Oliver Stone does just about everything right in his 9/11 movie World Trade Center, a dramatic recreation of what happened to two Port Authority policemen on that unforgettable day. John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Peña) were among the first-responders when the twin towers were struck. Helping to evacuate Tower One, their squad was trapped when the edifice collapsed. As McLoughlin and Jimeno lay buried in the rubble, Stone envisions the men’s desperate survival, the efforts by rescue teams determined to dig out any casualties, and the frantic anxiety of the men’s wives, Donna McLoughlin (Maria Bello) and Allison Jimeno (Maggie Gyllenhaal).
It is through Andrea Berloff’s screenplay that World Trade Center presents a well-thought-out view of the calamity. Berloff clarifies the event’s individual, social and domestic aspects. And Stone, with his practiced elucidation of Americans from various social strata caught up in political turmoil (war, big business, crime), recognizes how those different levels intertwine. This approach, rejecting United 93’s bogus docu-realism, never condescends to stoking our fears.
After 9/11, hucksters have had a huge opportunity to trick filmgoers who are unable to distinguish the solemnity of recent history from tacky Hollywood manipulation. During United 93, when I laughed at its preponderance of action-movie clichés, a middle-class woman chided me to “Be respectful!” Respectful of what? Clumsy exploitation-film mechanics! United 93 became an occasion for the nation’s media—and only a few, gullible ticket-buyers—to display self-righteous self-piety. Thankfully, Oliver Stone doesn’t go there. World Trade Center could really be about any public disaster, but Stone dignifies it by not over dramatizing its significance. He chooses to enlighten us about American character. Avoiding action-movie exploitation and specious docu-drama engenders absolute respect.
As film fiction, World Trade Center offers an interpretation of history. So it must operate just as Spielberg’s War of the Worlds did—turning real-life experience into symbol and metaphor. This is the proof of Stone’s intelligence and artistry.
The introductory sequence of different citizens preparing to work is a personalizing montage—it’s not anonymous-making like United 93, which turned characters into ciphers. (Director Paul Greengrass was clueless about the American quotidian and indifferent to his actors.) Stone gets it right that 9/11 was a blue-sky day but also a mundane, blue-collar day. His focus is on the diversity of the Port Authority’s public servants. This is not the all-white fraternity Mayor Giuliani posed with on the 9/29 episode of Saturday Night Live—propaganda that immediately re-wrote history in a homogeneous, jingoistic image. Stone shows one Port Authority officer receiving word of the terrorist attack from his wife who heard the news on hip-hop radio station HOT ’97—a pluralizing, socially-credible correction to Giuliani’s political canard.
Stone refuses the class and race biases that pander to Patriotism. Instead, he commemorates McLoughlin and Jimeno’s unforeseeable trial as a shared social experience. Each scene in the rubble, on the streets and in the suburban homes may trigger your own, personal, isolating dread, yet Stone pushes for connection. Bypassing facile, demagogic homilies, he insists that the separate dramas compliment each other: Italian and Latino officers suffer and bond; both civilian and military volunteers join the rescue effort; and the two officers’ Catholic families, whether patriarchies or matriarchies, panic and pray in an ethnically distinct hubbub. These specifics are recognizable and necessary. Their freshness reveals how Hollywood customarily falsifies our social makeup or trivializes our common tragedies. Emboldened by the urgency of 9/11, Stone achieves a more honest sense of America’s urban mix than any from those New York-movie icons Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and Spike Lee.
War of the Worlds set the high water mark for 9/11 movies through its similar depiction of community. Like Spielberg, Stone understands how catastrophe interrupts the conflicts of daily living. Separating 9/11 events from the quotidian would be misleading and a betrayal of the ultimate purpose of pop art. Stone recapitulates Spielberg’s wartime metaphor, turning World Trade Center into a hometown crusade. It’s not simply that the director of Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July prefers war narratives; Stone knows that we need the ritual of familiar myth. It reorients us to life suddenly gone beyond our ken, or turned stupefying.
Those core scenes of McLoughlin and Jimeno crushed under debris are ingenious. Recalling battle sequences in trenches or jungles, the men communicate through family stories, pop bromides and—when all else fails—sheer masculine camaraderie. (The salutation “brother” is coin of the realm.) Visually, the grim, collapsing dungeon—a pit within a pit—recalls the war tableau of Joseph Losey’s King and Country, an exploration of the intricacies of political heroism. But here, Stone shows unexpected depth: knowing that 9/11 is not the moment to question patriotism (a pitfall for both the Right and Left), Stone turns to McLoughlin and Jimeno’s spiritual sustenance.
Both men’s marriages further reveal personality through intimacy and responsibility. These flashbacks are luminous and exacting, similar to Malick’s in The Thin Red Line, but here the women move fiercely—muses made real. In a corresponding gesture—but very bold for this politically correct era—Stone honors McLoughlin and Jimeno’s Catholic faith. He doesn’t let religion become a source of discord. In fact, there’s an extraordinary awareness of religious and political prerogative as germane to American individualism. This comes through in the subplot of Marine veteran Dave Karnes (played by Michael Shannon, his rectitude evoking Tom Berenger’s recruiting-poster GI image in Born on the Fourth of July). Karnes responds to the terrorist attack as a literal call to arms. He travels from his far-off town to the Towers site, following Semper Fi duty, to lend his hand. Like those lonely eccentrics in an Altman film, Karnes moves from narrative periphery to center and back. Solitary, and perhaps unknowable, he haunts our American pride. So Stone interweaves Karnes into Jimeno’s vision of Jesus—a salvation image that connects to McLoughlin remembering his wife. This multiplane sense of the spiritual life Americans hold in common is nearly miraculous—something only Griffith, Ford, Borzage, Clarence Brown and Spielberg would dare.
Each storyline in World Trade Center converges on the hellhole where McLoughlin and Jimeno lie imprisoned. (The wives obsess on that pit and at one audacious point, there’s even an intergalactic POV) As Stone thinks through 9/11, World Trade Center downplays tragic terrorism. Instead, he touches on existential despair, especially in a montage of empty commuter and subway trains followed by handmade posters of missing loved-ones. It’s the intellectual extension of McLoughlin and Jimeno being cast into “Hell” where one sees one’s mistakes (sins) and regrets; then longs for redemption.
Contemporary Hollywood typically uses horror scenarios that teach how to be shocked rather than to feel—stories that balk at the possibility of movies interpreting life. But World Trade Center profoundly summarizes America’s 9/11 experience—as when McLoughlin comes out of his torturous would-be grave. Faith then provides ecumenical deliverance: A symbolic congregation of hands reach down, pulling McLoughlin up, and he touches each one. That’s better than a mere memorial, better than any “official” Hollywood history editorial writers might call for. It’s an illustration of what we desperately need movies to provide. [august 2006]
Some critics are hard-wired to praise any movie that deals with Nazis (Pauline Kael called them “Nazi junkies”) as if that subject automatically made a movie profound. Dutch director Paul Verhoeven tempts that fallacy in Black Book, the story of a young Jewish woman, Rachel (Carice van Houten), whose career as a singer is interrupted when the Nazis invade Holland. Verhoeven gives Rachel’s struggle to survive the soap opera treatment—epic ordeals involving changed identities, the Dutch underground, then espionage routines that require her to sleep with an SS officer, Ludwig (Sebastian Koch), with whom she falls in love.
These narrative extremes, combining romanticism with satire, test the tolerance of Nazi junkies who have, predictably, responded to Black Book with either knee-jerk praise or plain-jerk distaste. But Black Book is fun, above all, because it works in Verhoeven’s typically naughty-provocative style. Its success must be measured in how it enables viewers to think about war and survival in new ways—without shopworn, Oscar-endorsed sentiments. Imagine a Fassbinder movie, deliberately self-conscious for the new century. Rachel suggests Maria Braun or Lili Marleen only not simply transplanted to The Netherlands (lewd name for a Verhoeven location) but to the realm of comic books—oops! graphic novels—to use a term that implies Verhoeven’s Pop Art boldness.
Verhoeven’s outrageous storylines (Showgirls, Starship Troopers) travesty politics but not seriousness. Rachel’s situation is always grave, yet Verhoeven (co-writing with Gerard Soeteman) is often humorous about it. He can untap a character’s rebel libidinous streak or the absurdity of a grim circumstance, as in a moment sure to be famous—and destined to be misunderstood—when desperate Rachel rides on a motorcycle past a line of marching Nazi soldiers and flashes her thighs at them. The sense of personal liberation in that gesture isn’t just impudent, it defies historical sanctimony.
Such audacious incidents might have gotten Black Book past Kael’s objections to WWII mawkishness which (after Eastwood’s insufferable diptych of Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima) is now out of hand. But the interest of Rachel’s unruly behavior—and Verhoeven’s disturbing madcap storyline—lies in how it makes one look at the issues of Rachel’s ordeal with exhilarating freshness. Black Book’s historically-loaded situation and metaphorical images (gold coins gleam against the naked breasts of a woman killed when Nazis ambush wealthy Jews attempting escape) are presented with Verhoeven’s signature insouciance. The tragic/vulgar effect is not meaningless as in a comic book movie like 300; rather, Verhoeven raises new issues, provokes more thought. Black Book’s legitimacy comes from Verhoeven’s willingness to push history into the surreal.
At one point Rachel escapes the Gestapo in a coffin. Her mock resurrection sets up a joke that, when repeated, will be dire. But as she nails a bad guy in a coffin, the Grand Guignol cliché is made comic, horrific and moral. Verhoeven’s audacity can be alarming (especially to American tastes still shocked by his casual approach to frontal nudity) yet Black Book’s narrative efficiency and richness recall Robert Aldrich’s underrated The Dirty Dozen. The pleasure of Aldrich’s foil-the-Nazis plot always distracted from his vision of the Dozen’s complexes. Verhoeven shares Aldrich’s pop depth. He exposes Rachel’s psyche by way of an outrageously energized, divaricating plot. Situations that might seem bluntly decadent (Rachel dying her pubic hair blonde to pass for an Aryan while her male comrade lusts after her—to the tune of “Red Sails in the Sunset”) unsettle such resistance-movie pieties as in the dreary, solemn Army of Shadows.
Verhoeven’s narrative effrontery updates the moral quandary of war movies. When Black Book’s resistance fighters are called “terrorists,” it’s clear Verhoeven knows that the stakes have changed today. Yet Rachel’s genuine affection for Ludwig complicates the matter of allegiance. Verhoeven realizes that wartime alliances can be confoundingly personal. He won’t let old sentimentality prevail.
“You’re as bad as the Nazis!” a crowd of Liberation Day rioters are told when they vent their anger on Rachel. This is irony that an Army of Shadows encourages us to forget by reducing politics to simplistic melodrama. Verhoeven’s audacious comic tone provides intellectual distance. It takes Rachel’s dilemma of identity and sacrifice out of the past—avoiding the Nazi junkie trap—and into the present. [april 2007]
T he Diving Bell and the Butterfly tells a real person’s life story so inventively you might forget how rotten recent biopics have been. As part of director Julian Schnabel’s Cool Lives of Artists series (following films on Jean-Michel Basquiat and Reinaldo Arenas), this is not about an artist in the traditional sense; it depicts how Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor of French Elle magazine, managed to write his autobiography after suffering a stroke in the ’90s that paralyzed every muscle except his left eye. Schnabel understands what the imaginative life of an ambitious businessman and fashion capitalist like Bauby has in common with modern artistic types. Though set in haute-bourgeois territory, drawing from the Parisian highlife Bauby enjoyed, this turns out to be more radically perceptive than Control, the ostensibly hip British film about Joy Division singer Ian Curtis.
Ironically, it is Bauby’s story that has the improvisatory essence of punk while the Curtis biopic—set in the miserable, working-class climate of post-punk England—actually offers little more than a glossy, superficial fashion magazine layout. Directed by rock photographer Anton Corbijn, the NME, music-video style of Control fails to penetrate Curtis’ character (based on a memoir by Curtis’ apparently clueless widow), while The Diving Bell intensifies the poignancy of a privileged life brought low. Envisioning Bauby’s world in fresh ways, Schnabel’s movie teaches about life. Control frustratingly illustrates the Joy Division phenomenon in literal-minded ways. (Curtis, played by Sam Riley, alienates himself from everyone, then records “Isolation” in the studio while even his bandmates ignore him.) This insults one’s sense of art and human relations and panders to post-punk’s doom-and-gloom stereotypes. But Schnabel separates Bauby (played by Mathieu Amalric) from his media-elite life to give an impressionistic representation of both his infirmity and keen sensitivity. He honors Bauby’s sense of being an “emotional Cyclops” through wide-eyed images of sexuality, language, parenting, family and friendship.
Echoing Germaine Dulac’s 1928 The Seashell and the Clergyman, Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly has a French Surrealist essence. Schnabel animates the mind of a man “locked in his own body”—his sinking/flying feeling. Given this difficult circumstance, the film is more divertissement than plot; it ruminates on perception (POV shots from the patient’s hospital bed), feeling (memory sequences of family life), and atmosphere (from medical staff protocol to landscape details). Each sequence suggests pure intuition. Schnabel sees what the Cyclops feels, adding his familiar surfing motif from the Basquiat and Arenas films—an image immediately conveying personal freedom and risk. Bauby says, “Other than my eye, two things are not paralyzed—my imagination and my memory. I can imagine anything I want.” This leads to a Marlon Brando photo-montage ingeniously representing male erotic and artistic liberty.
Schnabel thinks about images, not story (while Corbijn locks Ian Curtis in the B&W clichés of pop music photojournalism without ever understanding his neuroses). Schnabel’s images are the story: Isaach de Bankolé’s friendly intimacy in propping his feet on Bauby’s hospital bed while reading to him; Bauby stiffly propped up in a wheelchair yet wearing an elegant ascot under his breathing tube. Schnabel eases into observations that are naturally symbolic or wrings poetry from common situations: While shaving his aged, infirm father (Max von Sydow), the old man’s mirror reflection is seen next to his son’s youthful photo. These extremes are beautiful; only in the chronological account of Bauby’s troubled marriage and eventual mishap does Schnabel’s filmmaking turn conventional.
