Dear comrades,
As it happens, I’ve also been reading Rosenbaum’s Movie Wars, a thoughtful holiday gift from my mother-in-law, and I’ve been provoked, chastened, and often convinced by his analysis of the parochialism of what we’ve been calling “mainstream” American film culture. The problem I have with his argument is that it tends to rely on the kind of ideological criticism that stops just short of outright conspiracy theory–or maybe not so short since his subtitle is How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See. He presents a familiar tale of what They are doing to control, manipulate, and bamboozle Us. Except that, in much of Rosenbaum’s account, They is Us, or at least some of us gathered here today: namely–to cite from the index–Ebert, Roger, (54, 55n, 57-59, 72, 73-73, 119, 200, 201, 205); Kerr, Sarah (198-200); The New York Times (too many pages to list); and me, though not by name (217) as someone “defined by [a] relative lack of interest in non-American movies” whose hiring was proof that “the Times is profoundly committed to the notion that anyone and everyone can be a film ‘expert.’ ” (Rosenbaum is not the only Chicago-based critic to have expressed such a view).
I don’t bring this up to defend myself, my employer, or any of you or to suggest that Rosenbaum is entirely wrong about the role “mainstream” critics play in promoting some kinds of movies (Hollywood) at the expense of others (foreign). I was at a screening in the fall at which someone asked a well-known broadcast critic if he’d seen any of the movies at the New York Film Festival, which was then in full swing. “Nah,” he said. “I sometimes think I should go and check out the new Eskimo movie, or the latest Portuguese thing, but nobody’s ever going to see these movies anyway, so what’s the point?” The point is that Rosenbaum certainly has one. I just think that the messy, groping practice of criticism–of trying to describe something accurately and render a judgment of it while being true to your own impressions and maintaining some analytic distance from them, usually in about 700 words, four times a week–is not as simple or as ideologically determined as he supposes. At least it doesn’t feel that way to me.
The mandate of the Times, for example, is to review every single movie released theatrically in New York or screened at the two major festivals here–more than 400 films this year, a greater number of reviews than any other nontrade publication, though I think the Voice runs a close second locally these days. The quantity and variety of these movies gives me the luxury of entering each screening in a state of willed naiveté, suspending a priori judgments and categories. Is this a studio picture, a pseudo-indie, a genuinely independent movie, a foreign film? I can push such concerns out of my mind and experience it just as a movie, good or bad, interesting or dull, honest or meretricious. And then, most of the time, I can write about it without those bothersome and aesthetically meaningless categories intruding. When my colleague and friend Elvis Mitchell filed his ecstatic review of Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet, the editors put it on the front of the weekend section in spite of the paucity of promotion or media “buzz” around the movie. When I exceeded 900 words in a review of Bertrand Tavernier’s It All Starts Today, a lovely, devastating movie about the effects of poverty and unemployment on children in Northern France, nothing was cut, despite the fact that it played for a week or two on a single screen in the city before vanishing and was not by the usual marketing definitions (though it was by any artistic or moral criterion) a big or important movie.
But it’s also important, especially in championing obscure or esoteric movies, to retain some connection to the taste and sensibilities of your readers–not to pander to some imaginary public consensus, necessarily, but to solicit the trust and good faith of the people you hope might care about the things you care about. David, you mentioned my review of The Wind Will Carry Us and the response it generated: A number of people wrote and called complaining that, on my advice (“It got a good review in The Times!”), they spent their precious time and money on a slow, plotless, virtually incomprehensible film. I admit that I was dismayed by the impatience and lack of curiosity displayed by some of these letters, but I was also sympathetic to the frustration many of them expressed. And I regret very much describing the film as “accessible” because the word was based on entirely subjective reactions: I’d seen a few of Kiarostami’s movies and started to get the hang of his themes and approaches; this movie seemed funnier than his others; I was becoming increasingly interested in Iranian movies; and I felt an obscure kinship with the main character, an engineer from Tehran stranded in a remote Kurdish town. But none of this could have been clear to the readers who wandered out of the movie feeling puzzled and tricked. The movie seemed accessible to me because I had a way into it. But to intellectually curious readers who didn’t have a way into it, and may have looked to a critic to provide one, the review must have come off as snobbish and exclusive, as though I were saying, “Well, I can appreciate this. Why can’t you?” Like Godard, Kiarostami takes some work and demands that you let go of certain expectations about how movies operate. It’s the job of critics who like his work to explain why the effort is worthwhile, and I could have done a better job. I guess what I’m saying is that we always have to be on our guard because it’s very easy to slip either into reflexive elitism or faux-populist condescension. I have to say, Roger, that you avoid these traps better than just about any other critic I can think of.
I’ve gone on too long in what was meant as a quick intro to the discussion of Yi Yi David invited yesterday. Briefly: I think the upwelling of affection for this movie–my favorite of the year–is related to the embrace of You Can Count on Me. Even though Kenneth Lonergan is nowhere near the filmmaker Edward Yang is (which is a bit like faulting him for not being Jean Renoir), both movies present the textures and rhythms of family relationships with a minimum of melodramatic amplification. In both, you feel you’ve been let into people’s lives, and those very ordinary lives prove sufficiently engrossing and mysterious to merit your attention. (The two pictures also feature cute but unusually realistic kids, whom you could imagine hanging out together if Matthew Broderick in a fit of spite transferred Laura Linney to the bank’s Taiwan branch.) Yi Yi’s canvas is bigger and its composition deeper, of course. It also seems to me to offer a meticulously accurate portrait of contemporary life in a big, global, cosmopolitan city. It’s Taipei, but any New Yorker will recognize its look and feel. There’s even an H&H bagel shop where the local teen-agers hang out.
I notice that in the current Village Voice, Amy Taubin complained that You Can Count on Me, like a number of other “indie” movies this year, “could have been made for TV.” Jim, I seem to recall that in your (positive) review of Yi Yi, you likened it to superior television. Here’s a question for the floor: Has the gap between TV and movies narrowed of late? If so, is this an entirely bad development for either medium? Why has it taken place (if it has)? Also, and relatedly, this year saw a number of features either shot on digital video or made to look as though they had been, as well as movies like L’Humanité and George Washington that seemed almost defiant in their use of old-fashioned cinematic technique. So … I don’t really have a question, but I’m sure you all must have something interesting to say about the matter. Or, if not, how about those Coen Brothers? How about that Spike Lee? How about that Robert Altman? How about that Kirsten Dunst?
All the best to all of you,
Tony
