a little life movie review

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A Little Life

Trafalgar Releasing production following four college friends in New York City: aspiring actor Willem, successful architect Malcolm, struggling artist JB, and prodigious lawyer Jude. Trafalgar Releasing production following four college friends in New York City: aspiring actor Willem, successful architect Malcolm, struggling artist JB, and prodigious lawyer Jude. Trafalgar Releasing production following four college friends in New York City: aspiring actor Willem, successful architect Malcolm, struggling artist JB, and prodigious lawyer Jude.

• Ivo van Hove
• Nick Wickham
• Koen Tachelet
• Hanya Yanagihara
• James Norton
• Luke Thompson
• Omari Douglas
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A Little Life review: A naive and psychologically incurious narrative of abuse

Ivo van hove’s adaptation starring james norton is cold, surgical and humourless, article bookmarked.

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Just as medieval peasants sought escape from their humdrum lives by gawping at lurid paintings of bleeding saints, so modern audiences are flocking to A Little Life , a gruelling, blood-soaked narrative of one man’s suffering. Ivo Van Hove ’s epic, bladder-testing, nearly four-hour adaptation takes all the pain in Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel and re-enacts it in graphic detail. Its star James Norton is pretty much constantly drenched in blood, often naked, and always being either psychologically or physically tortured. I could feel the people around me sobbing and covering their eyes and sometimes I did too. But I also felt manipulated by its naive and psychologically incurious narrative of abuse.

It centres on Jude, who’s got a full house of traumas: repeatedly raped and tortured by monks as a child, emotionally and physically abused as an adult. As he goes through adult life, he tries to form a normal life as a New York lawyer, going to hip parties with his mostly gay group of friends: Willem (Luke Thompson, who develops beautifully from coolness to warmth), JB (Omari Douglas) and Malcolm (Zach Wyatt), as well as his adoptive father Harold (Zubin Varla). Still, his self-destructive impulses constantly drag him back down into misery.

There’s something borderline pornographic to the intensity with which Van Hove’s production both describes and depicts this novel’s events. Screens display rolling footage of New York’s streets, creating a mundane backdrop to the emotional gladiatorial arena on the centre of the stage. When Jude has the urge to self-harm, the screens grow white and fuzzy; after he’s cut himself, their colours shine brighter. This is pretty much Van Hove’s only directorial attempt to evoke the emotions behind Jude’s painful experiences, rather than just baldly depict them.

Much will be made of Norton’s bravery in spending so much of this play naked, cutting himself, or being part of harrowing scenes of child abuse. And yes, it’s impressive. But somehow Norton doesn’t convey Jude’s inner life, or do enough to make you desperately root for him.

That’s partly the fault of Van Hove’s cold, surgical, humourless adaptation, but it’s more so the fault of Yanagihara’s book itself. There’s a child-like naivety to Yanagihara’s sense of how the world works. Here, it’s perfectly possible to be dealing with life-altering physical and mental disabilities while simultaneously having an unimpeded career as a top New York corporate lawyer, and also volunteering at a soup kitchen at weekends. The same doctor who treats Jude for every self-harm injury is personally responsible for sawing his legs off when they need amputating – yet this walking insult to the Hippocratic Oath never once gets Jude hospitalised or even medicated for his mental health struggles.

Yanagihara’s perspective seems to be that abuse messes you up for life, making emotional intimacy almost impossible and suicide the only way out. Van Hove’s production reinforces that, creating a production that’s so painful to watch that, like Jude, you wish it would all just stop. But it’s both a hugely irresponsible message, and a false one. Real-life suffering is more complex, interspersed with moments of joy, care and healing – and recovery is too precious to give up on.

There’s a kind of confirmation bias that makes people assume that when they see a very long play or read a very long book, they’re engaging with a great work. In the case of A Little Life , I don’t think they are. If you want to be immersed in other peoples’ pain, go and spend four hours in A&E: it’s cheaper, just as agonising, and you can have a wee whenever you want.

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A Little Life is not for the fainthearted – but, if you can hack it, James Norton performs a theatrical miracle

A Little Life at the Harold Pinter Theatre: Luke Thompson (Willem) and James Norton (Jude)

Hanya Yanagihara’s 700-page novel became a word of mouth, tearaway success in 2015. Many, on reading, will have considered it, frankly, unadaptable – what with its sheer length and the grim,  unrelenting  abuse (spanning self-mutilation to child rape). But Ivo van Hove, the Belgian theatre director, hardly one to skirt the heavy stuff, has done the impossible. He landed James Bond frontrunner, James Norton, in the lead role of Jude St. Francis and brought it to the London stage.

Following a run last year at the Edinburgh Festival (where it was performed in Dutch with English subtitles) it has now arrived at the Harold Pinter Theatre – to much fanfare.