Painter, musician and general cultural dilettante, Schnabel shows genuine moviemaker instincts. Strangely, Corbijn and other pseudo-biographers—such as Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant—don’t. Control, I’m Not There and Last Days never achieve Schnabel’s artistic empathy. They’re anti-biographies of Dylan, Curtis and Kurt Cobain; competing with the life and art of their subjects through the directors’ own parasitical opportunism. Critic John Demetry noted that Haynes and Van Sant both avoid using their subjects’ actual names. It disguises their deadly intentions. This sycophancy has inspired the year’s funniest movie blurb so far from a reviewer who praised Control as “Not just a biopic but a great film about a musician’s life.”
It should be exciting if Schnabel ever adds a pop music subject to his Cool Lives of Artists tales. The rhythm of his impressionist film style seems perfectly suited; in fact, Corbijn’s only good scene in Control works like a Schnabel: When skinny, lonely, teenage Ian Curtis lies in bed smoking, listening to David Bowie’s “Jean Genie” or Roxy Music’s “2HB” and internalizes the alienation of glam rock, the sense of simultaneous ambition and desolation is similar to Schnabel’s uncanny expression of Bauby’s dilemma. These moments are trenchant and universal, not dependent upon the significance of rich or famous lives. Although hipsters may flock to Control for an ersatz taste of post-punk nostalgia (accepting Corbijn’s compendium of clichés simply because they’re dressed in B&W), it takes Schnabel’s unconventional imagination to restore intelligence to the biopic. He confirms Germaine Dulac’s bold dictum: “To understand this film, it is enough to look deeply into one’s self.” That’s a sufficient definition of what a good biopic makes possible. [december 2007]
“No!” is the first word spoken in There Will Be Blood, and it should be the last said in response to Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest pretend epic. That obstinate “No!” is Daniel Plainview’s refusal to accept the fate awaiting him when he falls on his back and breaks a leg in his California silver mine in 1898. “No!” startles our concentration on the mystery of who he is and what he’s doing. The lonely willfulness of an American pioneer is also the stubborn tenacity of a born isolate and naysayer. As Daniel Day Lewis plays the part, Plainview is also a ferocious psychopath. His curious position as There Will Be Blood’s central character makes one recall the question Paul Newman asks in his soliloquy in Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians: “How come you took him to be a hero?”
The key problem of There Will Be Blood is that Anderson takes Plainview to be a hero—personifying everything that’s wrong in American character: greed, selfishness, stinginess and unchecked ambition. He’s a shock-and-awe hero who reduces all to shame. Mounting a large-scaled epic around such a characterization would be unthinkable before the 2000 presidential election unleashed the Left’s rage, and yet Altman-acolyte Anderson isn’t asking sympathy (like Altman did in his Richard Nixon movie, Secret Honor) because Blood is a guilt-soaked epic. Americans are meant to identify with Plainview for the worst aspects of themselves.
That makes the movie an oddball showcase for Day Lewis. His twisted charisma and commanding skill galvanize the 30-year plot developments and the parade of sketchy subordinate characters: a charlatan preacher, Eli (Paul Dano); an estranged brother (Kevin J. O’Connor) and a loyal but deaf adopted son (Russell Harvard). Plainview’s family-narrative tree suggests what Pauline Kael said about Days of Heaven: You can hang all your old metaphors on it. It’s never clear what Anderson intends these characters to mean—for Plainview or us. The movie’s interest lies simply in how Plainview reacts to them. Day Lewis digs deep into primordial madness—evoking Western culture’s most memorable freaks from Prospero to Captain Ahab to Gordon Gekko.
Plainview is the most remarkable movie performance since Eddie Murphy’s Norbit trifecta. One must recognize that Day Lewis’ is also a postmodern comic turn. He gives Plainview the insinuating growl of John Huston’s Noah Cross in Chinatown—a Biblical allusion already tied to both Hollywood dynastic history and the corrupt pioneer spirit. And because Anderson anxiously pitches himself into American cinema tradition, Day Lewis’ flinty characterization resembles the same obdurate old man that Jason Robards Jr. etched so magnificently in Anderson’s overweening Magnolia—only Day-Lewis has two and a half hours to do it. A thousand times better than his Gangs of New York butcher, he keeps coming up with actorly surprises from his own British theatrical tradition. The way Plainview shames his son by calling him an “Oooorphan” combines cruelty and self-dramatization in a way that recalls the hammy grandeur of Olivier and Charles Laughton at their best.
There may be no contemporary director more self-dramatizing than Paul Thomas Anderson, always attempting a true epic and this time coming close. But Blood is an insipid epic. Anderson adapts Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil, partly in response to the blood-for-oil arguments about the Iraq War—as if going back to Sinclair’s fictionalized history of the US oil industry explained anything about Americans’ dependence on energy and exploitation of their natural and spiritual resources. But Anderson’s argument isn’t muckraking or cogent. Plainview’s robber-baron immorality and atheism—the way he cheats a family out of its oil-rich land, his cutthroat competitiveness and inability to express love—do not represent the essence of American culture or industry. It’s just nihilistic reaching.
Ironically, Anderson enjoys unearned good will among today’s film nerds. Since the silly Boogie Nights sentimentalized the porn industry with a fake rubber penis, Anderson has been the small white hope for Gen-Xers wishing there was a Griffith, Stroheim, Ford, Wyler, Vidor or Stevens among them. It reveals the naive cynicism that infects today’s movie geeks. (Embarrassingly, There Will Be Blood won IndieWire’s online poll of real and wannabe critics yearning for a film that depicted America as land of the greedy and the home of the great Satan.) Yet, There Will Be Blood isn’t a unifying American epic like Giant or The Best Years of Our Lives; it’s the Worst Years of Our History, a post-Iraq War Termigant.
Anderson’s grandiose narrative gives the impression of depth when there’s only jumbled, surface breadth. It’s strange to watch a confidently-made film by a director who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Each dramatic segment is impressively paced—as if Anderson was showing Stevens how magnanimity ought to be done—but the result is piddling; inexpressive of universality. Have Anderson’s boosters noticed there are virtually no women in this epic? No single contradiction to Plainview’s masculinist cruelty? None of the richness found in Gone With the Wind, Giant, The Sundowners, Sounder?
Yes, Blood has photographic detail. Cinematographer Robert Elswit records nature more tastefully than the great Roger Deakins’ show-offy work in the fake-epic The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, instilling genuine visionary heft. And Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood provides a wondrous emotive score, as eclectic as Carl Stalling and expressive as Max Steiner. Musical wit disguises the story’s incoherence—its meaningless siblings, silences and opportunistic sadism.
Yet, Anderson’s story becomes stupidly fashionable in its stacked contest of Plainview vs. Eli, capitalist ruthlessness vs. religious fanaticism. The shabby set-up of Plainview and Eli’s ultimate confrontation in a bowling alley is so confusing and slapdash that their symbolic clash—where one forces the other to confess his shallowness and deny his beliefs—comes across as just secular-progressive prejudice and loopy, unconvincing drama. Each man is a thesis position, not a character. Is There Will Be Blood an undeniable exposé of American ruthlessness, or a formidable dramatization of the struggle between power and faith? No! [january 2008]
Bringing Sex and the City to the movies after its initial HBO run (it was a subscriber hit from 1998 to 2004) is like taking it to the prom. This summer blockbuster movie event is a combination coming-out party and graduation ceremony, showing off the successful enforcement—and enticement—of the media class’ will.
Carrie Bradshaw (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) has been idolized as America’s greatest female fictional character even though she’s little more than a good-hearted girl-next-door and a believably obsessed careerist. Actually, she’s a fantastically dressed mannequin, constructed through the alchemy of The Pill and the women’s movement: While embodying autonomous social mobility, she also exercises the freedom to combine bed-hopping with social climbing. Fact is, she illustrates the yearnings of today’s post-feminist media elite spreading their self-interest to the public. Like that bottle of whiskey stereotypical newspaper editors keep in their desk drawer, Carrie Bradshaw is the Barbie doll recessed in the hand-bag of contemporary white-collar women—she fortified their gaudiest Cinderella dreams through weekly televised teasings of possibility. However, as Carrie and her pals Samantha (Kim Cattrall), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) step up from the TV ghetto on to the red carpet of the pop imagination, movin’ on up to the movie big time means Sex and the City can no longer be accepted as just a cable-TV party game. It has to compete with the big girls, Hollywood’s classic representations of female beauty, desire and strength. And it doesn’t.
One of the show’s canniest tricks was its average-girl casting. Parker, Cattrall, Nixon and Davis aren’t movie sirens. Their regular, agreeable looks—plus acting chops—enabled them to stand in for the common Jane; but they were never shown in depth (merely that steady, episodic observation of superficial crises that passes for depth on TV). Fact is, they were hoisted above the mundane—into icon status—by their bourgeois accouterments, stylish wardrobes, slick photography and a limousine-leisurely approach to life. (That one had to first fork out cable-TV fees for the privilege of observing this upper-class soirée amounted to a capitalist pledge of allegiance.) Now, watching Sex and the City inflated on the movie screen finally lets you see how two-dimensional its characters really are. There’s simply no way Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte can compete with the shop-girl legacies of Joan Crawford, Irene Dunne, Doris Day, Natalie Wood, Diane Keaton (let alone Claire Danes as Steve Martin’s Shopgirl).
I always resented how the show disrespected that legacy. Warner Bros.’ recent Joan Crawford Collection DVD box set features the remarkable 1934 Clarence Brown film Sadie McKee, the story of a working-class girl who makes good and marries up—but not without wrestling complicated romantic rivalries and regrets. The criminally underappreciated, gothically intense Crawford was Hollywood’s most splendid example of female tenacity. In a less corrupted era, she glamorized a newly urbane American’s honest ambition. (Carrie’s opening line “Girls come to New York City looking for the two Ls—labels and love” is an infuriating canard.) Crawford’s restlessness was specifically feminine yet her social aspirations weren’t just a gender prerogative. Even before Sadie’s social rise, a group of ogling men recognize something genuine and comment, “She’s a thoroughbred!” Due to the sly way TV reduces and exploits topical ideas, many Sex and the City fans probably misperceive Carrie Bradshaw as a thoroughbred rather than the mutant spawn of casual feminism and the Elsa Klensch-Bill Clinton 1990s.
But the gimmick of Carrie’s man-hunting, word-processing life (attending fashion shows, turning diaristic musings into “journalism”) contradicts the Sadie McKee virtues of hard work. Instead, in a modern, subtly political twist, emphasis is on the blandishments of Carrie’s success such as writer Candace Bushnell magnified in her original “Sex and the City” columns commissioned by The New York Observer. Collecting those pipe dreams into a book, then adapting them into an HBO series brought ultimate acclaim and justification to Bushnell’s own ambitions. Her post-lib transmutation of Helen Gurley Brown’s 1960s landmark Sex and the Single Girl performed ideological sleight-of-hand, conflating working-girls’ concerns about marriage, pregnancy and dating with a socialite’s property values. Careerism first became a fairy tale, and then it became a prime-time, implicitly unimpeachable TV institution.
The Sex and the City movie doesn’t add nuance to these characters; it simply compliments viewers’ devotion to them. At two hours-plus (the length of five episodes), there’s barely a plot. Extending Carrie’s infatuation with Mr. Big (Chris Noth) and her dream of marriage, the shallow events and superficial complications are just reminders of what the series once presented in more facile detail. It’s primarily about the core group of girlfriends bonding. Its chick-flick gimmick reinforces the delusion that the privileges on view are common to all females.
Like the TV series, Sex and the City never acknowledges that it’s about the benefits of being a middle-class, white New Yorker. The series embraced class, race and gender advantages neutrally (or disingenuously, take your pick), sharing that naïveté with viewers so that they would never question it. Carrie’s shopaholic philosophy: “You want everyday. That’s what you do. You can’t stop being who you are.” She’s simultaneously flirtatious and horrendous; her girlish guile is as venal as Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. Thanks to Parker (who did a more unnerving yet poignant variation on Carrie in The Family Stone) this became the latest spin on that Hollywood hoodwink “escapism.” And the fawning, colluding media eagerly promoted it—in fact, saluting the show as a refreshingly honest view of sex simply because it pandered to the empowered class’ wish for a guiltless view of sex and money.
That was the genius of the show’s title: Sex was a euphemism for money. Carrie’s obsession with clothes and shoes trumped her interest in men. Men (especially wealthy financier Mr. Big) were another means for her to acquire things. In the movie, Mr. Big buys her a pre-war Fifth Avenue penthouse condominium (“I’ve died and gone to real estate heaven,” Carrie meows. “Finding the perfect apartment is like finding the perfect partner”). There’s a discomforting illusion of happiness in this modern-world fairy tale. It’s tied to a sociological agenda that assesses the true money/power-fixated nature of Giuliani-Bloomberg New York but then goes: “Fuck it, I want in, too.” It’s amazing to see the women’s movement come to this: An Equal Rights Amendment fashion show.
Writer-director Michael Patrick King makes his film images as bland as TV. It’s not as egregious as I feared, just meretricious. King’s biggest departure from the series’ formula is the brief inclusion of a young black woman, Louise (played by Dreamgirls’ Jennifer Hudson) as Carrie’s er… uh, “assistant.” Watching Parker’s cynical chic angles face-to-face with Hudson’s broad-featured innocence confirms that they have nothing in common. Their employee/servant camaraderie isn’t any more enlightened than in the Joan Crawford era; they simply gush over Louis Vuitton bags—the sisterhood of consumerism. Sex and the City doesn’t improve on the questionable white dominance of Woody Allen’s Big Apple movies; but what’s more dismaying is that 22 years after Hannah and Her Sisters (praised in Vogue as “This is a movie about our kind of people, the things we like to do, the places we like to go”), a still-biased view of New York City lifestyles gets celebrated as civic pride.
