The Talkies: Why Was This Movie Made?
Bowman, James
Why Was This Movie Made? BY JAMES BOWMAN Besides the money, I mean. In the absence of any obvious candidates for Movie of the Month, I thought it might be an idea to run through a selection of the...
...Written by Steven Katz, directed by E. Elias Merhige, and starring Willem Dafoe and John Malkovich, this movie too may have had a serious purpose to begin with, but ultimately it was made for fun...
...This makes it easy for us to pity ourselves when we pity her...
...He retreats to the bottle...
...and (4) that governments are comically unable to do anything about any of this...
...Like O Brother, Because "reality" is universally assumed to be violent dangerous, sexy, and absurd, a serious-minded Briton must show that he is in touch with it by playing up these qualities at the expense of everything else, a society built, as we have persuaded ourselves, on the oppression of women and minorities and riddled with the corruption (if that's what it is) of mere hypocrisy...
...3) that drug users are often the children of wealthy, middle-class parents who don't know what their kids are up to...
...As we have seen, the degree of their success varies, but Soderbergh is the only one of them who succeeds, however intermittently, in being able to take his eyes—or ours—off himself...
...Parts of it really are fun too...
...In both cases, however, one leaves less with the sense of disgust at the filmmakers' self-indulgence than with regret that so much talent has been expended in so unworthy a cause...
...Movie people's idea of having fun is making run of movie people as being totally outrageous...
...This was made for the same reason that almost all of Hollywood's costume dramas are made these days, namely so that a comfortable, wealthy, and individualistic audience of today can feel good about itself by looking back on the people of a hundred years ago with a sense of superiority...
...He says to folksy Liev that he felt betrayed because "Don Regan from next door says Bobby can't be scoutmaster for cub scouts because he's gay...
...But Tom Gilroy didn't know how to make something beautiful...
...Where feminine self-pity is at the heart of House of Mirth, it is the masculine variety that animates The Pledge, directed by Sean Penn and starring Jack Nicholson...
...But when it came down to the representation of character he let political slogans take over, proving the basic decency of his pair of municipal groundsmen from Connecticut (Beatty and Schreiber) by showing them with enlightened attitudes towards work, class differences, meat-eating, premarital sex, Eastern religions, drug taking, wife-beating and above all, naturally, homosexuality...
...this is a show-off's movie...
...At the same time, we are confirmed in all our prejudices against unloved, broke, and despised—has only the best.The drunkards warm and satisfying sense of self-pity may help to make Sean Penn and Jack Nicholson feel good about themselves, but so good do they feel that they can't even see the colossal inappropriateness of attempting to elicit our sympathies on behalf of a drunken and disappointed Jack in a context dominated by murdered children...
...And even Don Regan apologizes when Bobby finally dies...
...Because "reality" is universally assumed to be violent, dangerous, sexy, and absurd, a serious-minded Briton must show that he is in touch with it by playing up these qualities at the expense of everything else, including basic plausibility...
...It was made specifically to satirize Hollywood even though Hollywood is long past being satirizable, at least in the movies...
...Just look at Mamet's, in which the two movie stars are a brainless, talentless child-molester, played by Alec Baldwin, and a neurotic slut, played by Sarah Jessica Parker...
...It's the same way that Mr...
...The same impulse to satire spoils State and Main by David Mamet...
...The vampire, like the other spawn of Hollywood's great era of horror, has long since become a figure of fun, not taken seriously, and this movie makes no attempt to make him frightening again, even though he causes several deaths...
...For, having gone to a lot of trouble to understand the drug problem and, so far as I know, to rid himself of a lot of the kinds of assumptions that Hollywood might be expected to make about it, Soderbergh can produce in the end nothing better than a linked pair of lurid melodramas demonstrating (1) that police are often dedicated but also (particularly in Mexico) often corrupt...
...This is a shame because at times the movie comes close to saying something serious and interesting about the point at which the psycho-sexual significance of the vampire, Hollywood, and history all come together...
...Bobby cut his lawn for six years...
...Malkovich and Dafoe are both excellent in their roles and well worth watching, but we can't take them seriously when we know they are only having fun...
...This is a peculiarly British ambition, I think...
...Being at least somewhat like that themselves was part of the charm of playing these roles...
...But as he is about to deliver the bad guy to his ex-colleagues on the force, a million-to-one fluke persuades the colleagues that he is a deluded has-been and the new love in his life (Robin Wright Penn) that he is himself a menace to her child...
...It is also the enemy of intellectual honesty and historical accuracy, which is what ruins The House of Mirth, written and directed by Terence Davies from the novel by Edith Wharton...
...Drunks always believe that they have good reasons for drinking, and Jack—abandoned, Where Art Thou...
...It's the way our culture's craze for personal authenticity has taken the Brits...
...If insights like these come as a surprise to you, you may enjoy this movie...
