Beautiful Ruins

Joe and Umi move to West Cork and get married; childless, they divorce four years later, blaming each other for their sad, aging selves. After a few years apart, they see each other at a concert and are more understanding; they share a glass of wine, laugh at the perspective they lacked, and fall back into bed together. This reconciliation only lasts a few months before they go their own ways, happy at least to be forgiven in the other’s eyes. It’s the same with Dick and Liz: a turbulent ten-year marriage and one truly great film together, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (she gets the Oscar, ironically), then a divorce and a short reprise (more disastrous than Joe and Umi’s) before they drift their own ways, Liz into more marriages, Dick into more cocktails, until, at fifty-eight, he can’t be awakened in his hotel and he dies that day of cerebral hemorrhage, a line from The Tempest apocryphally left on his bed-stand: “Our Revels now are ended—” Orenzio gets drunk one winter and drowns, and Valeria spends the last years of her life living happily with Tomasso the Widower, and the brute Pelle recovers from his gunshot foot, but, having lost his taste for the goon business, works at his brother’s butcher shop and marries a mute girl, and Gualfredo gets a just case of syphilis that blinds him, and the son of Alvis’s friend Richards is wounded in Vietnam, returns home to work as a benefits advocate for veterans, and is eventually elected to the Iowa State Senate, and young Bruno Tursi graduates with degrees in art history and restoration, works for a private firm in Rome cataloguing artifacts and finds a perfect medication to balance his quiet, low-level depression, and P.E. Steve remarries—the sweet, pretty mother of one of his daughter’s softball teammates—and on and on it goes, in a thousand directions, everything occurring at once, in a great storm of the present, of the now—

—all those lovely wrecked lives—

—and in Universal City, California, Claire Silver threatens to quit unless Michael Deane leaves Debra “Dee” Moore and her son alone, and agrees to produce just one project from their trip to Sandpoint: a film based solely on Lydia Parker’s play Front Man, the poignant story of a drug-addicted musician who wanders off into the wilderness and eventually returns to his long-suffering mother and girlfriend. The budget is just $4 million, and after every financier and studio in Hollywood passes, it is funded entirely by Michael Deane himself, although he doesn’t tell Claire that. The film is directed by a young Serbian comic-book artist and auteur, who writes the script himself, based loosely on Lydia’s play, or at least the part of the play he read. The auteur makes the musician younger and, generally, more likeable. And, rather than having issues with his mother, in this version the musician has issues with his dad—so the young director can explore his own feelings for his distant, disapproving father. And, rather than having his girlfriend be a playwright in the Northwest, who takes care of her stepfather, the girlfriend in the film becomes an art teacher who works with poor black kids in Detroit, so that they can get some better music on the sound track and also take advantage of the big “Film in Michigan” tax break. In the final script, the Pat character—whose name is changed to Slade—doesn’t steal from his mother or cheat repeatedly on his girlfriend, but harms only himself with his addiction, itself changed from cocaine to alcohol. (He’s got to be relatable and likeable, Michael and the director agree.) These changes come slowly, one at a time, like adding hot water to a bath, and with each step Claire convinces herself that they’re sticking to the important parts of the story—“to its essence”—and in the end she’s proud of the film, and of her first coproducer credit. Her dad says, “It made me cry.” But the person most moved by Front Man is Daryl, who is still on relationship-probation when Claire brings him to an early screening. Late in the film (after Slade’s girlfriend Pe

Shane Wheeler uses the option money from Do