Instead of modernizing the farcical tone of such classic BFF sex comedies as The Women, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire—or perhaps capturing the authentic sensibility of modern urban romance like Fever Pitch, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Two Can Play That Game or this year’s Chaos Theory—the real drive behind Sex and the City is to replace romance with laissez faire economic ideology. Carrie’s overdressed materialism suggests that she and her friends are fashionista offspring of women’s lib. Samantha’s hot-pants self-sufficiency (the film’s most interesting element), Miranda’s self-indulgent resentment about her weak husband and Charlotte’s pampered, rich-girl goofiness are all subordinate to Carrie’s cutesy greed. (During a Mexico retreat, she isn’t licking her wounds over Mr. Big jilting her at the altar; she’s missing that condo!) These beneficiaries of the women’s movement share a peculiar self-righteous insistence that a modern Cinderella fantasy is, in fact, a liberated woman’s entitlement.
They haven’t inherited a political struggle, just a wardrobe and (at least in the TV series) sex toys. This blissful, solipsistic complacency might explain Sex and the City’s once ironic appeal as gay-male camp—although the movie downplays the girls’ intrepid sexual exploits. It no longer represents a surrogate/subversive gay-male dream because the show’s romance with privilege has prevailed; it’s now everybody’s dream. Proving that television had become the new opiate of the people, Sex and the City indoctrinated viewers into the religion of acquisition and leisure—unexpectedly accomplished through the feel-good shibboleths of frivolously sexualized feminism. When Carrie wonders, “Why is it we’re able to write our own vows but not our own rules?” she isn’t rethinking the institution of marriage. Her glib surmise betrays a particular modern bias—ignorant of the hard-won truths in Hollywood’s history of women’s emotions (the ambivalence about marriage and independence that the strongest actresses defined) yet pandering to fashionable, contemporary attitudes.
Carrie Bradshaw can’t rival a truly great American fictional character like Scarlett O’Hara, whose unapologetic willfulness continues to expose the pretenses of every generation. (Although Michael Patrick King came close with Lisa Kudrow’s powerful characterization in the HBO series The Comeback.) Carrie is a figment of what both the ruling class and the working class want to believe when they sentimentalize their lot. Sex and the City pretends to be feminist, but the truth is in the movie’s wedding-gown fantasia. Showing off designs by Chanel, LaCroix, Lanvin, Dior, Herrera, De La Renta and Westwood suggests a cavalcade of indestructible Little Girl illusions. The alarming truth is that this scene’s luxe and sensuality drives home feminism’s secret affluent dreams. Smart people congratulate themselves for enjoying the Sex and the City juggernaut as a cultural advance; but are they smart enough to see that its sexy fun is the inevitable expression of invisible hegemony? [june 2008]
Every generation has a right to its own Batman. Every generation also has the right—no, obligation—to question a pop-entertainment that diminishes universal ideas of good, evil, social purpose and pleasure. And Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, is a highly questionable pop enterprise. Forty-two-year-old movie lovers can’t tell 21-year-old movie lovers why; 21 can only know by getting to be 42. But I’ll try.
After announcing his new comics interpretation with 2005’s oppressively grim Batman Begins, Nolan continues the intellectual squalor popularized in his pseudo-existential hit Memento. Appealing to adolescent jadedness and boredom, Nolan revamps millionaire Bruce Wayne’s transformation into the crime-fighter Batman (played by indie-zombie Christian Bale), by making him a twisted icon, what the kids call “sick.”
The Dark Knight is not an adventure movie with a driven protagonist; it’s a goddamn psychodrama in which Batman/Bruce Wayne’s neuroses compete with two alteregos: Gotham City’s law-and-order District Attorney, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), and master criminal The Joker (Heath Ledger)—all three personifying the contemporary distrust of virtue. We’re way beyond film noir here. The Dark Knight has no black-and-white moral shading. Everything is dark, the tone glibly nihilistic (hip) due to The Joker’s rampage that brings Gotham City to its knees—exhausting the DA and nearly wearing-out Batman’s arsenal of expensive gizmos. Nolan isn’t interested in providing James Bond style gadgetry for its own ingenious wonder; rather, these crime battle accoutrements evoke Zodiac-style “process” (part of the futility and dread exemplified by the constantly outwitted police). This pessimism links Batman to our post-9/11 anxiety by escalating the violence quotient, evoking terrorist threat and urban helplessness. And though the film’s violence is hard, loud and constant, it is never realistic—it fabricates disaster simply to tease millennial death wish and psychosis.
Watching psychic volleys between Batman, Dent and The Joker (there’s even a love quadrangle that includes Maggie Gyllenhaal’s slouchy Assistant DA, Rachel Dawes) is as fraught and unpleasurable as There Will Be Blood with bat wings. This sociological bloodsport shouldn’t be acceptable to any thinking generation. There hasn’t been so much pressure to like a Batman movie since street vendors were selling bootleg Batman t-shirts in 1989.
If blurbs like “The Dark Knight creates a place where good and evil—expected to do battle—decide instead to get it on and dance” sound desperate, it’s due to the awful tendency to convert criticism into ad copy—constantly pandering to Hollywood’s teen demographic. This not only revamps ideas of escapist entertainment; like Nolan, it corrupts them. Remember how Tim Burton’s 1989 interpretation of the comics superhero wasn’t quite good enough? Yet Burton attempted something dazzling: a balance of scary/satirical mood (which he nearly perfected in the 1992 Batman Returns) that gave substance to a pop-culture totem, enhancing it without sacrificing its delight. Burton didn’t need to repeat the tongue-in-cheek 1960s TV series; being romantically in touch with Catwoman, Bruce Wayne and The Penguin’s loneliness was richer. Burton’s pop-geek specialty is to humorously explicate childhood nightmare. But Nolan’s The Dark Knight has one note: gloom.
For Nolan, making Batman somber is the same as making it serious. This is not a triumph of comics culture commanding the mainstream: It’s giving in to bleakness. Ever since Frank Miller’s 1986 graphic-novel reinvention, The Dark Knight Returns, pop consumers have rejected traditional moral verities as corny. That might be the ultimate capitalist deception. A bleak Batman entraps us in a commercial mechanism, not art. There’s none of Burton’s satirical detachment from the crime-and-punishment theme. In Nolan’s view, crime is never punished or expunged. (“I am an agent of chaos!” boasts The Joker.) The generation of consumers who swallow this pessimistic sentiment can’t see past the product to its debased morality. Instead, their excitement about The Dark Knight’s dread (that teenage thrall with subversion) inspires their fealty to product.
Ironically, Nolan’s aggressive style won’t be slagged “manipulative” because it doesn’t require viewers to feel those discredited virtues, “hope” and “faith.” Like Hellboy II, this kind of sci-fi or horror or comics-whatever obviates morality. It trashes belief systems and encourages childish fantasies of absurd macho potency and fabulous grotesqueries. That’s how Nolan could take the fun out of Batman and still be acclaimed hip. As in Memento, Nolan shows rudimentary craft; his zeitgeist filmmaking—morose, obsessive, fussily executed yet emotionally unsatisfying—will only impress anyone who hasn’t seen De Palma’s genuinely, politically serious crime-fighter movie, The Black Dahlia. Aaron Eckhart’s cop role in The Black Dahlia humanized the complexity of crime and morality. But as Harvey Dent, sorrow transforms him into the vengeful Two-Face, another Armageddon freak in Nolan’s sideshow.
The idea is that Dent proves heroism is improbable or unlikely in this life. Dent says, “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain.” What kind of crap is that to teach our children, or swallow ourselves? Such illogic sums up hipster nihilism, just like Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World. Putting that crap in a Batman movie panders to the naïveté of those who have not outgrown the moral simplifications of old comics but relish cynicism as smartness. That’s the point of The Joker telling Batman, “You complete me.” Tim Burton might have ridiculed that Jerry Maguire canard, but Nolan means it—his hero is as sick as his villain.
Man’s struggle to be good isn’t news. The difficulty only scares children—which was the original, sophisticated point of Jack Nicholson’s ’89 Joker. Nicholson’s disfigurement abstracted psychosis, being sufficiently hideous without confusing our sympathy. Ledger’s Joker (sweaty clown’s make-up to cover his Black Dahlia-style facial scar) descends from the serial killer clichés of Hannibal Lecter and Anton Chigurh—fashionable icons of modern irrational fear. The Joker’s escalation of urban chaos and destruction is accompanied by booming sound effects and sirens to spook excitable kids.
Ledger’s already overrated performance consists of a Ratso Rizzo voice and lots of lip-licking. But how great of an actor was Ledger to accept this trite material in the first place? Unlike Nicholson’s multileveled characterization, Ledger reduces The Joker to one-note ham-acting and trite symbolism. If you fell for the evil-versus-evil antagonism of There Will Be Blood, then The Dark Knight should be the movie of your wretched dreams. Nolan’s unvaried direction drives home the depressing similarities between Batman and his nemeses.
Nolan’s single trick is to torment viewers with relentless action montages; distracting ellipses that create narrative frustration and paranoia. Delayed resolution. Fake tension. Such effects used to be called cheap. Cheap like The Joker’s psychobabble: “Madness, as you know, is like gravity—all it takes is a little push.” The Dark Knight is the sentinel of our cultural abyss. All it takes is a push. [july 2008]
Pop culture is unpredictable. David Gordon Green’s career gets a boost with the Judd Apatow production Pineapple Express although it’s not the kind of movie anyone would have predicted for the young man who made the piercingly sensitive 2000 film George Washington. Green’s debut was uncompromisingly uncommercial; now he’s become absolutely commercial—leaping from art to junk. In between, Green had stifled his own promise. Stuck in a Sundance rut, he made a series of insufferably “poetic” films (All the Real Girls, Undertow, Snow Angels—even the titles make me wince). They proved that Green never got the good counsel a young director needs and fell back on his own wan instincts.
Careerism brought Green into the unlikely orbit of shlockmeister Judd Apatow, resulting in a pop-culture surprise: Apatow’s pandering to youth in punchy, tasteless films like Knocked Up, Superbad, and Walk Hard (these titles make me wretch) kicked Green out of his lard-ass sensitivity. Pineapple Express’ story of two pot fiends—process-server/bum Dale Denton (Seth Rogan) and his marijuana-dealer/bum Saul Silver (James Franco)—both on the run from ruthless drug lords, brings out Green’s sense of humor. It seems Green likes pratfalls and violence, as do many boys of his Star Wars/Pulp Fiction generation—though not as much as Apatow and screenwriter Rogen like scatology and genitalia. Yet they all find common ground in the vulgarity of American catastrophe. The result is Green’s first watchable movie since George Washington—even if it’s ultimately worthless.
Pot serves a barely acknowledged social function in Pineapple Express (the title is a brand of high-grade dope). Not simply a means of anesthetizing escape as in Cheech and Chong’s 1978 Up in Smoke, it’s now The Chronic, part of the privilege of post-Reagan youth. Apatow’s prime demographic enjoys the racially sanctioned quasi-rebellion; it’s a casually accepted part of Apatow’s middle-class liberal Jewish comedy—an offshoot of mainstream TV’s bratty humor. Dale dates a blond WASP teenager, and Saul sells weed while sentimentalizing fondness for his grandmother, Bubbe. Green augments this typical Apatow odd couple with a third character, Red (Danny McBride), a redneck L.A. dealer who first sells out Dale and Saul, then becomes their buddy. Fecklessness is their bond, as is the enjoyment of violent pranks that saturate the narrative.
Pineapple Express is less a Jewish prince or pothead movie than a movie geek’s oddity—a sensitive kid’s version of the Quentin Tarantino/Tony Scott obscenity, True Romance. The chaos on view is not nihilistic pleasure; it’s childlike, existential slapstick—higher-grade crap than regular Apatow. Dale and Saul’s on-the-road race recalls Superbad’s odyssey amidst freaks, thugs, errant authority figures and sexual temptation. This loopy universe recalls Repo Man or Richard Lester’s movies, envisioning a crazily heterogeneous culture (a plus-size black cop; an angry, pint-sized Latina cop; a salt-and-pepper team of Pulp Fiction-style hoods). Each wacko makes startling quips while exiting a scene or being accidentally shot. Note: The sweetness at the heart of George Washington’s sadness is also evident in Pineapple Express’ cartoon violence—the way characters get up and gab after a mortal wound, or in Dale, Saul and Red’s camaraderie. When Saul questions Dale’s loyalty (“I’m a drug dealer, you don’t trust me?”) it indicates a more poignant sense of naïveté than Superbad’s ribald little rascals. Green adapts a surprising, uncouth way to express his innocence theme, along with the social paranoia that is his particular Bush 1-era specialty. Although nothing here is moving or realistically convincing like George Washington, it’s never offensive like Knocked Up and Superbad, just a capitulation to the cruder sensibility Green had previously avoided.
Scenes introducing Dale and Saul’s friendship feature slacker mania (reefer plus 227 reruns), a cult explained by their cannabis buzz but without Apatow’s mechanical TV rhythms. Green gets a buzz going between the actors: Rogen’s bulk is actually physically expressive and Franco enacts a heavy-lidded calm (he evokes Brad Pitt’s doper in True Romance but goes farther; Saul has complicated thoughts inside his mental cloud). When this duo meets the even wilder Red, McBride jacks up the mania like doing another bump. He represents Green’s rural-gothic world, bringing a taste of the authentic eccentricity in his Foot Fist Way performance—a new comic star is born.
In the ’70s-set Superbad, Rogen’s script appropriated unlikely black popular music to enliven the rule-breaking antics of his semi-autobiographical teenage protagonists. Pineapple Express’ more eclectic pop score (including the Ironside theme) expresses Green’s multi-culti youth values—from Eddy Grant’s “Electric Avenue” to Peter Tosh’s “Wanted: Dread or Alive.” But why is Public Enemy’s “Lost at Birth,” a track of such searing magnificence, put in this jokey context except to reduce it to pop trivia?
