Some Came Running

Cameron Crowe, Victim Of Auteurism

Don't try this at home: Charles Boyer, Jennifer Jones, and Philip Morris, Cluny Brown, Ernst Lubitsch, 1946

Last evening, near the end of Film Twitter’s “We Need To Talk About Cameron” quasi-telethon, the critic Tina Hassannia registered some disapprobation thusly:

“ALOHA reviews are all framed in the auteurist framework, which inherently treats the white, male director as an artist worthy of discussion.”

“It doesn’t matter what you think of the movie, at the end of the day what’s important is: what’s going on with Cameron Crowe?”

“Now imagine trying to have a similar conversation about any mediocre, messy, or outright bad movie by a director who isn’t white or male.”

“When was the last time that happened?"

I have no trouble imagining having the “similar conversations” posited by Hassania, as I’ve had them, in the pre-Twitter days. “What’s going on with Spike Lee?” was a big question around the time of Girl 6, and again with She Hate Me; “What’s going on with Jane Campion?” was a big question for some with Holy Smoke (not for me—I loved it) and more so with In The Cut (yeah, that was bad).  The political sensitivities of young critics these days are so finely tuned that it’s hard to know sometimes whether a protest is part of an attempt to create a new critical paradigm centered around diversity, or just some kind of high-functioning troll activity (if I understand Hassannia’s subsequent Twitter updates correctly, Spike Lee doesn’t really count). But as we’re framing within the auteurist framework, and so much of the most interesting and provocative criticism happening today at least carries the implication that auteur-based criticism has somehow ruined almost everything, it’s worth noting that—judging from appearances, at least—a lot of Cameron Crowe’s current troubles stem from auteurism, or a misapprehension of auteurism.

Not that I’ve seen Aloha, or am in a particular hurry to. I began worrying about Cameron Crowe, like so many others, upon seeing Elizabethtown, in Toronto in 2005. Actually, not to get all inside baseball, but I had been worried about Crowe even before cameras started rolling on that picture. I knew that Crowe had written the script, an ambitious comedy-drama, with Leonardo DiCaprio in mind, and that DiCaprio was now determined to do only Serious Movies with Serious Directors such as Martin Scorsese, which left Crowe without a bankable leading man. And so it went. Anyway, I was at Toronto for the premiere of Elizabethtown, and Crowe personally returned to the scene of his Almost Famous triumph to deliver a quasi-apology at the beginning of the press screening of his new film, which was indeed, alas, Elizabethtown. I felt bad after seeing it. My thoughts were these: One, that Crowe was maybe the best-intentioned and most big-hearted of American directors (maybe I should have been thinking “of white male American directors,” but I wasn’t, I cannot tell a lie). Two, that because his kind of picture is so difficult to get produced nowadays, prior commercial triumphs or not (and let us not forget that between Almost Famous and Elizabethtown, there was Vanilla Sky), Crowe apparently feels compelled to cram EVERYTHING HE KNOW AND FEELS INTO EACH AND EVERY INDIVIDUAL FILM HE MAKES. The directors Crowe frequently cites as models and mentors, Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, working within the studio system (Lubitsch was even, at one point, a studio executive), had the advantage of being able to produce with some consistency; if they couldn’t do something they wanted on Project X, they might be able to get it done on Project Y. They didn’t have the nagging consciousness of each individual film maybe being their last.

