Role Playing with A Familiar Beast

Earlier this week, I noted this sentence in Hilton Als's recent New Yorker theatre review: "'Cyrano de Bergerac' is a big play that wears its importance lightly; its title character has been a paradigm for many of the conflicted, self-effacing yet principled heroes of our own time." It's been tumbling around in my head alongside A Familiar Beast, the wonderfully taut new novella by Panio Gianopoulos, which has me asking: What constitutes a romantic hero in our time? Does a society (or a generation) get the heroes and heroines it deserves? Do overblown expectations of perfection in relationships, continually fed by advertising and subliminally destructive rom coms, require so much of men to satisfy a search for the romantic hero--and defy expectations of betrayal--that they are often doomed to fail from the get go? And then I wonder how much if any of these problems will dissipate with Generation Y; this in spite of the continued Disneyfication of our society. These are questions I don't know the answers to, and they require more time and reflection than this blog post allows for. But I do heartily recommend A Familiar Beast, so without further ado, here are my picks for a book-to-film adaptation: You Can Count on Me and Margaret's Kenneth Lonergan to direct, Mark Ruffalo as Marcus who is running away from a failed marriage, Jeremy Renner as his deer hunting friend Edgar, with Greta Gerwig and Rutina Wesley as the two women they meet in a pathetic attempt at a night on the town. Can't you see it picking up an Indie Spirit award for Best Film? --Kim