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2002: The Year in Movies

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

Payne's "Where's Kilroy?" Relationship to Films

Posted Thursday, Jan. 2, 2003, at 12:47 PM ET

Who are these people?

Dear Tony, David, and Roger,

You're quite right about the wobbling tone in About Schmidt, Tony and David. But I still like the film for its overambitious variety of ambitions. Thank goodness Payne's view of the world is less reliable for instance, than director Todd Solondz's tiresomely creepy Storytelling, whose sendup of PC came awfully late to that dance, and whose every character is either cruel or nauseatingly pathetic. I interviewed Payne earlier this fall, and he told me he hoped critics would take on, maybe argue with but really take on, some of the ideas in the movie outside of Nicholson's performance. You might take this as another example of his smugness, but I think there are really interesting ideas in this film—about both moviemaking and the naive and insular righteousness of comfortable Americans. What about the beautifully woven-in music, a model of craft that takes a simple melodic anthem (I can still hum it) into variations that evoke Brahms, heartland Copland, and raucous gypsy dance? (Again with the music: What a year for good scores, what with Elmer Bernstein's great melodrama homage in Far From Heaven and John Williams' mercifully schmaltz-free white-boy jazz in Catch Me If You Can.) What about the exquisite precision with which Payne observes Omaha, Neb.? The ruthless accuracy of the settings, each room whispering eloquently of a social class, a mindset, and the unstoppable passage of time? And why should the good people of the Midwest be spared tough comic inspection, especially when we so often accept far more vulgar, imprecise parodies of Brooklyn goodfellas or snooty East Coast WASPs? Isn't the protectiveness its own kind of condescension?

Yes, some of the characters are grotesque. So are the characters in, I don't know, Gogol. And yes, there are shifts in tone, one scene bearing witness to the pain inflicted on a daughter by a shut-down father, the next showing a guy flopping funnily on a waterbed. But if Payne punctuates his lucid realism with judgmental anger, interrupts the anger to express sympathy, and steps back a beat later to give us a well-executed gag, I don't mind. His relationship to the material seems the appropriately tortured one of a comic artist to his family.

Speaking of which, here's an odd coincidence: Did you know that Payne is of Greek extraction and that in his boyhood his father owned a Greek restaurant in Omaha? Ring a bell with another movie this year? Strange how one guy could take advantage of the opportunity to study strangers and think about human nature. Whereas Nia Vardalos figured out how to work up a narcissistic fantasy that abandons its satiric intentions after the first 10 funny minutes and becomes the story of a how a girl who once longed to live a richer, more autonomous life hooks up with a tall, handsome sexual servant and learns to enjoy the prison of her family's surveillance. Seconding your defense of John C. Reilly, Tony, and your observation about how movies are foregrounding women's sexual needs over men's, whatever his deficiencies I'd choose Reilly in a heartbeat over John Corbett's Ian in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. The poor man is disturbingly vacant, an object. A baby machine, if ever there was one.

David, I just got your morning missive and can only begin to reply to its many good points. About Adaptation I may not have expressed myself clearly, but I'll have to leave that for tomorrow. As for About Schmidt, I'm with you about Dermot Mulroney's son-in-law, but not on Schmidt's wife, who at first looks like a cartoon but turns out to have been sadly unknown to him, and not at all on Hope Davis' beautifully observed daughter, whose flashes of anger when he buys a cheap coffin for her mother, and of despair after his pathetic wedding speech, tell a long story of disappointment. About Lovely & Amazing, I have mixed feelings. Catherine Keener is a jittery goddess, hilarious here as usual, but the brittleness of the part starts to grate. The naked Emily Mortimer scene is strong but not, to me, as shatteringly powerful as all that. Perhaps I felt let down, too, since I adored director Nicole Holofcener's first film, Walking and Talking, the shrewdest depiction of female best-friendship I know of. After that film's roundness, the characters here seem thinly written, notional. And are they representative women? Nutcases? I didn't buy the former possibility; the likelihood of the latter made me wonder, for all that the film does well, why I should spend time in their nerve-wracked company.

Roger, I have heard so many wonderful things about City of God and feel terrible about not having seen it yet, but hope and expect if it's this good to be discussing it on next year's list. In another rather odd coincidence, Alexander Payne went to Brazil and contributed advice on the script. But I think that's the extent of his "Where's Kilroy?" relationship to films of the moment.

Till soon,
Sarah

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

Payne's "Where's Kilroy?" Relationship to Films

Posted Thursday, Jan. 2, 2003, at 12:47 PM 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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