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JOE GOULD'S SECRET Send This Review to a Friend
Don't miss the great performance by Ian Holm in "Joe Gould's Secret" It deserves award consideration. Holm is outstanding as he creates an indelible impression as the enigmatic, irascible, scruffy, preposterous, fascinating but mentally ill Joe Gould, a favorite character in Greenwich Village during the 1940s. He achieved fame after New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell wrote about him in the magazine, and director Stanley Tucci has taken a screenplay by Howard A. Rodman, based on Mitchell's "Professor Seagull" and "Joe Gould's Secret," and created a film that is a wonderful piece of New Yorkana. This is more than Gould's story; it is also about the effect of Gould on Mitchell's life and work, and Tucci, who plays Mitchell as well as directs, successfully conveys the odd relationship that develops.
The film also is an affectionate glimpse at a time when a character like Gould could command attention among the literati and social set. Gould was a writer and he told everyone he was writing an enormous oral history of the world in countless notebooks. He was a sponger, cadging meals where he could and panhandling contributions for his self-proclaimed "Joe Gould Fund." On the one hand he is depicted as one big pain in the ass. On the other, he's portrayed as a gifted person who entertained his benefactors with poetry and making seagull sounds (he claimed to talk seagull). Susan Sarandon gives an amusing and touching performance as artist Alice Neel, who befriended Gould and also painted a portrait endowing him with three penises (the actual painting is used in the film).
Nostalgia permeates the film, with Patrick Tovatt playing Harold Ross, the renowned New Yorker editor, David Wohl and Julie Halston depicting Max and Sadie Gordon of the Village Vanguard, and Steve Martin turning up as publisher Charlie Duell. The haunts frequented by Gould are there too, such as the Minetta Tavern and the Raven Poetry Society, as well as Washington Square Park. Tucci has done an effective all-around casting job, including Hope Davis in a warm portrayal of Mitchell's photographer wife Therese, and Patricia Clarkson as Vivian Marquie, the gallery owner who was Gould's long-time friend and a source of steady assistance.
Tucci had the sense to approach the subject in a low-key manner that gives voice to the essential story, embraced with welcome period detail, without an attempt to hoke it up, Hollywood-style. As for Holm, he fleshes out Gould so that we can be both amused by him and deeply touched by him as a man of talent undone by his mental illness, yet successful in his own way by collecting supporters and admirers, gaining recognition and --after all these years--becoming the subject of a movie. A USA Film release.
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