That consciousness is part of the artistic and intellectual DNA of at least two generations of “personal filmmakers.” Which Lubitsch and Wilder, both directors icons of critics and creators of the Possessory Credit School, were in fact not. One of the features of what we call "Auteurism," or "auteurism," as we know it, and so on, is how damned confused it is. The politique des auteurs as articulated by Bazin and Truffaut is a different kettle of fish from auteurism as articulated by Andrew Sarris. And while Sarris was in fact pretty careful about differentiating between illuminating evidence of a director’s personal signature and avowing that the director or “auteur” is the creative be-all and end-all of every artistically worthwhile film made, he might as well not bothered given the crude way such notions are bandied about on an almost daily basis. In any event, one thing that gets lost in the shuffle is that the “personal touches” that distinguish Lubitsch and Wilder films from more routine Hollywood fare of its time is that these touches were by-products of a process that Crowe either doesn’t have access to or doesn’t want. Reading Charles Brackett’s recently published diaries, one is struck by how often Brackett virtually roles his eyes at Wilder’s insistence on narrative coherence—“Billy’s terrifying neurosis that everything isn’t crystal clear to the audience” is how he puts it at one point. Contrast this “neurotic” precision with the loose baggy monsters Crowe has to fight tooth and nail to get made at all, and then has to cut by thirty minutes or however long. The self-consciousness of the contemporary “personal touch”—even when adapting an intriguing Spanish-language horror/sci-fi romance, Crowe was madly compelled to transform it into My Empathetic Tortured Biopic Of My Old Boss Jann Wenner—can be laid, I think, pretty squarely at the feet of slavish devotion to misunderstood auteurism. Combined, paradoxically enough, with the production-on-my-own-terms ethos of the early French New Wave. All of which seems to have left Crowe in a pretty, and seemingly inextricable, pickle. At least when Lee and Campion went off the rails, they did so trying to accomplish something a little different from their prior fare. One reason I’m not in a hurry to see Aloha is because the accounts of the movie have me thinking dog-returning-to-its-own-vomit. 

2013 in review: Q.E.D.

The ensemble of American Hustle, beloved of David O. Russell, and why not: Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Renner, Christian Bale, Jennifer Lawrence. 

In an interview last winter with Mary Kaye Schilling of New York magazine,  the director Steven Soderbergh, prompted by Schilling’s remark “You’ve never been a fan of film critics,” responded, “It’s what Dave Hickey said: It’s air guitar, ultimately. Was it helpful to read Pauline Kael’s work when I was growing up? Absolutely. For a teenager who was beginning to look at movies as something other than just entertainment, her reviews were really interesting. But at a certain point, it’s not useful anymore. I stopped reading reviews of my own films after Traffic, and I find it hard to read any critics now because they are just so easily fooled. From a directorial standpoint, you can’t throw one by me. I know if you know what you’re doing, and, ‘Wow, critics’—their reading of filmmaking is very superficial.”

Because Soderbergh and his work are well-liked by most critics, this verdict did not elicit the howls of derisive outrage that might have attended the exact same words had they been delivered by Michael Bay or Tyler Perry (not that they would have been). Sure, I detected a slight wounded whiff of “Dad’s just giving us the tough love” defensiveness from some younger colleagues in conversation, but that was about it. (I have no real dog in this non-fight, as Soderbergh pretty much closed The Iron Door on me after I panned The Good German in Premiere magazine back in 2006.*)

However, as if to provide the Q.E.D. to Soderbergh’s blanket condemnation of a “superficial” reading of filmmaking (a generalization I feel Soderbergh might revise were he to read Kent Jones on Paul Thomas Anderson, or  on anything else), earlier this month the New York Film Critics’ Circle, once considered an august, deliberative, and not-really-pandering-to-mainstream-taste entity, awarded it Best Film award to American Hustle, directed by David O. Russell. American Hustle is a  film that is very engaging in parts, and full of lively performances. Also a film that is incredibly sloppy and practically incoherent and not even close, by any objective  or quasi-objective standard of directing or any other aspect of filmmaking, to being the best any-kind-of-movie released in 2013.

Some Dude on Twitter™ (not a member of the New York Film Critics’ Circle) recently opined that American Hustle was a "better Scorsese movie" than Scorsese’s own The Wolf of Wall Street. I don’t imagine this person will be the first to voice this opinion. It is an idiotic opinion, and it is based entirely on superficial readings of both films. (Because neither Hustle nor Wolf has  yet opened [oh, wait, I see Hustle opens in "exclusive" engagements today], I’m going to try to keep my descriptions as spoiler-free as I can.)

