Dear David,.
As to whether Pauline Kael, you and I, or anyone, should support a film simply because it might do humanity some good, my argument is: All good films do humanity some good, and no bad films do. So I will not give a movie a pass because its heart is in the right place, and voted thumbs down on such as A Soldier’s Story, Besieged, Buena Vista Social Club (great music, bad direction, terrible story sense, too much Ry Cooder), Jakob the Liar, and The Other Sister.
In writing approvingly about The Green Mile, I was not endorsing it for political reasons but for personal ones. Aware although I was of the broadness of the John Coffey character, I genuinely liked the movie–found it absorbing, careful storytelling. Reports from theaters indicate audiences, by and large, love it and are moved by it; it may emerge as the season’s biggest hit.
If I have “saddled myself with political responsibilities,” it has not been consciously, but I don’t think that would be a bad thing for any critic to do, at least when a film makes it appropriate. My intense dislike for Very Bad Things and the second half of Fight Club reflected political or moral outrage, among other things. And should have. Anyone who can find racism in The Green Mile but not fascism in Fight Club is looking through a very specialized filter.
But I hope you don’t believe I would praise or attack a movie I didn’t actually like/hate, just because of a political agenda. As for the “damn Jar-Jar picture,” that one is an excellent example of a film so quickly dismissed by fast-draw gossip that many critics (I am not including you) may have been ashamed to say they liked it. It could have been the lost footage from Magnificent Ambersons and if presented by George Lucas in that climate would have been shot down. It is always a little sad when critics tune their strings with “Page Six.” When Janet Maslin announced she was leaving the times, the New York Observer headline said (quoting from memory) “Liked Phantom Menace, Hated Gummo.” As if, ‘nuff said. My thought was, So?
As for Jar-Jar, what was the matter with him? Didn’t like his accent? Thought his movements were too alien, or not alien enough? Aliens in movies are routinely made understandable, likable, comprehensible. Or monsters. Can they not also be goofy and very odd?
Are the “common man and woman” capable of responding to works of complexity? Sometimes. Depends on the work. But you cite Being John Malkovich, Three Kings, and South Park as your examples, and I can only observe that the first did disappointingly at the box office, the second only fairly well, and while South Park made piles of money, my own guess, having attended a public screening, is that its fans did not respond to it with complexity but embraced its vulgarity while the irony whizzed right overhead.
Some of the reviews of that film were hilarious in the way they praised it for accomplishments that had no remote connection, I suspect, to the way it was seen, perceived, enjoyed, and understood by most audiences. They liked the dirty jokes, the homophobia, and racism and the shit jokes, period. The function of that material as liberating irony and reverse criticism, etc., was limited to an elite minority within the audience. I believe I was too hard on the movie in my original review, and doubled back a little in a later TV program on animation, but the notion that most audience members picked up in its complexities strikes me as optimistic.
South Park’s cheerfully blatant racism was praised as satirical anti-racism by some of the same critics who found racism in The Green Mile, a film its makers intended to be anti-racist. My best guess is: A large majority of the audience for South Park processed the racism on its primary level and missed the irony, and a large majority of the audience for The Green Mile will see no racism, and if their attitudes are influenced by the movie, it will make them less racist, not more. The critical discussion of the racial content of those two movies has been too clever by half.
Best,
R
