The Talkies: The New Vulgarity

...But just as European mothers could scare their children with stories of wolves long after the last wolf in Europe had been exterminated — sometime, I believe, in the mid-eighteenth century—so the legend of the dreaded censor continues to haunt the most licentious society known to human history...

...Craig, now his wife's rival in love, kidnaps her, locks her in a cage with her pet chimpanzee, and contrives a way to occupy Malkovich's body permanently...

...Smith's execrable film is not only not funny, it is boredom cubed, defiant narcissism carried to the limits...

...Take, for instance, Dogma, the latest from the director Kevin Smith, who has gone steadily downhill since his promising debut with Clerks (1994...

...THE TALKIES by James Bowman The New Vulgarity R ecently, when Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York threatened to withdraw the city's subsidy from the Brooklyn Museum of Art over a gratuitous insult to the Virgin Mary in an exhibition appropriately called "Sensation," a great many of his constituents seem to have thought him guilty of "censorship...

...After Mallrats (1995) and Chasing Amy (1997) he has now hit rock bottom...

...dictionary definition of the word "disclaimer" suggests the sort of semi-literate Smith is obviously trying to appeal to) suggesting that religious believers who may be offended by the movie consider that God must have a sense of humor...

...I have to tell you that it is not...

...Moreover, it evinces the same failure of imagination that I have often had occasion to remark on in the films of the latter-day Disney...

...The pitiful remnants of what the great Russian literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, called the "official culture" in America have been incapable of any real censorship for a quarter of a century or more...

...Rozema, for instance, could have made a movie about slavery and the condition of women in nineteenth century Britain and left Jane Austen out of the matter altogether...

...I would not criticize a movie for being unlike Not just filthy and crude, but arrogant and intolerant too...

...Insofar as we know anything outside ourselves, we know it by getting inside other people's heads, but the imaginative process by which we do so is as much open to abuse as Craig's "portal" into John Malkovich...

...She loves her but, "Only as John," with whom she makes love while Lotte is inside him...

...John Malkovich himself, alerted to something strange going on, turns up and also takes the ride —with results that make perfect sense in terms of the crazy logic of this movie...

...Soon Craig and his workmate and accomplice, the beautiful but unobtainable Maxine (Catherine Keener), are selling tickets to mere voyeurs, people who want to experience life as a celebrity for fifteen minutes—before they are inexplicably expelled and deposited on the hard shoulder of the New Jersey Turnpike...

...The whole world must listen to what they listen to...

...What is Miss Austen doing in such strident and unmannerly company...

...What she cannot do with any credibility is to give her period characters, particularly the wastrel Tom Bertram, sensibilities of a distinctively non-contemporary kind, all the while attempting to preserve large portions of the novel and its concern with such quaintly old-fashioned matters as the immorality of amateur theatricals or the duties of poor girls to accept rich suitors for the sake of their families...

...Lotte decides she was meant to be a man and determines to ask her allergist to perform "sexual reassignment surgery...

...This is a witty, clever, fast-paced, and very funny movie which only fails in the end to show us how imaginative identity-swapping might be good for something other than getting what we want sexually or in career terms or, in the case of the mysterious Dr...

...Rozema even manages to include parts of the great Jane's letters and diaries in order to convert Mansfield Park from the most troubling of the novels and the one of which Lionel Trilling made a central exhibit in Sincerity and Authenticity to a boring polemic, fully in the late twentieth century style, against slavery and the oppression of women...

...In this new identity he is able not only to marry Maxine but also to enjoy the success as a puppeteer that has hitherto eluded him...

...But Maxine, whom both she and Craig have fallen in love with, doesn't want Lotte as a man...

...Such selfishness and stupidity, of course, do no harm to the higher things they despise, let alone to God, but they are offensive to the life of the mind and the imagination...

...The very excellence of the performances of those engaged in the central, Austenian drama—Frances O'Connor as Fanny, Hannah Taylor-Gordon as the young Fanny, Jonny Lee Miller as Edmund Bertram, Alessandro Nivola as Henry Crawford, and Embeth Davidtz as Mary Crawford—only serve to remind us how starkly out of place there they are...

...What else do we expect...

...In fact the best way to look at this film might be as a sort of allegory of the imaginative task, common to both actors andpuppeteers, of assuming alternative identities...

...It's as near as Hollywood will ever get to an understanding and appreciation of the impulse to religious reverence...

...It is not so serious a failure of imagination as Kevin Smith's, but it is one all the same...

...The American Spectator • December r999/January 20o0 GI 83...

...7 ineering yet neglectful yet sexy mother is a fatal distraction from the portrait of evil which is otherwise unfolding before us...

...But this dom44 What is Miss Austen doing in such strident and unmannerly company...

...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on TAS Online —www.spectator.org...

