Some Came Running

Maybe "Selma" is too smart to be an Oscar movie anyway

 

When I saw Ava DuVernay’s Selma last December, I, like many other critics, was terrifically taken with it. And I was also a little surprised. I was not surprised that it was good—DuVernay’s 2012 Middle of Nowhere demonstrated she had both considerable talent and considerable perspective—but at the way it was good. DuVernay stuck to her metaphorical guns with respect to perspective and declined to deliver a Great Man biopic. Instead she wove a drama of considerable intelligence, empathy, and analytical chops. She made a film sufficiently unconventional so as to be called radical, a film whose style—or perhaps the better word for what I mean is “mode”—I thought, owed more to Steven Soderbergh’s Che than it did to Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi.

Right-wing Internet gadfly John Nolte probably hit the nails on the heads of  hundreds of voting AMPAS members when he wrote, on Twitter, “Selma's biggest problem is that it just doesn't soar at the end. You wait for that emotional release. It never comes. Real failure.” This is an interesting point, for a number of reasons, one of which would arguably center around the request “Define ‘soar’.” (It would be in poor taste for me to speculate as to what kind of film with Martin Luther King as its central character would “soar” for Nolte, whose Twitter feed after the quoted observation has since, as of this writing, been dedicated to all-caps yelling at Ava DuVernay fans about how Martin Scorsese didn’t get an Oscar for Raging Bull either and how they should just shut up.) But Nolte’s not exactly wrong. I was moved by Selma, and by its ending, but that ending, which breaks away from the staged drama of the march and the speech from Martin Luther King  (David Oyelowo) to intercut actual documentary footage of the events and people. It’s a stirring moment, yes, but it’s a distinctly anti-manipulative one. Instead of using cinematic craft and guile to provide a you-are-there feel, and then perhaps to force an idea of being transported on the viewer, the movie steps back and says “this happened.” Your “emotional release” may vary—as I said, I myself was moved—but the movie’s sense of integrity eschews a particular kind of sentimentality. It won’t indulge deceit.

"I find it hilarious that most of the stuff being written about movies is how conventional they are, and then you have people [...] upset that something's not conventional," Steven Soderbergh remarked at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008, responding to some critical slings and arrows hurled at Che when it played there that May. (Soderbergh would take a form of revenge against critics later that year, hiring an actual walrus to give an unflattering portrayal of an escort-reviewer in his 2009 release The Girlfriend Experience.) I imagine that there is if not upset, at least a fair amount of discomfort concerning the unconventional aspects of Selma within the more barnacle-crusted ranks of the Academy. As for the movie’s alleged smear of  Lyndon Johnson: whether it is one or not, and its actual extent if it is one, is arguable. But I thought it was within DuVernay’s rights, as an artist and maybe particularly as a black artist, to have Johnson’s character stand in for some particular manifestations of white fear. Johnson’s mild resentment at King’s insistence, as depicted in the film, is revelatory. It’s also rather funny—a good bit—that Johnson decides to act as King has asked largely because Johnson becomes more pissed off at George Wallace than he has been, or ever gets, with King. Whether this is factually true or not is less important in this film’s scheme than not just the dramatic truth of the scenes themselves, but also the truth the scenes demonstrate. Truth about how history, or rather, what we come to see as “History,” is made; almost by accident, pivoted on the pettiest of motivations, perhaps. Similarly, DuVernay’s conception of King seems very much informed by, among other things, what for lack of a better term I’ll call her female tolerance. Clearly DuVernay and her film admire King, but Selma doesn’t quite worship him. It’s not just a matter of acknowledging his flaws and failings as a husband, or depicting him smoking a cigarette while composing a difficult letter. There’s a larger, more intellectual dynamic at work here too. It’s seen in the way DuVernay insists that King, while the most publicly prominent leader of the Civil Rights movement, was not the SOLE leader of it. DuVernay’s careful staging of tactics meetings, her vividly limned portraits of younger figures such as John Lewis, even the single scene in which Malcolm X appears, all stress the value of collective action—that is, the importance of the Civil Rights movement as a movement. And here too the movie resists sentimentality. Not only that, it suggests a continuity and sounds, implicitly, a call to action. Call-to-action movies are not the sort of thing the Academy enjoys. It likes a nice neat social justice movie that sits back and says “problem solved” after the Great Man at its center has done his work. Or, in the case of the aforementioned Gandhi, says “isn’t it a shame things went so wrong, too bad nothing really can be done.” Selma is not just a movie about getting a job done, it’s about thinking things through, and it very often depicts its characters thinking things through. There’s nothing to which Old Hollywood is more hostile than actual thought, except maybe its cinematic depiction. And yes, I know that movies about Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking also got nominated for Best Picture Oscars. But those movies are hardly concerned with thought. 

