Physical travail being an inexhaustible source of black comedy and a recurring metaphor for the human condition in Beckett’s writing, the depiction of mortal decline is on point.

But an air of fabrication hangs over the film, even as it hews to a factual outline. In distilling Beckett’s journey into a series of brisk, self-contained chapters, “Dance First” can’t help distorting and over-dramatizing.

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Beckett was known to have had a tense relationship with his demanding and disapproving Protestant mother, May (Lisa Dwyer Hogg), the first stop on the feted author’s guilt trip. The young Beckett (played with intriguing self-possession by Fionn O’Shea) fled Ireland in part to slip beyond her iron grip, but the film doesn’t suggest other dimensions to a bond that would haunt Beckett’s work throughout his career.

The section on Lucia Joyce (a wild Gráinne Good), James Joyce’s mentally ill daughter who convinced herself that Beckett would marry her, and the scenes chronicling Beckett’s involvement in the Resistance during World War II are condensed in ways that seem spurious. But the actors have moments that transcend the recap treatment.

The interactions between O’Shea’s Beckett and Aidan Gillen’s James Joyce, an early mentor who resists the role but is ultimately won over by the young man’s reverence and rigor, are handled with welcome complexity. Gillen’s Joyce recognizes not only a prodigy in Beckett but also a potential husband for his unstable daughter — a scheme that galvanizes his no-nonsense wife, Nora (Bronagh Gallagher), who is far less subtle in her manipulations.

Beckett’s aloofness, his ability to resist falling captive to other people’s needs, enables him to become the Great Writer, but at a cost that becomes more apparent as the film shifts to Suzanne (played by Bonnaire as the mature wife and Léonie Lojkine as the girlfriend who makes herself indispensable, romantically and practically, to him). Bonnaire and Lojkine preserve not only the character’s dignity but also her farsighted intelligence and tactical discretion.

Suzanne understands the assignment of being Beckett’s wife, standing guard against anything that could detract from his higher mission. It’s not clear that Beckett would have realized his gifts without the stability she provided. He was loyal, after his own fashion, to the woman who was at his bedside as he recovered from a near-fatal stabbing in a random incident of street violence in 1938. She is lovingly and courageously at his side during their dangerous war years working with the Resistance.

When Barbara Bray (Maxine Peake), the BBC script editor who becomes Beckett’s long-term mistress, enters the story, Suzanne carefully circumnavigates the treacherous marital waters. The pain that Beckett inflicts on both women registers silently on his handsome craggy face. He might be selfish, but it would be a mistake to think him heartless.

Language is inadequate to the suffering he has wrought, but Beckett manages to give it artistic form in “Play,” his daring one-act in which a husband, wife and mistress rehash their story of infidelity at warp speed while planted in funeral urns in some indeterminate afterlife.

Beckett might have a reputation for bleakness, but he was also a sporting man who loved rugby, cricket, tennis, attractive women, male friendship and good whiskey. O’Shea has room to encompass this other Beckett, but Byrne’s reclusive version of the character seems like he might be more at home in a monastery or academic library.

Still, the emotional acuity of a writer who felt things too deeply to stoop to cheap sentiment comes through. “Dance First” may not be especially Beckettian, but it personalizes a figure who, destined for the pantheon, never doubted that he was human — all too human.