...T he task of imagination in the movies as in the other arts is to convey to us the sense of "being inside someone else's skin, feeling what they feel," as the puppeteer Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) says and then proceeds to do quite literally in the Movie of the Month, Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich...

...Except of course that it isn't true...

...82 December 1999/January z000 • The American Spectator the book on which it is based, but that does not mean that the adapters of literature to the movies do not frequently come a cropper, as much by remaining faithful to their source as by deviating from it...

...Lester (Orson Bean), a shot at eluding death itself...

...Charlie Kaufman's wacky screenplay has Schwartz discovering a secret passage leading off of floor 7 1/2 in the building where he works that ends somewhere inside the head of the actor, John Malkovich, who plays himself...

...So he joins the company of boors and bores and philistines who live and die in the unexamined and untroubled certainty that all that are, in this world or the next, and that are blessed with the gift of consciousness, are just like them...

...We only have to ask...

...No one cares...

...And you might find that some of those things would be vulnerable on very different critical grounds...

...Deprived of our censors' pens, we conservatives tend to drone on boringly about how offensive we find certain things to be...

...Because they are incapable of appreciating anything better than this rubbish, they must eke out their meager pleasure in it by forcing the rest of the world to join in and listen with them...

...Once again, we cannot object simply to Egoyan's tampering with Trevor's exquisite fictional clockwork and are encouraged that he does so only sparingly...

...The fact that Hilditch spends all his spare time, when he is not murdering young girls, watching old kinescopes of his mother's 195o's-vintage cooking show gives us the illusion of knowledge —so that's why he kills them, Egoyan prompts us: to get back at his mother...

...Something similar is happening, I think, in Felicia's journey, Atom Egoyan's adaptation of William Trevor's brilliant novel...

...The film begins with a disclaimer (the fact that the disclaimer also comes with a JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...Or she could have attempted to show us the ways in which these matters really were troubling to people of intelligence and humanity of the period, probably including Miss Austen...

...We all have parents and grandparents who can attest that not just the far corners of the world but even our own home towns were immensely different only 30, 40, 5o, or 6o years ago...

...In fact, the only important alterations that he has made, so far as I can tell, are to give Hilditch a taste for ghastly 195o's musical kitsch by someone called Malcolm Vaughan ("My Special Angel" is a particular favorite) and to fill in the character of his now-dead mother, who is only just mentioned in the novel...

...But where the Disneyites limit their failures to conceiving of a Pocahontas or a Hercules who is indistinguishable from a late twentieth century American teenager, Smith takes this failure metaphysical...

...It just goes to show you how some myths have the power to hang on...

...But the lives of Maxine and Craig and his wife, Lotte (Cameron Diaz), are transformed by the experience...

...There is no excuse for such willful blindness...

...A more up-market version of the same vulgarity is to be found in Patricia Rozema's adaptation of Mansfield Park, which leaves only Northanger Abbey and the fragmentary Sanditon as the only bits of Jane Austen's oeuvre not to be translated to the silver screen this decade...

...What kind of spiritual pygmies could possibly be interested in such stupefyingly idiotic fantasizing...

...It's supposed to be funny...

...I forbear to do more than mention that the religious people in the movie come off as being rather worse than their counterparts in the novel...

...0* James Bowman welcomes e-mail at JamesBowman@home.com...

...What vulgar arrogance...

...This movie is the cinematic equivalent of those people who drive with their windows down and some exquisitely awful pop or rap music blaring from their car speakers...

...For Ms...

...Instead it is indeed offensive—not because it makes light of sacred things but because its attempted lightness lumbers across the screen like a wounded hippopotamus...

...He cannot even imagine God and His heavenly hosts, the Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, and Powers that make up the hierarchy of angels, as anything other than foul-mouthed, sex-obsessed, dope-smoking slackers like himself...

...But of course the change proves not so easy as at first it seems...

...get used to it...

...There, terrific performances by Bob Hoskins as the creepy serial killer, Hilditch, and Elaine Cassidy as his sweet, vulnerable victim, together with a masterly and atmospheric evocation of the industrial midlands of Britain tend to point up a larger conceptual failure...

...Smith's making his God-in-two-persons a mute Alanis Morissette and an old man (Bud Cort) who vacations in Jersey so that he can play ski-ball is not inconsistent enough with our idea of God even to be particularly funny, but it does accomplish the main purpose of the film, which is defiantly to proclaim that the taste and understanding of Kevin Smith are or ought to be the standard for the entire universe...

...But if we see the picture as an allegorical one, it is not necessarily a bad thing to represent the ability to see the world as others see it as the key to everlasting life...

...The offense of such dull, witless stuff is in fact to the sense of humor it pretends to appeal to...

...We know that no one is compelled by adverse psychological circumstance to do evil deeds, and to pretend that the unanswerable why has been answered and evil thus robbed of its grandeur and mystery is to trivialize the immensity of the moral drama in which the characters are engaged...