Mark Reviews Movies: CREATING A CHARACTER: THE MONI YAKIM LEGACY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 18, 2020

It's clear that Moni Yakim, who has taught movement at the Juilliard School since 1968, served as a guiding force for many actors, some of whom make brief appearances to celebrate their former teacher. The best scene of Creating a Character: The Moni Yakim Legacy is a reunion between the professor and one of his students, namely Kevin Kline. The two embrace and then chat about acting, almost challenging each other in a game of pantomime.

There's real, mutual affection and admiration between these two, which is something we most certainly don't get from the series of talking heads—including Jessica Chastain, Anthony Mackie, Laura Linney, and Oscar Isaac—who sit in an empty room and explain how important Yakim was to their training. Watching Yakim and Kline discuss and actually perform, though, digs beneath the surface of Yakim's core philosophy of acting: Movement is the most important tool an actor possesses.

This documentary, directed by Rauzar Alexander, may follow a single class in Juilliard's drama program for the entirety of their education (with Alex Sharp, who makes a great achievement by the end of the movie, as that story's main focus), but it never quite goes beyond the superficial of Yakim's ideas. We see moments of the process, as students perform monologues and gradually remove language from the speeches, but the movie doesn't help us to understand the thinking behind that process.

That's half of the narrative. The other half is a straightforward biography of Yakim's professional life—starting in Israel, learning the art (and shunning the shallow entertainment) of pantomime in Paris, and coming to the United States to run his own company (with his wife Mina) before being recruited to teach at Juilliard. As intriguing as his life has been (meeting luminaries like Stella Adler and Marcel Marceau), the documentary's biographical element feels more like a requirement than a way to illuminate the man's central thesis about acting.

Anyway, by this point in the subject's life, Yakim is a teacher through and through, allowing the success of his students to be his legacy. Near the end, when the teacher visits his most recent star backstage, we may feel some affection for the teacher's selfless attitude, but Creating a Character: The Moni Yakim Legacy doesn't go far enough for us to admire the actual theory and process of the man's teaching.

Note: First Run Features is making Creating a Character: The Moni Yakim Legacy available via virtual cinema. You can choose to support a local independent theater (e.g., the Music Box Theatre in Chicago) with your rental purchase. Half of the proceeds will go to the local theater. For more information and to access the film, click here. Participating theaters are listed on the page.

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