American Hustle, directed by Russell from a script by himself and Eric Singer, is a two-hour-and-change, sort-of based-on-a-true-story picture ("Some of this actually happened," reads a title card at the beginning) about a con man and his partner in love and crime who get gathered up in a venal law man’s net and are compelled to set up "stings" with the federal agent in order to escape jail time themselves. Along the way various complications, dressed up in outer-borough and Jersey accents and 1970s fashion filigree, and including criss-crossed romantic entanglements, and the emergence of a criminal fish bigger than anyone in this scheme is comfortable trying to handle, take the double-dealing into some unusual areas. But Russell, who is nothing if not exuberant in his approach, also doesn’t really know what movie he wants to make. The narration, the hard-stressed period flourishes, and the milieu suggest, yes, Scorsese's Goodfellas, but Russell never pulls off that movie’s headlong (or breakneck) narrative momentum. Indeed, one suspects that he’s a little ashamed of the fact that his script has a very distinct plot, one that’s more in the tradition of The Sting than of any ostensibly realistic film (fact-based or not). And so, he presents the actual story of  American Hustle through a series of sprawling scenes in which he lets his actors do their soulful/funny/weird things, while also giving  his ‘70s song soundtrack something like free reign. Russell seems to deeply deplore the fact that karaoke had not caught on in America in the late ‘70s, or that he wasn’t able to configure the whole film as a musical, because he does love to let his actors sing, and when he can’t have them sing, he likes to cut to shots of them copping various attitudes while a particular song plays out, in full or something like it,  over the soundtrack.  There’s one scene about two-thirds of the way through the picture that should be a crucial one, in which the loose-cannon wife of Christian Bale’s character (played by Jennifer Lawrence) first lays eyes on her romantic rival (Amy Adams), at a big party during which Bale’s con artist and Bradley Cooper’s F.B.I. guy find out their entrapment of politician Jeremy Renner is leading them to the aforementioned bigger criminal fish, and a bigger risk. There’s a lot of character and plot material at stake, but Russell seems more interested in backlit slo-mo shots of Amy Adams being all open-mouthed luscious as Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” plays really loud. And she does look luscious, and you think you’re watching a music video.

"So what?" you may ask. All those things I cite—slow motion, pop-song soundtrack, digressiveness—are hallmarks of, yes, what people associate with Martin Scorsese movies. (It's clear too that Russell has also seen Boogie Nights. And Magnolia.) Except here’s the thing. In Scorsese’s films—in  Goodfellas, and, yes, in The Wolf of Wall Street—these elements are put together with very distinct purpose, and they fuel the dynamic of the scene and what’s going on within it. (Think, in Goodfellas, of the overhead shot of Joe Pesci's Tommy hitting the floor at his “made man” ceremony, juxtaposed with De Niro smashing up the pay phone.) Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker are not dogmatic about “matching” (and as filmmakers heavily indebt to a New Wave that had a deeply ambivalent relationship to “invisible editing,” why should they be), but they’re damn serious about scene construction, and when it’s necessary, they cut in microbeats. Russell goes all over the place. As he waxes up an “everybody cons everybody” theme that isn’t really justified by the movie’s payoff, and drops empathetic notes about various of the characters’ debilitating or potentially debilitating instabilities, hints of Soderbergh’s own The Informant! emerge, but Russell isn’t nearly conceptually or technically accomplished enough to come within swinging distance of Soderbergh’s achievement. Still, the showy generosity of Russell’s vision will no doubt (if it hasn’t been already) earn praise for being “visual jazz.” Which it is not.  Believe it or not, even the free-est of free jazz, as in actual music, has its rules. What Russell’s up to in American Hustle is just plain can’t-make-up-his-mind sprawl/bloat. It’s possible that Russell's movie is sloppy for arguably the best of reasons—he loves his actors, man!—but it’s still sloppy. In a movie that didn’t selectively hit their pleasure centers so squarely, the critics who are proclaiming this the best movie of the year would be deploring its incoherence.

