The Movie Club

Where’s the Love?

Friends,

Sarah, what you find off-putting or incoherent about Traffic–the forced union of stylistic inventiveness with a fairly conventional liberal morality–is what I found most thrilling about it. I think Soderbergh has gone a long way toward reviving the kind of big, serious, politically engaged (though not necessarily politically radical) movie that was a staple of Hollywood in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. He has cited The Battle of Algiers and Z as influences (as well as The French Connection), and while they have clearly informed Traffic’s structure and technique, I think the film has deeper affinities with movies like All The President’s Men, The China Syndrome (featuring a younger, hairier Michael Douglas), and Prince of the City. I think this is a very honorable tradition–these pictures combined intelligence and ethical weight with broad popular appeal–and one that has been too easily mocked and too long dormant. I’m delighted that Soderbergh, as David Russell did in Three Kings last year, has placed his formal virtuosity in the service of square, earnest, but also passionate and necessary ethical exploration. What I think these guys are trying to do is rescue smart, self-conscious filmmaking from the detachment, emptiness, and neutered, mannered irony that have characterized many mainstream indies since the late ‘80s, even as they attempt to work on a larger scale and attract a bigger audience. In Traffic, each of the major characters–the cop played by Benicio del Toro, the kingpin’s wife played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, and the drug-czar designate played by Douglas–faces a clear and difficult choice. If, in the end, these choices resolve in neat, perhaps predictable ways, you nonetheless spend much of the movie in a state of dislocation and dread that mirrors what each of them is going through. And you worry, or at least I worried, about the state of their souls and wonder what you would do in their circumstances. To answer your question, then, I did feel, for much of the year, an unmet hunger for a really fantastic American film. But Traffic, at least for now, has satisfied it.

But back to the gloom. I hadn’t really noticed it as a trend until you brought it up, Sarah, but it relates to something I did notice–an absence of convincing love stories. Perhaps one of the reasons that You Can Count on Me has been praised out of proportion to its merits is that it’s interested in the stickiness and complexity of human connections. (Did anyone see La Buche? It deserves mention along with Yi Yi and You Can Count on Me as one of the year’s closely observed dramas of domestic life. Well worth seeing.). Virtually the only other American movies I can think of that manifest a similar interest are George Washington and Chuck & Buck, neither of which deal with what we ordinarily understand as adult relationships. (Similarly, Almost Famous dodges the more dangerous emotional implications of its story by making its protagonist a teen-ager, thus forgoing the possibility of barbed, Wilder-esque sexual comedy in favor of a rose-colored coming-of-age story). It strikes me that the depressive cast we’ve noticed in movies as different as Crouching Tiger and Gladiator–I’d add Cast Away to the list and also X-Men–is a hallmark of adolescence, the mopiness without objective correlative that clouds our passage into adulthood. Adolescents are, of course, the prime movie audience, and maybe the ambient self-pity of this year’s movies–even some of the better ones–owes something to that brute fact of the market.

But maybe I’m overreading. Did any of you see a great–or even a passable–love story this year, or at least a persuasive movie about love? I can think of Chuck & Buck, Alice and Martin, and Francois Ozon’s Water Drops on Burning Rocks, based on an early play by Fassbinder. Are there some I missed, or is our age too knowing, cynical, and self-involved to risk the perils and pleasures of romance?

Affectionately,
Tony