The Talkies / A Piano Recital
Podhoretz, J ohn
THE TALKIES A PIANO RECITAL by John Podhoretz Vyne of the most maligned movies in recent memory is Joel Oliansky's The Competition, a film so roundly drubbed by the New York critics that its...
...every thought of what the competition means to him leads her to believe that she must drop out and give him an easier time of it...
...If this is what people go to the movies for, then I'm the little old lady from Dubuque...
...Yet because time is running out for him, he is riddled with guilt over his lack of success and his financial dependence upon his parents...
...She plays the Prokofiev so well that Paul cannot bear to stay and listen, for surely she will win...
...And so they pan The Competition and praise Raging Bull, a movie as original and challenging as it is alienating and incomprehensible...
...This also holds true for great works of art...
...Suddenly it is clear to us, and to Paul, that she is good, and that she does wish to compete...
...What is wanted, they aver, is originality and challenge...
...Paul plays the Emperor Concerto, beautifully and proudly...
...He must win, that is all, and the pressure upon him leads him especially to antagonize the attractive Heidi, who might divert his thoughts from his single-minded determination...
...her teacher (Lee Remick), the sixth in a line of students that leads straight to Beethoven, has even entered her without her knowledge...
...Most moviegoers, I think, do not go to the movies for originality and challenge...
...The further complication of his father's serious illness makes it absolutely imperative for him to win the Arabella Hillman Competition (with its $20,000 prize John Podhoretz is editor of Counterpoint and film critic o/The American Spectator...
...The gangster movie and the Western, which have been the two most profitable genres in the history of the movies, tell stories with which we are completely familiar over and over again...
...THE TALKIES A PIANO RECITAL by John Podhoretz Vyne of the most maligned movies in recent memory is Joel Oliansky's The Competition, a film so roundly drubbed by the New York critics that its future general release around the country is somewhat doubtful...
...They merely throw us off guard, which is not a pleasant experience, and is certainly less than enlightening...
...The audience can enjoy only that which it knows...
...rather, they go for repetition and simplicity...
...He has had his triumph, is sure he cannot lose, and so she is surer than ever that she must withdraw...
...But when Heidi begins her Mozart concerto, something goes wrong with her piano, and something happens inside her...
...She seems oddly unconcerned about her success or failure in her chosen profession...
...But the corporation goes on...
...Heidi, we discover, did not even start out playing the piano...
...He shows up at the competition tense, arrogant, and antagonistic...
...if the form is truly alienating, the material will be as we'll...
...If I winbetter...
...The harsh words with which The Competition was greeted in the press testify to its conventional strengths: its interesting situation, its two interesting characters, and its willingness to pander to its audience...
...And if she does, what will that do to their "corporation...
...Paul is the son of a father who has saved his every trophy and medal, and so he walks with the mild strut of the permanently spoiled...
...She demands a new piano, and she demands to play a different, more difficult Prokofiev concerto...
...He convinces her otherwise: "If you wingood...
...Heidi's teacher views this growing resolve bitterly, and it is intimated that in the past she may well have done the thing Heidi wishes to do, and has learned an unpleasant lesson from it...
...The Competition sets up a familiar situation, and manages to milk it for all it's worth, and more...
...Despite a somewhat sodden subplot about a high-strung finalist from the Soviet Union and the defection of her teacher (a device thrown in to delay the competition for a week so that Paul and Heidi will have time to fall for each other), the movie stays resolutely on course with these two characters and their tempestuous relations...
...Their absolute lack of originality and refusal to challenge us are two of the main reasons for their success...
...All successful popular entertainment is in the most profound sense conservative...
...But they are clearly the two best entrants, and so one of them must win and one must lose...
...They fall in love, of course...
...Raging Bull, which concerns a near-psychotic boxer, allows its audience to wallow for two hours in the bestial behavior of its title character...
...The other is Heidi Schoonover (Amy Irving), twenty-two, wealthy, beautiful, with years of competitive life ahead of her even if she loses this one...
...Now, pandering to an audience is something held in the utmost contempt by "serious" critics of film...
...the cello was her instrument, but its stem tickled her nose, and so she switched...
...At last the finalists must play (there are six, and so the competition takes place on two nights, Paul playing the first night, Heidi the second...
...He must win this competitionprobably the last he will be allowed to enter because of his ageif he is to realize his hard-travelled ambition to be a world-class pianist...
...One is Paul Dietrich (Richard Dreyfuss, in a superb performance), nearing thirty, a prodigy already five years too old to be a prodigy...
...Every thought of his goal causes Paul to grow angry and fearful of her...
...that is, it must follow set, pre-ordained patterns, with which the audience has become comfortable...
...Heidi immediately lights on Paul, whom she had encountered four or five years before at the Tanglewood Music Festival...
...His initial coldness does not much faze her...
...We "learn" nothing more from Raging Bull's powerful flash and dazzle than we do from movies like The Competition...
...It is a simple, quiet story, forthrightly told, about an important piano competition and two of its finalists...
...The Competition relates a familiar story welland that is more than enough...
...When Paul softens to her, she does not heed her stern teacher's words about the need for competitive edge, but instead does all she can to support and encourage him...
...and two years' worth of concert bookings) if his entire life is not to go to waste...
...Heidi, on the other hand, is almost flip about the whole affair...
...Everything seems set...
Vol. 14 • March 1981 • No. 3