Green’s exoticizing appropriation is a cultural kink. Even dialogue bears his oddball sincerity: “We’ve got to prematurely evacuate.” “I wish we had nowhere to go.” “Monkey’s out of the bottle.” “Pandora doesn’t go back in the box, she only goes out.” Such idiosyncrasy gives Pineapple Express more shading, more feeling, than the usual Apatow/Rogen formula.
Rogen got all sappy in Superbad’s brotherhood scenes (here satirized as “bromosexual”) whereas Green imparts innocence. Dale and Saul square off in an alley but against the background of a rose trellis next to a garbage dumpster. Their Dumb and Dumber–style separation shows Saul weeping while sitting in a swing at a children’s playground. It’s George Washington-esque—as in slo-mo pot-smoking montages featuring a woodsy idyll, Dale break dancing, or trying to get a caterpillar high or dealing to school kids. Green’s gone goofy while similar scenes in All the Real Girls were screaming to be noticed for their sensitivity.
Collaborating with Apatow and Rogen’s loutishness has imposed commercial-filmmaking discipline and loosened Green’s pretenses. Surely some screenplay compromise affected the cheesy B&W opening sequence about a secret 1950s government drug experiment (“Item Nine”), fulfilling Green’s long-rumored desire to make a sci-fi movie. But it isn’t paid off during the climax.
The final drugs-guns-friendship free-for-all departs from the social significance Green is good at. This is especially disappointing after the ’50s post-war paranoia in Spielberg’s Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which resonated with current historical-political concerns—that’s an example of Pop becoming unpredictable Art.
There isn’t much significance to Apatow and Rogen’s asinine vision and aspects of Pineapple Express are down-right offensive. Dale’s relationship with a high school girl defies reason except to out-gross Woody Allen’s statuto-ry-rape romance in Manhattan. And the desperate Tarantino shoot-outs have an effect that counters George Washington’s all-American beauty. This film’s body count is primarily African American, Asian and Latino. That’s how Apatow’s gross-out humor replicates status-quo insensitivity.
It can’t be denied that Pineapple Express is crowd-pleasing junk; unfortunately it’s part of the vice-grip that Hollywood has on young people’s imagination and adults’ sentimentality. Apatow movies aren’t just com-edies; they feature submerged fantasies of power and sex (that’s why a schlub like Dale is told, “You’re great and you’re funny and you’re sexy!”) but without examining their political or emotional source. Pineapple Express reveals no more about dope trading than The Wackness, yet Jonathan Levine’s movie had richer feeling and a gen-uine sense of class inequality. That’s the kind of sensitivity Green has now sacrificed. My initial fear came from the flat, dank interiors that resemble Superbad; that movie looked like vomit and dung—and not just metaphorically. Thankfully cinematographer Tim Orr regains his sensitivity for the exteriors.
Dreadful as Green’s idiosyncrasies have become, who could have guessed the dire expense of his going Pop? BAM’s recent tribute to Green had the air of congrat-ulating him for abandoning his early racial, economic, spiritual subtexts. A recent The Village Voice article even had the brass to negate Green’s Charles Burnett and Terrence Malick influences, as if to give him a new identity pegged to the Apatow formula: Gross + Crude = Success. The precedent for this is Martin Scorsese’s first Hollywood assignment for an American International Pictures pot-boiler. Afterward, Scorsese’s mentor, John Cassavetes, famously scolded: “You’ve just wasted a year of your life. Don’t do it again.” [august 2008]
“We are naked!” gasps a victorian-era father when his middle-class Scottish daughter’s affair with a Frenchman is exposed. It’s a highpoint of the 1950 film Madeleine—one of director David Lean’s unsung masterpieces, part of Film Forum’s long-awaited series, “David Lean: Ten British Classics.” That howl of paternalistic shock powerfully reverberates throughout Madeleine, shattering the misguided notion that Lean’s movies epitomize unsensual, predictable, Tory blandness. This showcase of Lean’s first 10 features reveals one of the strongest, most impressive careers in movie history (his final six films conclude the series). Perfectionist Lean was a giant; only small-minded moviegoers would miss this retrospective.
Ironically, Lean’s most celebrated film, Lawrence of Arabia (1962), unbalanced his reputation: linking his name to the cliché of epic-length stories in exotic locales. While Lawrence is certainly one of the greatest films ever made, its awesome spectacle has obscured its precise psychological detail, grasp of history and astonishing craft. The earlier, lesser-known films are intimate spectacles—fine scrutinies of England’s class system; but, more impressively, they examine the empire’s emotional and sexual underpinnings. Lean’s second most-acclaimed film, Brief Encounter (1946), has recently been dismissed as a bourgeois weepie, largely because of the paradox of film critics (that most bourgeois profession) objecting to Lean’s spiritual dissection of their class.
Critics’ enthusiasm has, instead, shifted to Lean’s colleague Michael Powell, whose fervent theatrics (Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, Peeping Tom) carry more obvious sentiment and are easily comprehended. Lean’s reputation has suffered from his lack of ostentation. His taste and refinement have distracted casual viewers from recognizing his depth and daring—as when Madeleine mocks her father’s urge for her to marry by suggesting he wants to bring her suitor “to the boil”; the father harrumphs, “That is both vulgar and flippant!” The response isn’t stodgy—and it isn’t Lean’s. Rather, it shrewdly conveys the middle-class hypocrisy that rebellious Madeleine flouts yet secretly shares.
That Lean has a complex understanding of British class doesn’t mean he is uncritical; England’s best artists traditionally critique social inequities. But Lean’s critique is finely complicated—something even scholar Edward Said misunderstood when he fashionably slagged Lawrence of Arabia in the PC 1980s. Since 9/11, it’s been apparent that no aspect of the West’s historical involvement/arrogance regarding the Middle East escaped Lean and screenwriter Robert Bolt’s vision. Remarkably, that film’s inside/outside view of Lawrence—strategist, adventurer, homosexual, hero, enigma—is consistent with Lean’s other protagonists.
Starting with his directorial debut, the WWII film In Which We Serve (1942), Lean connected national character to cultural idiosyncrasy, personal drama to social adventure. Co-directing four films with playwright-performer Noel Coward instilled in Lean a distinct appreciation for characterization as well as a flawless sense of dramatic structure—such that Spielberg copied In Which We Serve for the dramatic climax of Schindler’s List. (It’s also significant that Lean’s early career as a film editor included the 1938 version of Shaw’s Pygmalion—another example of social critique melding personal drama into eloquent comedy.) Coward was one of the protean figures of 20th-century theater (Britain’s Orson Welles) yet Lean himself became Welles’ cinematic equal.
To this day, Lean remains an unsurpassed film artist—a supreme technician on the level of Welles, Bresson, Antonioni and Kubrick, matching their gravity and wit, too. In Madeleine, Lean’s deep-focus compositions and chiaroscuro evoke the sumptuous historicism of The Magnificent Ambersons. It starts as contemporary documentary, then cinematographer Guy Green shifts to the 19th-century setting through a style resembling high-relief engravings. Seeing this movie is like touching it. Lean’s visual command has been held against him for too long. Key to his artistry, Lean’s visual accents prove his erudition.
Although his famous Dickens films, Great Expectations (1947) and Oliver Twist (1948), also delimited his reputation, they are far more than mere literary adaptations. Both revere English cultural heritage yet bring it to life. It’s as if those books were suddenly lit from within and their meanings made radiant. Every image, camera movement, every edit and sound communicates ideas and feelings. Lean used Dickens to express what Roland Barthes called “The Pleasure of the Text,” but this was Lean’s own pleasure in kinetic narrative. Unembarrassed by cultural tradition, Lean’s sophisticated adaptations distilled Dickens to cinematic essence. The caricatures have psychological essence and social truth. Finlay Currie’s Magwitch, Martita Hunt’s Miss Havisham, Jean Simmons’ Estella and Alec Guinness’ Fagin still haunt pop culture.
Dickens’ stories of cruelty and compassion link the two through recognizable human nature and its odd ardent forms (like Guinness’ discreetly fey Herbert Pocket). For Lean, story order and balance (not Powell’s hysterics) represent an artist’s search for existential justice, which is a constant theme. He was less interested in realism than in stylizing and elucidating experience—whether with his phantasmagorical Dickens movies or his later, big-screen spectacles of man within phenomenological environments.
All Lean’s movies are Life Epics, about individuals’ (from John Mills’ Pip to Katharine Hepburn’s Rosie; and from Peter O’ Toole’s Lawrence to Victor Bannerjee’s Dr. Aziz) and their dawning conscience. This is most apparent in his underrated (or unknown) quartet of love stories: Brief Encounter, Madeleine, The Passionate Friends and Summertime. All feature female protagonists with Lean (collaborating with wives Kay Walsh and Ann Todd) visualizing their emotional candor and psychological torment. Without being a 19th-century British woman, I’m still stunned with empathy when Madeleine’s yearning for personal satisfaction leads her into the cellar of her home, pushes her to resist the codes of her society and then fight her own guilt as in the unnerving confession, “The pain makes me stupid.” Meryl Streep would give up both Oscars for dialogue that true.
In each film, Lean’s attention to weather, locale and nature represents a personal agony, as do his legendary landscapes, seascapes and skyscapes. Madeleine’s narrator describes her story as “romance,” which for Lean isn’t a lesser genre but a mature means of perceiving behavior and desire. The UK Guardian recently called these intimate dramas “personal,” but that wrongly implies that the epics were not “personal.” This series allows us to see how personal the late epics are and appreciate the epic dimensions of the early intimate stories.
Perhaps the greatest rediscovery at Film Forum is The Passionate Friends (1949). It confirms two things about Lean: his absolute artistry and his uniqueness. Of all cinema’s orthodox storytellers, Lean is the most misunderstood since Josef von Sternberg (given that the conventions Sternberg came out of have long passed into camp legend, he now stands practically sui generis). Lean’s reputation is tied to narrative forms we think we know too well, but the excitement of his movies is primarily—primally—photographic and kinetic.
Passionate Friends demonstrates Lean’s strange talent for composing shots and constructing shot-sequences that illustrate a story but also create a startling and awe-inspiring kinesthetic response. (Critics accused Lean of pictorial perfection, the John Ford crime.) It takes willful blindness to dismiss Passionate Friends as a soap opera—that’s merely its premise. Lean does audacious visual, aural and montage “experiments” throughout. It would be easy to call this Michael Powell expressionism, but Lean’s tricky; he’s got something like Cartier-Bresson’s straightforward photographic approach, yet it’s judiciously applied to moments of ecstasy and hysteria.
That scene where the love triangle—Ann Todd, Claude Rains and Trevor Howard—sit in a room and withhold emotions from each other has Lean cut-in shots of a tryst/theater ticket, cheap music playing on the phonograph, while drinks are poured and set down. It would be mundane by a truly conventional director, but Lean keys up the tension—visually. Not mere melodrama. For a movie lover, it’s an epiphany.
It’s as if Lean decided to fuck with his then-biggest hit Brief Encounter and let loose with unruly sexual desire—both the illicitness and the repression—that Brief Encounter was bursting to contain. The images and talk of bedrooms, marriage and “love” are so frank it’s almost French. (The opening chaotic New Year’s Eve ball surely was inspired by Carné’s Children of Paradise.) If this is a “woman’s picture,” I can’t think of another that so matches the sensual anarchy of Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante. (Except maybe for Ophüls’ Frenchness yet again.)
How bizarre for a veddy British filmmaker like Lean to be so artful—ribald yet controlled. Focus on Ann Todd’s performance: those glazed porcelain features that can look desperate, enchanted or desolate. She’s terrific—the screen’s most catastrophically sexual Caucasian woman until Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive. Todd is like a reverse negative of Celia Johnson’s conscientious housewife in Brief Encounter; sexual danger pours through her image like light through an x-ray. I use a photographic simile because it is appropriate to how Lean (and Guy Green) presents faces, aura, nature. Trevor Howard may be Lean’s alter-ego (the big-eared, sedate yet sexually avid British male), but Todd, the temporary Mrs. Lean, is a radiant example of the director’s spiritual conflicts. Even in black and white, she is so white and blond she anticipates O’Toole’s Lawrence—and Lawrence’s embodiment of risk-taking Imperialism.
Ann Todd’s distress is not only situational like Hitchcock’s Joan Fontaine figures; she illustrates Lean’s interest in man’s mortal distress. Nature fascinates his innate camera-eye and vivifies his sense of existence (Howard and Todd going up a funicular through clouds, or basking in lakeside sunshine). Lean’s interest in natural phenomena includes his penchant for contrasting the fickleness of human behavior against settings that are awesome and portentous.
I love how the visual allegory of emotions in Passionate Friends plays with time and memory—different angles on desire—to create one epiphany after another: Howard tensely waiting in an office while a ticker-tape machine clatters on the right and the wind blows the curtains on his left! The soft-edged flashbacks that put quotation marks around “romance” a full decade before Louis Malle did the same in The Lovers!
Lean’s epiphanies are a delirious comment on the straightness of Brief Encounter (which isn’t all that “straight” either—it’s the most intense movie ever made about stages of lust). Yet this craziness in Passionate Friends gives way to awareness of how people compromise, sacrifice and live together that may be far more adult than Brief Encounter. And is this not the ultimate Claude Rains cuckold role? But Rains’ eventual angry-husband eruption is the most thrilling and righteous of all. (Consider this and The Shanghai Gesture as movies that embarrass the hell out of Casablanca.) Rains becomes an important fulcrum for the story and the emotional shifts Lean dramatizes. “Wow!” describes the moment Rains’ secretary tries to keep the secret of her boss’ wife’s deception; Lean plays suspensefully with various points-of-view including a hotel guest’s singular, lonely, petulant, gay vanity. (This subtle suggestion of the secretary’s unrequited love bests the wife fetishizing John Wayne’s army coat in The Searchers.)
