Day 71/75 - Joe Gould's Secret (2000)

I have always felt that Stanley Tucci is one of our great and undervalued American actors. In Joe Gould’s Secret (2000), which he also directed, Tucci plays Joe Mitchell, a writer for The New Yorker, who becomes fascinated with the story behind Joe Gould, Professor Sea Gull, (Ian Holm) a Greenwich Village street person, who claims to have written the Oral History of the World, a1,200,000 words long book filled with the conversations he has overheard on the streets of New York.

The film becomes a kind of love story of two very different writers.

As Mitchell introduces us to his New York, he says:

In my home town, I never felt at home. In New York, New York City, in Greenwich Village, down among the cranks, and the misfits, and the one runners, and the has-beens, and the might-have-beens, and the would-bes, and the never-wills, and the God-knows-whats, I have always felt at home. (imdb.com)

Set in the early 1940s, the film is rich with period details.  Tucci peoples his film with some of my favorite character actors—Susan Sarandon, Hope Davis, Patricia Clarkson, Celia Weston, Alice Drummond, Nell Campbell, and Steve Martin—some names you will recognize, all you should know.

As the story begins, the owner of Jefferson’s Coffee Shop defends the smelly, disheveled, homeless Gould when a cop says he’s a freak. “We’re all freaks, Mike, truth be known. We’re all freaks together.” 

Gould says of himself, “Please don’t think I’m stupid just because I’m unclean.”  

As Mitchell interviews and in some ways woos Gould, he learns of his extensive past—a Harvard grad, author, famed among the New York intellectuals. He even meets artist Alice Neel who painted Gould’s nude portrait complete with three penises. Gould attends parties and holds court in spite of his antisocial tendencies.

When Mitchell’s writing about Gould is published in The New Yorker, homeless Joe becomes a celebrity and begins getting money from admirers. A patroness even surfaces who pays for his room and board. Mitchell is warned by The New Yorker receptionist that “the story doesn’t end just because the writer has finished writing.”

At first wanting Gould’s companionship to write about, Mitchell finds Gould latching onto him as over-frequent companion. The rest of the story involves Gould, his disappointments, the search for the Oral History and the resolution of the two-Joe’s history. Gould’s secret changes all of the characters.

In one of Joe Gould’s writings he muses:

The insane person is a victim of self-deception. Yet in a measure, we all have this virtue. One is his own imaginary creation of himself. If we could see ourselves for what we really are life would be insupportable. Hence, I would judge the sanest man to be him who most firmly realizes the tragic isolation of humanity, and pursues his essential purpose calmly. (imdb.com)

Joe Gould’s Secret teaches us about the need to relate and the power of those connections—and ultimately the responsibility necessary to sustain those connections. Ian Holm and Stanley Tucci are both worth watching.

Joe Gould’s Secret (2000) **** (on Netflix streaming)

The first nine minutes of the film