Old Joy's Club

There’s a guy named Jim Emerson who writes a terrific movie blog called Scanners for the Chicago Sun-Times website. Because it’s the Sun-Times, he sort of exists in the shadow of Roger Ebert, but he seems okay with that, and seems happy to play the role of Ebert’s more cerebral kid brother—writing thoughtful, lengthy posts on the art of the opening shot while the more populist Ebert is busy giving three-star reviews to Garfield and Cheaper by the Dozen 2.

A typically insightful Emerson comment about Zodiac has lingered with me over the last few weeks. He’s comparing David Fincher’s film to the work of David Lynch, specifically the way that Zodiac and Lynch’s films are driven by the viewer’s primal need to figure out mysteries. “We want to put the pieces together ourselves,” Emerson writes, “even if these characters from the past were never able to. We know the identity of the Zodiac Killer was never conclusively determined; but maybe this movie will give us the information we need to solve the crime.... No, it’s not likely or logical, but we can’t help but crave a solution, no matter how unlikely.”

This principle doesn’t just apply to unsolved crimes, either. I think, very often, we hope movies will supply us with clues that we can use to solve the mysteries of our own lives. For instance, one of the reasons I was so interested in seeing Kelly Reichardt’s drama Old Joy was that I had read a few reviews of the film that described it as the story of two old friends who haven’t seen each other in a while and who decide to take a camping trip together in the Oregon wilderness. Mark, one of the friends, I gathered, was the more “responsible” of the two, with a wife and a child on the way, while the other, Kurt, was something of a lost soul, still tentatively feeling his way through life, jobless, not really able to put the pieces of his existence together.

That reminded me a lot of my relationship with Ken, my best friend since high school, although the Old Joy details don’t match up precisely. Ken has been married for years, for instance, while I’ve always struggled to make romantic connections. I’ve always envied that about him. And that loneliness often makes me feel as lost and unrooted as Kurt does. But I’m also the one who seems to have made the most progress professionally and artistically: I’ve had some plays produced, I’ve won a couple of writing awards and I’ve been able to make a decent living as a writer and editor. Ken, meanwhile, has worked a few menial jobs and now has settled into the role of househusband to his wife, a university professor.

Which is fine. What distresses me more is that Ken, despite being probably the most imaginative and creative person I’ve ever met, seems stuck in... well, kind of an artistic rut, rewriting and repackaging the same handful of horror and sci-fi stories he wrote 15 years ago. Not long ago, he proudly sent me a homemade CD he’d recorded recently—which turned out to consist of new recordings of songs I first heard him sing back in high school. That’s where I lost patience with him. I’m living in Florida, he’s living in Ontario, and we haven’t spoken in months. Occasionally he sends me links to short videos he’s posted to YouTube, but selfishly, I haven’t responded. I feel ashamed to even write any of this down; I haven’t behaved at all like a friend to him and it pains me to say such hurtful things about him.

I was hoping that Old Joy would give me some insight into how to reconnect with my old friend, or at least how to handle our undoubtably awkward next conversation. I wanted it to give me a solution to my personal mystery. But Old Joy didn’t help me out one bit: the film is such a beautifully understated character study—and Reichardt refuses so resolutely to pass judgment on either Mark or Kurt—that I emerged from the theatre unsure which man’s life needed “fixing” more, and a little bit guilty for my somewhat superior attitude to Ken’s life. As if I know anything. As if I’ve made such a triumph of myself.

All I knew was that I wanted to commune again with my old friend, the way that Will and Kurt do, lying side by side in their individual tubs at the idyllic Bagby Hot Springs. I wish there was a way Ken and I could do it wordlessly, the way Will and Kurt do, instead of chatting nervously over the telephone, not sure whether the other guy is nodding along or silently taking offence to everything you say. I wish we at least could go to a movie together and sit next to each other and laugh at the same jokes, the way we used to.