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A Little Life at the Harold Pinter Theatre:  Luke Thompson (Willem), James Norton (Jude)

Seldom have I been interrogated so keenly about a play – the West End has been buzzing since the cast was announced (James Norton, but also, gasp,  Bridgerton ’s Luke Thompson and Omari Douglas). Rumours and gossip whirring about the nudity, the graphic rape scenes, the self-harm and the sell-out run. Was it the James Norton effect? Or the lure of what has become known, rather hideously, as ‘torture porn’? Why was Norton, who could have any role (stage  or  screen), going for this one?

Certainly, it’s a helluva ordeal Norton has to put himself through every night (and occasionally a matinée as well). An unyielding, agonising torrent of abuse. If the test of every screen idol is to tread the boards in order to prove their ‘acting chops’ – Norton has done well (and could have chosen a play which is considerably milder). Why put himself through such misery?

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While the play is really Jude’s story, it also follows the lives of his three great friends in New York City, all recent graduates from a prestigious university. In an opening gambit, artist JB (played by Omari Douglas) introduces the gang: we have Malcolm (the architect – with ambitious parents – played by Zach Wyatt), Willem (the good-looking, aspiring actor, played by Luke Thompson) and the ever-elusive Jude St. Francis who, while being a successful white-collar attorney, JB claims has ‘no discernable race, sexuality or past’. ‘Jude the Postman’ he calls him in a joke that thankfully doesn’t stick.

A Little Life at the Harold Pinter Theatre: James Norton (Jude) and  Elliot Cowan (Brother Luke)

The compact set is divvied up into rooms: a pristine, almost modern kitchen counter where actual cooking takes place; a hospital bed (all-too-frequently in use); a sink and sofas. The front stall seats of the Harold Pinter Theatre have been removed to accommodate violins and a cello (to really heighten the jingle-jangle of nerves) and seating has been moved on to the stage (for an all-the-more visceral watch). The versatile space transitions into a nightclub (complete with flashing lights, garish music), a forest and a modern, suburban home at times. Video projections of NYC light up either side of the stage which fuzz up – like a broken TV set – when Norton self-harms.

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It’s a story about abuse and its legacy: can wounds ever be healed or is it forever inscribed in your DNA? Time is fluid: we meet Norton in the present (as a successful attorney, his monstrous past temporarily dormant – or at least ‘managed’) and gradually the truth – or versions of the truth – reveal itself. Time moves backwards to his childhood at the monastery, when he was repeatedly sexually abused by the brothers, and then forced into years of child prostitution. His whip-scarred back is revealed to audiences, his perennial limp and scarred legs explained (what he truthfully puts down to a ‘car injury’). The depiction of pain and self-loathing, while being a lot to swallow, is also believable. Jude’s tormentors are played in a relay of characters by a deeply creepy Elliot Cowan: a catholic priest (Brother Luke), a terrifying doctor (Dr. Traylor) and an abusive lover (Caleb). It’s difficult to decide who is the worst.

A Little Life at the Harold Pinter Theatre: Luke Thompson (Willem), James Norton (Jude), Zubin Varla (Harold), Emilio Doorgasingh (Andy), Zach Wyatt (Malcolm) and Omari Douglas (JB)

Blood cascades across the stage. The scenes of self-harm are graphically realistic; so is another involving fire. And yet there are moments of lightness – when Jude is adopted and when he reveals he is in a relationship with a significant friend. And you sense palpable relief across the theatre (knowing the moment is fleeting and to be enjoyed). At one point, Jude says his life is filled with ‘an embarrassment of riches’ – and readers of the book grit their teeth, knowing what is round the corner (plus, he is still in a blood-stained shirt, which becomes a perennial, overlooked fixture).

A Little Life at the Harold Pinter Theatre: Zubin Varla (Harold), James Norton (Jude), Elliot Cowan (Brother Luke), Nathalie Armin (Ana)

Norton – over the course of just under four hours – showcases his vulnerability so palpably. Somehow, despite being a strapping man, he manages to make himself tiny and defenceless. At one point, celebrating his birthday, he is wolfing down slabs of chocolate cake; at another, he is skipping round the stage with Brother Luke, in his believable portrayal of childishness. At the latter stages, he is withered and weak, fixed up to a machine, in the bleak midwinter of his life.

His friends, while perplexed by him, adore him; Harold (poignantly played by Zubin Varla) loves him as his son; the doctor (Emilio Doorgasingh) cares for him deeply – all in spite of the ‘hyenas’ that haunt him.  A Little Life is harrowing, heavy-going and utterly miserable – but it’s also a miracle of theatre; and well worth going to see if you can bear it. James Norton’s performance will be indelibly marked in your memory.

A Little Life is on at the Harold Pinter Theatre until 18 June;   haroldpintertheatre.co.uk

21 years on from the last production, London is primed and ready for a fresh take on the Lerner and Loewe classic. What would Cecil Beaton think?

