HOME / the movie club: Critic vs. critic.

Edelstein and Rosenbaum

the movie club:
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

The Best Is Yet to Cum

By David Edelstein
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 30, 1998, at 12:22 PM ET

Dear Jonathan:

RSS

I've spent several hours on the Web site of The Chicago Reader and commend to Slate subscribers some of the best writing on movies I've seen this year. Your piece on Taste of Cherry makes for especially wonderful reading, although I'm less impressed with your case for the film than with your passionate evocation of it. God knows, that is not meant to be patronizing, since great criticism begins with an incisive account of what's there. (Manny Farber will never convince me that The Third Man is an artistic failure, but I learned more about that film in his dismissal than in almost anything else about it I've read.) I'm still not sure that the bewildering "it's only a movie" coda is what elevates Taste of Cherry to the status of "masterpiece," although I admire your perversity in saying so. Kiarostami must adore you.

Your comments about Spielberg strike me as extremely refreshing, although Spielberg's "through the eyes of a child" innocence might seem less venal in a culture that didn't revere his brand of anti-intellectualism. I'll never share your preference for Poltergeist over E.T., even though the former's first half hour captured the unnatural intimacies of suburban life in a way that nothing has before or since. The child's-eye perspective is what makes Jaws the most terrifying of all thrillers, and what gives so much of the imagery in Schindler's List a purity that transcends its often gummed-up scenario. I loathe the conclusion of Saving Private Ryan because Spielberg's way of "'settling' our grown-up ethical issues" involves an implicit embrace of vigilante justice that not even Clint Eastwood at this point would dare to put forth.

Part of why I'm struggling with my feelings about The Thin Red Line is the very issue that you raise--its Zen "neutrality," its speculatations on the existence of an oversoul. "Is there an avenging power in nature--not one power but two?" asks one of its protagonists, in what I think is the film's point- of-view. (To shift to another mythos: We begin in Eden, we go to hell, we return to Eden...) This would strike me as a more compelling idea if Guadalcanal were viewed not in an absurdist vacuum (the soldiers come, they kill and are killed, they leave) but in the larger context of World War II. Is it not possible that the German and Japanese fascist orders were profoundly anti-natural, and that the Allies' cause was part of a violent but natural correction? You don't have to buy into Spielberg's Lincolnesque pieties to believe that there is a difference between that war and, for example, our benighted campaign in Iraq. What I guess I'm saying is that I'd have an easier time with Malick's metaphysical speculations if I'd gotten a sense of some concomitant physical ones. In that sense I agree with Stuart Klawans that the film's point of view is New Agey.

The distinction between so-called "independents" and "majors" does all but evaporate in the face of Fox's release of The Thin Red Line and Miramax's release of, say, Scream 2 or Shakespeare in Love (which I seem to be alone in disliking). Sundance long ago ceased to function as an outlet for genuine independents, who have more and more become marginalized even within the margins. As to your comment that Happiness represents "the crudest sort of audience-mongering that retroactively raises all sorts of questions about Todd Solondz's alleged 'seriousness' and 'compassion'," I can only cite my own, favorable review, in which I also complain that many of the gags (such as the bored shrink) are cheap, and that Solondz's writing doesn't cut very deeply. And I'd never accuse Solondz of anything like "compassion." Part of what I find intriguing about the film is that it's pitched on the border between irony and empathy: There might be jokes at various characters' expense, but those people are in an authentic--and palpable--hell. The audience-mongering is not always so clear-cut. When the fat girl, Kristina (Camryn Manheim) tells Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffman), about the way in which she killed and then dismembered a doorman and then tucks into a hot fudge sundae, the bit didn't strike me as sour: I could see that Kristina had been living a life of nightmarish deprivation, and was getting the only kind of pleasure that she knew. I share your view of Happiness as the dark side of There's Something About Mary, and note, without judgment, that the New York Times was all set to do a dialogue on transgressive humor between Solondz and the Farrellys, but the latter were apparently so grossed-out by Happiness that they canceled the interview.

I'd like to ask your permission to continue this discussion through the afternoon; I must rush off to have some emergency dental work. (Fun!) Briefly: Of course I don't take the rules of the Academy Awards seriously; my point was that the discrimination you perceive against Chicago has less to do with the studios' New York- or L.A.-centric bent than with dopey Oscar protocol... Speaking of dopes, I assume you'll be attending The National Society of Film Critics meeting on January 3. Once more I'll be out of town but I'd like, later, to give you (publicly) my proxy. Is it crass to ask how you'll vote on some of the acting categories? I like Nolte in The Thin Red Line (not Affliction!), Catherine O'Hara in the much-maligned Home Fries, Jane Adams and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Happiness, Holly Hunter in Living Out Loud, and Brad Pitt in Meet Joe Black--NOT!!!

Later,

David