But isn’t hitting the pleasure center all that matters? That was pretty high on Kael’s priorities, “entertainment” value or more-than-entertainment-value or not. Again, I did not find the experience of watching American Hustle to be pleasure-free. Indeed, I’ve never heard or seen the intro to Chicago Transit Authority’s “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is” put to better use than in the Bale/Adams meet-cute scene. And Jennifer Lawrence really does do the trick, although Russell serves her ill with the movie’s second faux-karaoke scene. But while Lawrence is indeed a very good actress, the way the chattering classes fall all over her is getting kind of embarrassing; every profile of her reads like a wordy upmarket variation of a “Celebrities! They’re Just Like Us!” caption. She’s certainly a factor in the overpraising of American Hustle. But the real reason I believe Hustle is winning over so many is because it rather overtly flatters its audience. Its observations concerning corruption ultimately take a back seat to a cockeyed optimism and a consoling (conditional) tolerance of everyday venality. While the now-beloved Goodfellas, The Informant!, and The Wolf of Wall Street are all deeply pessimistic, distinctly un-ingratiating movies, American Hustle slobbers all over its viewers like an overeager puppy. (That’s something that 12 Years A Slave, reportedly the main challenger to Hustle during the NYFCC’s vote, certainly doesn’t do, either. Hmmm.) It likely sounds pat to say that the people going gaga over American Hustle have fallen for some kind of con, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

* This is a joke. 

A J. Hoberman Top Ten

1) "Eraserhead's not a movie I'd drop acid for, although I would consider it a revolutionary act if someone dropped a reel of it into the middle of Star Wars."—The Village Voice, Oct. 24, 1977 (Hoberman's first review for the paper.)

2) "It's a melancholy fact of life that, for too many people (including, I suspect, Tarkovsky himself), the praise of Stan Brakhage is something like the kiss of death. Stalker and even The Mirror have done surprisingly well in limited runs downtown at the Film Forum but, dog knows what sort of audience exists for Tarkovsky in the foreign film ghetto of Lincoln Center and environs. Something tells me he's an unwelcome guest, one more orphan of the storm toting a shopping-bag full of junk across upper Broadway. Like, who invited this long-winded Russian prophet into the world? I mean, who needs this guy whose movies pretty much demand to be seen twice or not at all?

"Who indeed? You can loath Tarkovsky or you can adore him. What's mindless is to pretend that his particular genius doesn't exist."—"The Condition His Condition Was In," The Village Voice, Jan. 10, 1984

3) "Since America was a land Kafka knew only from books, the place he describes is as imaginary as Karl May's New World or the land so numbingly detailed in the Impressions of Africa Raymond Roussel published at his own expense in 1910. Still, it was an escape hatch he must have pondered. Even as a child, Kafka planned a novel about two warring brothers 'one [of whom] went to America, while the other'—the good one, naturally—'remained behind in a European prison,' the writer's own European prison (a castle, perhaps)."—"Once Upon A Time In Amerika: Straub/Huillet/Kafka," Artforum, Sept. 1984

4) "Much of what has been written about Shoah glosses over the film's provocations—its repetitions, its absences, its Talmudic system of cross-references. Review after review contains a flash of recognition—to experience the Holocaust onscreen is still, on some level, to experience the Holocaust—followed by a movement to put the film at arm's length. 'If this isn't the best film of 1985, what does that category mean?' one well-known TV film critic asked his partner. (What does that category mean? Less than a month later, he answered his own question with The Color Purple, an altogether more upbear film about brutality and oppression.) In light of the extravagant praise Shoah received, Pauline Kael's negative appraisal in The New Yorker—which reportedly held her copy for several weeks before tacking it on to the December 30 reviews of Out of Africa and The Color Purple—would seem particulrly nervy. But Kael's response is something more complex than a personal distaste."—"Shoah Business," The Village Voice, Jan. 28, 1986

5) "Blue Velvet is a triumph of overall geekiness—a fat man in shades walking a tiny dog, the deadpan Dick-and-Jane detective who wears his gun and badge in the house, the references to Jehovah's Witnesses, the strategic use of the world's loudest flushing toilet. As the demiurge of raunchy, lower-class sexual menace, Dennis Hopper is a virtual Harkonnen on Main Street—a violent, volatile hophead, periodically dosing himself with ether to further addle his turbulent, fuck-obsessed stream of consciousness."—"Return To Normalcy," The Village Voice, Sept. 22, 1986

