2005: The year of living strenuously
by ANTHONY LANE
If you were out of the country, or out of your mind, for the past year, you may wish to know what you missed. One glance at the titles of the most admired films, and you will wonder what the hell was going on. “Brokeback Mountain,” “Broken Flowers,” “Crash”: that’s an awful lot of breakage. Yes, you might say, but those are fancy pictures. How about the rugged weekend viewers, hauling their good sense to the multiplex? What did they pay to watch? “Wedding Crashers.” Ouch.
There is nothing new, of course, in the promise of fracture. Whether you crash a wedding or an Imperial Starcruiser, movies are the place to do it. This year will mark the seventieth anniversary of “San Francisco,” in which Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy keep body and soul together in the jetsam of an earthquake. After the literal wreckage of 2005, which began with the aftershock of an undersea quake, and whose litany of the homeless stretched from New Orleans to Kashmir, cinematic fantasies of disaster feel more flippant than ever. Yet “San Francisco” is an exercise in American stoicism, and the wryness and proficiency with which its characters respond to chaos remain a defensible dream. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, amid the finger-pointing, lay a tempting thought: If only Spencer Tracy had been in charge.
No wonder Hollywood has turned to old John Carpenter films. He was one of the last directors to trade repeatedly in underreaction, that most precious of screen commodities. In his glory days, he made wiry thrillers like “Assault on Precinct 13” (1976), which closed with this exchange between a cop and a prisoner:
“You’re pretty fancy, Wilson.”
“I have moments.”
Both that film and “The Fog” have been remade in the past year, neither to any purpose; producers, in their lavish innocence, seem to believe that cool, like Christmas leftovers, can be reheated ad infinitum. Still, one understands their plight. CGI has encouraged cinema to hit levels of bombast that even Cecil B. De Mille, dozing in his boudoir, would have considered a touch de trop, and if we worshipped Orlando Bloom’s Legolas, in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, that is because he seemed elfishly underwhelmed by the very spectacle that was wowing the rest of us. Hence the crushing comedown of this year’s “Kingdom of Heaven,” Ridley Scott’s crusader epic, in which Bloom wore the air not of a militant knight but of a worried boy who badly needed to pee.
In its dicing with political prejudices that it dimly knew to be important and its fatal inability to relax, “Kingdom of Heaven” was a workable median for the movies of 2005. From the unarguable tripe of “Alexander” and “The Phantom of the Opera,” at the back end of last year, through the torn families of “Proof” and “Cinderella Man,” to the furrowed indecision of “Munich,” there has been a marked reluctance to breeze through any setup. Movies come loaded these days, more like a cart than a gun. The forthright Bill Murray of “Ghostbusters” (“This chick is toast”) was anesthetized into the Bill Murray of “Broken Flowers,” cast as an unfeasible Don Juan in search of former belles, and urged to sit perfectly still in a tracksuit, with the lights turned down, until we saw in him our common nullity. Even “Brokeback Mountain,” for all its delicacy, felt obliged to add a couple of chunky scenes, not in Annie Proulx’s original tale, in which Jack rebuked his father-in-law, and Ennis chewed out a pair of apelike bikers. As he stood there, with Fourth of July fireworks flaring behind him, I thought, O.K., we get the point—gay men can be strong Americans, too.
The box-office returns for 2005 are not yet complete. “King Kong” is still slugging it out with “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” and my money is on Tilda Swinton to beat the crap out of the primate. Other slots have already been filled, by such masterworks as “Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith,” “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” “War of the Worlds,” “Batman Begins,” and “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” All their plots depend on a fear of the unknown (or, if you are Brad Pitt, a fear of Angelina Jolie), and yet their creators’ deepest fear is that we might not know in advance what the unknown consists of. That is why most of the highearners are either sequels or remakes—born, in other words, with brand recognition intact. We must not kid ourselves that the market leaders of old sought to frolic with the avant-garde; the most successful movie half a century ago was Disney’s “Lady and the Tramp,” and a decade before that it was “The Bells of St. Mary’s,” with Bing Crosby in a dog collar. Nevertheless, today’s contrast between the mayhem onscreen and the splintered nerves of the industry behind it feels freshly ominous. The studios, hunting for templates, trust nothing but a proven winner, however ropy it was in the first place, and they dread to think that we, in turn, might dare to take new characters on trust.
