Nobody's Perfect: Writings from the New Yorker

Giving Satisfaction

If the New Yorker wanted a film critic, and it could only choose from the characters in The Importance of Being Earnest, who would get the job? Yes, I know the proposition is fanciful, though it is not necessarily fruitless, especially when Anthony Lane (one of the present incumbents, though so sprightly that the word "incumbent" seems misleading) takes as an epigraph to this vast collection a conversation from that play between Algernon and his manservant Lane in which, told that he is a perfect pessimist, Lane replies: "I do my best to give satisfaction, sir."

Well, Lane is already established as a sparkish, merry, very cool, and elegant writer — a sane head at mad movies. If he does not exactly or always deliver satisfaction, it is not for a lack of trying. He is a born entertainer. And if his days in the dark are so often disappointing, well, he does his best to be fun (a very important concept to Lane) at the expense of elephantine movies. He can be hilarious talking back to the screen and mocking the follies of its ghosts in a way that was pioneered by S.J. Perelman, who was also a screenwriter, to his extra rue.

A large part of Lane's (and our) problem, of course, is that so few contemporary movies deserve his high spirits, his intelligence, and his playfulness. He never really turns to that subject in the way that one of his predecessors, Pauline Kael (a Gwendolen who became a Lady Bracknell) sometimes simply refused to get out of bed and go to the screening room and its depressing dark, and instead poured five thousand or so baleful words on the business that was spoiling her medium, her art, her fun. A very important distinction lies therein, I think: scolding the business while asserting that a medium and an art might exist, and thrive, independently of it. That is where we, the readers and the filmgoers, have to decide whether or not it is worth asking more of what we call film criticism.

But to begin with the horribly young Anthony Lane — by which I mean only that his youth seems horribly intimidating to me. (He says he is forty, but he can seem no more than a dashing twenty-four with, somehow, twice that long spent in the world's library.) Over the years Lane has said very kind things about me in public, about how my work encouraged him to be a film critic. That means a lot to me; but it is distressing to realize that he could be my son, and it opens up a prospect and a question — what will become of Anthony Lane? — that I can hardly see getting sufficient answer or material from the movies. And we have further affinities: we were both born English and then, in different ways, urged to throw our hats into the American ring; we have both been associated with the Independent on Sunday and the Independent in London; and, to my recollection, we have shared a few meals over the years without quite becoming friends of the degree that would disqualify us from reviewing each other's books. If I am unlikely to be altogether harsh with Lane, it is not just because of the high quality of his work, but because I feel we are trying to do the same thing in much the same spirit. We deserve sympathy more than the lash.

Lane was invited to write for the New Yorker by Tina Brown in 1993, and he has been in those pages ever since. He is certainly the brightest voice on film in that magazine since the days of Kael; or, to be more precise, since the days of Kael some years before she felt compelled to retire. Kael's body betrayed her, but her medium had gone sour first. That is another way of saying that Kael in her sexpot Gwendolen days had the enormous advantage of coinciding with a heady moment in American film. There are two broad ways of defining that moment: first, that there was a rash of good, daring, dangerous pictures as Hollywood lost confidence and control, and brash youngsters found more liberty; and second, that there was an urge for film education in American colleges and universities that swelled her potential readership.

I have in mind the years from Bonnie and Clyde (the occasion for Kael's coming-out dance) to the end of the 1970s. It's not that Kael necessarily reviewed all of these films (for she was shorn to her task and made all the more eloquent because of that). But the Age of Kael includes Bonnie and Clyde, both parts of The Godfather, The Conversation, The Long Goodbye, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, California Split and Nashville, Chinatown, The Last Detail and Shampoo, Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris, Carrie and The Fury, The French Connection, The Exorcist, Klute, The Parallax View, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Annie Hall, American Graffiti, Star Wars, Harold and Maude, Two-Lane Blacktop, Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, Badlands ... I could go on. You don't have to accept all of those as masterpieces, or even as great films. Still, as you go through the contents of Lane's reviews for the years since 1993 — or as I go through them — I have a hard time finding films of the same weight, fizz, or threat.

Instead we find that this real hope for criticism, or reviewing, or whatever, has had to grapple with Indecent Proposal, Sleepless in Seattle, Speed, Wolf, Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction, Braveheart, The Bridges of Madison County, Crash, Con Air, Contact, Titanic, Godzilla, Ronin, Meet Joe Black, The Phantom Menace, Gladiator, and Mission: Impossible 2. Not that this makes Lane dull to read. You have only to return to his dainty shredding of Indecent Proposal to learn the lesson that bored high spirits may be far better aroused by a really bad film than a solemn, high-minded failure.