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. 

How David Mamet gets away with it

Last week in Newsweek, or some online entity bearing the Newsweek logo, David Mamet published an essay about gun laws that I didn't pay much attention to, largely because at first glance it was sufficiently boilerplate in a not even Peak Wingnut fashion—you know, "Karl Marx, blah blah blah, Founding Fathers blah blah blah, no you're wrong if you think that's what the police are for blah blah blah"—that it would appear to lack the requisite negative entertainment value I look for in such items. The column did excite the disapprobation of many of my fellows on The Left, and with good reason, and I was actually stimulated by something that Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote on his blog at The Atlantic, where he also linked to a similar musing by the great Scott Lemieux at the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog, wherein both men point out that Mamet's assertion that the "Founding Fathers" were "not even politicians" is, not to put too fine a point on it, utter bullshit. Coates goes on to wax not inappropriately indignantly about how he finds "the processs that produces this sort of work to be utterly amoral." That's one way of putting it. I not only have a window into this process, I was party to it back in my print days. One example, of a decidedly different scale than what Coates is talking about, but illuminating nonethless, involved Mr. Mamet himself. 

I don't remember exactly when it was, but I seem to recollect the early part of the current century. One of my colleagues at Premiere, the guy in charge of the front-of-the-book section "Action," which was where we put the bitsy stuff, had heard from Mamet's agent—with guys like Mamet it's always the agent you hear from—who told him that Mamet had been experimenting with cartooning, and wondering if our magazine would be interested in running a monthly one-panel cartoon by David Mamet. We would pay for it, of course, and pay pretty heftily, because he was David Mamet. As I recall the fee would be something like the one a writer would get for a five-hundred word piece if he or she were to be paid a dollar a word. 

Mamet's drawing style, if it could be referred to as a style, made James Thurber look like Gustave Dore. The jokes animating the cartoons were mixed. I honestly can't recollect any; I have a vague picture of a fake movie poster advertising a blockbuster picture about a giant octopus, and there was at least one lampooning movie executives, no duh, but that's about all I can conjure. (I did go through my limited collection of Premiere back issues looking for an example but came up with zilch. I did find the issue containing my pan of The Good German, though, I better get rid of that...) The point is the cartoons were largely not great, and when they were worse than not great they were embarassing. One thing I do recall, very clearly, and I think it's something that really summed up Mamet's contempt for the enterprise and contempt for us—contempt that, now that I think about it, we had, in a sense, wholly earned for indulging him this way—was that he submitted his "drawings" on lined notebook paper. He knew enough about magazine mechanicals to know these lines would be erased photographically. But the idea that he couldn't even be bothered to invest a little of the money were were paying him to, you know, get some fucking drawing paper (which he then could have written off as a business expense, as I'm sure he must have known) speaks volumes. Fortunately he had a contract. I say fortunately because it was a short term contract, and it soon expired, and we did not pursue its renewal, and Mamet's agent understood our not pursuing its renewal to mean that Mamet had tired of the enterprise himself and was busy with other things and so would not be able to continue. In other words, his contempt for us was such that he wanted us to understand that not continuing this exercise in mortification was HIS idea. This was the personal cherry on the top of his short con, and I have to give it to him: this short con was a nice one. 