A while ago, I spoke with a class of film students. Each of them, smart and keen, sketched out for me the bones of a screenplay that he or she was writing. Two things rapidly became clear. First, there was not a speck of comedy in sight. These kids were not just serious about their work; they could conceive only of characters who were serious about their lives. Second, when I suggested that those characters might be slipped, unheralded, into the action I was gently corrected, not by the students but by their teacher. “We don’t do that here,” he said. I knew, courtesy of Hamlet, that there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, but it now appears that the sparrow will request a cut of the DVD sales and a backstory the size of “Moby-Dick.”
It is this want of resolution—of the will to believe that a movie, like a poem, can deliver a person or a predicament straight into our hands—that leads to a bummer like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Tim Burton decided to burden Mr. Wonka with a miserable childhood and a package of flashbacks; since when did a Roald Dahl hero or villain need to be explained? Burton is a dreamy and inventive fellow, so why does he think we’re so dumb? Stranger by far was David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence,” in which Viggo Mortensen, after a heroic defense of his small-town diner against robbers, winds up on the TV news, and thus finds his misty, murderous past creeping back at him, like smoke under a door. The movie was all backstory: tense and tormenting while it was hinted at, but slackening into silliness, complete with puffed-up gangsters, once it was fleshed out. Nothing in the second half of the movie told you as much as the terrifying grace of Mortensen’s gunplay in the diner. Reactions speak louder than words.
So, what were the highlights of 2005, and what hopes can we summon for a year in which the densest streams of ticker tape will float for “X-Men 3”? Well, we got Ralph Fiennes starring in, and surpassing, “The Constant Gardener”; we got Philip Seymour Hoffman doing the same with “Capote”; and, above all, we got Kevin Pollak’s impersonation of Christopher Walken in “The Aristocrats,” which I would describe as hair-raising if Walken had ever been hair-lowered. The most rackety fun I had all year came in the first twenty minutes of “Wedding Crashers,” which demonstrated that Vince Vaughn is either a genius or an escaped lunatic who should not be approached without a stun gun, yet even that farce declined into soulful whimsy, as did “Hitch.” I did laugh at the end of “The Revenge of the Sith,” but that was from pure relief, much as the people of Stalingrad gave a bitter, mirthless grin when the siege was finally lifted.
As for complete films, the one that struck me most forcefully was a German-Turkish production, “Head On.” The year before that, my favorite was Russian (“The Return”). In 2003, it was Swedish (“Lilya 4-Ever”). In 2002, it was Mexican (“Y Tu Mamá También”). In 2001, it was Swedish again (“Together”). In 1999, it was French (“The Dreamlife of Angels”). This is not as I would wish. America is a formidable machine for moviemaking, with all the fuel it needs, but the kinds of story that it now chooses to tell of itself, and the appetite for such nourishment—the taste for mass public shows, that is, rather than unhypnotic home entertainment, which you can snap out of when you need a beer—may be shrinking beyond recall. The last year in which our wits and our senses alike could feed on homegrown products, thanks to such disparate dramas as “Gladiator” and “Wonder Boys,” was 2000; before that, there were delights from Richard Linklater, with “Dazed and Confused” and “Before Sunrise”; from Wes Anderson, with “Rushmore”; from Bryan Singer, with “The Usual Suspects”; and from Curtis Hanson, with “L.A. Confidential.” All of the above were amused, grown-up entertainments made by men who weren’t trying too hard. One hopes that Hanson’s “In Her Shoes,” of last year, was a soft-soled blip, and that order and toughness will be swiftly restored to his work. If 2006 is going to yank American movies out of the rut, we need something pretty fancy from Hanson and his peers. We need moments.