This collection (only a selection, we are told, with none of Lane's early London stuff) is far too indulgent, but any reader will have a lot of fun waiting for things like this on Robert Redford meeting Demi Moore in Indecent Proposal:

So when he sees Diana in a Vegas boutique the wheels of lust start to grind, and before you can say junk bond he's asking her to kiss his dice and throw a seven. She wins, of course, whereupon he installs her and David [her husband, Woody Harrelson] — who have just lost all their cash — in an expensive suite. They look awed and pleased, although it's probably the nastiest hotel room ever seen on film: a steel-blue mess, rounded off with a delightful touch, at least in the print I saw — a microphone nodding from its boom at the top of the frame. Gage [Redford] then makes his big offer: a million bucks for a night with Diana — no aftermath, no strings. "It's just my body," Diana explains. "It's not my mind." I was glad to have that cleared up, though it does raise an interesting question: How much would you pay for an evening with Demi Moore's mind?

The last Michael Bay film, Armageddon, was a handy guide to what you should do when an asteroid bumps into your planet. At the time, most critics scorned the picture as deafening and dumb; in retrospect, it feels like a mature, even witty, exercise in self-reference, considering that the effect of watching a Michael Bay film is indistinguishable from having a large, pointy lump of rock drop on your head. His new picture, Pearl Harbor, maintains the mood, pulsing with fervor as it tells a tale familiar to every child in America: how a great nation was attacked and humbled by the imperious pride of Ben Affleck.

This is the kind of droll backhander that Lane pulls off five or six times in a set. He is truly a beautifully balanced comic knocker, without a trace of malice. You know he would treat Demi Moore just as well as he would a good golden Labrador retriever. And yet the joke about her in 1993 is not just funnier, it is truer to that film. For Indecent Proposal is very much the kind of melodrama that might have stewed its way into life in the banal but fevered mind of Moore; whereas the joke about Pearl Harbor is not nearly as penetrating of that awful film. Yes, Ben Affleck and his assurance are fatuous, but Pearl Harbor is dire because of the way its own historical idiocy has been obscured by techno-lust (the remorseless efficiency at explosions). It is a movie that fervently wants Pearl Harbor to be attacked so that it can blow everything up. And the fact that it came close to prospering at the box office has to do with the way not every kid in America now knows the reality of Pearl Harbor, yet every kid rejoices in the medium's capacity for Wow! and Crunnnnch!

An aside that may prove instructive: a very good friend of mine is nowadays in the habit of going to the movies with a bunch of pals. They have no interest in films that might have any virtue; perhaps they have given up believing in that cause. Instead they prefer to go to what, in advance, they trust will be a bad film. They have rich fields of choice, and they seldom face the embarrassment of being trapped in the dark with anything that stills their good-natured riot, or even moves them. They treasure the desolate vanity of minds such as Demi Moore's. They feast on bad lines, far-fetched situations, demented plot turns. Now, one can easily suggest that the American movie has always been catering to their smart superiority — Perelman's wild notices from the 1930s and the 1940s were all founded in the aghast wonder of look what we're sitting through! Why should people stay as silent as neutered cell phones in the dark when trash deserves riposte? Wretched movies have always been fit for audience interaction. If you have to see Indecent Proposal, see it with my friend and the gang. And Anthony Lane is their reviewer of choice, because he seems to go to the movies with nothing but his wit and his long-suffering incredulity to defend him against outrageous coincidence and indecent proposals.

All of which tends to show how, in the space of ten years, Lane at The New Yorker has become the suave voice of a kind of superiority that has always reckoned the movies were silly, diseased, and to be deplored. His own great talent has played into that portrait, whether or not he finds pleasure or even career in raising the laughter of New York's smart set. In fact, I do not think that he is remotely that kind of person. Knowing that the medium can be silly (or worse) is not the same as regarding it as shallow. Not even as steady a search for fun as Lane's necessarily commits film or cinema or the movies to being a place bereft of depth, passion, or mystery.

How do I know how serious Lane wants to be? Why, from the second half of this book, which gives up Notting Hill and Dancer in the Dark for such writers as Edward Lear, Nabokov, Cyril Connolly, Andrι Gide, Evelyn Waugh, and so on. It is a credit to Lane and to The New Yorker that neither has been prepared to confine his intelligence to a dark where he finds so few signs of nourishment. Being English may have helped. Lane speaks with a kind of intellectual assurance that signals a very good education (Trinity College, Cambridge) as well as a manservant's knowledge that you should never let masters or employers get the upper hand, in life or in conversation. So Lane is dazzlingly well read, very intelligent on books and book people, and quite prepared not to have those pretty pineapple jokes explode in your face when he is talking about "serious" things.

