I don’t totally agree with you, Sarah–there are some formulas in sight. What diminished Three Kings for me was that at heart it was a “conversion” melodrama in which a cynical, amoral, Bogartish hero finally can’t live with himself in the face of injustice and opts to “do the right thing” at considerable personal cost. That’s one of the great movie plots, but it doesn’t feel as fresh as the rest of what’s on screen. Elsewhere, however, it’s the way that screenwriters and directors bend and twist formulas that accounts for the “anything goes” quality that we’ve all been responding to. The beauty of The Limey is that it takes a pretty standard pulp formula–wronged gangster turned vigilante avenger–and creates what amounts to an essay on the idea of “distance”: from other people, from the effects of our own actions in the past, and from ourselves. The villain turns out not to be a person but a concept. You see that not just at the end but in the middle, when Peter Fonda–a superb, non-star performance that supports your thesis, Sarah, about the subordination of ego in many of today’s most interesting actors–registers terror at the thought that it’s all “getting too close” to him. It’s the hero’s willful blindness to the fact that his behavior in the past had rippling consequences that has brought about his daughter’s death.
Meanwhile, there are a zillion formulas in the wonderful Dogma, but they’re all rearranged–and then held in place–by Kevin Smith’s passion. Election is a reworking of What Makes Sammy Run?–the replacement of “Sammy Glick” with “Tracy Flick” gives the game away–but told in a way that makes more (or more modern) sense: Its hero–unlike Budd Schulberg’s–doesn’t remain the voice of moral authority; his envy, self-hatred, and displaced lust makes him self-destruct in spectacular fashion. My larger point is that it’s doubtful we’ll escape formulas–especially with executives and would-be screenwriters flocking to courses by Robert McKee and others. The more realistic hope is that filmmakers will use the technology to deconstruct those formulas before our eyes–in ways that remind us what was vital about them to begin with.
I’d like to follow up, Sarah, on your question about the decade’s big themes. In June, Daniel Menaker wrote a fascinating article here in Slate on what has shaped up as a Hollywood trend of the ‘90s. Using The Truman Show, The Matrix, Notting Hill, and a score of other films, he cited scenarios in which the heroes–whose lives are swamped by technology and media–must “break through into the real.” Truman must leave the studio/world, Julia Roberts must escape the cameras (ditto Ed in EDTV), the kids in Pleasantville are stuck in a “TV artifice of life and must break through it in order to get back to their real existences.” Menaker goes on: “What may be new … is the role that technology and the media play in these productions as existential villains, depriving people of their ‘real lives.’ ” (Consider The Insider–mysteriously named the year’s best movie by the L.A. Film Critics–in this light.)
I don’t think that theme is going to go away. As our culture becomes more and more private–as video replaces movies the way movies replaced theater, as e-exchanges replace phone calls the way phone calls replaced talking over the back fence–we might find that our most powerful relationships are with figures in movies and television and our own fantasy lives. “Breaking through into the real” might not be so simple.
P.S.: Oh, one other thing, I strongly dispute the comparison to 1974. I don’t have a video guide handy but wasn’t that the year of Godfather II, Mean Streets, and one or another great Altman picture (The Long Goodbye?). I don’t see the same kind of ambitions in this year’s films, and I don’t see any outright “masterpieces.” Let’s just say that this has been a great year, a reversal of so much that happened in movies in the ‘80s. But we’re not back to 1974 yet.