Shaved and Confused

I’ve never been able to grow a mustache, and I’ve always been vaguely resentful of guys who can. Actually, I can barely grow eyebrows—like my father, I’ve got alopecia, which means I have random bald spots all over my body. The condition first manifested itself when I was about 15 as a matching pair of small, hairless ovals on my thighs; not long after, I developed a strange patch of missing hair at the base of my skull, which was followed by a bald spot about the size of a silver dollar on the right side of my head. Self-consciously, I began growing my hair long to cover it up, but when it occurred to me that my hairdo was really nothing more than a displaced combover, I decided, like my father, just to shave it all off.

People noticed the difference immediately. The same, sadly, can’t be said for Marc Thiriez, the hero of La Moustache, an odd, unclassifiable little French movie from director Emmanuel Carrère, who also wrote the source novel.

As played by Vincent Lindon (perhaps best known to North American DVD renters as the male lead in Claire Denis’ sublime Friday Night), he’s a middle-aged but still handsome Parisian architect whose loving wife Agnès is played by Emmanuelle Devos (who those same francophile DVD renters will vividly recall from Arnaud Desplechin’s amazing recent film Kings and Queen). The film begins with Marc staring at his reflection in the mirror as he sits in the bathtub, shaving—can this damp, repulsive-looking practice really be as widespread as French movies would have me believe?—wondering whether he should shave off his mustache. “I’ve never seen you without it,” Agnès replies before leaving their apartment on an errand.

That settles it: off it goes, in an impressively detailed shaving sequence, the best and most realistic of its kind since Luke Wilson shaved off his beard and mustache in The Royal Tenenbaums. Really: hats off to Carrère for showing every stage of this complicated process. Film directors always underestimate men’s curiosity about other men’s grooming habits, and the movie theatre is a great place to pick up all sorts of little tips and tricks, like the shaving advice Jon Polito’s Italian gangster gives to his chauffeur near the end of Miller’s Crossing or the scene in Charade where Cary Grant explains to Audrey Hepburn how he shaves the cleft in his chin.

Anyway, here’s where things in La Moustache start to get weird. Marc’s decision to shave his mustache seems to have opened up a hole in the very fabric of reality. When his wife returns, she doesn’t notice anything different about him. Neither do the friends at the dinner party they attend that night. Doesn’t anyone notice I’ve shaved off my mustache?, asks an increasingly exasperated Marc when he and Agnès return home. What are you talking about?, she replies. You’ve never had a mustache.

Carrère directs the film in such a deadpan French way that it’s hard to know how we’re supposed to react to its premise. Marc’s distress is so genuine that we can’t really take the film as a comedy, but the film never quite ratchets up enough suspense for it to qualify as a psychological horror movie. Every review I’ve read of this film compares it to a different predecessor: The New York Times likens it to John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer,” Slant compares it to Claire Denis’ L’Intrus, it reminded The San Francisco Chronicle of Gaslight, while The Onion thought it had more in common with Roman Polanski or Michaelangelo Antonioni. Myself, I thought an apt comparison would be to Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Véronique, another enigmatic fable fascinated by the notion of alternate realities and the malleability of identity.

La Moustache takes a fascinating turn in its final half-hour, as Marc goes on the run from his wife, who wants to commit him to a mental institution, and ends up in Hong Kong, compulsively riding the ferry back and forth to Kowloon over and over again. The Onion says here’s where La Moustache becomes “another dry art film about a guy walking around,” but I like those kinds of movies—and this one comes up with a surprisingly satisfying resolution that’s nevertheless perfectly in keeping with the oblique tone of everything that’s preceded it. There’s even another good scene of Marc shaving in the bathroom of his Hong Kong hotel suite.

I need to shave today too, come to think of it. Actually, I’ve been noticing that after 20 years or so, the bald spot on the side of my skull seems to be growing in, which suggests that maybe I can stop shaving my head. I wonder if anyone will notice if I do.

