The Talkies: Stolen Time
Bowman, James
by James Bowman Stolen Time The more predictable the message, the longer the movie. T his year's Christmas movies were all mediocre at best and nearly all way too long. Movie after movie,...
...ames Bowman welcomes e-mail at JamesBowman@home.com...
...Mark works at two jobs-delivering newspapers and cleaning a mausoleum- in order to finance his obsession with making cheesy horror movies...
...Although he writes about "the American Dream" without any indication that it is anything other than what it was for our immigrant forbears, namely a chance for a degree of economic competence and social respectability not afforded them by their native lands, he implicitly recognizes that twenty-first century American dreamers must dream bigger...
...Now that practically everyone who is willing to work (and most of those who are just willing to show up) has before he is out of his twenties far more than his immigrant grandfather could have dreamed of having as the result of a lifetime of back-breaking toil, our American dream is to manufacture our own reality...
...From the very first scene in which we see Ripley accompanying a lieder recital for an audience of very rich New Yorkers and then cut to his day job in a men's washroom, it is apparent that the movie is a total anachronism...
...Nowadays, this guy would have had a scholarship to Princeton and prospects of wealth and social position considerably brighter than those of the wastrel shipping heir and Princeton graduate, Dickie Greenleaf (]ude Law), whose life he homicidally covets...
...he asks...
...We find it about as easy to enter sympathetically into it as we would into a tale of dueling...
...The third is a tour de force from Jim Carrey as the Andy Warhol of comedy, Andy Kaufman, while the fourth is a hilarious send-up of the "Trekkie" phenomenon that also has something serious to say about heroism and the currently disputed borderlands between fantasy and reality...
...Much more than Ripley, these movies show us something like "the American Dream" for our too-prosperous times...
...I do7 No I don't...
...The third of his three murders makes this clear...
...Though he must know that Smith and Smith's audience are laughing at him, he doesn't mind, and in fact plays up to the part of the bumptious schlock merchant, a sort of self-conscious Ed Wood, so long as it gets him on "Late Night With David Letterman," as it did recently...
...In this case the movie, and the vehicle for his "aspirations," is called Coven, which he pronounces KOH-ven ("How else would you pronounce it...
...He's got these aspirations that a lot of people who are searching for the American dream have...
...Huh...
...Ripley...
...Bill also has a small par in the picture, and we watch with mounting hilarity as he attempts through 31 takes to get his single line right: "It's all right, it's OK, there's something to live for...
...Ripley at the opera, ostensibly in Rome but actually in Naples, having recently murdered his friend, watches as Onegin does the same on stage-and we observe him shedding a sentimental tear...
...The weirdest of the Christmas movies was Anthony Minghella's screen adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel, The Talented Mr...
...Movie after movie, seen in previews, cost me from two and a half to over three hours of my life when I could have got all that they had to offer in a fraction of the time...
...His version of Ripley is no "Gatsbyesque dreamer" but a gay man who feels constrained to deny his true nature in order to ascend the social scale to a point he thinks (and we think too) appropriate for him...
...The best of the Christmas movies were Ang Lee's R/de With the Devil, which was really a Thanksgiving movie, Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, Milos Forman's Man on the Moon, and Dean Parisot's Galaxy Quest...
...Calling herself Brandon Teena, she poses as a young man not among glamorous American expatriates in Italy, who would presumably have appreciated the imposture, but among the trailer-trash of Nebraska...
...With appropriate fin de si&cle melancholy and the relentlessness of a thriller," he wrote, "'Ripley' nails both the wonder that has attended our century's celebratory version of the American dream and the anxiety that is stirred up by that dream's stealthy doppelg~inger, the American tragedy that befalls the Gatsbyesque dreamer who goes too far...
...No one can doubt, now, that with Smith's help he will sell out his 3,000 copies of Coven and go on to make the immortal Northwest...
...In the case of Snow Falling on Cedars, which consisted of pictures of the weather and the loudly semaphored message that racial and ethnic prejudice is very bad (haven't I heard this somewhere before...
...r you buy this film for $a4.95...
...All the same, Frank Rich is not quite so wrong as he might seem--and, indeed, as he usually is...
...There are plenty of other talentless nonentities who have done it, which is doubtless what gives Mark's story its considerable scope for emotional self-identification for ordinary, celebrity-worshipping Americans in the year 2000...
...Interestingly, the film includes a duel-the one in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin...
...It takes the past on its own terms instead of as an excuse, Merchant-Ivory style, for our self-congratulation at being so much more enlightened than our ancestors were...
...There a couple of yahoos and jailbirds whom she has befriended, one of whom has lost his girlfriend, the delicious Chlo~ Sevigny, to her, take exception to her contemporary sort of"reinvention"--with more or less predictable results...
...The American Dream stays with me each and every day," he tells Smith's camera, and "I will be goddamned ifI don't get The American Dream...
...Weirder than the movie itself, however, was the opinion of Frank Rich who, writing in the New York Times Magazine, saw it as a sort of paradigmatic movie for our times...
