The Movie Club

A Polite (but not Complacent) Farewell

Tony, I hate to rain on your Paltrow parade (I’m marching in it, too), but I think as much as you love her AnniversaryParty performance, you underrate it. Her golden goddess is quite self-conscious and even rather devious in how she plays with the attentions of onlookers. (Her effusiveness towards Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character is a sincere act but an act nonetheless, and one that’s designed to both flatter and psych out.) What makes me laugh is how little she puts out to such astonishing effect: She knows that at times great acting consists of simply being in the moment and not interfering too much with what the spectator sees. (Come to think of it, The Cowboy knows the same thing. I think we’ve reached a consensus on at least one performance this year. Anyone know the guy’s name?)

And I didn’t realize that your take on “polite comedy” was the start of a Marxist treatise (however brilliant), or I might have called you on the carpet. Because I think there is a universe of difference between polite comedies in which the characters are complacent and polite comedies in which the filmmakers (or playwrights or novelists) are complacent. Whit Stillman’s modest but insightful high-society Metropolitan has no populist gestures yet is not a complacent film; Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail is full of populist gestures and is a deeply complacent (and snobbish) work. (Is it unfair to say that anything with Meg Ryan is a complacent work, given the nature of her shtick?) In praising the vulgar ShallowHal, I don’t want to imply a lack of respect for the sophistication that gives us confections like Va Savoir—from which I learned a lot about the ebb and flow of romantic acceptance and rejection. Sept. 11 or not, some things are eternal. (Strange that Elvis found it ephemeral, and that someone thought that was a selling point …)

Enid in Ghost World will emerge, as you wrote, “from her shell of defensive solipsism into a greater awareness of the world around her,” but I’m not sure that this happens in the movie itself. Or if it does, it’s expressed in the final flight of fantasy and not in words. What I like about the film is that her epiphany is so understated. The upshot of her solipsistic outlook is that she’s alone—but the moviemakers treasure the particulars of that outlook enough to make it clear she won’t find what she’s looking for with Rebecca and her corporate coffee bar and fold-down ironing board. She won’t find what she’s looking for by making nice-nice with humankind. She’ll go into the world like any unformed artist, knowing more about what she doesn’t like than what she does. Which isn’t the worst beginning for a critic, Sarah. She’s halfway there.

And so we end. Roger, Sarah, Tony, Jonathan: I hope this was fun. I thank you deeply for what you’ve written and apologize for what my wife terms, in reading me, my “casual belligerence.” (At least you don’t have to live with it.) I think we’ve established that as bad as the year was in other ways, it was pretty good in movies. If nothing else, we had a lot to talk about. I hope our discussion is a good example of how to engage on the subject of movies; but even if it’s a good example of how not to engage on the subject of movies, it has meaning.

Back to the screening rooms—
David