[New Yorker, issue 16-1-2006, posted 9-1-2006]
RB
If you were out of the country, or out of your mind, for the past year, you may wish to know what you missed. One glance at the titles of the most admired films, and you will wonder what the hell was going on. “Brokeback Mountain,” “Broken Flowers,” “Crash”: that’s an awful lot of breakage. Yes, you might say, but those are fancy pictures. How about the rugged weekend viewers, hauling their good sense to the multiplex? What did they pay to watch? “Wedding Crashers.” Ouch.
There is nothing new, of course, in the promise of fracture. Whether you crash a wedding or an Imperial Starcruiser, movies are the place to do it. This year will mark the seventieth anniversary of “San Francisco,” in which Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy keep body and soul together in the jetsam of an earthquake. After the literal wreckage of 2005, which began with the aftershock of an undersea quake, and whose litany of the homeless stretched from New Orleans to Kashmir, cinematic fantasies of disaster feel more flippant than ever. Yet “San Francisco” is an exercise in American stoicism, and the wryness and proficiency with which its characters respond to chaos remain a defensible dream. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, amid the finger-pointing, lay a tempting thought: If only Spencer Tracy had been in charge.
No wonder Hollywood has turned to old John Carpenter films. He was one of the last directors to trade repeatedly in underreaction, that most precious of screen commodities. In his glory days, he made wiry thrillers like “Assault on Precinct 13” (1976), which closed with this exchange between a cop and a prisoner:
“You’re pretty fancy, Wilson.”
“I have moments.”
Both that film and “The Fog” have been remade in the past year, neither to any purpose; producers, in their lavish innocence, seem to believe that cool, like Christmas leftovers, can be reheated ad infinitum. Still, one understands their plight. CGI has encouraged cinema to hit levels of bombast that even Cecil B. De Mille, dozing in his boudoir, would have considered a touch de trop, and if we worshipped Orlando Bloom’s Legolas, in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, that is because he seemed elfishly underwhelmed by the very spectacle that was wowing the rest of us. Hence the crushing comedown of this year’s “Kingdom of Heaven,” Ridley Scott’s crusader epic, in which Bloom wore the air not of a militant knight but of a worried boy who badly needed to pee.
In its dicing with political prejudices that it dimly knew to be important and its fatal inability to relax, “Kingdom of Heaven” was a workable median for the movies of 2005. From the unarguable tripe of “Alexander” and “The Phantom of the Opera,” at the back end of last year, through the torn families of “Proof” and “Cinderella Man,” to the furrowed indecision of “Munich,” there has been a marked reluctance to breeze through any setup. Movies come loaded these days, more like a cart than a gun. The forthright Bill Murray of “Ghostbusters” (“This chick is toast”) was anesthetized into the Bill Murray of “Broken Flowers,” cast as an unfeasible Don Juan in search of former belles, and urged to sit perfectly still in a tracksuit, with the lights turned down, until we saw in him our common nullity. Even “Brokeback Mountain,” for all its delicacy, felt obliged to add a couple of chunky scenes, not in Annie Proulx’s original tale, in which Jack rebuked his father-in-law, and Ennis chewed out a pair of apelike bikers. As he stood there, with Fourth of July fireworks flaring behind him, I thought, O.K., we get the point—gay men can be strong Americans, too.
The box-office returns for 2005 are not yet complete. “King Kong” is still slugging it out with “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” and my money is on Tilda Swinton to beat the crap out of the primate. Other slots have already been filled, by such masterworks as “Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith,” “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” “War of the Worlds,” “Batman Begins,” and “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” All their plots depend on a fear of the unknown (or, if you are Brad Pitt, a fear of Angelina Jolie), and yet their creators’ deepest fear is that we might not know in advance what the unknown consists of. That is why most of the highearners are either sequels or remakes—born, in other words, with brand recognition intact. We must not kid ourselves that the market leaders of old sought to frolic with the avant-garde; the most successful movie half a century ago was Disney’s “Lady and the Tramp,” and a decade before that it was “The Bells of St. Mary’s,” with Bing Crosby in a dog collar. Nevertheless, today’s contrast between the mayhem onscreen and the splintered nerves of the industry behind it feels freshly ominous. The studios, hunting for templates, trust nothing but a proven winner, however ropy it was in the first place, and they dread to think that we, in turn, might dare to take new characters on trust.