...Yet this is not quite true...
...So what's the problem...
...Now our national penchant for self-reinvention, our belief in what Robert Jay Lifton calls "the Protean Self," must extend well beyond the material to encompass-oh, lots of things, but above all the transcendence of all sexual limitation, whether of a moral or even of a biological kind...
...Something in this poignant ambition called out to Smith, a not-all-that-much-more successful Midwestern filmmaker himself...
...And yet he does...
...The first is that rarest of things among Hollywood pictures, a respectful treatment of the past-in this case the Missouri frontier during the Civil War...
...But a turn-of-the-century audience could only look at such a story in the MerchantIvoryish fashion and feel superior...
...What can Rich be thinking of...
...It's not that, even as late as x958 when the film is set, it would have been impossible for such an explosive conjunction of ambitious poverty and wealthy arrogance and snobbery to have taken place...
...and agreed to release three-hour movies this holiday season so that movie-goers could not vote with their feet and reward the rare filmmaker who managed to put a sock in it...
...It tells the story of a young woman called Teena Brandon, marvelously and memorably played by Hilary Swank, who somehow arrives at the conviction that she is a he...
...I only have to find 3,000 people like you across the country," says Mark with satisfaction...
...Hell, yeah," says Mike...
...Of course he's also a character trying to make a dumb movie...
...What really makes the movie is the presence in it of Mark's uncle, Bill Borchardt, an old man who bankrolls, not without a lot of grumbling, his moviemaking ambition and the thousands of videotapes of Coven that he hopes to hawk...
...I found that Mark wasn't just this character trying to make a dumb movie," he said...
...Like Smith, like us, he believes in Mark...
...She wants to be in your film, Bill," he says with a leer to the old man, who seems hardly interested...
...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on TAS Online at www.spectator.org...
...I don't believe in nothing...
...quite turns into a whole movie, though it is never less than fun to watch...
...Her engagement of our sympathies follows what is rapidly becoming a familiar cinematic path and one that is also followed in two other recent but less good films featuring transsexual characters who come from the other, male to female direction, Flawless and The Adventures of Sebastian Cole...
...His idea is to run off 3,000 videotapes of this patently awful movie in order to finance his next project, a film to be called Northwest...
...In return, Mark makes him a producer and shows him photos of would-be actresses who must be even more pathetic than he is...
...The Movie of the Month--like Boys Don't Cry, unfortunately, probably gone from your neighborhood Multiplices by the time you read this and awaiting the afterlife on videotape-presents a challenge that makes Brandon Teena's proposed sex change seem uncomplicated by comparison...
...The suspicion arises that the major studios all got together (surely in violation of some anti-trust act, somewhere...
...The American Spectator _9 Fe b r uary 2 o o o 63...
...You have to believe in what you're saying, Bill," he says...
...Jesus told me so...
...he asks his reformed but still spaced-out druggie sidekick, Mike...
...But as this specifically gay tragedy is a little lacking in-how shall we say?--resonance for a majority non-gay audience, the anachronistic stuffabout social snobbery has been 62 Fe b r u ary 2 o o o _9 The American Spectator put in as a sop to the Merchant-Ivoryites and opera-lovers...
...five minutes would have sufficed...
...The subtext of Minghella's movie reveals that it is not really about social class at all but about homosexuality...
...Mark tries to direct him: "You gotta put some passion into it...
...S uch gender-bending tangles are still rare enough, however, that we must turn elsewhere to see the best recent example of the American dreamer's Promethean challenge to the gods of Things As They Are...
...As one gets older, one naturally resents more and more such unwarranted demands on one's time...
...The point would seem to have been made, if inadvertently, that what Eugene Onegin is to Ripley, Ripley himself is to us: a bit of fossilized sentiment carefully preserved in an elegant and "artistic" package for the benefit of those who wish to advertise their social position by a judicious appreciation of his tragedy...
...Tops...
...A more straightforward example of "the Gatsbyesque dreamer who goes too far" is Kimberly Peirce's excellent Boys Don't Cry, billed without irony as "A True Story About Finding the Courage to Be Yourself...
...How can he have failed to notice how dated is the story of Tom Ripley (Matt Damon), a bright, talented, ambitious young man condemned by class prejudice to a life of poverty as a washroom attendant until he has the gumption to start deceiving and then killing people in order to escape it...
...I wouldn't be at all surprised to see it released in time for next Christmas--at just over three hours in length...
...At some level, we all know that Mark is the real paradigmatic figure, the Gatsby de nos jours whose tragedy is being repeated--as per the only prediction Karl Marx ever got right-as farce...
...The second is a bravura exercise in cinematic wit and cleverness that never JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...Where Brandon only wanted to transform herself from a woman to a man, Mark Borchardt, a hopeful filmmaker from Milwaukee and the real-life hero of Chris Smith's marvelous documentary, American Movie, wants to transform himself from a talentless nonentity to a directorial superstar...
Vol. 33 • February 2000 • No. 1