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‘A Little Life’ review

The story is indefensibly horrible, but there’s no denying the brilliance of James Norton’s performance

Time Out says

Interview: ‘Bridgerton’ star Luke Thompson on why ‘A Little Life’ is much more than ‘misery porn’.

I really struggled to pinpoint how I felt about ‘A Little Life’, super-director Ivo van Hove’s in-many-ways-brilliant stage adaptation of a novel so bleak it borders on the unethical. Should the fact that the parent novel has already sold millions of copies automatically exempt the play from scrutiny over its similarly catharsis-free, apocalyptic vision of the life of an abuse survivor? Or is the concentrated hit of a theatre production – three hours 40 minutes but still a lot breezier than the 700-page book – simply confirmation that author Hanya Yanagihara went beyond the pale?

Whatever the case, I joined in the ovation at the end. Of course I did: we clap for the actors, and James Norton gives a truly titanic performance as New York lawyer Jude, who we follow from childhood to deep middle age. There has been some distracting online sniggering about the fact he strips off a couple of times (audience members now have stickers placed over their phone lenses). But the nudity feels entirely justified. Both of the naked scenes are moments of agonising vulnerability: not a sexy fantasy but the pathetic sight of Jude’s scarred, broken body, exposed like an insect shucked from his shell. He has suffered horrific abuse and little truly remains on him but his self-loathing. And yet Norton gives him a fey, not-of-this-world vulnerability that is hugely appealing – you can see why almost every other character in the story is drawn to this little boy lost, each hoping they might be the one to persuade him of his real worth.

I suppose you could draw a line between this performance and Norton’s most famous screen role as ‘Happy Valley’ psychopath Tommy Lee Royce: both are abused children who grow into damaged men; neither has been able to fully cross into adulthood. The big difference is that while Royce takes it out on others, Jude takes it out on himself, albeit just as sickeningly. Although the truly punishing physical stuff is kept to a minimum, there are frequent, eye-watering scenes of self-harm: by the end, Norton’s shirt is stained red with Jude’s blood. It’s a huge performance, magnetic and repellent, the linchpin of the play. 

It’s a meditative treatise on how life is unutterably cruel and shit

Although Jude is the book’s main character, its prodigious length means it’s more equitably split between Jude and his lifelong friends Willem, JB and Malcolm. To get it down to something stageable, this version zeroes in on Jude. That’s sensible, but shifts the tone somewhat. The required cuts mean Omari Douglas’s livewire artist JB is relegated to a memorable minor character. And all we ever really learn about Zach Wyatt’s affable Malcolm is that he’s an architect – his only role in the play is to design a succession of homes for Jude.

The book’s more amiable passages – details of the men’s lives in Manhatten – are largely pruned out . And so after a gentle start, ‘A Little Life’ is a veritable atrocity exhibition, as the unspeakable awfulness of Jude’s childhood and the nauseating ramifications for his present become clear.

There are spots of light. As Jude’s actor BFF, Luke Thompon’s Willem emerges as an almost angelic figure, his puppyish decency and refusal to be scared away from Jude offering some relief in the second half. Then there’s the always excellent Zubin Varla as Jude’s former professor turned father figure Harold. He’s more agonised than Willem, and can’t banish the darkness quite so well. But his fierce decency is something else for us to hold on to, and he’s the rare father figure to not betray Jude.

It’s beautifully staged: a live string quartet provides the largely dissonant soundtrack, occasionally leavened by some sweet snippets of Mahler (James Norton sings Mahler! In German!). Jan Versweyveld’s set is nifty: a narrow strip of stage with a kitchen counter and hospital bed on one side and JB’s art studio on the other, with the visuals dominated by two huge screens showing dreamy, slowed-down camera footage of a journey through Manhattan. The adaptation – by Koen Tachelet, Van Hove and Yanagihara herself – is deftly crafted, moving forward pacily but relatively elegantly, expunging a lot of passing details of the men’s lives in favour of lucid storytelling.

To his credit, Van Hove never makes it feel pulpy or trashily exploitative, more of a meditative treatise on how life is unutterably cruel and shit. But in doing so it becomes a sort of experiment in terror, an attempt to see how an audience will react to seeing unimaginable horrors piled upon a single character with almost nothing in the way of relief. There’s some seating at the back of the stage and I wonder if its main purpose is so we can see the shocked faces of our fellow audience members' faces.

What I really wrestled with here: what is the point to its bleakness? Maybe that’s a question more meaningfully directed at the book, but the play can’t hide behind it.

Jude’s experiences are so extreme – and so cruelly inflamed by sheer bad luck – that the story doesn’t feel useful as a tale about an abuse survivor: ‘if you’ve been horribly abused then your life will be ruined with no hope of redemption’ is not much of a message.

And if it is an experiment in terror: well, that’s interesting, I guess, but again it feels icky bringing abuse victims into it.