Even as I read this book and wondered what to say about it, Lane appeared in the New Yorker with a lengthy appreciation of the films of Max Ophuls. That is fit company for essays here on Buρuel, Hitchcock, Tati, Bresson, Keaton, and Sturges that are really the best things that Lane has done, and which show how far the wisecracker is alert to entire careers and to the history of a medium. Here is Lane talking about Hitchcock on the occasion of his centenary, in an essay that runs twelve printed pages and which manages to place Hitchcock as both a model entertainer triumphing with large crowds in a crass business and a visionary — an artist even:

What is at work here is something more intricate than comic relief; Hitchcock is not merely relaxing the viewers before he cranks them up again. One of the disarming morals of his movies — even of such a glum and hunted work as The Wrong Man — is that it's fun to be cranked; to watch someone take a wrong turn or to see Vera Miles glance curiously at the cellar door in Psycho is not to congratulate yourself on your own safe path but to get into your imaginative stride, to follow the victim or the sucker as far as you conceivably can. Film has eroded the stony Aristotelian principle that pity and terror become tolerable at a decent distance — say, at twenty yards from the stage. The movie screen flattens that aplomb and sucks the viewer in; what is more, as Hitchcock knew, we can even be invigorated by our helplessness. If Aristotle had ever checked into a motel and taken a shower, he would have felt the same.

Of course, anyone writing about Hitchcock today has the benefit of time and reflection, to say nothing of all the discerning things that have been written about him. There is a sentimentality about movies — it was vastly promoted by Kael — according to which films are different, and not like writing, music, and painting (or people, for that matter). Films, it is said, must be there now in front of us — the whole sensation — instead of eked out over time, recollected in tranquility, reappraised in argument, and allowed to age, like wine (or people). There are things to be said on either side, and it is certainly the case that America has tended to make pictures that could be eaten raw, on the bone, and in the dark, while other systems have made for pictures that respond to time and cuisine, human alteration, and growing older. So, let us say, the works of Renoir, Ozu, and Ophuls are like conventional works of art, whereas the great American films are akin to sports events, roller coasters, and traffic accidents — most of their power is owed to your being there when the live thing happened.

More and more, I find this view to be nonsense. There was a sensationalism in, say, Birth of a Nation that may have obscured its racism and its trashiness. There was a buzz to Carrie that diverted us from its cruelty. And there is a spectacle in so many American film sensations that tries to paper over their lack of human reality. Reviewing has become the culture of the thumb (up or down). What other field has so deliberately cut off its own eloquent fingers? But in what other would-be art has criticism been so co-opted by advertising?

There is something else to add. Lane takes Hitchcock for granted as a master. Everyone does so now — but taking art for granted never helps much. There was a time, at Hitchcock's peak, when films such as Rear Window and Vertigo were passed over or condemned. It was in France and even in England that a few spectators saw those pictures and recognized that some strange beauty had occupied the screen. In our day a critic can note the same thing with, say, Mulholland Drive or Paul Schrader's forthcoming Auto Focus. Lane has not yet proved himself in that way, and he may ask himself how far his caution comes out of the habit of making such good fun of the movies. We have the reviewing strategies and styles of an age despairing of magic, wit, and feeling. Will something happen to restore the busy years that Kael enjoyed? I hope so, though Kael herself was very shrewd on the commercial practices that make such a restoration unlikely — and those systems have set in with a vengeance since she retired. Is Lane meant to pass the next thirty years getting off with increasingly artificial jokes at the expense of movies that we love to hate? He is far too good for that. I hope that, very soon, he will pass on to novels, to plays, or to some large work on Anglo-America. God save him from the most likely and soul-destroying fate: screenplays. Though a season in that hell might make him wounded and angry, and at the moment he rather suffers from being unscarred.

Lane writes for a magazine in New York but he lives in London, and in his introduction he records that he must have crossed the Atlantic at least one hundred fifty times in the last decade, traveling to and from Manhattan screenings. That is a rare torture, and a great concession to keeping his family English. But I want to ask more: that a writer as good as this trying to discuss the relationship between America and its films (and that is, inevitably, the core of his task) become more committed to America, to its size and space, its mixture of pity, terror, and the ridiculous, of the monstrous and the banal. Kael was very American; it was the fiber in her meat, the texture of her abrasive soul. Lane is keeping an emotional distance that can only assist and abet the air of snobbery or condescension that attaches to his writing (and which has earned the spite or envy of some of our Jacks and Algies — all longing to be called Ernest). It is the notion — very prevalent in Britain — that America and its movies are too much, too silly, too excessive. All true, and all so urgent that we need an American to say so. If Anthony Lane is to become more than a brilliant film reviewer, then he needs to live in America. It is the best advice I can offer. And I think it might be fun — as in fun to run a newspaper, the sport that made Charles Foster Kane famous, and that destroyed him.

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