It was not too long after this misadventure ended that Mamet and his friend and collaborator Ricky Jay appeared at New York's Town Hall for a staged chat entitled "Two Hussies." It would essentially be Mamet and Jay discussing "the state of the performing arts." I went with some pals, among them at least one successful writer who idolized the author of Glengary Glen Ross and other theatrical pieces. And while Ricky Jay was his usual droll self on that stage, the author of Glengarry Glen Ross oozed such oily pompous self-satisfaction that we walked out en masse after less than forty minutes. I hasten to add that this was well before Mamet's much-bruited conservative conversion that's supposed to be the reason I don't like him. (October 2001, this was.)

Anyway, Coates nails it when he says "You cannot change the fact that Thomas Jefferson served in the Virginia House of Burgesses because it's unfortunate for your argument. Unless you have a name like David Mamet. Assuming that Mamet's Newsweek piece had an editor (and it's entirely possible and plausible that Tina Brown just pushed it into digital print after only allowing some copy person or other to give it a perfunctory proofing), that editor would likely have had no contact with Mamet himself. When you're dealing with a name like David Mamet, you submit your proposed changes through a third party, and that third party, usually an agent, gets back to you, and fairly often says "no" to your proposed changes, or sometimes not. (A couple of months ago I ran into Martin Amis in a magazine store in my neighborhood and because I'm such a schmuck I semi-sheepishly introduced myself and said to him "We worked with each other once. Via fax.") But again. I'm sure that the relevant people involved, the people with the power, merely said, if the idea even occured to them at all, "Fact-check David Mamet? Well, did you evah?" or some such thing.

Of course, fact-checkers themselves are like cops. There are good ones and there are bad ones.  An associate of mine who works for a prominent person has recently had cause to be in correspondence with several fact-checkers, and they have been inundating my associate with questions such as "can you confirm whether X was a 'consultant' on the project or a 'special advisor'?" and for all sorts of other bits of data that could actually be gleaned via consultation of reliable and easily available outside documantation. But just as Premiere's publication of "The Mamet Version" (for this is what his cartoon feature was called) was a function of our own star-fucking tendencies—which we rationalized by telling ourselves that were weren't just indulging Mamet on account of his name but because of the great, iconic work he had produced, that we were counting on his talent—so too do fact-checkers (the bad ones) go places where they're not needed, or wanted, simply because it puts them in closer proximity to the famous subjects of the articles they're working on.

For example: At Premiere there was one fact-checker I considered a particular annoyance, because he did things like call Woody Allen's actual production office to verify the number of Oscars Annie Hall had won. Also, when we had occasion to make a reference to the actor Ron Perlman, he called the offices of Revlon to verify the spelling of the name. (This will be more fun for you to figure out yourself if you don't get it already. Trust me.) It is perhaps no accident that the fact-checker in question was (and, I suppose, remains) the son of a relatively well-known, and not particularly well-liked, political pundit. As they say, that's show biz.

Some propositions from Pauline Kael

Hollywood follows the mass audience and the mass audience follows Hollywood; there is no leader. The worst of the past is preserved with new dust. How many films that we once groaned at do we now hear referred to nostalgically? When the bad is followed by the worse, even the bad seems good. (Film addicts talk about Grand Hotel or Busby Berkeley's choreography, as if those were the days.) The hostility toward art and highbrowism that infect much of our culture helps to explain the popularity of so many untrained and untalented screen performers. Richard Burton and Dan O'Herlihy do not stimulate the fans; Tony Curtis, Tab Hunter, Janet Leigh, Jane Powell do. Fans like untrained actors; perhaps they like even the embarrassment of untrained actors (why should they tolerate the implied criticism of speech or gesture that derives from a higher culture?). The office girl says, "No, I don't want to go see Howard Keel—he was a professional singer, you know." The taste of the mass audience belongs to sociology, not aesthetics. Those who make big films do not consider primarily the nature of the medium and what they want to do with it, they try to keep ahead of the mass audience.