Accumulating images of complicated, thwarted emotions leads to the film’s final coup: Convention says cheating wife Todd will not commit suicide but Lean’s superbly rendered emotionalism—his vertiginous visual style—commands that she will indeed; that she will do what Celia Johnson only dared in Brief Encounter. And this gives genuine surprise to her fate. “Woman’s fiction” conventions are subverted. Yet, there’s one more turn in the story and this, in the final shot, can only be described as beautifully tragic. Passionate Friends’ characters are emotionally naked. Lean goes beneath the manners—the high-life, the genitalia—to their souls.
It’s fitting that Film Forum resurrect Lean’s 1970 Ryan’s Daughter giving viewers the opportunity to finally understand Lean’s most trammeled intimate-epic, summing-up his misunderstood artistry. Recently praising Ryan’s Daughter, director John Boorman recalled Lean’s death-bed testimony: “We’re very lucky. We got to make movies.” Now the luck is ours. This David Lean series ignites the fall film season and sets film history right. [september 2008]
Movies, at their greatest, are personal endeavors. That’s true for audiences as well as filmmakers—especially Terence Davies, whose newest film Of Time and the City continues his individual exploration of the medium. Once again, Davies revisits his youth growing up in post-WWII Liverpool, England—as in the masterly features Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes. Now, instead of fashioning lush dramatic recreations that use avant-garde narrative structures, Davies arranges straightforward documentary images taken from archival footage shot by others. Forced to find a new means of production, this new style breaks through to a deeper way of seeing. But how will it fare at a time when lightweight, derivative kitsch like Benjamin Button is taken seriously?
Realistic historical proofs confirm Davies’ unique method of cinematic testimony. Combing through British archives assists Davies’ memory retrieval. Financed as an official history of Liverpool, Of Time and the City isn’t that any more than Gerry and the Pacemakers’ “Ferry Cross the Mersey” was. But like that 1960s British Invasion hit, it proves the spiritual reality of Liverpool through the sincerity of Davies’ recall. He narrates the film himself: “We love the place we hate; then hate the place we love. We leave the place we love; then spend a lifetime trying to regain it. Between loving and hating the real journey starts. Do you remember? Will you ever forget?” Through unabashedly theatrical cadence, Davies pours all his artistry into these images.
Because Davies’ style is both formal and idiosyncratic, you cannot distance yourself from his recollection. By presenting history in a personal manner, he stirs your own memories of youth, of home and of media. Like that magnificent Long Day Closes sequence of school-, church- and movie-going rituals unified by the pop song “Tammy,” Davies appraises shipyard, tenement and factory scenes; relating them to classical and pop music. It is the most extraordinary demonstration I know of the postmodern experience.
What’s postmodernism? If you’ve ever felt a pang of longing from home movies, family photos, old movies or songs, then the formal innovations in Of Time and the City will tell you. Davies’ breaks through the intimidating and alienating use of found footage by experimental directors like Bruce Conner or James Benning. That’s not a slam but a distinction. These images are more than material but totems brimming with unguarded emotion. Of Time and the City isn’t a high-minded anti-capitalist critique but a rich panoply of the historical and spiritual facts of industrial-age life. Quotations from Joyce (“As you are, we once were”) to Engels (“Removed from the sight of happier classes, poverty may struggle along as it can”) combine political awareness with passionate empathy. Davies cites De Kooning: “The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.” Then replies, “The trouble with being rich is that it takes up everyone else’s.” He pinpoints the problem of hegemony.
Opening with an old-style movie palace as its sumptuous red curtains unveil a brilliant white screen, Davies establishes a familiar mode of dreamlike projection. His meticulous eye lives up to hushed expectation. Though he didn’t shoot this footage, each clip is handled like a personal memento, explicating England’s Free Cinema documentary tradition. Davies’ legato pace (nostalgic/analytical) confers emotional grandeur very similar to the recognition of psychic and sociological violence in Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep montages. Scenes of vast cheering soccer crowds and beaches loaded with sunbathers convey the phenomenon of desperate leisure. Women washing laundry, workers filing in and out of factory gates are awesome in themselves but overwhelming when Davies adds choice musical scoring (Ewan McColl’s “Dirty Old Town”) and his own acerbic observations (“We had hoped for paradise. We got the anus mundae”).
Selecting from other people’s images conveys the evanescence of memory. It’s amazing that the anonymous documentarians’ best instincts match Davies’ own. He achieves a fragile sense of loss, anxious to capture the exact significance of a passing moment. Memorializing quotidian life, he provides ironic grace: as when happily chanting schoolgirls are linked to a diva’s operatic finesse. It conveys Davies’ process of maturation and his class aspirations.
While sexual identity is a major theme (“caught between canon and the criminal law, I said good-bye to my girlhood”), spiritual longing is bigger. Of Time and the City uncannily parallels Guy Maddin’s charming, satirical gay-memoir film, My Winnipeg, but this more rigorous concept—sticking to actual documentary footage as in shots of a heterosexual couple kissing—achieves a greater sense of outsider’s regret and desire. These are the two most original, ingeniously written films of the past year, yet Davies doesn’t retreat into subculture like Maddin but reworks nostalgia for the universality of its tenderness and comedy.
Towards its conclusion, the documentary evidence of working-class stress inspires indignation, unleashing Davies’ harsh rejection of Catholicism and his disillusionment with “fossil monarchy.” But Davies connects intimate yearnings to his political and existential quandary to demonstrate the importance of movies and music as means of spiritual sustenance. One scene reveals how his repressed sexuality sought the formality and elegance of ballroom dancing. This explains his grave formalism as well as his fuddy-duddy disdain for rock ’n’ roll. The Beatles may have become synonymous with Liverpool but Davies dismisses John, Paul, George and Ringo as “Not so much a musical phenomenon but a firm of provincial solicitors.” Only an artist so passionately devoted to pop music can get away with that perversity. Davies redeems himself by including a Hollies war requiem and with an extraordinary montage where Peggy Lee’s “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” addresses Liverpool’s bitterest home truths.
Throughout his career Davies has referenced T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and here he quotes it directly (“In my end is my beginning”). There’s been nothing this ravishingly highbrow since the compendium of literary quotes in Godard’s Nouvelle vague. Yet it’s most effective when juxtaposed with the power of popular music and movies. Of Time and the City should inspire moviegoers to pursue full recognition of their cultural experience. Davies doesn’t detach art from life; he knows it’s the key to what makes us citizens and humans. [january 2009]
Claire Denis must be the most exoticizing filmmaker Europe has ever produced. Barely telling conventional stories, her best films—Chocolat, Beau travail and the new 35 Shots of Rum—are ruminations on the peculiarities of colonialism: How the white West interacts with the Dark cultures it has appropriated. Denis’ unique vision departs from traditional storytelling; she’s interested in phenomena of mood and circumstance—the visual rhythms of sexual and racial irony.
35 Shots joins what Truffaut called “The French Tradition of Quality” by queering it. Denis opens with an étude of advancing/receding train tracks recalling Jean Renoir’s memorable motif in the 1938 La Bête humaine, but this time the train conductor is a middle-aged black man, Lionel (Alex Descas), contending with technological and social pressures. Drawing from Renoir’s tale of psychologically stressed social mobility—and, significantly, Fritz Lang’s 1956 remake Human Desire—Denis uses the working-class premise to survey a neglected aspect of contemporary France—represented by widower Lionel’s intimate French-African community: his daughter Josephine (Mati Diop); neighbors Noe (Gregoire Colin) and doting Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue), who moonlights as a cab driver; and a retired railroad coworker Martial (Djedje Apali).
Deliberately shifting to the dark side of town, Denis can’t quite escape Bwana/social-worker inquisitiveness. She’s studying Lionel’s world as much as reveling in it and her collaboration with cinematographer Agnes Godard makes this excursion seductive and beautiful.
At first, 35 Shots evokes 1980s multiculturalism—that sympathetic, urbane transfer between classes, cultures and races epitomized in the high/lo pop of Jonathan Demme (Something Wild) and neo-bohemianism of Jim Jarmusch (Mystery Train). Today, multicultural pop feels less compelling partly because its immediate inspiration and social urgency are gone, replaced by society’s increasingly familiar crossbred—what ’80s British pop magazines called “beige”—reality. Europe’s self-consciousness about its colonialist history coming home to roost through rising third-world immigration has become an observable cinematic fact.
Yet Denis exceeds the humanist realism in André Téchiné, Ducastel-Martineau and Dardennes brothers movies that show the new face of Europe’s ethnic coexistence. Better yet, she gets beyond Jarmusch’s smug, multiculti complacence (which has even infiltrated commercial films seeking hipster caché like Judd Apatow’s Funny People where RZA approvingly calls Seth Rogen “my nigga”). Denis’ fascination with the other (despite the colonialist guilt that it bears) remains inoffensive because it is humanely enlightened.
A scene in Josephine’s college economics class contains a discussion about the World Bank, third-world debt, Frantz Fanon and the history of slavery. It offers the first grasp that 35 Shots is dealing with French tradition differently—viewing history and contemporary circumstance in systemic terms. “You’re not here to hope or despair,” the professor instructs Josephine, “but to develop critical skills, rhetorical skills, analytical skills. That’s what we’re trying to achieve. Try again.”
This scene makes Denis’ political sympathies blatant but it importantly improves on the insufferable classroom scenes in Laurent Cantent’s horribly paternalistic The Class—the recent art-film model of liberal consciousness that actually did little more than condescend to both third-world kids’ and Old Europe’s resentments.
Through Denis’ richer vision, 35 Shots depicts a larger theme: how this new social class learns, assumes and changes Frenchness. When Josephine says, “Debt can be discussed without getting full of emotion,” but, “precisely, rigorously, technically,” she is, in fact, describing Denis’ distinctive style. Avoiding narrative convention, Denis rejects the tradition of quality’s implied sentimentality for an emphasis on time and reflection—the drift that is so popular among today’s unskilled young filmmakers who distrust narrative efficiency. (If only a mumblecore film like the “post-racial” Medicine for Melancholy could develop similar style, audiences might be seduced into rapturous fascination with people/subjects.) Yet, Denis is nearly masterful. Her seeming casual view of Lionel’s world, elliptically showing connections between people and events, is actually precise, rigorous and technically determined.
One highpoint takes place in Amour Jeu, a bar where Lionel and his circle convince the African proprietress to open after hours. As a sociological document, this scene descends from Edouard Manet’s 1881 masterpiece A Bar at the Folies-Bergere. It condenses various tensions of ethnic-urban struggle and relaxes them. The characters dance in a swirl suggesting cappuccino stains and Gitanes cigarettes; its tone perfect for the rhythm of The Commodores’ “Night Shift” on the juke box—a Western song that spotlights the cultural continuity maintained among African émigrés. The effect is something like the strange Canadian West Indian hip-hop monochrome of How She Move but with more emotional detail. Nothing in current arthouse guru Pedro Costa’s stylized view of immigration (a scandalous demeaning of black pathology into stylized friezes) can match Denis’ compassion and insight.
35 Shots demonstrates Denis has focused her usually amorphous interests. Even the retired worker’s subplot—which initiates the title’s toast to pride, confidence and endurance—suggests a New World Order reality more complex than even the Dardennes could admit. Drifting through the drama of unrooted lives, Denis closely observes Lionel and family’s fight against alienation—as during a side trip to Germany, Josephine’s mother’s birthplace. Josephine herself embodies cultural irony; a biracial beauty, she’s yet a classic jeune fille like Bouchez, Bonnaire and Ledoyen. When Denis casually introduces Josephine’s wedding day, the lingering close-up of the bride’s neck as her father drags jewels across the nape is simultaneously erotic, cultural and political. It confirms how in Denis’ exotic vision, everyone is beautiful. [september 2009]
James Cameron’s love of technology is enough to sell Avatar to fans awaiting his first techno-feat since 1997’s Titanic. But will they understand the awful thing he’s done with it? Avatar’s highly-touted special effects depict an army from Earth traveling to Pandora, a moon in the Alpha Centuri-A star system, to mine rare ore from under its inhabitants; tall, blue-skinned creatures with tails called the Na’vi. These F/X show Cameron’s ex-Marine hero, Jake Sully (the great everyman Sam Worthington), taking part in a quasi-military program where he enters the alien society via a hybrid body (an avatar) made from human and Na’vi DNA. Cameron’s “fully immersive” 3-D technology is irritating to watch for nearly three hours. And then there’s his underlying purpose: Avatar is the corniest movie ever made about the white man’s need to lose his identity and assuage racial, political, sexual and historical guilt.
Only children—including adult children—will see Avatar as simply an adventure film; their own love of technology has co-opted their ability to comprehend narrative detail. Cameron offers sci-fi dazzle, yet bungles the good part: the meaning. His undeniably pretty Pandora—a phosphorescent Maxfield Parrish paradise with bird-like lizards, moving plant life and floating mountains—distracts from the inherent contradiction of a reported $300-$500 million Hollywood enterprise that casually berates America’s industrial complex.
Cameron’s superficial B-movie tropes pretend philosophical significance. His story’s rampant imperialism and manifest destiny (Giovanni Ribisi plays the heartless industrialist) recalls Vietnam-era revisionist westerns like Soldier Blue, but it’s essentially a sentimental cartoon with a pacifist, naturalist message. Avatar condemns mankind’s plundering and ruin of a metaphorical planet’s ecology and the aboriginals’ way of life. Cameron fashionably denounces the same economic and military system that make his technological extravaganza possible. It’s like condemning NASA—yet joyriding on the Mars Exploration Rover.
While technically impressive, Avatar is basically a daft version of the Transformer movies’ sci-fi, techno fantasy. Michael Bay’s extraordinary gift for flashy spectacle found perfect expression in the gargantuan slapstick comedy of technology run amok; his teenage characters’ rapport with cars and machines showed an ambivalent relationship with the things that expedite human activities yet threaten our peace and our history. Avatar, however, invents an alternate world to make the airy-fairy pronouncement: “There’s a network of energy that flows through all living things.” Alien-girl Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) teaches Sully how to bond with a tie-dyed, eagle-like creature by docking his wriggly tail into it. “Feel her!” Neytiri urges, and Cameron emulates the boy-plus-car symbiosis of Transformers—but with pulsing loins, veins and orifices. Better than Titanic’s kitschy romanticism, it is Cameron’s most sensual incident since the husband-wife airlift of True Lies yet, strangely, this sexualized conquest suggests latent fascism in his style.
