FILM REVIEW: “Dance First” (Samuel Beckett biopic)

I recently saw a picture on the internet of Nobel Prize winning author Samuel Beckett on vacation in Tunisia. He looks like he’s about 60. He’s walking, wearing shorts. You can see his skinny white legs.

I took a screen-shot of the photo and posted it on Facebook. It got a lot of likes. In the comments a friend asked if I’d seen Dance First (2023), which was a recent bio pic of Beckett.

I hadn’t. And honestly, I know almost about Samuel Beckett. He was a writer obviously. He was Irish. He wrote the play Waiting for Godot, which everybody read when I was in college in the 1980s.

The main reason I know of him at all—and I’m probably not alone on this—is because of his cool wrinkly face.

I remember seeing Beckett’s face in college for the first time. Now that guy is a writer! I thought. His heavily wrinkled face seemed to indicate: wisdom, creativity, intelligence, hardship . . . but also it just looked cool.

My Irish grandfather had a similar face. Narrow and wrinkly. It was the good kind of wrinkly, the Samuel Beckett kind. My grandfather lived to be 77, so he had several years of maximum wrinkly.

I kind of look like that grandfather and when I was a young writer and was constantly being rejected by the publishing industry, I would look at a picture of my wrinkly grandfather and think: when I get older and have a cool wrinkly face, they will BE FORCED to accept me, because I will look like Samuel Beckett!

It turned out I haven’t really wrinkled that much. Which is a blessing I guess.

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Samuel Beckett, in max-wrinkle mode.

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But I was curious about the movie so I looked it up online. Dance First appeared to be a small budget, Masterpiece Theater sort of film.

It starred Gabriel Byrne as Beckett. Byrne doesn’t have a narrow face. Or distinctive wrinkles. His face is actually quite round and puffy. So that seemed like a bad sign.

Another bad sign: the movie is called Dance First, which is not a compelling title and gives you no clue what it’s about.

And then the worse sign of all: it scored a 43% with the critics on Rotten Tomatoes, and had a lowly 6.0 on IMDB. This means the critics didn’t like it at all and almost guarantees that it is objectively bad.

But my local library had the DVD, so I checked it out. I wanted to know something about Samuel Beckett and I didn’t feel like reading a long Wikipedia article.

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The story of Dance First begins with Beckett as a child fighting with his cold, cruel mother who criticizes him constantly, to the point of abuse. His dad is nicer and they fly a kite together in an early scene. This kite flying becomes one of Beckett’s few fond memories of childhood.

While a teenager he writes some poems and even gets one published. His creepy mother thinks it’s about her and severely chastises him.

As soon as he can Beckett leaves Ireland and moves to Paris, where he will remain for the rest of his life. There, he goes to University and continues to write and study.

He quickly finds his way to James Joyce and boldly introduces himself. In real life, Joyce also had a narrow Irish head but the actor playing him is another round-headed actor like Byrne. So that’s distracting.

(This actor is good though. He’s very funny.)

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Young Unwrinkled Beckett

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