But really I can’t help but think ‘A Little Life’ is probably essentially meaningless, a horrible story told for the thrill of telling a horrible story, its nihilism ultimately sophomoric and unserious.  Brilliant acting, great direction, b ut at heart it’s simply an empty vision of despair.

Been there, done that? Think again, my friend.

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Where to watch

A little life.

Directed by Ivo van Hove

Following four college friends in New York City: aspiring actor Willem, successful architect Malcolm, struggling artist JB, and prodigious lawyer Jude. As ambition, addiction, and pride threaten to pull the group apart, they always find themselves bound by their love for Jude and the mysteries of his past. But when those secrets come to light, they finally learn that to know Jude St Francis is to understand the limitless potential of love in the face of life.

James Norton Luke Thompson Omari Douglas Zach Wyatt Elliot Cowan Zubin Varla Nathalie Armin Emilio Doorgasingh

Director Director

Ivo van Hove

Writers Writers

Ivo van Hove Hanya Yanagihara Koen Tachelet

Original Writer Original Writer

Hanya Yanagihara

Playful Productions Trafalgar Releasing

Releases by Date

28 sep 2023, 06 oct 2023, releases by country.

• Theatrical R 18+

Netherlands

• Theatrical 16
• Theatrical 18

219 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by emily_f9 ★★★★ 2

oh to be one of willems pre jude long term long distance low commitment casual girlfriends

Review by watchingwyara ★★★★★ 1

I genuinely hope these people had a psychiatrist on set because if I had to do this every single day I’d sign myself into a mental hospital after the final show.

Review by kaia nöelle ★★★★★ 2

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

rip jude st francis you would’ve loved boygenius

Review by louise ★★★★★

the little smudge of blood on willem’s face after he kisses jude for the first time…. i’m shattered

Review by rhiannon ★★★★½ 2

made me absolutely want to kill myself

Review by zoe ★★★★★

This entire play be like: 😁🙂😕🙁☹️😣😖😫😩🥺🤨🙃🙂😍☺️🥹🤣😳😨😰🫣🫢😓🫡🫥😦😲😡😡😡🤬😭🤯😱😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

Serious thoughts: ik there’s only so much you can do with a 700+ page book and 4 hours but so much of the book felt like it was missing. The friendships weren’t properly developed, or explored - how am I meant to believe these people would do ANYTHING for Jude if I can’t understand the depth of their friendships? Where was Julia? Why was Malcolm some kind of comic relief character when he’s one of the most serious in the book? Why wasn’t Harold and his relationship with Jude properly explained and fleshed out. Could we not have had more of a glimpse into the happy days post Jude’s amputation?? Surely that would have…

Review by ammy ★★★★

i wish they didn’t censor james nortons dick

Review by imo ★★★★

how are u ever meant to be normal again after this. serious question

Review by ab444by ★★★★★ 1

Review by emi 🌛 4

???????/5 stars 

i read the novel a little life five years ago, after my friend suna told me mournfully at a party that it was an awful book that made her feel like shit for weeks and i shouldn’t read it. obviously, i went out the next day and got it, because i am nothing if not curious to a fault. five years later here we are, the two of us seeing a screening of the london play based on the book. (warning ahead for some slight spoilers as i ramble on) 

i have very complicated feelings about a little life. i understand the criticisms of it and even agree to a certain extent; that it is tragedy porn, that…

Review by B E R T ★★★★★ 7

Jamie Lee Curtis “TRAWLMA” compilation for 4 hours, the play.

A once in a lifetime performance by James Norton, truly outstanding.

Willem was so beautiful, the kindest, most caring and amazing friend a person could have, I wish there were more Willem’s in the world.

THAT'S SO GAY LIST

Review by caitlinhill04 ★★★★½

this is my roman empire

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‘A Little Life’ Review: Director Ivo van Hove Draws Blood and Tears at BAM

By Daniel D'Addario

Daniel D'Addario

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Through the second act of “ A Little Life ,” the titanic Ivo van Hove -directed play that premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music ‘s Howard Gilman Opera House on Oct. 20, the protagonist literally wears his trauma. After various flagellations, culminating in a suicide attempt, Jude (Ramsey Nasr) remains in the white button-down shirt that distinguishes him as a lawyer. It’s smeared in blood.

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Van Hove’s by-now well-known willingness to pursue visual metaphor finds effective use here. The entire play transpires in a massive apartment that houses both kitchen and art studio, so other characters are often standing onstage, puttering and cooking or cleaning while Jude suffers. Their inability to help — although Harold tries, by slowly cleaning up Jude’s spent blood — is vivid, and appallingly frank. So, too, is our own helplessness; the play is presented in the round, and so we’re watching our peers watch Jude flail. Yanagihara punctuates a story of granular emotional realism with villainous characters who feel like fairy-tale archetypes; here, Jude’s three tormentors are all played by the imposing Hans Kesting (in present and in flashback to Jude’s childhood), lending a sense of the harms in his life as both having recognizable impact and a somewhat mystic origin at once. It translates and develops what Yanagihara wrote, if at times operating by brute force. There’s something gruesome and ungainly about “A Little Life” in any medium; van Hove’s treatment of it as the tragedy it is makes it undeniable, too.

