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Sorry for Being Patronizing

By J Rosenbaum
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 29, 1998, at 4:03 PM ET

Dear David:

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Let me start with your last question first, taking each sub-question in more or less reverse order ... I didn't like Life is Beautiful, but whether I'd go so far as to call it an obscenity depends almost entirely on whom I think this movie is addressing. If it's for kids, maybe there's some way of partially rationalizing it; if it's for grownups, then I guess there's something obscene about the way it treats us like kids.

I like and agree with the way you put quotation marks around "independent" in your remark about Seagram's and Happiness. Sundance, after all, isn't so much a festival of American independent films as it is a festival of American "independent" films, because to "succeed" at Sundance usually means to lose one's independence. I agree that Seagram/Universal's squeamishness with Happiness was both creepy and hypocritical, and I was probably going too far yesterday when I linked that movie to the Starr report. My qualms about the movie have more to do with its tacit acceptance of the fact that its pedophile shrink doesn't listen to his clients--which we're seemingly asked to shrug our shoulders about--than they do with its refusal to demonize pedophilia. But it also seems worth noting that the movie's final gag--the one involving semen and the family dog--would fit quite comfortably inside There's Something About Mary, whereas inside this movie I find it the crudest sort of audience-mongering that retroactively raises all sorts of questions about Todd Solondz's alleged "seriousness" and "compassion."

What were the movie highlights of 1998 for me? I couldn't agree with you more about the expanded edition of Manny Farber's Negative Space, especially because well over half of my favorite pieces in this book weren't in the first edition. But I hasten to add that Negative Space, the only collection by this country's most important film critic, was only the best of an unusual number of good and important film books published this year--a list including James Naremore's More Than Night (the best book on noir ever written), Gilberto Perez's The Material Ghost (a brilliant collection), Chris Fujiwara's fabulous critical study of Jacques Tourneur, and Michael Anderegg's book about Orson Welles and Shakespeare, among many others. And I can't deny that the Touch of Evil re-edit feels like a significant victory in all sorts of ways. The studio essentially left us (meaning mainly producer Rick Schmidlin and editor Walter Murch, secondarily me and a few others) alone, and we had so much freedom amongst ourselves to implement Welles' instructions that it was even possible for me to object to one of Murch's interpretive decisions and ultimately change the re-edit as a consequence.

It was more of an uphill battle when it came to convincing the woman in charge of Universal's foreign sales that people outside the U.S. wanted to and should see the new Touch of Evil as well as Americans--we finally won, but it took a few months--and, alas, we couldn't prevent Universal from re-releasing the old preview version on video and calling it the "director's cut" (which, properly speaking, no version of Touch of Evil could ever be) a month or two before our version came out. The biggest surprise of all, at least for me, was how accurately Universal and October described what we had done and how well it's done at the box office. (By the way, regarding the AFI's infamous and unspeakable list of the greatest American movies, it goaded me into composing my own counterlist of a hundred titles; you can find the list and accompanying article here on the Chicago Reader 's Web site.)

Let me add one more major movie highlight to the mix: the release on video by Water Bearer of Louis Feuillade's magnificent French serial of the teens, Les Vampires, making 1998 the first time it's been available in this country (apart from rare archive and festival screenings) in about eighty years. For me Feuillade at his best is greater than Griffith, and one thing that's invariably made film history courses in this country provincial and incomplete is its exclusion of his thrilling and magical work.

Anyway, returning to the issue of adolescent gratification that I raised in my last letter and which you responded to in yours: Sure, Rushmore, Small Soldiers, and Pleasantville are all deeply implicated in that; so, for that matter, is Touch of Evil, and Les Vampires positively teems with both adolescent and preadolescent frissons . But I was concerned more with what was missing from your top 10 than what was included. Sorry if I was being patronizing about what you did and didn't see. I was intrigued by your comments about Taste of Cherry, and would only add that my own engagement with the movie involves at least as much identification with the soldier, the seminarian, and the taxidermist--all of whom are asked to bury the hero if he succeeds in killing himself--as with the hero. I'm also fascinated by the way Kiarostami works without scripts and regards audiences as his creative collaborators, incorporating blank spaces in the narratives of all his major features that we're invited to fill.

Your explanation of why you applaud the opening of Saving Private Ryan seems fair enough, although I should add that your description yesterday of The Thin Red Line as "a true anti-war movie" seems to me completely off the mark. I find it neither pro-war not anti-war; its philosophical distance seems to me to preclude both of those positions, just as its remoteness from the period when it's supposed to be taking place is equally significant (though for me, at least, more problematic). Stuart Klawans may have been right when he wrote in The Nation that Malick's movie is the first New Age World War II film, but I like it more than he does because the spin it puts on familiar material is often so fresh: I love the way that Nick Nolte's general is all set up to become another Buck Turgidson (out of Dr. Strangelove), or Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, and then winds up interrogating and doubting his own positions more strenuously than anyone else. And I love the notion of collective hero that can be traced all the way back to William March's novel Company K (or The Spoon River Anthology much earlier). For me, the devastating account in Small Soldiers of how we watch wars as well as war movies made Saving Private Ryan look ludicrous (despite the effectiveness of the opening sequence), but it didn't undermine The Thin Red Line at all because Malick's movie to its credit is playing an entirely different sort of game.

Whatever adolescent gratifications Small Soldiers may traffic in, it certainly isn't guilty of taking us back to infancy the way that all Spielberg movies ultimately do, no matter how "grown-up" the ostensible subject might be. In fact, I'm afraid that the real reason why he's been virtually declared our designated guru and national poet laureate is that everyone knows he's a child at heart, so putting him in charge of "settling" our grown-up ethical issues is the best possible way of preserving our own innocence about such matters. And let me stress, at this juncture, that my unfashionable defense of an audience favorite like Pleasantville certain doesn't encompass its puerile civil rights allegory. What impresses me about this movie is its implied rejection of the present more than its ideologically deranged nostalgia--its recognition of how awful it must be to live as a teenager in 1998. Interestingly enough, when the writer-director was asked in an interview what research he did for Pleasantville, he replied that the only thing he did was visit a contemporary high school, and you can see right away the fruits of that visit in the movie's opening sequences (the color of which, incidentally, has nothing to do with the recreated Technicolor of the various epiphanies in black-and-white Pleasantville).

Thanks for your explanation about how the Academy Awards work, which I already knew; taking these rules seriously and solemnly, as most members of our profession do, strikes me as being just about as ridiculous as regarding the impeachment proceedings in Congress with equal credence. My point about why I don't consider 1999 films for my 1998 ten-best list has to do with the reach of my readers in Chicago, not with the reach of studio propaganda, and I don't see what's so peevish about that.

In closing, let me add that Pi struck me as a better version of Velvet Goldmine (maybe because I prefer most black and white to most color): It was fun while I was watching it, but it left me with virtually nothing as soon as it was over. But even if I enjoyed the Pi preview even more than the movie itself, I agree with you that the Patch Adams preview is nauseating enough. And, for whatever it's worth, despite some small demurrals about some minor virtues in Primary Colors (e.g., Travolta, some of Elaine May's dialogue), the only serious objection I have about your ten-worst list relates to Unmade Beds, which for me is guilty of neither the smarminess nor the nastiness of Your Friends and Neighbors; I found its style interesting, its characters touching. But I guess that's what makes horse races.

Best,

Jonathan