The Deep End Ghost World Fighter: Seeing movies through Pauline Kael's eyes
Cooper, Rand Richards
SCREEN Rand Richards Cooper THROUGH KAEL'S EYES 'The Deep End/ 'Ghost World' & 'Fighter' Pauline Kael, New Yorker film critic from 1969 to 1991, died in September at the age of eighty-two....
...Without playfulness and the pleasure we take from it, art isn't art at all," Kael wrote in her famous 1969 Harper's essay, "Trash, Art, and the Movies...
...But it could be called Fighter and Writer, because Lustig, whose family (like Wiener's) was wiped out in the Holocaust, is a professor and novelist—and the journey is prompted by his interest in writing about Wiener's heroic life...
...I don't give a shit for this kind of analysis...
...To Wiener, his sacred memories are being defiled...
...It bothers me...
...It's hard to be this self-consciously lovely without seeming arty, but The Deep End pulls it off, thanks in large part to Tilda Swinton's bravura performance—her pinched, bug-eyed face conveys intelligence and a trapped desperation...
...Commonweal 18 September 28, 2001...
...Listening, Lustig decides to blur the picture a bit...
...If you are hungry, you change your morality...
...If you're going to track down just one of these films, perhaps it should be Fighter, Amir Bar-Lev's poignant documentary account of two septuagenarian Czech Jews, Jan Wiener and Arnost Lustig, who met in this country as emigres decades ago, and now take a trip back to the scenes of their war-ravaged youth...
...the neon of the bar where the son gets into trouble...
...I can't relate to 99 percent of humanity," he says to Enid in despair...
...This is daylight noir, and domestic too: even as Swinton calls her banker in a frantic attempt to raise $50,000, she's sorting laundry, and her frightened meeting with the blackmailer is interrupted by her daughter asking to be driven to ballet class...
...Did the man himself perhaps have a son...
...What would have happened to me if I had been born a German boy...
...Ghost World polishes another familiar genre, the coming-of-age movie, to a fine gleam of wit...
...Maybe you made a mistake," he says...
...The day of her death I rented Nashville, a film she ardently boosted, and imagined her sitting in the theater, as she wrote in 1975, "smiling at the screen in complete happiness...
...And when Enid recommends finding someone who shares his interests, he bursts out: "I don't want to meet someone who shares my interests...
...How many Jews would I have killed...
...In the case of Crumb, the answer was, barely...
...Seymour sells Enid a blues LP, and when she listens to the plaintive wail of "Devil Got My Woman" and observes Seymour's total absorption in the arcana of records, she begins a worshipful friendship...
...Kovacs from NBC's "ER"—as the handsome blackmailer who thinks likewise...
...but Ghost World's Enid (Thora Birch, who played Kevin Spacey's daughter in American Beauty) is no genius, just an alienated seventeen-year-old who's graduating from high school with no clue about what comes next...
...he complains...
...he bursts out when he and Lustig visit the former police headquarters where he was interrogated...
...Fighter has the fascination of Louis Malle's My Dinner with Andre, the same tangle of the philosophical and personal, revealed through conversation...
...A storyteller, he embroiders and expands, dissolving all sins—including his own—in the mordant fact of human fallenness...
...Director Terry Zwigoff made the brilliant 1995 documentary study of the comic artist R. Crumb, and his new film is adapted from a comicbook novel by Daniel Clowes...
...Why is Lustig trying to change the subject...
...After all, the man went on to become a Communist functionary, and probably did a lot of harm, including to Jews...
...The film is named for Wiener, a boxer and soldier who escaped Nazi-held Czechoslovakia and joined the RAF...
...Others are evil...
...Zwigoff pegs the precocious adolescent's cult of irony, revealing, behind the retro and kitsch, a fantasy of authenticity, as well as a Holden Caulfieldlike fear of the messy compromises of adult life...
...Her bad-girl vision of movie reviewing betrayed a midcentury notion that taking forthright pleasure in something was a challenge, while being "false to what we enjoy," either through morals or manners, was a constant temptation—especially for other critics...
...What did you do while I was in prison...