Bay’s exultant technological thrills climaxed with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’s war metaphor, where mankind’s historical continuity was at stake. But Cameron gets sappy and hypocritical. Set in the near future, Avatar is a throwback to the hippie naïveté of Kevin Costner’s 1994 production Rapa Nui (directed by Kevin Reynolds). While prattling about man’s threat to environmental harmony, Cameron’s really into the powie-zowie factor: destructive combat and the deployment of technological force. At first, Sully, a “warrior and dreamwalker” like The Matrix’s Neo, is shown as a fierce, sculpted meathead with a wounded look in his wide eyes. Cameron lights Worthington superbly in tremendous, empathetic close-ups, yet when Sully’s involvement with the avatar project increases—as hair and beard grow in—his humanity becomes nondescript and he identifies with the Na’vi. (It’s disappointing that the great Worthington only appears in a quarter of the film; most of the time Sully is a Smurf.) Going native allows Cameron to move on to the violent technology he really loves—though never scrutinizing Sully’s new bond with an angry red dragon or how Sully’s temperament becomes dangerously enflamed.
Here’s the hypocrisy: As Sully helps the beleaguered, virtuous aliens fight back and conquer the human invaders, Avatar puts forth a simple-minded anti-industrial critique. Despite Avatar’s 12-year gestation, Cameron’s obviously commenting on the Iraq War—though not like his hawkish Aliens. Appealing to Iraq War disenchantment, he evokes 9/11 when the military topples the Na’vi’s sacred, towering Tree of Souls. The imagery implies that the World Trade Center was also an altar (of US capitalism), yet this berserk analogy exposes Cameron’s contradictory thinking. It triggers the offensive battle scenes where American soldiers get vengefully decimated—scored to the rousing clichés of Carmina Burana.
The fantasy of Sully giving up the impediment of his (American) humanity is a guilt-ridden 9/11 death wish. References to “fight terror with terror” and “shock-and-awe campaign” don’t belong in this 3-D Rapa Nui with its blather about the Na’vi’s “direct line to their ancestors.” Once again, villainous Americans exhibit no direct communication with ancestors. That’s Cameron’s fanboy zeal turned into fatuous politics. He misrepresents the facts of militarism, capitalism, imperialism—and their comforts.
Cameron’s seditious hero cheapens Neveldine/Taylor’s timely concept in Gamer, where modern characters took responsibility even for their avatars’ misdeeds. Invested in his own techie legend, Cameron never risks Neveldine/Taylor’s honest critique of our technological dependency—which would be to examine national values. Cameron’s deep failing as a pop artist lies in the fact that, unlike the avant-garde Neveldine/Taylor team, he’s a techno-geek who conflates mindless sentimentality with meaning.
Avatar’s going-native F/X fantasy infantilizes Cameron’s technology-infatuated audience; they’ve never read Joseph Conrad on colonialism or feel any compunction about balancing politics and fantasy. There’s even a Busby Berkeley-style tribal dance to divert them. Also, Avatar’s techno-exoticism involves blue cartoon creatures, not brown, black, red, yellow real-world people. It’s the easiest, dumbest escapism imaginable. [december 2009]
Sometimes directors grab an opportunity just to stretch their filmmaking muscles. That explains both Mark Romanek’s new venture, Never Let Me Go, and why Paul W. S. Anderson has essayed Resident Evil: Afterlife, his second movie in the Resident Evil series, which he initiated with the fantastically swift, streamlined and compelling original film in 2002.
In Afterlife, Anderson confirms his astonishing gift for imagery and frighteningly good action craft. Despite the grim, pessimistic CapCom video game premise where Alice (Milla Jovovich) fights a constantly mutating, globe-threatening virus—like Ripley always battling those aliens—Anderson finds ways to depict apocalyptic scenarios that actually suggest foresight. They have a stylish, sharp-witted sense of the future and a dreamy, exciting faith in human resilience embodied in Jovovich’s lithe, resourceful, strikingly lovely Alice, as well as a group of survivors that include actors Boris Kodjoe and Ali Larter.
If critics and fanboys weren’t suckers for simplistic nihilism and high-pressure marketing, Afterlife would be universally acclaimed as a visionary feat, superior to Inception and Avatar on every level. Just look at how Anderson activates his canvas in the plane crash sequence. First, the shock of the crash is solarized in a wide shot, then he cuts to the interior where the imagery is frozen yet the camera pans left, moving through suspended time, characters and objects, all composed in perfect pop-art balance like a James Rosenquist panorama, and then the camera pivots—and in 3-D!
Anderson redeems that techno-gimmick which James Cameron foolishly hawks as a gateway to new perception because he realizes it’s just a play thing, not a New Age talisman. Anderson toys with 3-D for artistic caprice, constantly shifting levels, distance, perspective, layers. He’s a clear-eyed visionary who expiates videogame cynicism, insisting on imaginative potential. When Alice is resurrected from her android state (“Thank you for making me human”), it confirms Anderson’s ingenuity as a life force.
Afterlife opens with deceptively dark movie homages to Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg, plus teasing riffs on Hitchcock’s The Birds, Terminator, even The Texas Chainsaw Massacre when Jovovich and Larter team up to face down a terrifying male behemoth—it’s a stunning bad bitcharama. Anderson never got the respect he deserved for his great Death Race. But now that opportunity’s knocked again, he knocks it into the stratosphere. [September 2010]
Prediction: it might take five years before most people see The Social Network for what it really is. That’s about how long it will take to flush it through the media system, thus allowing viewers to respond without interference. The same holds for the education documentary Waiting for “Superman” which clutters the same ground already covered more incisively by The Lottery, a documentary the mainstream media practically ignored. The difference is that Waiting for “Superman” has a bigger promotional budget and the surfeit of liberal guilt appeals to media sanctimony.
All this distortion owes to what’s been called film culture’s “democratization,” a misleading term for how the expansion of film discussion beyond journalism’s art pages and all over the Internet has weakened our cultural foundation and decentered aesthetic and political authority. As uncredentialed experts multiply and flounder, we’re all victimized by hype.
Or, as film critic Molly Haskell astutely observed: “The Internet is democracy’s revenge on democracy.” Nothing proves that better than all the hype for The Social Network, which enshrines Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s anti-social behavior without understanding how his neuroses set the agenda for Internet bullying and film culture chaos.
Consider how film criticism now works: Publicists select favorable media outlets to create advance buzz (embargoing others) and then, with frat-boy mentality in effect, no one else in cyberspace dares dissent from the hype. Ironically, The Social Network locates the origin for this unprincipled practice in Zuckerberg’s misconduct. To praise this movie is to praise the whole rotten system.
As Chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle (which is now in its 76th year), I proudly pledged to defend “the dignity of criticism” as specified in the organization’s original charter, but it couldn’t have happened at a more difficult time. This summer’s most alarming movie event was watching the critical profession get drowned out by trendy aggregate websites.
Reviews of blockbuster films Toy Story 3 and Inception by established professional film critics [myself particularly] received a record number of largely intemperate posts on the RottenTomatoes site, which then expanded into wholesale Internet attacks by agitated fanboys and upstart blogs. A new model of cultural response is taking over: criticism of criticism—and critics—as a pointless, snarky substitute for examining films themselves.
Support for this sea change is apparent in the way mainstream publications—Wall Street Journal, Time magazine, Washington Post, USA Today—covered the RT melee as either amusement or as a legitimate new form of discourse. At one point, over three million Google results offered links to the ad hominem ferocity which suggests that group-think and mobmentality happens beyond the Internet’s lunatic fringe. This ignorant viciousness threatens to become the standard. If so, the era of erudite criticism we once knew is finished.
Attacks from bloggers—crude interlopers of a once august profession—are not about diversity of opinion. What’s at root is an undisguised rivalry. Every moviegoer with a laptop claims equal—vengeful—standing with so-called professionals. This anti-intellectual backlash defies the purpose of the Circle’s founding in 1935. Professional dignity is the last thing Internetters respect. Their loudmouth enmity and lack of knowledge are so overwhelming that it is imperative to put this crisis in perspective.
These new social networks overturn the informed judgments and occupational decorum of journalist-critics, substituting the glib enthusiasms and non-discriminating devotion of apparently juvenile cliques. Worse yet, this schoolyard style of peer group fanaticism has devolved into all-out, ugly intimidation: Internet bullying. It has begun to sway the professional ranks already frightened by media transitions that have cost many of my colleagues their jobs.
The most important concern exceeds the critical profession; it’s the danger these changes pose to the culture in general. Ridiculing the need for mature thought and discriminating judgment diminishes film culture. Any opinion that challenges the blockbuster market gets punished. We never experience a healthy exchange of ideas. The social networking approach to criticism encourages anti-intellectual harassment and the excoriation of individual response; it may spell the end of critical habits altogether.
When was the last time you had a good conversation about a movie? Not watercooler chat about box-office scores, but a discussion dissecting what a movie says, means or how it relates to your life? Every weekend, box-office reports bring the bad news that the public is being discouraged from talking about what any of the hits or flops actually are about. When the largest number of posts on a single topic in the history of aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes appeared, stemming from my review of Toy Story 3, points made in my critique of the movie were ignored in favor of the site’s arbitrary percentage-point system. The wild, hostile response was so extreme it became news in itself, but not the film’s style, aesthetics or content, not even the nastiness and racism bloggers unleashed.
What has not received widespread attention is the total disregard for interpreting or understanding a film. Useless clamor distracts from the fact that the decline of intelligence regarding popular culture has become routine; fanboy enthusiasm has replaced reflection. Musician Neil Young first noted this problem in the 2004 song lyric “No one could explain it/It just got great reviews.”
Consider the illiterate belief in “spoilers” that now restricts critical discussion: Fear of “spoilers” nullifies any attempt at detailed interpretation or explanation of a film. It forestalls the tendency to analyze meaning and content that used to be a tenet of liberal arts education. Somehow the critical practice of analysis, reflection and comparison has not dawned on today’s consumers or taught them the merits of a reasoned response. In the blockbuster era, criticism has wound up in a disrespected place where it no longer addresses audience’s needs for enlightenment and excellence. Criticism has lost its educative function and the culture loses its moral foundation.
In 2008, The Dark Knight’s Internet minions gave the first sign that there was a disgruntled cyberspace underground. Now their asperity rules discourse. This generation has never been affected by lively, impassioned, informed criticism, only by Hollywood hype. And job-panicky critics have helped this dumbing-down by going along, responding to movies like thrill-hungry teenagers, colluding with commercialism. They are allied with blockbusters that, by the very impersonal nature of blockbusters, leave fanboys feeling anomic, running to the Internet, screaming for attention. Ignorant of their own minds, they throw brickbats and bad names at any professional opinion that brings attention to their own susceptibility.
The Internet’s querulous, sarcastic backtalk should not be mistaken for intellectual debate; it’s schoolyard bickering, enmity from an otherwise voiceless mob unable to synthesize opposing points of view. What’s missing from the Internet hordes’ mean spirited griping is the learned skepticism, detachment and rationalization that are essential to intelligent cultural consumption and maintaining individual taste and choice. The late Pauline Kael’s warning, “Criticism is the only thing that stands between the audience and advertising,” has gone unheeded thanks to the newly empowered nonprofessional bloggers. Now, movie watchers—including some scared reviewers—have lost faith in journalistic criticism as a trustworthy source of information or judgment.
In giving up, they merely rubber-stamp the summertime notion that criticism is meant to only promote movies. But criticism should be an act of reasoning that prepares us to reason through life. The Internet’s free-for-all and anonymity fosters gullibility and incivility even among those who consider themselves film-lovers. And when film discourse becomes discourteous, mindlessness takes its revenge on reason. This critics’ nightmare is a movie huckster’s dream. It demeans us all. [september 2010]
In 2002, the New York Film Critics Circle came close to naming Jackass: The Movie the year’s Best Nonfiction Film until more traditional-minded members (after some audible grumbling) pushed the vote to the since-forgotten Standing in the Shadows of Motown. (Some might call that a cop-out.) Now, Jackass 3D continues the prankster series that began on MTV and, at last, has picked up a kind of honor: Jackass 3D held its premiere at the Museum of Modern Art.
Clearly, notions of respectability have changed since ’02, but so has the mainstream’s understanding of the Jackass phenomenon’s significance. Curator Josh Siegel put Jackass 3D in the same tradition being celebrated in MoMA’s series “More Cruel and Unusual Comedy: Social Commentary in the American Slapstick Film,” which showcases movies from the silent era that dared to crack the funny bone before tickling the mind. The Jackass crew—Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera, Chris Pontius, Wee Man and Steve O—perform Three Stooges-style slapstick with mischievous disregard for propriety and safety. Turning their bodies into pincushions, punching bags, toilets and vomit projectors, they publicize redneck recklessness as a form of foolish all-American freedom.
Jackass stunts are clearly stuff parents wouldn’t sanction their rowdiest sons to do—with the exception of Bam Margera’s parents (ursine Phil and grinning April), who are eager, if often surprised, participants in the set-ups. They provide an adult-to-kid context that proves risk and folly are not limited to youth. It may have something to do with the American sensibility for individual fearlessness and license. Jackass 3D upgrades the silliness by incorporating the latest—hallowed—Hollywood technology. And be grateful for that. Seeing feces and dildos poke-out at your customized goggles puts all James Cameron’s high-falutin’ pronouncements about “immersion” in correct perspective: it’s not only a filmmaking gimmick, it’s also a marketing gimmick.
Through such candor, Jackass 3D isn’t exactly subversive: How can it be when it doesn’t take itself seriously? It is, thankfully, irreverent of all pomposity.
