150 Word Review: 'The Designated Mourner' (1997)
Last man sitting
Three voices, three interlocking monologues. Three people, living under a totalitarian regime. In The Designated Mourner, director David Hare is faithful to writer Wallace Shawn’s play. He points his camera at actors sitting at a table—Mike Nichols, Miranda Richardson, and David de Keyser—and the close‑ups almost swallow you up. It’s a daring effect. When these characters talk, it’s like someone getting in your face, confessing. Richardson burns as the brilliant daughter of a celebrated author. Oscar‑winning director Mike Nichols is mesmerizing as her husband, a middling literary talent poisoned by envy and resentment. Do they live in the past or the future? Now?
In The Designated Mourner, the intelligentsia is slowly hunted by a populist authoritarian government. Shawn’s work is word‑drunk; his sentences gallop, and then he wallops you with an image shockingly beautiful or horrifying. No cutaway could be as upsetting as Nichols’ garrulous observer remembering a public execution.