...Wiener will have none of this—especially from Lustig, who during the postwar Communist regime in Czechoslovakia was a committed party member, while Wiener himself, falsely accused as a British spy, spent five years in a labor camp...
...Into this mix trips Seymour (Steve Buscemi), a fortyish nerd with one great obsession: record collecting...
...Soon afterward, the trip breaks off...
...we are simply too different for friendship," Lustig comments...
...The Deep End stars Tilda Swinton as a woman who mistakenly believes her teenage son has committed murder, and Goran Visnjic—Dr...
...Kael confounded highbrow/lowbrow distinctions (she loved Bergman and Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and changed American film criticism by making it much more personal...
...This smart genre variation draws an immensely sympathetic performance from its star, and converts a sunny day into menace that comes, as it were, out of the blue...
...Directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel have given this classic noir setup (Max Ophuls's 1949 adaptation of the same Elizabeth Holding novel, The Reckless Moment, starred James Mason) an unlikely setting, amid the austere loveliness of a lakefront in the northern Nevada woods...
...What Enid sees as Seymour's purity is to Seymour himself his tragedy—his habit of collapsing, for instance, into scholarly nattering when a sexy woman in a bar asks what music he likes...
...Maybe you should have killed him...
...Perhaps a son who had died in the war...
...Morality is a child of necessity," he says at one point...
...Lustig is an intellectual, by habit and training a busy contextualizer, for whom the soldier's black-and-white morality is alien...
...In Italy Wiener tracks down relatives of a long-dead man who was kind to him, searching for someone who remembers...
...The trip starts in high spirits, but to our fascination—and surely the filmmakers'—the camaraderie between the two men disintegrates...
...Things begin to sour in Prague, where Wiener dramatically recounts his postwar return, in British uniform, to the office of an antiSemitic bureaucrat who had humiliated him, and whom he had fantasized about killing...
...She and her best friend, Rebecca, spend their days trading deadpan quips and sarcastic put-downs of classmates...
...The movie is worth that line alone...
...A movie was not a set of ideas, she insisted, but an experience, something that works on us...
...The film is a study in blue: the water of the lake where a body is found...
...Here, then, a summer's-end A heroic life trio of surprises that Kael, I think, would have liked...
...a blue Corvette parked where it shouldn't be...
...True, but at another level a fascinating, near-mythic battle has been joined—one in which Wiener, the trail of his actual life gone cold even as Lustig rambles on about his story, must face an infuriating truth: yes, the fighter may make history, but in the end it's the writer who owns it...
...Zwigoff is interested in how far eccentricity can inhabit the real world...
...At the movies we want a different kind of truth," she wrote, "something that surprises us...
...His outlook is relativistic and deterministic...
...In her room Enid has a backlit faux stained-glass panorama of waterfalls and woods, gaudy, like something in a bad restaurant...
...he muses aloud...
...No one does...
...Wiener, on the other hand, is idealistic, humorless—and increasingly angry...
...She blasted the kind of big Hollywood production, like A Man for All Seasons or Dances with Wolves, that makes "a genuflection to importance...
...He describes the man begging for his life, and his own cathartic experience in deciding to spare him...
...Some people are good...
...anything that smacked of high-minded solemnity—of teaching or preaching— aroused her scorn...
...Kael was famously opinionated—her reviews, charged Renata Adler in the New York Review of Books, contained "a protracted, obsessional invective"—but fans knew that her judgments issued from a delirious love of movies and movie-watching...
...Ghost World confronts a teenager's dream of heroic outsiderCommonweal 17 September 28,2001 dom with the reality of a loner for whom being different is not irony, but isolation...
...I don't want it to be diluted by prattling around with this kind of nonsense...
...Did Wiener's extreme good looks possibly play a role...
...The Deep End is full of beautifully composed shots, such as a time-lapse sequence of nightfall overtaking the upper window where Swinton's character sits smoking and worrying...
...I hate my interests...
...You think it's healthy to obsessively collect things...
...Lustig, meanwhile, speculates about why an Italian fascist prison officer helped a young Czech Jew instead of turning him over to the Germans...
...For the writer, this is just thinking aloud, exploring the material of the story...
Vol. 128 • September 2001 • No. 16