Siegel cites the tradition of slapstick as social commentary, but that’s only accidentally true of Jackass 3D. Having derived from the venal, shameless laboratory of MTV’s mad scientists who are devoted to exploiting teens and young adults by luring them into hedonism, narcissism, alcoholism and shopping, there’s no room for commentary—just consumerist anarchy by example. Despite a disclaimer that warns against imitating the Jackass stunts, most of the acrobatics and hazing routines cost money (and standby EMS) to perform. The promptings of drugs and idiocy notwithstanding, these kamikaze acts tell less about the mental state of these irresponsible boy-men than about our youth culture’s open sleaziness.
Cultural critic Richard Torres’ 2002 assessment of Jackass: The Movie—“It’s not homoerotic, it’s just homo”—wittily cut to the masculinist basis of these Iron John/Burning Man rituals run amok. Credit one of the series’ producers (and sometime participant), Spike Jonze, with the knack for turning such polymorphous perversity into something akin to surrealism. But keep in mind an important difference: the Surrealists weren’t paid by Sumner Redstone. Back then “Shock the Bourgeoisie” was not an expected part of the entertainment marketing. The only surreal element of the Jackass films is the thin line between performance and humiliation. The line between silly and psychotic wavers. Knoxville and crew absorb all definitions of gender as well as gender-fuck (although this time I missed Pontius’ bouncy, glitter-thonged Party Boy shtick), and they come out free.
The Jackasses laugh at their own virility and fearlessness. This allows them to ring clownish variations on classic examples of social critique: One routine has a Jackass hold an apple between his buttocks as a pig snorts it out and returns for more—mocking the horrific moment of unmanning in Deliverance. But most often Jackass 3D offers outrageous changes on comic form: A bar fight among dwarfs is the most conventional, containing a complete, unified scenario. Steve O’s Super Cocktail Bungee routine in a feces-filled port-a-john utilizes distance and trajectory in a way that recalls the great waterslide joke in Norbit (and should help rehabilitate that wonderful film’s unfair reputation). Bam’s fear of snakes gets aroused with Indiana Jones-style torment. There’s even perfect dramatic/comic balance in the recurring meta-motif of a cameraman constantly repulsed by the odorous antics. Revulsion or jittery trepidation is what acknowledges the existence of standard perimeters or at least the audience’s own squeamishness.
Jackass 3D can also be considered an inkblot that tests popular perception of what is tasteful and, of course, what is male. Director Jeff Tremaine’s final 3D trick is a celebration with in-your-face explosions, wreckage and confetti.
It imitates the destruction of bourgeois materialism at the end of Zabriskie Point, then becomes an end-credits montage singling out each of the Jackasses alongside their nostalgic schoolboy photos. An accompanying Weezer tune, “Memories,” describes a longing for innocent carelessness. It’s an indulgence, but to understand it is to understand why the terrorists hate us and why Jackass 3D is also a political documentary. [october 2010]
Violence and sarcasm are overvalued in the Coen Brothers’ reputation. Shallow evaluations of the Minnesota-born filmmaking team always, mistakenly, refer to Blood Simple, Fargo and Miller’s Crossing as career highpoints, as if to turn the Coens into elegantly acerbic hipsters, the Steely Dan of filmmakers. But their new film, a non-sarcastic remake of the 1969 Western True Grit, confirms the Coens’ underappreciated seriousness and their ongoing winning streak. True Grit’s neofolktale follows Mattie Ross, a 15-year-old girl out to avenge her father’s death by bringing his killer to justice or final judgment. It’s a sincere story on the personal costs of retribution; too good to be cheapened by those who want the Coens to ratify their own smartass cynicism.
As ever, the Coens outwit cynicism. They are slyly humorous—pairing officious little Mattie (Hailie Steinfeld) with Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), the booze-bag old bounty hunter she hires to help her manhunt—but they’re also concerned with moral consequences. More than simply a remake, this True Grit shows the Coens responding to the classical Western, a genre they updated in No Country for Old Men (still misunderstood as a serial killer spree rather than a film about difficult moral reckoning). In True Grit the Coens take on the myths by which Americans establish their customary principles. Mattie’s aggrieved innocence and determination thrusts her into a world of compromised virtue and desperation, interacting with Cogburn, Texas Ranger Labeouf (Matt Damon) and various wilderness miscreants encountered on the road. This American odyssey is textured with religious overtones from the hymn “Lean on Jesus,” introducing martyrdom in the dark opening image of a cabin lit only by a hearth fire that resembles a crucifix.
Through adult Mattie’s memory-narration, the Coens mournfully re examine Wild West archetypes. This includes Henry Hathaway’s original film along with John Ford’s essential contribution to the Western’s legacy. At certain points, the Coens and ace cinematographer Roger Deakins evoke iconography from Ford’s 1957 The Searchers, which has become the cynic’s model for the Western’s depiction of race, violence and Manifest Destiny.
When Rooster looks into an abandoned mineshaft, his silhouette recalls The Searchers’ final image of John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards, memorably framed as an unregenerate outsider whose transgressions exempt him from communion in the American home. The Coens’ new image obliterates home, an unsentimental perspective, fully aware of the moral compromise Old Rooster, a white man who kicks little Indian children, represents. (“He is pitiless, double-tough.”) Later, that silhouetted viewpoint is repeated when Mattie commits an act of violence and falls into a pit, cast into a moral void: She lies trapped next to a human carcass with snakes slithering through its skeletal chest cavity.
Moments like this deepen the Coens’ vision beyond elegant hipster sarcasm. They stir a graver response than the dread critics cherish in Fargo and No Country for Old Men. The old-timer’s wisdom Sam Elliott parodied in The Big Lebowski is sincerely intended here. It’s part of a forgotten temperament, like the Coens’ fond use of period lingo and arch expressions (“He has abandoned me to a congress of louts”) that call up Mark Twain as much as The Bible for the traditional moral terms it implies. When Rooster cradles a delirious, snake-bitten Mattie, her struggling suggests a realistic resistance that Ford left out of the moment John Wayne rescues Natalie Wood in The Searchers. (“Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” sung in a voice that mixes anguish and longing, becomes a powerful spiritual, cultural plea.) Instead, the Coens’ rescue sequence imagines a fevered long night of American moral agony. (It was a daytime ride in the first version.)
This way, True Grit speaks to our current moment of vengeful, moral uncertainty. It continues the same revamped Americana that distinguished the Coens’ sophisticated remake of The Ladykillers—a truly original religious-political hybrid. When Mattie sleeps in a mortuary, the story consecrates her existential stress (“I felt like Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones”), connecting cynicism to a spiritual, cultural foundation as in their half-satirical Yiddish prologue to A Serious Man. This view of the Western’s brutality challenges recent cultural standards regarding violence and sarcasm as established by Quentin Tarantino. Now, True Grit is no longer just a tall tale; it clarifies the Coens’ feelings about violence and America’s spiritual history.
After a confrontation with two suspicious men in a cabin, Rooster looks shocked at the up-close violence—something no QT character ever does. And Mattie’s jolt at witnessing killing (“I was in the middle of it. It was a terrible thing to see”) restores the humane response that Tarantino nihilism has neglected. In Jonah Hex, Neveldine/Taylor’s Western reboot provided catharsis for its explosive vision of very modern-seeming moral turpitude. The Coens’ depiction is not necessarily better, just subtler: Deakins’ exteriors contrast daylight in trees with moonlight spreading across a blasted landscape. It envisions the Western as American history’s moral testing ground. Bridges previously essayed this in Walter Hill’s 1995 Wild Bill, a more psychologically probing Western; here, he describes a complex, realistic figure within John Wayne’s mythic largeness. Moral complexity is the Coens’ point, as when Labeouf gets a man in his gunsights then prays before firing, like the sniper in Saving Private Ryan. Their genuine solemnity—and True Grit’s depth—comes through in Mattie’s old age but especially in the scene where a wounded Labeouf confesses to young Mattie, “I am considerably diminished.” It is a prophetic statement of what retribution does to the body as well as the soul. [december 2010]
Mike Leigh’s Another Year looks at social net-working from a mature point of view. Its middle-aged characters, a small group of long-time family, friends and co-workers in London, have a familiarity with each other that turns everyday relations—whether on the job, when traveling or at meals—into startling, vivid and intimate exchanges. This partly has to do with the closeness and understanding that comes with friendship, even kinship, but it’s also the pure pleasure of Another Year’s immediate and constant sympathy.
Leigh’s filmmaking has reached a level of expressiveness where observation becomes revelation and revelation—in the sense of clarifying spiritual and political connections—becomes storytelling. Another Year’s plot does not build to the hoary theatrical contrivance of a calamitous situation where lies and resentments are exposed. (Although that’s obviously in the background of the director of 1996’s Secrets & Lies.) By now, Leigh has also transcended those Humphrey Jennings, Ken Loach roots that linked him to docudrama, kitchen sink convention. He honors their verities, yet his landscape is not so much authentic English environs (as suggested by his “Shooting London” lecture commissioned at last fall’s New York Film Festival); Leigh’s mode is social interaction. The basic British Socialist ideal is transcended into a literal correction of Facebook’s remote dynamics—and this is certainly the year to do it: Leigh focuses on the human face, the territory that features the spectacle of the soul.
Lesley Manville (Mary), Jim Broadbent (Tom), Ruth Sheen (Gerri) and Imelda Staunton (Janet)—all Mike Leigh regulars—live into their roles. They hardly seem to be doing anything except representing recognizable behavior—the rare sight of middle-aged folk involved in daily perseverance (what the girl in Neil Jordan’s Ondine called “the mundane”). They cope in the midst of labor, busyness, respite, communion, obligation or surprise. No self-conscious deliberation seems required for these actors to reveal humanity. Leigh orchestrates their eye contact, flush complexions, even their very breathing, like notes and rhythm in a symphony (as in a remarkable moment when Sheen hugs-it-out with Manville; her exasperation is purged in the very sound of Sheen’s sigh).
Watch the early scenes of Staunton’s unhappy housewife for the depths of withdrawal, her rebellious, self-gnawing anger. A soliloquy of extreme temperament, it’s arranged by Leigh for difficult counterpoint with Sheen’s extraordinary, empathetic patience. It becomes a duet that defines compassion; its subtle dynamics establishing Another Year’s theme and Leigh’s artful humanism.
It’s almost anathema in today’s cultural climate to make a film about non-youth experiences after youth. (“It’s a young person’s prerogative to be noisy,” Tom says.) No doubt part of the reason critics—but not the public—flipped over The Social Network has to do with its indulgence of college-years folly and betrayal. It celebrates the media class’ disingenuous nostalgia for their own frat days and post-adolescence; offering the excitement of bad behavior and distrust yet avoiding moral reflection, it settles for self-pitying patronization of the rich and powerful. In Another Year, Leigh demands that viewers look past superficiality and guile that, in youth, is not fully answered for. Doing so permits Leigh to make a landmark cinematic discovery: Middle Age as the moment of self-consciousness.
Chagrin, obligation, judgment, desperation, the hard facts of middle age, make the movie fascinating even as it defies thrill-hungry, narcissistic film culture. (That’s why this amazing movie has come up short during awards season.) Conceiving his story in terms of a movement through the seasons, Leigh captures the weight of swiftly passing years. Not a trite gimmick, the atmospheric changes are visually compelling, although the funereal winter is almost aesthetically trite; yet Leigh and cinematographer Dick Pope justify the conceit—possibly nodding to Ozu. Mortality shadows these characters even in the midst of life.
“We all get older,” says Gerri, a female counselor who’s seen it all. Leigh depicts self-pity as spiritual self-abuse. It takes various neurotic forms such as Mary’s compulsive flirting or Ken’s (Peter Wight) gluttony; like Mary, Ken drinks and smokes beyond adult license. It’s how he wards off desperation. Leigh pinpoints this in the casual way Ken is introduced: he seems an anonymous bloke carrying two cans of beer on a train but mere observation turns into moving perception with our awareness of Ken’s abiding panic and then his personal history. Mary similarly drinks and smokes; she’s always anxious but she’s also always desirous which enlarges the character past her peers’ free-floating panic. Mary’s hopeless sense of being ridiculous puts her in the class of Blanche DuBois and Manville’s grasp of such fragile strength (“My looks work against me”) is equally memorable.
Instead of going for big pathos, Leigh takes common tragedy and willfully contrasts it with the stability of Tom and Gerri’s marriage—a coy cartoon poke at the unfairness of life and the mystery of human symbiosis. Their happy marriage may not be explainable, but it’s implicitly understood. This surpasses romanticism, it is the insight of maturity. Leigh graduates from Happy-Go-Lucky’s benevolence to a profound sense of understanding that one’s humanity and vulnerability are always exposed—not as a matter of drama but of sensitivity. It’s a vision that equates to such senior stories as Make Way for Tomorrow, The End of the Day and a magnificent time-obsessed classic that advised “42 cannot tell 21 about this; 21 can only know by getting to be 42.” Another Year recognizes the richness (not always happiness) of age. [december 2010]
Give 20th Century Fox credit for releasing Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life as a movie and not as a glue-trap for year-end awards. Five films into Malick’s eccentric 40-year career, it’s understood that he intentionally brands himself as art-minded. Indifferent to the usual commercial concerns of mainstream filmmakers, Malick has always exercised the privileges of erudition, which lend each of his films the aura of a cultural event. But that doesn’t mean The Tree of Life is a great movie—despite the pole-vaulting ambitions of its title.
Just when you get accustomed to Malick’s precise hand-held camera movements and sly jump-cuts that give elegant spontaneity to the illusion of a family’s idyllic-then-tragic life in a small Texas town, The Tree of Life shifts style and tense to observe the beginning of the cosmos, then pre-history, then shifting again to examine the infinitesimal origins of cells. Those huge leaps are not immediately coherent, but Malick does them with such domineering confidence that viewers will accept his grandiose allusions to phases of life and the construction of time—his belief in his own visual poetry.