A while ago, I spoke with a class of film students. Each of them, smart and keen, sketched out for me the bones of a screenplay that he or she was writing. Two things rapidly became clear. First, there was not a speck of comedy in sight. These kids were not just serious about their work; they could conceive only of characters who were serious about their lives. Second, when I suggested that those characters might be slipped, unheralded, into the action I was gently corrected, not by the students but by their teacher. “We don’t do that here,” he said. I knew, courtesy of Hamlet, that there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, but it now appears that the sparrow will request a cut of the DVD sales and a backstory the size of “Moby-Dick.”
It is this want of resolution—of the will to believe that a movie, like a poem, can deliver a person or a predicament straight into our hands—that leads to a bummer like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Tim Burton decided to burden Mr. Wonka with a miserable childhood and a package of flashbacks; since when did a Roald Dahl hero or villain need to be explained? Burton is a dreamy and inventive fellow, so why does he think we’re so dumb? Stranger by far was David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence,” in which Viggo Mortensen, after a heroic defense of his small-town diner against robbers, winds up on the TV news, and thus finds his misty, murderous past creeping back at him, like smoke under a door. The movie was all backstory: tense and tormenting while it was hinted at, but slackening into silliness, complete with puffed-up gangsters, once it was fleshed out. Nothing in the second half of the movie told you as much as the terrifying grace of Mortensen’s gunplay in the diner. Reactions speak louder than words.
So, what were the highlights of 2005, and what hopes can we summon for a year in which the densest streams of ticker tape will float for “X-Men 3”? Well, we got Ralph Fiennes starring in, and surpassing, “The Constant Gardener”; we got Philip Seymour Hoffman doing the same with “Capote”; and, above all, we got Kevin Pollak’s impersonation of Christopher Walken in “The Aristocrats,” which I would describe as hair-raising if Walken had ever been hair-lowered. The most rackety fun I had all year came in the first twenty minutes of “Wedding Crashers,” which demonstrated that Vince Vaughn is either a genius or an escaped lunatic who should not be approached without a stun gun, yet even that farce declined into soulful whimsy, as did “Hitch.” I did laugh at the end of “The Revenge of the Sith,” but that was from pure relief, much as the people of Stalingrad gave a bitter, mirthless grin when the siege was finally lifted.
As for complete films, the one that struck me most forcefully was a German-Turkish production, “Head On.” The year before that, my favorite was Russian (“The Return”). In 2003, it was Swedish (“Lilya 4-Ever”). In 2002, it was Mexican (“Y Tu Mamá También”). In 2001, it was Swedish again (“Together”). In 1999, it was French (“The Dreamlife of Angels”). This is not as I would wish. America is a formidable machine for moviemaking, with all the fuel it needs, but the kinds of story that it now chooses to tell of itself, and the appetite for such nourishment—the taste for mass public shows, that is, rather than unhypnotic home entertainment, which you can snap out of when you need a beer—may be shrinking beyond recall. The last year in which our wits and our senses alike could feed on homegrown products, thanks to such disparate dramas as “Gladiator” and “Wonder Boys,” was 2000; before that, there were delights from Richard Linklater, with “Dazed and Confused” and “Before Sunrise”; from Wes Anderson, with “Rushmore”; from Bryan Singer, with “The Usual Suspects”; and from Curtis Hanson, with “L.A. Confidential.” All of the above were amused, grown-up entertainments made by men who weren’t trying too hard. One hopes that Hanson’s “In Her Shoes,” of last year, was a soft-soled blip, and that order and toughness will be swiftly restored to his work. If 2006 is going to yank American movies out of the rut, we need something pretty fancy from Hanson and his peers. We need moments.
[New Yorker, issue 16-1-2006, posted 9-1-2006]
RB
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