What Mamet Are You From?

“Critics are a plague.” —David Mamet, Bambi Vs. Godzilla

A few years ago, the theatre critic John Heilpern published an anthology of reviews entitled How Good Is David Mamet, Anyway? After reading David Mamet’s new book of essays about Hollywood, Bambi Vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business (Pantheon, $22), I’m inclined to ask a question of my own—namely, Is It Just Me, Or Is David Mamet Full of Shit?

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve enjoyed plenty of the movies Mamet has been involved with. Glengarry Glen Ross is, of course, endlessly rewatchable. I always get a big kick out of House of Games—especially the ice-cold final showdown with Lindsay Crouse gunning down Joe Mantegna and telling him, with implacable emotionlessness, “I can’t help myself... I’m out of control,” and Mantegna responding to the first volley of bullets hitting his chest by contemptuously spitting, “Thank you, sir, may I have another?” Having seen it when I was 17, I’ve got a soft spot for The Untouchables. State and Main is hilarious. I even think We’re No Angels, the much-maligned mid-’80s comedy starring the laugh-a-minute team of Sean Penn, Robert De Niro and Demi Moore, is actually much funnier than its reputation.

But I don’t take the same pleasure from Mamet’s films that I used to; with their sketchy plots, so impenetrable as to be nearly abstract, and their oddly gnomic dialogue, Heist and Spartan and The Spanish Prisoner seem to me more like outlines for movies, or half-written songs where the composer never bothered to replace the dummy lyrics. I don’t care what Roger Ebert thinks; Danny DeVito’s big line from Heist, “Everybody needs money—that’s why they call it money,” has got to be one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard a fictional character say. (And I’ve seen The Lake House.)

Speaking of money, Bambi Vs. Godzilla doesn’t exactly give you much value for your dollar. The chapters are extremely short—there are 40 of them, and they barely fill 206 pages. (Many of them began life as newspaper columns for the Guardian.) The book is basically Mamet’s version of William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade: an opinionated guide to how screenplays work and, in a larger sense, how Hollywood itself operates—except where Goldman’s motto was “Nobody knows anything,” the lesson Bambi Vs. Godzilla wants to leave you with is “Mamet knows everything.” It’s Mamet holding court like Ricky Roma in his booth at the Chinese restaurant, dazzling the awestruck client with his patter, dazzling him not just into buying but believing he’s found a new religion.

But I’m not dazzled. On the contrary, I find Mamet’s writing style—a musky, manly mixture of deliberately stilted oratory and tough-guy street wisdom—nearly unreadable, his advice to aspiring screenwriters unusable. This book is basically Six Easy Steps to a Better Screenplay, but Mamet behaves as if it he’s writing Sun Tzu’s Art of War.

Compare. Here’s a typical passage from Mamet, from the essay “Manners in Hollywood”: “I shall not tax the reader’s credulity with tales of film-world savagery, for such tales must impose upon either his belief or his sense of outrage. ‘What?’ the affronted might say. ‘I bought (or—may heaven forfend—borrowed) this book for entertainment, and I am asked to debase myself in attention to an unclean ritual.’ Well, then, may my recital (for I cannot remain continent) be entertaining.”

And here’s a typical passage from Jane Espenson, whose blog is a wonderful source of practical advice about the art and business of writing for television (her credits includes scripts for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica and Gilmore Girls): “The first priority is telling the emotional story. If there’s a little ‘buy’ that the audience has to make in the logic of the piece, it’s often fine to simply allow it.... If they’re hooked into the bigger stakes, they’re along for the ride and they’re not asking why the hero’s wife seems to know where he is when we never actually saw her get that information—or whatever the issue is.” Mamet won’t stop giving you pompous anecdotes about his friend the soldier or his friend the professional knife-maker; Espenson tells you how to place act breaks and how to apply for the ABC Screenwriting Fellowship. Mamet loves saying “vide”; Espenson loves going “Whoo-hoo!”