...Madonna the first wants to be thought the victim of an unjust universe...
...2) that drug dealers are nearly always brutal, ruthless, and murderous...
...The filmmakers know that the audience knows that it's only a movie, so they don't make any real effort to make us believe that the vampire is really real...
...Consider Spring Forward, written and directed by Tom Gilroy and starring Ned Beatty and Liev Schreiber.This is a movie that started out to be made, as all movies and all works of art should be made, as a beautiful object...
...but the cartoonish96 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 ness of the wicked people who were apparently born for no other purpose than to do her down makes the film as a whole little more than an exercise in feminist propaganda on the one hand and feminine self-pity on the other...
...He had a few half-good ideas to start with—for instance, showing suburbanites in the four seasons of the year going about their familiar tasks as if they were figures on a medieval calendar...
...They are only movie deaths—like those of the scores of anonymous Arab "terrorists" in a Schwarzenegger movie: dehumanized and therefore without human dignity...
...Taking a leaf out of the Merchant-Ivory book, Davies has made a Lily for us (especially for the grievance-ridden modern woman) to love because she is the only one in the film who seems to aspire to be like us...
...Any movie which sets out to criticize the excesses of Hollywood is immediately co-opted by Hollywood...
...At any rate, both Ritchie and the Coens really are clever and funny, the Coens more so than Ritchie, who is nevertheless their superior when it comes to plotting and storytelling...
...Gillian Anderson gives a fine performance as poor, doomed Lily Bart, the beautiful free spirit with whom we naturally identify ourselves...
...Being outrageous is a good thing, in case you didn't know...
...An almost Wordsworthian belief in the basic decency of the suburban peasantry shines through this boring film—which is boring because, ultimately, it was made to show us what a decent guy Tom Gilroy is—and what skunks social conservatives are...
...Folksy Ned has a gay son, Bobby (whom we never see), suffering from AIDS...
...There are some excellent jokes, for instance, as when Malkovich in the role of F.W Murnau on the set of Nosferatu, soothes his leading lady by saying: "In this scene you make the ultimate sacrifice for love...all you have to do is relax and the vampire will do all the work...
...Such a catastrophic mistake by Madonna's first husband makes Snatch by her latest, Mr...
...It may even be getting close to being a parody of me\ Not at all...
...This role ridicules my profession...
...Well, we already knew that...
...At least politics does not disfigure Shadow of the Vampire...
...Yorktown University .com The first for profit online conservative university For a prospectus please visit www.yorktownuniversity.com THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 97MERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 97...
...The secret sorrow is secret so that it can assume larger and larger proportions, to the point at which our Jack has become a kind of Christ figure, carrying the sins of the world on his back...
...Madonna the second wants to be thought authentic and Mr...
...Guy Ritchie, seem pretty harmless by comparison...
...For reasons too complicated to go into here, moviemakers have a freer hand than ever before in history to please themselves, or a narrow sect of like-minded people, rather than a mass audience...
...Here he is a boozing ex-cop who seems on the point of returning to emotional life just as he single-handedly cracks the case of a serial child-killer...
...And the fatal temptations of the in-joke, the political tract, the self-consciously arty bid for Great Director status—or of just showing off— are so rarely resisted these days that the supply of movies worth seeing seems unlikely to increase any time soon...
...His ambitions in Traffic are large and worthy ones, but his talents, except in the most superficial and technical sense, are generally unequal to them...
...Did either of them pause to think: Wait a minute...
...Steven Soderbergh seems to me to have the opposite problem...
...People who are delighted to satirize themselves are far gone in self-satisfaction, and self-satisfaction is the natural enemy of satire...
...It's also the way that Terence Davies and Tom Gilroy want to be thought of as belonging to the most tolerant, decent, and enlightened segment of mankind and E. Elias Merhige and David Mamet to the most acute and intellectual...
...Needless to say, Liev is a much more understanding type of guy himself...
...But where the latter, with its self-conscious allusions to the Odyssey, was made (like most of the Coen brothers' movies) merely to show off how clever and funny the Coen brothers are, the former adds to that ambition its writer-director's desire to be known for knowing his way around the underworld of London...
...Because the movie wasn't made for anything but fun, it soon degenerates into that most tedious of "satires": Hollywood satirizing itself, which is really just another way of saying the same thing...
...Nicholson is once again employed to work his special magic on that romantic archetype that he has for so long made his own: the exceptional man emotionally paralyzed by a secret sorrow...
...Soderbergh wants to be thought serious and profound the same way that the Coens want to be thought clever and funny...
...But then the habits of the slack, undisciplined post-modern era kick in...
...In the absence of any obvious candidates for Movie of the Month, I thought it might be an idea to run through a selection of the movies I saw with a brief explanation of why, I think, each fails through one variTHE TALKIES ety or another of self-indulgence, the besetting sin of our movie culture...
Vol. 34 • March 2001 • No. 2
