‘Peter Hujar’s Day’ Review: Ben Whishaw Plays the Noted New York Photographer in Ira Sachs’ Magical 1974 Time Capsule of a Movie
In the ever-shifting world of the biopic, a biopic can be many different things. It can be like a novel (if it covers someone’s entire life). It can have the more concentrated quality of a short story (if it’s set during one key period). On that score, you might say that “Peter Hujar’s Day” is the biopic as sonnet. The entire film takes place in one day — but more than that, it consists entirely of Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw), the noted New York photographer of the 1970s and ’80s, having a rambling conversation with his friend, Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall), in which he recounts everything he did the day before.
It seems that the two were collaborating on a project. Rosenkrantz instructed Hujar to write down everything that happened to him on Dec. 18, 1974, and to show up the following day at her apartment on 94th St. in Manhattan, where she would ask him about the day in detail and tape-record their conversation about it. Was there anything special about the day she chose? No. The whole point is that it wasn’t special. It was ordinary. It was about whatever Peter Hujar happened to be doing.
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A transcript of that recorded conversation was recently discovered, and when the venerable indie filmmaker Ira Sachs (“Passages,” “Keep the Lights On,” “Love Is Strange”) read it, a light bulb went off. He decided to make an entire movie in which he simply staged the recording, replicating Hujar’s rambling description of his own day, anecdote for anecdote, pause for pause, trivial tidbit for trivial tidbit. The always astonishing Ben Whishaw plays the sweet, morose, gay, chain-smoking, furtively sincere, faraway-eyed Hujar, a veteran freelance photographer who was just coming into his own as a gallery artist and downtown scenester. Rebecca Hall plays Rosenkrantz, who is mostly there to listen and prod. But the two are pals, and the intimate vibe of the dialogue is part of what lures you in.
In its tiny-scaled staged-documentary way, “Peter Hujar’s Day” is exquisitely done and arresting to watch. Personally, I’ve always had a yen for movies that consist of nothing but conversation, like the “Before” trilogy or “My Dinner with Andre.” That’s because I think conversation is one of the greatest pleasures there is (one that’s in danger, in the age of technological communication, of being marginalized). To me, the sound of two people talking, when they’re really having an exchange, has all the drama you need. But those films I mentioned are obviously built, in their way, to be dramatic experiences. “Peter Hujar’s Day” is a bit more of a radical experiment.
The Peter Hujar we see talks about interesting things, like the fact that on the day in question he carried out an assignment by The New York Times to photograph Allen Ginsberg. Yet Hujar is not, by nature, a theatrical embellisher of his experience. If anything, he tends to underplay whatever he’s feeling. He talks, with a note of wry jadedness, about the money he’s owed for various freelance assignments, about wanting to go back to sleep at 10:15 a.m. (just because he can), about talking on the phone to Susan Sontag, about buying Oscar Meyer Braunschweiger to make a sandwich, about a concocted person named Topaz Caucasian who everyone thought was real, about more conversations (with Vince Aletti and Lisa Robinson and Glenn O’Brien), and about finally heading over to the Lower East Side to visit Allen Ginsberg’s apartment, where taking his portrait for the Times proves to be an ordeal.
There’s a certain kind of tri-state-area accent I’ve always found touching — at least, when you hear it out of the mouth of a certain kind of person. Peter Hujar is that kind of person. He was born in New Jersey and spent his first 13 years there, then moved with his mother and her second husband to a one-room flat in New York City. (It was an abusive household, and Hujar took off when he was 16.) In “Peter Hujar’s Day,” Whishaw, his puppyish handsomeness set off by floppy hair and dark stubble, talks in one of those Jersey-inflected voices, a voice that you heard among a lot of the people who lived and thrived amid the gay hipster subculture of ’70s New York. What’s touching is that they paraded themselves as flamboyant sophisticates…yet you could hear the working-class roots. You heard, in every word, their aspiration.
“Peter Hujar’s Day” is, in a certain sense, all about aspiration. When Hujar finally makes it over to Allen Ginsberg’s flat, he’s confronted with the legendary poet still living in a kind of self-imposed New York squalor. But Ginsberg, by this point, is also a media brand, a misanthropic purist. He rants about the corporations running everything, and about the New York Times; he also tells Hujar that he should offer to service William S. Burroughs sexually in order to take a better shot of him. Hujar, whose first assignment for the Times this is, was 39 at the time, but he’s like the young na?f who’s got to play up to the pasha of bohemia.
All of this is fun and engaging. Yet the movie finds its meaning in its very lack of overt drama. The whole affectless one-thing-after-another description of events, and the way it’s presented to divert us, is very 1974 — most tellingly in the way that it connects to the mood and ethos of Andy Warhol’s Interview, the coffee-table magazine that consisted of transcripts of assorted famous or semi-famous people talking to each other, and the whole joke of it was that the formally presented “interviews” would just be…two people chatting about whatever. This was Warhol’s aesthetic, and also what he saw as the meaning of life: a whole lot of nothing…which was really everything. You could say, as some do of Warhol’s art, that he was celebrating banality. But what those of us who are Warhol fanatics understand is that Andy Warhol was a sacramental artist who saw the “ordinary” as magical. And that’s how he saw conversation. He was saying: “What is life…but this? And that’s enough.”
That very way of looking at things becomes the film’s hidden message to us about the life we’re living now. “Peter Hujar’s Day” is a pointillistic snapshot of one day in the life of a not very well-known photographer (though Hujar, who died of AIDS in 1987, became quite a celebrated artist after his death). But it’s really a salute to the hidden transcendence of the everyday. And part of it is that back then, at least if you had a certain kind of job, you could live in a way where your mind wasn’t always being interrupted by things. There was no Internet, no cell phones, no multi-channel TV, no eyes-of-corporate-Big-Brother charting your every click. It was a time when you could drift through a day and do something and simply have it be what it was. “Peter Hujar’s Day” is a vision of the ordinary that holds us because it contains a hidden glimmer of paradise.
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