Espenson also has an encyclopedic memory for moments from scripts (her own and those of others) that illustrate the points she wants to make about structuring jokes or cutting from the A story to the B story. Mamet can’t even accurately describe what happens in Bambi Meets Godzilla, the two-minute animated short that gives his book its title. How, then, can I believe his opinion of The Lady Eve?

Flaming Creature

When I started writing this blog, one of my biggest challenges was figuring out what kind of voice I wanted it to have. All I knew was that I wanted to adopt a style that was different from the voice I used when I wrote movie reviews, which I had grown to kind of hate. Well, maybe I didn’t hate my voice, exactly, but I was tired of the way my reviews slipped so often into the same boilerplate structure: quirky observation, plot summary, words of praise (or criticism), minor quibbles (or hey-it-wasn’t-all-bad silver-lining-finding), on-the-whole final assessment.

That’s why one of the things I most value in a film critic, even more than their opinions, is a fresh voice. That was what originally drew me so strongly to Pauline Kael, for instance: I especially loved those long, garrulous reviews she wrote for The New Yorker in the 1970s, where she seemed to be figuring out what she thought of the movie even while she was writing the review—on occasion even convincing herself of a position opposite from the one she began the article with. I love the confident, well-reasoned contrarianism of former Salon critic Charles Taylor, but I also adore the self-deprecating incisiveness of someone like New York’s David Edelstein.

But I’ve never read a film writer with a voice quite like Howard Hampton. He’s just published a new book of essays entitled Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales and Pop Apocalypses (Harvard University Press, $28.95), and it’s by turns exhilarating and confounding. Imagine Manny Farber on fast-forward, or Lester Bangs if he were addicted to Red Bull instead of cough syrup. Hampton is the master of that dense, can-you-keep-up-with-me style of writing that Film Comment specializes in: full of puns, wordplay and rapid-fire allusions to culture both high and low.

Here’s one of my favourite passages from Born in Flames—favorite not because I can make sense of it, but because it shows a writer really taking his style to the limit. (He’s talking about Pistol Opera, a 2001 movie by Japanese auteur Seijun Suzuki about a female assassin.) Wind Hampton up and watch him go: “Pistol Opera’s spatial harmonics and absurd lyricism suggest a cinematic equivalent to the songs of Laurie Anderson and Brian Eno, or “This Must Be the Place” in Stop Making Sense.... Suzuki employs deadpan visual cues the way Anderson uses verbal ones, and it’s as easy to imagine her adapting Pistol Opera into futuristic D’Oyly Carte Sprechstimme as it is to see him making a Dadaist thriller from Eno’s ‘The Fat Lady of Limbourg.’”

Every time I read that paragraph, Hampton’s casual confidence about how easy it is to imagine this elaborate scenario slays me. (I know, Howard: it’s a snap, isn’t it?)

Half the time, I have no idea what Hampton is talking about, but I feel flattered that he assumes I have the same working familiarity with the movies of Brigitte Lin, the essays of Walter Benjamin and the records of Pere Ubu that he does. In one essay, he uses D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature to analyze Buffy the Vampire Slayer; in another he maps out the overlapping history of Hollywood and porn, referencing everything from Catherine Breillat’s Romance to Joel Schumacher’s 8mm to Max Steiner’s Max 15: Street Legal.

Hampton is at his best at these history-of-a-niche-genre pieces: he provides brilliant insights into Elvis movies, assassination movies, Hollywood movies about rock ’n’ roll. Hampton, like the heroine of Pistol Opera, is better at quick volleys of gunfire—bringing his target down with one or two well-placed bullets—than at long, drawn-out battles. And these roving essays allow him to make short, devastating observations about movies that bug him and then jump acrobatically to the next topic.

