Word: dysart
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...opening portions of Equus unveil the two recurring images that will dominate the film's visual dimension: a close-up of the doubt-ridden psychiatrist Martin Dysart (Burton) musing about the complex case of his teenage patient Alan Strang (Firth), and a darkness-clothed scene of a naked Strang standing beside a horse, the object of his near psychotic obsession. Lumet fills his lens with Dysart's ruminating face, punctuating the narrative with the Shakespearean soliloquies of the confused shrink. At times, these infrequent monologues border on the histrionic, as Burton casts off the necessary restraint of a film star...
...That boy has known a passion more ferocious than any I have ever known throughout my life, and I envy him for it," Dysart declares to the audience, making an eloquent summary of the dilemma that the psychiatrist perceives as he approaches Strang's case. In the figure of the disturbed boy, Dysart has run up against a patient who matches his own forceful character, yet can identify Dysart's very unique weaknesses with all the insight of one of the psychiatrist's professional colleagues. Strang senses the sexual and emotional impotence of his putative healer, using his instinctive acumen...
...understanding the extraordinary success of Shaffer's work (he also is responsible for the film's screenplay) lies in the fundamental issues of existence raised by Dysart's mental meanderings. In his search to uncover the sources of Strang's obsession, Dysart observes that "a child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave." But the psychiatrist can only throw up his hands with an admission of resigned incomprehension: "Why those moments of experience are particularly magnified no one can say." From one perspective, the psychiatrist's reflections seem a recognition of the paradox...
...darkest of nights and a blinding brilliance of light. But the segment that qualifies as Lumet's tour de force lies elsewhere, in the scene showing Strang's brutal rampage through a stable--sparked by his failure to make love to young girl--that eventually leads him to Dysart's couch. After he has brusquely dismissed the girl out of frustration and shame, the unclothed Strang stands fully erect in the loft of the stable, hurling himself into the now familiar rite of horse adulation. Suffused with ambers and golds, the shot evokes a tinted Renaissance fresco, with the rapturous...
...challenge he set himself, Lumet deserves pardon for a few tactical mistakes. He has come up with a film sufficiently slick and commercial to avoid the stigma of a pseudo-Bergman exploration of the soul, yet without cheapening the gravity of the questions that arise from the struggle between Dysart and his young patient. Much of the credit for this achievement must of course go to Shaffer's extraordinary script. But such a nod to the playwright in no way lessens the triumph of the man behind the camera...