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2002: The Year in Movies

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from: David Edelstein
to: Sarah Kerr, A.O. Scott, and Roger Ebert

Layers of Irony

Updated Thursday, Jan. 2, 2003, at 11:32 AM ET

Who are these people?

Happy New Year! Now that we've gotten past our you-show-me-yours-I'll-show-you-mine phase (what a world this is, in which everyone has his or her custom-made 10-best list), it's time to tear into this stuff. Being hopelessly outnumbered on Adaptation, I'm going to choose another battle. But Sarah, I'm not sure it's possible for you to "read the ending differently" than I did, since I wrote in my Slate review that I "didn't have a clue" what the ending meant. Initially I interpreted it as a cynical slap at Hollywood, then Tony suggested it was meant, on a human level, to be affirmative. There are just too many layers of irony here for my limited intellect. I guess I finally see it as a kind of weird hybrid, not unlike some strange species of orchid, that you can take in different ways depending on the light and your mood. But I didn't much like it—or the movie. As an admirer of Charlie Kaufman (I actually preferred his Human Nature script), I was disappointed that, in effect, he blew the adaptation. But as our friend Stephanie Zacharek (another rare dissenter on this one) has said, the script is one of the great ass-savings in motion-picture history.

I also feel a little sad playing the killjoy on About Schmidt, since I think Alexander Payne and his co-writer Jim Taylor are terrific, and I respect what they set out to do in this movie. It strikes me, Sarah, that you, like John Powers and some other critics I respect, concede the charge of smugness in a couple of individual shots but find that the movie adds up to something much larger. But I think that the complacency runs a little deeper. If the milieu is superbly handled, the mistake is in making the characters seem too much in sync with it. I know that you're less enthusiastic than I am about Lovely & Amazing, but compare Dermot Mulroney in that to Dermot Mulroney in About Schmidt. In the former, he begins as a blowhard yet reveals, in the movie's key scene, an unexpected sort of decency. He does what is asked of him but is deeply ambivalent and guilty, and he's still trying to sort it all out when the movie leaves him. He's alive and capable of surprising us. In About Schmidt, whatever you know of him in his first minute onscreen is exactly what you know of him in his last minute onscreen. There's no tension between how Schmidt sees him and how he actually is, and hence there's no real drama. The same is true of every supporting character in the movie: They're all grotesquely limited. I haven't read Louis Begley's (apparently much different) novel, but if Payne and Taylor transplanted his protagonist's attitude they made a mistake. A first-person narrator (especially a blinkered one) can be bitterly conclusive, but a movie or play owes us at least a hint of something larger. Even in the context of Payne's own work, this is a lapse. My favorite moment in Election is when Tracy Flick, stunned and enraged to find that the jock has entered the race for student-council president (and that McAllister put him up to it), nonetheless seizes his petition and scrawls her name on it. What a marvelous, complicated moment! There is nothing in About Schmidt even remotely that rich.

Tony: I gave John C. Reilly unwanted career advice myself in my The Hours review (hey, none of youse guys put it on your list! are we agreed on that one?); I'd also add that when Liam Neeson & Co. walked past him in Gangs of New York I wish they could have "looked right through him/ walked right by him/ and never kneeeeeew he was there." He's a tad overexposed. (I'm not sure most people would regard him as a heartthrob, but he had such a wonderful hangdog neediness in Magnolia; he was irresistible.)

Anyway, the answer to your discourse on men and marriage is that virtually all the male protagonists in the films you cited have crushing Daddy issues: either with their own dads, their surrogate dads, or their kids. And a lot of the good women this year were in comas, literally and metaphorically.

David

the movie club
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1234567891011121314151617181920
from: David Edelstein
to: Sarah Kerr, A.O. Scott, and Roger Ebert

Layers of Irony

Updated Thursday, Jan. 2, 2003, at 11:32 AM ET
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Roger Ebert is the Chicago Sun-Times' film critic. David Edelstein is Slate's film critic. You can e-mail him at . Sarah Kerr is Vogue's film critic. A.O. Scott is a film critic at the New York Times.
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Notes From The Fray Editor:

The Movie Club Fray has been busy adding to and subtracting from the critics' lists (additions: Ararat, The Two Towers, Jackass; subtractions: Minority Report, anything that hasn't been in wide release, The Pianist). One item of note: critics should entertain gender-switched hypotheticals at their own peril. Ebert's feminized Igby reminds pnuge of Wish You Were Here; Edelstein's Man-Hours reminds DeaH of American Beauty. jknyc tracks down Ebert's Howard Hawks reference. There is also a smart Spielberg thread—that is, one about narrative and character development and not the omnipresent "bad dad"—here, with seanweitner, simparker and Rachel doing most of the bandying.

Remarks From The Fray:

The reason I felt betrayed by Adaptation's climax was because, just as Mr. Ebert claims, it was thumbing its nose at the members of the audience who didn't understand how "brave" it was. That's a pretty damning criticism from one of the movie's admirers. It's okay to thumb your nose at the start of such a movie--pre-empt criticism, confound expectation, etc. But by the end you should be making a movie for those in the audience who DO understand how brave you are. The best possible ending for this film would have been a true compromise, an actual adaptation by Kaufman; or, on the other hand, as un-McKee an ending as possible, something that Kaufman truly loved. If he was writing the ending for someone who didn't understand the rest of the movie, then it's understandable that I, who liked the rest of the movie, felt so alienated.

Worth it, however, for that gorgeous final time-lapse shot. Most elegant time-lapse photography since Boys Don't Cry.

-- simparker

(To reply, click here.)

"Can you imagine the outcry if Igby had been a teenage girl and her lover the 40-year-old best friend of her father?"

That sounds a lot like David Leland's "Wish You Were Here".

-- pnuge

(To reply, click here.)

Mr. Edelstein says that a man making the same choice as the woman in The Hours would be looked upon as a monstrous coward. It really wasn't too many years ago that Kevin Spacey won an Oscar for playing a man who made just that same choice. His character is seen as liberated for choosing to get high and lust after a rose-covered teen. Mentally, at least, he left his wife and children to live for the first time until he, ironically wasn't alive anymore.

-- DeaH

(To reply, click here.)

The quote about Hawks being enjoyable was in the Sunday NY TIMES Book Review section in a review on Elmore Leonard. [It is; here. The review is by Salon's Charles Taylor and he is citing Robin Wood.—Fray Ed.]

-- jknyc

(To reply, click here.)

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