Hampton is also a big fan of alternative rock and jazz, and his willingness to mention music in his film essays is another quality that makes him such a fresh voice—can you imagine Roger Ebert mentioning Cat Power or Sleater-Kinney in a review? (Hampton doesn’t compare Brian De Palma to Alfred Hitchcock; he compares him to Alice Cooper!)

And his discussions of music every bit as pithy as the ones about film. Just listen to him take down The Doors: “You name the drowning pool, and The Doors jumped into its contradictions wearing nothing but a cement inner tube. Leaving no cliché untouched, no myth unmolested, The Doors forged a city of the imagination as lesser morals might pass bad checks.”

“A stench is haunting young America,” Hampton writes in another essay, this one about heavy metal, “and it’s coming from the decomposing corpse of ‘youth rebellion’ itself, the same moldering dead parrot that glib salesmen like Guns N’ Roses keep trying to pass off as the living article. (‘Beautiful plumage,’ chimes an anxious Axl to calm the corpse’s newly dissatisfied owners.)”

A writer who can puncture Guns N’ Roses with a two-word Python reference? That’s my kind of cultural critic.

Three Cheers for Shouty Al

I received an e-mail responding to this week’s post about Martin Scorsese’s Oscar win from a reader named Evan Thomas. I don’t know if he’s the same Evan Thomas who’s managing editor of Newsweek and the author of well-reviewed biographies of John Paul Jones and Robert Kennedy, but whoever he is, he makes some pretty pithy points.

Specifically, he takes issue with my characterization of the Best Actor award that Al Pacino won for his performance in Scent of a Woman as one of the bigger “embarrassments” in Oscar history:

***

“There is nothing embarrassing about Al Pacino’s Oscar win for that film,” Thomas writes. “He’s terrific in the role. If you go back and read reviews at the time, his performance is universally praised as brilliant. He not only won the Oscar, he won the Golden Globe, he was runner-up in the National Board of Review and National Society of Film Critics polls as well.

“This sort of myth has arisen over the last 15 years that he won that award for yelling or something—I guess it’s because he’s played similar type roles since then and the performance has become widely imitated and parodied (by others and himself).

“As for him winning simply because he was ‘owed’: this is not only not true, it’s historical revisionism. The fact of the matter is the race in ’92 was always between Pacino and Denzel Washington—the 2 most acclaimed performances of the year. Pacino being owed was part of why he won, sure, but there were other factors. His movie was a hit , Washington’s a flop, and Pacino’s film was still in theaters.

“Washington was playing a real life character that people know, and the Academy never rewarded that until recently. Plus, Malcolm X has been portrayed brilliantly before on film (Al Freeman Jr.) in Roots II so that probably had something to do with it as well, and yes, Washington had an Oscar already and Pacino didn’t.

“Do I think that was Al Pacino’s greatest performance? Nope. But the award is for performance of the year—not best performance an actor has ever given. His work in Scent is clearly among the two best performances of the year—there’s nothing embarrassing about the win at all.

“If you wanted to give an “embarrassing” example you should have picked Paul Newman in The Color of Money.”

***

Thomas’ letter is a good reminder that so many Oscar victories that are now regarded as outrageous lapses of taste were in fact enthusiastically endorsed by the critics of the day. Pauline Kael’s memorable takedown aside, Dances With Wolves really was a highly acclaimed film, for instance, and mainstream critics were honestly swept up by the confidence of Kevin Costner’s widescreen storytelling and impressed by his ability to turn this seemingly unconventional project into a crowd-pleasing blockbuster. The English Patient and Titanic are commonly regarded nowadays as “typical sappy Oscar fare,” but that’s hindsight talking: even The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane, who never misses a chance to mock a movie, gave both films pretty much unqualified raves.

Thanks for the letter, Thomas. I’m curious, though: if Peter O’Toole had won Best Actor this year for Venus, would you say he earned the Oscar on his own merits like Al Pacino, or that the Academy was tossing him an Oscar before it was too late, like Paul Newman?