Van Hove is notorious as a reinventor, finding new tones within familiar works like “The Crucible” or, controversially, “West Side Story.” Here, though, he’s astoundingly faithful to the spirit of the thing: Effectively every plot event in the 700-page-plus novel is here. And Nasr transmits the reader’s sense of Jude as only fully alive when moving himself towards death. For much of the play, video screens on either side of the stage depict street scenes of Manhattan, a reminder of the endless busy distraction that allows his friends to forget Jude’s damage for a while; when Jude prepares his razor for his ritual, what we see of New York City blurs into a soothing, burbling static. Then his screams of pain come.

What is depicted is, quite plainly, not being endorsed; a shattering testimony by Harold brings the play to a close, and expresses a sort of hope that those who stay might carry on. And, indeed, any romance that an uncareful reader might have brought to the story of penitent, suffering Jude is erased by what we’re literally shown. He’s in agony.

But it’s not to last: Old pains run deep. The beginnings of a laugh caught in my throat when, explaining to the remembered ghost of his case worker (Marieke Heebink), Jude explained his aversion to sex with Willem: “Not having sex — it is one of the best things about being an adult.” It’s a beautifully crafted line, a razor. What we see of Willem’s attempts to bring Jude pleasure obscure Jude from view: He’s on the bottom, within an obscuring couch that looks like a plywood coffin. All that extends into view is Jude’s fist, clenched in fear or frustration.

Can such a man, someone so trained to see the pleasures of life as bad and threatening, find solace? “A Little Life’s” answer is, balefully, no. But what might at times seem on the page a sort of tidy nihilism has a richness and texture onstage. The stage, and Jude’s wardrobe, are drenched with blood at different points throughout the evening. It’s a reminder of his suffering, and a difficult barrier to the squeamish and the sensitive. But it’s proof, too, that the work has a beating heart, and that it courses with the stuff of life.

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House; TK seats; $TK top. Opened Oct. 20, 2022. Reviewed Oct. 20. Running time: 4 HOUR, 10 MIN.

• Production: An Internationaal Theater Amsterdam production of a play in two acts by Koen Tachelet.
• Crew: Directed by Ivo van Hove. Sets, Jan Versweyveld; costumes, An D'Huys; lighting, Jeff Croiter; sound, Jan Versweyveld; production stage manager, Stijn van der Leeuw.
• Cast: Ramsey Nasr, Maarten Heijmans, Majd Mardo, Edwin Jonker, Hans Kesting, Marieke Heebink, Jacob Derwig, Bart Slegers.
• Music By: Eric Sleichim.

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‘People Go Out, Come Back, Because It’s Too Much’

Ivo van hove’s staging of a little life immerses audience members in its main character’s suffering..

“I call it the marathon into hell,” says Ramsey Nasr. The race is a four-hour adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel, A Little Life , and the hell is the emotional landscape of Jude St. Francis, the story’s protagonist, whom he’s been playing since 2018. This adaptation, directed by Ivo van Hove , premiered in Amsterdam four years ago and is only now coming to the city where its action takes place via the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Like the book, it’s not an easy experience. Nasr portrays Jude as someone who is as much a wound as he is a person, as much a literary victim as Tess of the d’Urbervilles or the biblical Job, a man so cloaked in pain that his continued existence is itself shocking. “We’re talking about people who cut themselves, people who have depressions, people who are in abusive relationships, and people who commit suicide or do attempt,” he says. “That’s a whole bundle of bruisedness.”

Yet that damage is just one part of A Little Life , a book marked not only by its agony but by its detail. Small aspects of life and lifestyle compound upon one another: Food, art, and scenery are described but not judged. Intense, overwhelming sadness occurs in the same tone as great love and mediocre pho. “She writes it so elaborately — how they eat, what they do, to which music they listen, where they are — that at some point you would think, Well, you could condense that a little bit ,” Nasr says. “But because you know all this, because you are being confronted with all this information about how they walk — all this extra information — in the end, when you close the book, you have the feeling that this is a living character, that it’s not fiction. And that’s the miracle of what she did.”

Onstage, these details must give way to something more recognizably plotlike. “In the theater, of course, there’s the beginning, middle, and an end,” says van Hove. The production may be four hours long, but that still required the first 80 pages of the book to be turned into just ten minutes of performance. Jude, who van Hove estimates cuts himself “20 times or something” in the novel, does so three or four times here. “Otherwise, it becomes too much, and then it becomes only about that.”

