Lifetime Achievement
PODHORETZ, JOHN
BOA Lifetime Achievement One less vote for Pedro. by John Podhoretz In our day, the world's most famous filmmakers are brash Americans whose names are brands every bit as much as Nabisco is:...
...Greatness just means wallowing in swill...
...In the 1960s, movie critics and others looked to European and other foreign films because they wanted the medium to rise above the common level of Hollywood trash and achieve greatness comparable to novels, poetry, and painting...
...There is one notable exception to this trend, one director remaining on the Continent whose name alone inspires rhapsodies, Oscar nominations, and critical ratings of 100 percent among American critics surveyed by the rottentomatoes.com website...
...Only she's not dead...
...In 2003, he won an Oscar for best screenplay for Talk to Her, and this year he won the same award at the Cannes Film Festival for Volver...
...Now foreign film production functions best as a Hollywood farm team...
...The same is true of the critical attention garnered by Truffaut, whose delightfully breezy work today seems as substantial as cotton candy...
...They were hailed for their willingness to grapple with dark themes, existential dread, and the despair of the soulless bourgeoisie...
...And while the movies can't be Tolstoy, they certainly can be a great deal more than Danielle Steel in Spanish, with English subtitles...
...He is Pedro Almodovar, the bard of Madrid...
...Every other brand-name filmmaker lived far from America and made films in other languages: Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni in Italy, Frangois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard in France, Ingmar Bergman in Sweden, Luis Bunuel in Spain, and Akira Kurosawa in Japan...
...Actually, it's just ridiculously uncon-vincing—a Girl Power fantasia that doesn't even make a modicum of sense on its own terms...
...It's juicy, pullout-the-stops-and-go-for-it cinema, nakedly emotional and wildly melodramatic, more operatic in its emotional pull than most movies ever try to be...
...But at least those were ambitions...
...Efforts to create successor superstars— especially the egregious Lina Wert-muller, an Italian Eurocommunist who became the toast of New York for about a year until audiences figured out that films like Swept Away and Seven Beauties revealed Wertmuller was primarily an antifeminist misogynist—faltered...
...A teenage daughter kills her father for making moves on her...
...Make a good or stylish or catchy movie abroad and you just might be asked to direct an action or horror picture starring Sarah Michelle Gellar...
...His women are either saintly victims of brutish men or saintly avengers of male brutishness...
...What accounts for Almodovar's sterling reputation and standing during an era in which non-American films are in eclipse, not only here but also abroad...
...Penelope enlists the aid of her friend the neighborhood hooker in burying her dead husband in a refrigerator down by the river where they used to go spooning...
...Susan Sontag took regular trips to Paris in order to be instructed on what to think...
...The cinema can't really support those lofty ambitions...
...Only it turns out he's not her father...
...If Pedro Almodovar is, by common assent, the world's greatest living filmmaker, then that means movie critics no longer have expectations or hopes for the cinema...
...It's a relic of an earlier time when people eager to embrace and champion the medium of film were always mistaking artsiness for art and pretension for profundity...
...She set their tryst-making shack on fire, then made it look as though she had died in the fire as well...
...This is not eat-your-vegetables cinema...
...I suppose this plot could be the source of a great film, just as any storyline could be the source of any great work of art...
...His films are vivid, teeming affairs—a feast of superbly photographed colors and textures, with dense and convoluted plots that are surprisingly easy to follow, beautifully acted by a repertory company of sprightly performers...
...Though he began making movies in 1980, he became an international star only with the release of his screwball comedy Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in 1988—and since then, he has made nine films and all of them have been released theatrically in the United States, the only international filmmaker of whom that can be said...
...But it doesn't...
...Stanley Kauffman once said that Bergman should win the Nobel Prize for Literature, a notion seconded by John Simon...
...Volver Directed by Pedro Almodovar America's love affair with foreign film ended at some point in the mid-1980s, pretty much with the passing or obsolescence of the 1960s generation of directors who were once so famous...
...Surely, if you recognized the depth and moral seriousness of these works of art, you could transcend this country's broad-shouldered Babbitry and become a true citizen of the world...
...They were discussed with veneration, even when (maybe especially when) a new film proved to be something of a dud...
...he assumed the role because her mother was raped by her own father and gave birth to her...
...Step back 40 years, though, and only one of the world's best-known directors even spoke English (that would be Alfred Hitchcock...
...So assured is he of his brand-name status that he now simply bills himself as "Almodovar," and Pedro be damned...
...It turns out she killed her husband (Penelope's incestuous father) and his girlfriend once she found out he had abused Penelope...
...John Podhoretz is The Weekly Standard's movie critic...
...The only way a man is not a brute is if he's in a wheelchair or if he's gay...
...by John Podhoretz In our day, the world's most famous filmmakers are brash Americans whose names are brands every bit as much as Nabisco is: Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese...
...In Volver, we have two succeeding generations of abuse...
...The mother, a working-class pixie played by the sex-pot Penelope Cruz, is determined to protect her pseudo-parricidal daughter, in part because her own mother closed her eyes to the abuse in her home...
...The releases of their movies were considered major cultural events in this country...
...Meanwhile, Penelope's dead mother returns from the dead...
...And certainly Volver is being discussed as though it transcends its roots in melodramatic trash and reaches a higher and more mysterious artistic plane...
...Today, such a view of the pompously ponderous Bergman—with his ticking clocks representing the coming Doom—seems almost touchingly dated...
...Almodovar's movies echo each other with themes that would not be out of place in a Lifetime (The Cable Channel for Women) Movie Marathon—if Lifetime's movies were only a little bloodier and dirtier...
...Their stature was due more to deep American cultural insecurity than it was to the artistic aspirations of the films in question...
...America's middlebrow film critics took regular trips to films made in Paris to be told what to feel...
...Amid the rapes and child sexual abuse, there's always time for a mournful song and a group hug of maternal solidarity across generations, classes, and gender preferences...
Vol. 12 • November 2006 • No. 11
