Generally I avoid movies made from stage plays. The two arts are different in sly ways; you don't notice the enormities of the abyss between the two until you stand at its edge and peer down in. Branagh made history because he mastered a happy way to capture Shakespeare on film that was not static or stagebound, and did it brilliantly until he started getting a little wacky, possibly out of restlessness with his designated "New Olivier" role. Does anyone really want to watch a Love's Labour's Lost that's been musical-theatrized? for God's sake, man, why?
Peter Shaffer's Equus is an extraordinary play, demanding of its actors and requiring a sure-handed director with a strong vision; the movie is perhaps even more so. Watching it again after all these years (the play was written in '73, the film came out in '77, directed by Sidney Lumet), I was stunned to realize how ominously close it skates to being truly ludicrous, how chillingly effortless it would have been, with one simple lapse or moment of oversight, to have made of it an object of easy ridicule.
Any true Harry Potter fan can tell you the basic story. A terrible crime has been committed: an apparently normal boy has blinded six horses in a stable with a metal spike and is sent to a psychiatrist, in this case played by Richard Burton. Quibble as you will with Burton's oeuvre, he was a courageous chooser of roles, and that may be why his CV is littered with as many disasters as triumphs (Bluebeard, anyone? the Assassination of Trotsky? or how about the obvious: Exorcist II: the Heretic, which also emerged in 1977 and in which Burton plays a similar character, a priest examining the teenaged Regan. It boasts, too, the dadaism of James Earl Jones dressed in a locust outfit, and is therefore not to be missed). This is one of his triumphs: from his riveting opening speech to his riveting closing speech, he knows exactly when to underplay, exactly when to cry havoc and loose the dogs of war. He was, in fact, nominated for an Oscar, which went instead to Richard Dreyfuss for the Goodbye Girl. The past is another country; they do things differently there.
The actors are almost uniformly awe-inspiring: Eileen Atkins, always brilliant in her fearless, no-nonsense way, Colin Blakely, Harry Andrews, and Joan Plowright, of whom I am generally more suspicious, plays enough against the obvious in her maternal role that I relax and trust her. Even Jenny Agutter, with her terrible, thin, cracking voice (newly emerged from a successful career as a child actress in the Empire onto the American screen with her woodenly awful performance in Logan's Run but on her way to the utterly lovable camp of An American Werewolf in London) gives a suitably low-key and entirely credible turn as the girl who unwittingly sets off the bloodshed.
Peter Firth, in his mid-twenties at the time but somehow unfailingly convincing as a teenager, has the bulk of the project resting on his back. All the most difficult bits are his, from the nude climax to the child-flashback scene to the religious incantation, and even the comparatively easy parts are not really easy. The first time he walks into Dysart's (Burton's) office, his physical presence is astonishing, communicating tension so extreme he's shaking, all the while keeping his facial muscles consciously smoothed into a mask of placidity. His eyes are haunted, but in some strange, unobvious way. Truly like a boy in hell trying to convince the world he is untouched.
The heart of it, though, is the subject matter. For all our modern obsession with sex and pornography, for all the Live Nude and Semi-nude human figures you can see on most channels and in most movies, I can count on one hand the number of films that delve bravely into sexuality with any kind of truth, and this is one. I've heard it claimed the film is weak because it does not recognize the central metaphor of the boy's horse-worship is really about repressed homosexuality. That's too small, though, too small a part of the vaster realm of Eros from which the Equus-worship is really drawing. It speaks, and with startling courage, about sexuality in its largest sense, the way you experience it when you're young and it feels dark and huge and ineffable and more important than anything, as if that's where the answers lie, all of them, divine as well as prosaic. In everyone's youth there is a time of searching, consciously or not, for the gods, and it is conducted most often in the domain of sex. Equus is about sex as the root of worship, and it's an intense, almost devastating success.
****************
"What we do with the eros inside us, be it heroic or perverse, is our spiritual life." -- Ronald Rolheiser, Forgotten Among the Lilies
****************
As an addendum, the other movie I can think of offhand that digs down into the truth of eros is Intimacy (dir: Patrice Chereau, 2001). The plot description on IMDB begins, "A failed London musician meets once a week with a woman for a series of intense sexual encounters to get away from the realities of life...", and that was enough to keep me away from it for many years. At last I gave in on a night when I needed to watch Mark Rylance act but wasn't in the mood for Angels and Insects again. It took me several minutes to get past the credits, because it begins with a song so strange and beautiful that I played the opening several times just to hear it ("A Night In", it turns out, by Tindersticks). Then I watched the entire film twice through immediately, with that sense of seeing something unlike anything else I'd ever seen before. I have not gone back to watch it again, since the intensity of that viewing is enshrined in my memory with a sort of perfection, and I am loathe to displace it. Maybe it isn't as good as I remember. Maybe it was the exact proper moment for me to watch it, and that's why it was so affecting. The way each sexual encounter wordlessly communicated the states of the characters seemed marvelous, and Kerry Fox and Mark Rylance seemed both fearless and completely without vanity. The sex is not simulated, and the bodies are those of real people, not movie stars, -- although Rylance, admittedly, might have had a decent career in porn if he'd wanted it. It doesn't pretend to be about love, but it is about how the entanglement of limbs is not exclusive to the physical, since any true intensity carries with it emotional repercussions. That said, there is no Hollywood "message" here, no simple statement of purpose, no easy conclusion reached. It is an exploration into eros along a previously unmarked road, at least in the world of cinema.