In this streamlining, the impulse was to hit the “big events” — the deaths, the suicide attempts, the sacrifices — resulting in less sitting in on the friendship of the novel’s four main characters, Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm. The adaptation is “very geared towards Jude, which is logical,” Maarten Heijmans, who plays Willem, says. “But you don’t have all the backdrop, the little dinners they have, the little jokes they make. I tried to bring that back as much as I could, but my influence is limited because I’m just an actor.”

What van Hove and his translator, Koen Tachelet, have preserved is the novel’s punishing nature. (Depictions of physical miseries aside, the audience has to multitask for the entirety of the long and difficult running time: They must read the Dutch-to-English subtitles, watch the actors, and cry all at once.) Sometimes, van Hove notes, “People go out, come back, because it’s too much.” In a way, that, too, protects the experience of the novel — they may not be able to experience the bruisedness to the extent of Jude or even Nasr, but they are experiencing a punishment of their own. “My theater is really visceral,” van Hove says. “The people in the audience must be horrified. When Willem dies, your hair should stand still.”

In fact, van Hove has put some audience members literally into the play, seating them onstage, forcing the rest of the crowd to watch them react while they face the people watching them. “It creates a conspiracy,” he says. “You’re watching something that’s too horrible to be true, which you shouldn’t watch, and you see everybody doing the same thing. It creates a kind of togetherness, a real intimacy, that we are all together in this intimate world of Jude with his friends.”

Not despite the brutality but because of it, people who relate to Jude have connected to this onstage expression, deeply so. Nasr and Heijmans describe regularly being approached by audience members who have scars from cutting themselves or have been abused or are in a relationship in which one partner no longer wants to live. After each show, “there are people,” Heijmans says, “who’ve had a cleansing, religious experience.”

• brooklyn academy of music
• a little life
• ivo van hove
• hanya yanagihara
• maarten heijmans
• ramsey nasr
• een publiek in de hel
• adaptations

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Review: ‘A Little Life,’ Hanya Yanagihara’s Traumatic Tale of Male Friendship

By Janet Maslin

• Sept. 30, 2015
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Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life,” published in March, turned out to be one of the most talked-about novels of the summer. It’s a big, emotional, trauma-packed read with a voluptuous prose style that wavers between the exquisite and the overdone. A potboiler about very intense male friendship, it’s a sui generis phenomenon that became a runaway hit. And it is now a shortlisted contender for the Man Booker Prize , which will be awarded on Oct. 13.

“A Little Life” initially looks like the story of four college friends who have come to New York from their Massachusetts school and are managing to lead hermetically sealed lives together. They are Malcolm, who still lives with his rich parents; J. B., already an ambitious artist; Willem, a good-looking waiter; and Jude, a mesmerizing wounded bird whom the others can’t figure out. These four intend to be friends for life, and the book intends each of them to be very, very successful in his chosen field some day.

It opens at an unspecified time, when Jude and Willem are living in picturesque poverty in Chinatown, their closeness solidified by shared deprivation. They also share a sense of suffering. Jude is secretive about his past, but we quickly learn of Willem that before he was “a kind man, he was a kind boy.” His disabled brother died young, and Willem will carry that memory with him as Jude grows from beautiful boy to a man who requires more and more patience and loving care. Their early friendship is so warmly described that this vibrant part of the book is irresistible.

Willem’s good looks and innate talent ease his way into acting. Meanwhile, J. B., who is black, turns out to be a talented artist who concentrates on paintings of his three friends. He often paints Jude, whose unfathomable mixed-race origins and air of mystery make for beautiful images that are soon the talk of the art world, if also a great annoyance to Jude himself. And Malcolm, who is half-black, and easily needled by J. B. about it, has a gift for architecture that he parlays into a successful business. Someday he will be designing the fabulously hip homes (yes, plural) that Jude’s success as a fierce litigator allows him to buy.

So upward they all go. But this is not a happy story. At its heart is Jude’s secret suffering, and Malcolm and J. B. soon fade into minor characters as race becomes a nonissue. It will turn out that Jude has spent his whole life — from the moment he was first discovered, as a newborn either in or near a garbage bag — being subjected to horrendous abuse by a series of sadists who simply defy belief. The full parade of them adds up to almost more misery than one novel can contain.

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This is a moderated subreddit. It is our intent and purpose to foster and encourage in-depth discussion about all things related to books, authors, genres, or publishing in a safe, supportive environment. If you're looking for help with a personal book recommendation, consult our Weekly Recommendation Thread, Suggested Reading page, or ask in r/suggestmeabook.

On 'A little life' and its criticism

I recently finished reading 'A little life' by Hanya Yanagihara and have been thinking about it since. It is one of the few books that have moved me to tears. So, I was surprised to find out about the large amount of hatred it receives on this sub and in general. Now, I understand that a book is not going to work for everyone. But I am confused about certain points of criticism.

