At the start of A Late Quartet, Christopher Walkenâs character explains to a group of his cello students that Beethovenâs late quartet, Op. 131, is not the standard four movements but instead has seven parts, and that you have to play them straight through with no breaks, which causes your instruments to go all out of tune with one another. âItâs a mess,â he says.
Itâs also a metaphor about how basic entropy affects togetherness. The togetherness, say, of a musical group thatâs been playing for 25 years when the oldest member finds he has Parkinsonâs and canât go on. Walken plays that character. Has he ever been the emotional center of a film before? Itâs magical. For much of A Late Quartet, the camera follows the storm of the other charactersâ dramaâoften, melodramaâuntil it finds a resting place once again on his alien face, quietly registering the effects of old age, including the death of his wife.
If any pair of actors could mellow melodrama, itâs Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener. They play the second violin and the viola, respectively, of the Fugue String Quartet, of which Walken is cello. Mark Ivanir plays the driven, obsessive first violin; Imogen Poots is the just-post-teenaged daughter of Hoffman and Keener, a rageful, driven violinist herself.
The Parkinsonâs registers not only in the body of the cellist, but in the body of the quartet. Upon Walkenâs announcement, Hoffman decides itâs time to announce his desire to share the lead, not just play second, as well as for more free-spirited readings of the music. Meeting resistance, he decides to fuck a hot dancer; not exactly a creative decision. Neither is the brief coupling of the two driven violinists of two different generations.
But the movieâs messy central truthâmesses get made, regardless of intentionsâovershadows its tidy, clumsy Jenga of a drama because the performances are just that good. Walken is getting old. See him.