6) "Featuring everyone from Yiddish theater impresario Maurice Schwartz to noir axiom Mike Mazurki to the young Cyd Charisse and the strongman from Freaks (1932), Mission to Moscow features such ineffable moment as Paulina Molotova, commisar of cosmetics, telling Walter Huston's wife that, Ninotchka notwithstanding, 'feminine beauty is not a luxury.' This scene added after the film wrapped, was one of several created to satisfy Mrs. Davies' desire for a larger role. 'Yes, I guess women are the same all over the world,' the actress who playes the ambassador's wife replies. 'Primarily, they want to please their men.'" —From the chapter "A History of Communism," The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism, Temple University Press, 1998

7) "Television, in Time's McLuhanesque formulation, had assumed Hollywood's traditional function, and 'cinema' was now 'the favorite art form of the young.' This generational relationship was clinched when the newsweekly's December 26 issue ran a letter by an eighteen-year-old college freshman from Peoria maintaining that Bonnie and Clyde was 'not a film for adults'—which was why it incurred such establishment wrath. Nor was it Bonnie and Clyde's violence that shocked his peers: 'The reason it was so silent, so horribly silent in the theater at the end of the film was because we liked Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, we identified with them and we wanted to be like them.' What did that mean? Can one imagine such a letter being written in defense of The Dirty Dozen—and imagine it being published?"—From the chapter "Born To Be Wild: Outlaws of America, 1967-1969," The Dream Life: Movies, Media, And The Mythology Of The Sixties, The New Press, 2003

8) "In a sense, Inglourious Basterds is a form of science fiction. Everything unfolds in and maps an alternate universe: The Movies. Even Shosanna's Parisian neighborhood bears a marked resemblance to a Cannes back alley, complete with a club named for a notorious local dive. Inflammable nitrate film is a secret weapon. Goebbels is an evil producer; the German war hero who pursues Shosanna has (like America's real-life Audie Murphy) become a movie star. Set to David Bowie's Cat People title-song, the scene in which Shosanna—who is, of course, also an actor—applies her war paint to become the glamorous "face of Jewish vengeance," is an interpolated music video. Actresses give autographs at their peril. The spectacular climax has the newly dead address those about to die from the silver screen."—"Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds Makes Holocaust Revisionism Fun," The Village Voice, Aug. 18, 2009

9) "The Red Menace spends a surprising amount of screen time explicating Marxist dogma. Indeed, in exposing the Party leadership as cynical and manipulative, The Red Menace intimates that the Communists are betraying their own ideals. Several true believers—Molly and her Negro comrade Sam Wright—have disapproving parents operating under the spell of more acceptable religious leaders. In one tumultuous scene, the cell's resident Jewish poet, Henry Solomon, is attacked for denying an immaculate-conception view of Communism: 'We contend that Marx had no basis in Hegel!' the requisite fat, sweaty Party secretary sneers."—From the chapter "The Ministry Of Truth, Justice, And The American Way," An Army Of Phantoms: American Movies And The Making Of The Cold War, The Free Press, 2011

10) There is no number ten, because, the incredibly bone-headed (and that's the NICE term for it) decision of The Village Voice to can Hoberman today notwithstanding, I trust or at least believe or at least hope that we will be hearing from him again in print and/or on the internet very soon. Now I have plenty, PLENTY of stories pertaining to Hoberman's personal menschiness, and of my own longtime admiration for him, and the like; but I figured the most apt tribute to his career up until this sad point would be something in his own always witty and acute words. Nine other passages could just have easily filled the spaces above, and provided similar wisdom, elucidation, idiosyncrasy, and so on; nine hundred other passages could have served as well, too. This space, then, is symbolically reserved for something mind-expanding to come from Hoberman in the future. Good luck, J.

UPDATE: Mr Hoberman speaks, and displays his typical modesty and nobility and common sense, in a letter to the Village Voice staff reproduced at his blog.