One seems to be that the abuse Jude goes through is described in excessive detail. This is the most baffling to me. Not to undermine what he goes through. It is awful. But I don't remember the writing going overboard with the details. In fact, it was one of the things I loved about the writing. It never had to be unnecessarily detailed to give a sense of how bad it was.

Is it torture porn? I can see where this criticism is coming from. Many seem to feel that the story goes over the top with the bad stuff that happens in Jude's life. But as bad as it gets for him, there are also a few positives, like the loving people that surround Jude. But I am confused myself. At what point does it become 'torture porn' and stops being a really well-written, but incredibly sad story?

I don't think any comment would change my opinion of the book but I am interested in seeing other people's views on it. Sorry if this has already been posted a lot.

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'A Little Life': An Unforgettable Novel About The Grace Of Friendship

John Powers

A Little Life

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America is hooked on stories of redemption and rebirth, be it Cheryl Strayed rediscovering herself by hiking the Pacific Trail or the late David Carr pulling himself out of the crack-house and into The New York Times . We just love tales about healing.

But how far should we trust them? That's one of the many questions raised by A Little Life , a new novel by Hanya Yanagihara, whose acclaimed debut, The People in the Trees , came from seemingly nowhere 18 months ago. This new book is long, page-turny, deeply moving, sometimes excessive, but always packed with the weight of a genuine experience . As I was reading, I literally dreamed about it every night.

The book follows three decades in the life of four friends from a posh college. There's the kindhearted actor, Willem, and the self-centered artist, JB, of Haitian stock. There's the timorous would-be architect, Malcolm, born of a wealthy, mixed-race family and the handsome, lame Jude, a brilliant attorney addicted to cutting himself. As the book begins, they've moved to New York to make their fortune, and over the next 700 pages — yes, 700 — we watch them rise, lose their bearings, fall in love, slide into squabbles and wrestle with life's inevitable tragedies.

Yanagihara has a keen eye for social detail, and reading her early riff on actors like Willem who work as waiters, you may think she's offering something familiar — a generational portrait like Mary McCarthy's The Group or the witty, emblematic realism of Jonathan Franzen. In fact, the book's apparent normalcy lures you into the woods of something darker, stranger and more harrowing. Turns out that everything largely orbits around one of the four, Jude, whose gothic past Yanagihara slowly reveals.

For those who want trigger warnings, consider yourself warned — Jude's tale has enough triggers for a Texas gun show. The poor guy may endure the harshest childhood in fiction, one that's equal parts Dickens, Sade and Grimm's Fairy Tales . Evidently named for the patron saint of the hopeless and despairing, Jude is treated so badly that I flashed back to my mom reading me the book Beautiful Joe , about a dog so cruelly abused that I melted into inconsolable weeping.

Hanya Yanagihara's acclaimed debut, The People in the Trees , was released 18 months ago. Sam Levy/Courtesy of Doubleday hide caption

Hanya Yanagihara's acclaimed debut, The People in the Trees , was released 18 months ago.

Yanagihara writes with even more trenchant precision about the scars on the adult Jude's soul — the self-hatred and self-destructiveness, the yearning for love laced with utter mistrust, the baroque defense mechanisms he erects to keep anyone from learning who he really is. He struggles again and again, in long frustrating detail, to recover from his past, along with support from his friends, his doctor, Andy, and his law-school mentor, Harold, who becomes a father figure.

Now, I should also warn you that these struggles become too much, as sometimes happens with a John Cassavetes movie. Readers will be ready to move on, even if Jude is not. Then again, the book's driven obsessiveness is inseparable from the emotional force that will leave countless readers weeping.

Besides, Jude's condition is Yanagihara's way of exploring larger issues. Even as the book pointedly challenges the neat, happy arc of popular redemption stories — "People don't change," Jude decides — it calls on our imaginative sympathy. Yanagihara is fascinated by how we understand minds very different from our own. Here, Jude's ghastly history puts him in a mental universe that his friends — and readers — must work to enter. Not that this is impossible, mind you. He's no alien. Jude's guardedness makes him the heightened embodiment of the secret private self we all have, with our own calming rituals, mental hideaways and escape hatches.

While A Little Life is shot through with pain, it's far from being all dark. Jude's suffering finds its equipoise in the decency and compassion of those who love him; the book is a wrenching portrait of the enduring grace of friendship. With her sensitivity to everything from the emotional nuance to the play of light inside a subway car, Yanagihara is superb at capturing the radiant moments of beauty, warmth and kindness that help redeem the bad stuff. In A Little Life , it's life's evanescent blessings that maybe, but only maybe, can save you.

SUPER BOWL 2025: Rap megastar to headline the halftime show in New Orleans

‘Unstoppable’ captures Anthony Robles’ singular life, with Robles as his own stunt double

The Associated Press

September 7, 2024, 2:08 PM

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TORONTO (AP) — A few hours before the film about his life, “Unstoppable,” was to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival , Anthony Robles, sitting alongside the actor who plays him, Jharrel Jerome , was remembering the moment he won the NCAA wrestling national title.