Perched on a cliff of near self-parody, The Tree of Life dares to reveal Malick’s idiosyncratic—and humorless—interest in existential occurrences. He uses America’s past to showcase mankind, nature and time. The Texas O’Brien family (Father Brad Pitt, Mother Jessica Chastain and three boys well-cast for remarkable genetic similarity as their sons) supplies a story context for Malick’s personal speculation on spiritual themes. His previous movies grew from the germ of mid-20th century pop ideas: juvenile delinquency (Badlands), the industrial revolution (Days of Heaven), war (The Thin Red Line) and colonialism (The New World). Being of the movie-brat generation, Malick related those subjects to familiar genres and iconography that he expanded into what critic and Malick-scholar Gregory Solman accurately termed phenomenological epics.
As an artiste, Malick collates spiritual signs, questing for meaning; an ambition that achieved its fullest expression in the historical, political, sexual, racial paradoxes of The New World. But The Tree of Life is little more than a grab-bag of generational preoccupations: outer-space explorations and inner space doubt. Starting with a scriptural quotation from the Book of Job, Malick depicts a nuclear family’s disillusionment still evident in son Jack O’Brien’s adulthood (played by Sean Penn), whose modern anomie is depicted in familiar cold, gleaming industrial settings that contrast warm, lyrical boyhood memories of his father’s frustrations as businessman, artist and parent. Malick digresses with études on Intelligent Design, where CGI scenes of prehistoric animals, mitochondria and phallic fish are meant to reflect later aggression in human behavior. But these aquarium/observatory tropes get mixed-up with Malick’s own quasi-profound (quasi-religious) reaching: dividing Father and Mother as Nature vs. Grace in voiceover counterpoint. The son’s eventual questioning of authority (“Why should I be good if you aren’t?”) is either blasphemy or just the ultimate ’70s youth-rebellion—with no small amount of New Age sentimentality. Koyaanisqatsi, anyone?
“Tell us a story from before we can remember”—one of O’Brien’s sons’ requests of his mother—typifies Malick’s storytelling impulse. Always undeniably romantic and nostalgic, he will transcend nostalgia through specific adolescent fetishes: key instances of private pleasure, lonely perceptions, secrets. These are often pop myths (like the dinosaurs and planets), but they can also be psychic myths, as when Young Jack (played by Hunter McCracken) spies on arguing couples or sneaks a bit of women’s lingerie, leading to a signature Malick surmise, “What have I done? What have I started?” and equating sex, guilt and sin. Malick falls back on these surmises as a reflex: montages on sibling rivalry, filial resentment and a clever, expansive sequence where the O’Brien boys imitating a street drunk becomes a confrontation with the infirm, then with criminal-class unfortunates. Frankly, these meanderings cause Jack’s symbolism to go berserk—from Job to Judas to Cain to Abel. Malick’s poetry loses sociological and political grounding. That’s what distinguished David Gordon Green’s George Washington; Green had the timely good fortune (and Charles Burnett influence) to add substance to Malick’s method of reveries.
Pauline Kael memorably derided Days of Heaven as “a Christmas tree; you can hang all your old metaphors on it.” The Tree of Life is overloaded with pensées—Malick’s visual metaphors—but the grand ideas bloat its human drama, making it banal, as when alienated Jack wanders among ferns outside impersonal office towers. It’s less effective than Alain Resnais finding weeds sprouting between the concrete of city streets in Wild Grass, a whimsical, instantaneous image revealing nature, progress and idiosyncrasy.
Everything Malick attempts in The Tree of Life was already achieved in Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments, a memoir that used a wife’s photographic talent to probe human relations and social progress. And Robert Altman already perfectly revised American family heritage in the vivid, expansive memory sequence of his Sam Shepard adaptation, Fool for Love. Those films achieved cinematic poetry naturally by focusing imagination, history and destiny.
In The Tree of Life, Malick prioritizes self-conscious artistry over any coherent concept of family, society or the origins of life. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s clean light is pretty but inexpressive; it plays into Malick’s vain idea of cinema as a kinetic picture-puzzle. Yes, some of these images refer to D. W. Griffith’s strong and fluid visions of man-in-nature and Jean-Luc Godard’s ironic view of society’s spiritual decline in the midst of divinity in Nouvelle vague, but much of The Tree of Life is not transcendent; it looks like greeting-card homilies. There’s not enough specificity to all this self-conscious “beauty.” For example, Chastain’s performance is mostly exquisite mime since Malick neglects to articulate Mother’s consciousness, spending more time with Young Jack’s rebellion and McCracken’s menacing glower. But this could also be due to Malick’s great leap backwards—undisciplined poetic storytelling that leaves out connections between primordial instinct and the modern cultural habits and biological drives that exist eons later. It’s as if Malick was making up for time lost to his ’70s peers and sought to combine the stoner astonishment of 2001: A Space Odyssey with the inherited family depression of Death of a Salesman. [may 2011]
Annette Bening’s sincere, intelligent speech at last week’s New York Film Critics Circle Awards ceremony should be the cultural decree of the new year. It was the finest, calmest explanation of the relationship between critics and artists that we’re ever likely to hear in this era of media-crazed sensationalism.
“Something my husband often says that I think is very true is that actors are like gardenias: very, very fragile and sensitive to criticism. And I think what’s also clear [here tonight] is that critics… feel very vulnerable to criticism as well,” Bening said. “We have a symbiotic relationship. We need each other. We need you to write carefully and thoughtfully about the cultural, political and sociological context that filmmaking lives in. We need you to keep a close eye on us. It’s part of how it always has been in terms of performance and criticism. It’s not new. And we want your approval—desperately—that’s just in our nature. There’s something very important about that, and there’s something important about being able to try to function under the watchful eye of criticism. That’s how it all works.”
As NYFCC Chairman, I felt Bening’s speech was like music (I told her so). It’s climax was the simple statement: “It’s not new.” Sadly, this symbiosis is something that most film critics and audiences don’t understand. Cowed by editors and publishers who have relinquished truth and intelligence to the promotion of power and money—resulting in the overweening tabloid nightmare that is today’s mainstream—some reviewers prefer the tired, poisonous myth that critics are hostile and inferior to filmmakers and performers. They forget that it’s up to critics, not film producers or publicists, to maintain critical authority and standards and not bend to the will of marketers. Bening’s speech asserted our interrelationship as well as our equality; it was the first such statement I’d ever heard in 24 years of attending NYFCC events.
Prior to Bening’s speech, director Darren Aronofsky presented the cinematography award to Matthew Libatique, his photographer on Black Swan. He used the occasion to make a weak joke about my negative review of the film, published by this newspaper. He got the old antagonisms rolling, then naive Michelle Williams and gullible Mark Ruffalo followed suit, perhaps nervously thinking this is what film folk do in the presence of critics: a rare chance to settle scores. That’s precisely the inanity that Bening responded to, extemporizing about her colleagues’ apprehensiveness and the clearly misunderstood function of criticism. She termed it our mutual “vulnerability”—humanizing the confusion in a gracious, almost sexy-maternal way that was compassionate as well as sophisticated.
Compassion and sophistication are what we’ve lost in this age of media transition and chaos, exacerbated by the Internet where no standard of quality or principle exists. Bening’s words have received little attention in the media; instead, a deliberate distortion of the Jan. 10 gala has viciously misrepresented the truth. (Numerous bloggers spread the rumor that my compliments to the guests were in fact insults that made Bening cry.) I recognize this as a pitiful attempt to maintain the status quo—keeping critics and performers at bay as a way of perpetuating the power advantage of exorbitantly paid Hollywoodians over their Fourth Estate handmaidens. Even at last year’s NYFCC soiree, the audience of reviewers, gossip columnists and showbiz invitees guffawed when George Clooney boorishly lampooned the performer-critic relationship, snidely bragging he wouldn’t invite a certain critic to his Italian villa. Clooney’s bad manners went uncriticized as the acceptable thing to do. Now, Internet gossip spread a false account of the evening: Gawker and other websites twisted Aronofsky’s attack on me into malicious reports that I offended the attendees. These lies merely intimidate readers and journalists to be subservient to celebrities.
Yet something more egregious has occurred. The attempt to damage my reputation bounces back on the entire critical institution. The evening that I had introduced as “a celebration of film and criticism” got perverted into after-the-fact mudslinging that revealed criticism as a viper pit of enmity and discord—uglier than anything Bening’s thoughtful words could allay.
Public Indecency is what the police call an offensive, unwanted display of private parts. It’s also what Entertainment Weekly critic (and blogger) Lisa Schwarzbaum and The Village Voice’s critic Jim Hoberman committed when they took to the Internet with sick fantasies and vituperation about what happened at the Critics dinner. The Schwarzbaum and Hoberman duo are so consumed with envy and anger regarding my third tenure as the NYFCC Chairman (the only African American to ever do so) that they broke solidarity with the organization through their public hostility. Revealing their pettiness once again, this cabal of New York film elites—who clog festival juries and committees, yet are incapable of discussing art, politics, religion or history—have forsaken critical debate and resorted to personal insult and deliberate mendacity. Their narrow-minds and small hearts are apparent in the rivalry they raise, yet don’t have the integrity to openly engage. It’s sordid to have to admit this: the lies Hoberman and Schwarzbaum have perpetrated about me actually sully themselves and, what’s worse, it embarrasses the entire practice of film criticism.
Schwarzbaum’s betrayal of the Circle should disgust any right-thinking person. As a former Chairman, she should know the position’s enormous pressure and protect the Circle’s unity, yet she has behaved contemptibly. She and Hoberman resemble children who can’t win an argument and so want to pout. In screening rooms and meetings, they huddle together, sniggering and giggling in packs like the not-cool kids in junior high school.
Hiding behind the facade of publications with larger circulations, they assume professional integrity that doesn’t exist. Oddly, they welcome being pissed on by movie people, then display the obnoxiousness of middle-class cowards who resent less-empowered people not like themselves.
Yes, racism motivates Schwarzbaum and Hoberman. They pretend to be hip and ladylike, but they’re simply the type of class oppressors unique to the bourgeoisie. Blue-collar people would likely be straightforward and more honest, but these pseuds harbor unexamined ethnic prejudices, political partisanship, intellectual pretenses and jealousy.
Fact is, they’re shills: uninterested in free expression or different points of view. Their lives are committed to promoting Hollywood and controlling culture and criticism. Their dishonesty is symptomatic of the media’s corruption. For years now, Hoberman hasn’t been able to stand the heat of the New York Press’ competition. They cannot abide any challenge to their influence—a danger epitomized in the dubious consensus surrounding The Social Network, which is nothing more than a memorial to in-group ruthlessness. Tellingly, the film remains unsupported by public enthusiasm. Yet Hoberman is so incestuously positioned in media and suspiciously connected to the bohemian and art scenes that he’s got New York film culture toadying and cowering before his most sinister whims.
Legions of Internet clones—what one secretive critic termed “Hobermice”—imitate his bigoted art and race preferences and follow his telepathic command. It’s called hegemony. A real despot, Hoberman makes Internet hoards bend the truth. (The Gawker rumormonger is, in fact, married to Hoberman’s The Village Voice editor.) As for Schwarzbaum, a less interesting intellect, her position at Entertainment Weekly makes her a minion of the status quo while her personal connections—she’s buddies with pseudo-historian and former EW editor Mark Harris, who annually freeloads as Schwarzbaum’s escort to the event, then disparages the NYFCC in print—confound basic social gentility. Schwarzbaum’s the sort who comes to your party, brings her rude friends, eats your food, drinks your liquor, walks out in a huff without saying “Thank you,” then complains in public that the host is ungracious.
EW, a publication that brainwashes its readers into consumerist idiocy, is home to Schwarzbaum’s lifelong mantra “The Oscars matter!” It’s the mentality of autograph hounds, which is how Schwarzbaum and the Hobermice, in their post-awards-dinner tantrum, want to reduce the NYFCC.
That’s why they extol the elitism of The Social Network, the prizewinner I duly acknowledged at the podium. For the record, here’s how I introduced presenter (and Schwarzbaum pal) Tony Kushner: “Our Best Film Award goes to The Social Network, the movie that made the mainstream recognize the significance of the Internet and how it has changed all our lives. We would be remiss if we did not take a moment to remember Tyler Clementi, the gay Rutgers student bullied by the Internet who then placed his suicide note on Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook the week The Social Network premiered. This film about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg portrayed a self-absorbed soul who took his frustrations out on his friends and the world. By coincidence, it reminded me of Tony Kushner’s musical Caroline or Change—which I always tell him I want Spielberg to film—where the black Southern day worker Caroline memorably prayed, ‘Lord, don’t let my sorrow make evil of me.’ By lucky coincidence, Kushner is here to present the New York Film Critics Circle’s Best Film of the Year Award to The Social Network and its producers Scott Rudin, Michael Deluca, Dana Brunetti and Cean Chaffin. Surely Kushner, whose great play Angels in America showed how spiritual and social connections transformed lust and duty to family, friends and country into moral responsibility, will explain why The Social Network is deserving.”
Kushner’s presentation—glib and fast-paced—avoided addressing hegemony just as Hoberman and Schwarzbaum always ignore it. Their fit of public indecency brings pettiness, sour grapes—and their privilege—into the open when normally it never affects public perception of the critical ranks. Yet, this is the awful state of things in criticism—an expanding yet ever-diminishing breed.
Attacking me doesn’t add to the aesthetic appreciation of film—by which The Social Network and The Kids Are All Right look more like TV than cinema—it only exposes Schwarzbaum’s pathetic, vindictive need to manipulate film culture. Now that that awful truth is out, we should take heed and beware the mainstream’s tendency to avoid discussing “the cultural, political and sociological context that filmmaking lives in” as Bening suggested. It exposes the shameless, indecent Schwarzbaum and her ilk as frauds. Envy makes evil of them.
Everybody who was at the lavish Crimson event space last week knows it was a lovely evening and that the gossip is a lie. Only the tabloid public and swarms of undistinguished bloggers can be duped into believing Schwarzbaum and Hoberman’s slander. They have placed a pall over journalism. But everyone should remember Annette Bening’s wise words. [january 2011]