As the mass media developed, the fine points of democratic theory were discarded, and a parody of democracy became public dogma. The film critic no longer considers that his function is the formation and reformation of public taste (that would be an undemocratic presumption); the old independent critic who would trumpet the good, blast the bad, and tell his readers they were boobs if they wasted money on garbage, gives way to the amiable fellow who feels responsible not to his subject matter but to the tastes of the stratum of his public. Newspaper critics are, in many cases, not free to attack big films (too much is at stake), but they are usually free to praise what they wish; yet they seem too unsure of themselves, too fearful of causing a breach with their readers, to praise what may be unpopular. It is astonishing how often they attack the finest European productions and the most imaginative American ones—safe targets.  Attitudes become more important than judgments. The critic need not make any definite adverse comments; his descriptive tone is enough to warn his readers off. Praise which includes such terms as "subtle," "low-keyed" or "somber" is damnation; the critic saves his face but helps kill the movie.

There are people, lots of them, who take big pictures seriously. What is one to say to the neo-Aristotelianism of the salesgirl who reports "I saw The Student Prince last night—it was so wonderful and so sad. I cried and cried, and when it was over, why, I just felt all cleaned out." Only snobs howl at Duel in the Sun ($11.3 million gross), and if you crawled out on Quo Vadis ($10.5 million gross) you not only showed your disrespect for heavy labor, you implied contempt for those who were awed by it. Hollywood productions are official parts of American life, proofs of technological progress; derision is subversive. You will be reproved with "What right have you to say Samson and Delilah is no good when millions of people like it?" and you will be subjected to the final devastation of "It's all a matter of taste and one person's taste is as good as another's." One does not make friends by replying that although it is all a matter of taste (and education and intelligence and sensibility) one person's taste is not as good as another's.

—Pauline Kael, "Movies, the Desperate Art," The Berkley Book of Modern Writing No. 3, 1956, revised for Film: An Anthology, 1959, reprinted in The Age of Movies, Selected Writings of Pauline Kael, edited by Sanford Schwartz, The Library of America, 2011 

Dear Kent Osborne,

40 IS a bitch. Man, don’t I know it! I think it was Martin Amis who said—and I’m paraphrasing here—that turning 40 is the most fucked up thing ever for a guy, because it means, for all intents and purposes, that the first half of your life is over, and like, what have you got to show for it, right? You are never going to get that first half back, it’s all downhill from here, you’ve stopped growing, physically, and you’re actually starting to putrefy. You’re on your way to death. Things start going away, right away. In this film about you, Uncle Kent, you start having some problems with your sight—you’ve got to look at certain stuff on paper first farther away, then nearer to you, in order to read. Wow, I’m relatively lucky—I didn’t start getting eye issues when I turned 40, and I still don’t have ‘em, but man, beyond that…well, I gotta admit I was a little surprised and shaken at how much the story told about you in the film Uncle Kent had in common with what I was going through when I turned that age.

The affinities started hitting me pretty early on, as I watched you hunching over your work easel, doing that animation stuff—you apparently work as an animator, whereas I work as a writer, they’re both kinda solitary occupations. And then there was how you live by yourself, and how you drink a lot, and how you smoke a lot of pot, and how you hang out a lot with your cat. See, here’s you, with your cat.

And here’s me, a long time ago, back in my 40s, with my cat.

And my stupid fanboy Akira t-shirt. And my double chin. And my nose hair. Sorry about that. Gosh, how embarrassing.

Now I was never that much of a pot person—until this one period where I got so anxiety-ridden and insomniac that I started smoking it very intently…but I’m getting ahead of myself here—but I definitely had this routine back then of working and drinking and just sort of wallowing in loneliness. And you’re clearly not taking very good care of yourself in other respects. “Check” on that, for me, when I was your age, too. You live in L.A. , so you have a car, and you’re letting that go to shit; I haven’t owned a car in a while (an advantage of a certain mode of urban living, I’d say), but I dare say if I had, well, what’s happening to your car would have happened to mine.

And there’s even more, and here’s where it gets kinda weird!

Image of the day, 6/9/10

From The Big Snooze, Robert Clampett, 1946