He had done something that was, by any measure, extraordinary. Robles was born without his right leg. Through grit and determination, Robles had risen to be the best 125-pound wrestler in the country. But the last thing on his mind at that moment was Hollywood.

“I was sitting there showering off after the match,” Robles says. “I was excited and then I was like, ‘I gotta find a job. I gotta start getting my resume together.’ I never got into any of this for the attention.”

“Unstoppable,” which premiered Friday night in Toronto, was one of the most-anticipated premieres of the festival partly because of outside drama. The film is produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and co-stars Jennifer Lopez as Robles’ mom, Judy. But if all the talk going in was about who would turn up between Affleck and Lopez (Lopez did), the talk after the movie belonged to Robles and Jerome.

The film, directed by the Oscar-winning editor William Goldenberg (“Argo,” “Heat”) and which Amazon MGM will release in December, is in many ways a conventional sports drama, with an uplifting message and terrific supporting performances from Lopez, Don Cheadle, Michael Peña and Bobby Cannavale. But it also, rather than building toward one big challenge, takes a more naturalistic path. Robles, as played by Jerome, doesn’t face a hurdle or two. He faces continual adversity, at home and on the mat.

“That’s honestly how I felt going through my life,” says Robles, who redshirted as a freshman at Arizona State University. “I was constantly fighting something, whether it was on the mat against a flesh-and-blood opponent or it was in my family or the world. There was always something I was fighting against. All those things, that frustration got channeled inside me. But wrestling was my outlet.”

While many real-life stories include some involvement from the subject, “Unstoppable” went several steps further. Robles, a producer on the film, also serves as Jerome’s stunt double. For the wrestling scenes, Jerome and Robles, both in costume, would take turns performing the moves on the mat. Goldenberg would later mix the two together, using visual effects to remove Jerome’s leg.

“I signed on to the movie and then I was like: How am I going to do the wrestling?” says Goldenberg. “I watched so many hours of him wrestling. I thought, there’s no way I can do this without him doubling himself. He moves in a way that I just thought no one could ever master.”

Jerome, the talented 26-year-old actor of “Moonlight” and “I’m a Virgo,” first met Robles in 2020. Robles wanted to meet in a gym.

“You can imagine how I feel. I’m barely in the gym and this is the guy I gotta play. I think it was a test,” says Jerome, laughing. “I remember the pressure of meeting him was so intense for me. But once you get to meet him and know him, all that pressure goes out the window.”

After the two had gotten started, the pandemic shut down development on the film, and “Unstoppable” didn’t reassemble until several years later. But that also gave Jerome and Robles more time to get to know each other.

“Missing my leg, he’d see how I interact with people,” says Robles. “People would just look at me because I’m a little bit different, how that motivated me. That was something that I couldn’t really explain with words. Him just seeing it and being around it, he could feel it after a while.”

Jerome trained intensely not just as a wrestler but to match Robles’ poise. After training with Robles, he would work with a movement coach to capture how Robles, who uses crutches to get around, walked and carried himself. When it came time to wrestle in the film, Jerome says they were like a tag team.

“As an actor, you always have somebody walking around who looks like you, your body double or stunt double,” says Jerome. “But I have the guy I’m playing, so it was a weird mind bend for me.”

Robles, 36, who’s married and has a young son, now coaches wrestling at his old high school in Mesa, Arizona. But stepping back on the mat, in gymnasiums decorated to look just like those he experienced his greatest triumphs in, was surreal.

“I got the butterfly feelings like I was really wrestling,” Robles says. “That for me was fun, being able to train for something again.”

Robles’ high school coach taught him, as a wrestler, to focus on his strengths and camouflage his weaknesses. On that mat, that meant dropping to his knee to wrestle from a neutral position, allowing him to use his hands to move around. His upper body strength is extreme, as is his grip strength from always being on crutches. “It’s kind of like I’m working out 24/7,” he says.

But much of “Unstoppable” focuses on Robles’ relationship with his mother. Robles’ strength, he says, comes from family and faith.

“My mom has always been my hero from day one. Being born missing my leg, immediately everyone thinks about what I’m not going to be able to accomplish in my life or how this is going to hold me back,” Robles says. “I was blessed to have a mom who chose not to have that mentality, and not allow me to have that mentality growing up. She called it a challenge. She said: You don’t let your challenge become an excuse.”

Now, Robles looks at “Unstoppable” as part of his legacy. He’ll show it to his son when he’s a little older.

“Going through this whole process of filming this movie, meeting Jharrel and talking about things, I kind of feel like I’m at the point now where I’m done fighting,” Robles says. “I’m just blessed to be on the journey.”

Copyright © 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, written or redistributed.

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