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2002: The Year in Movies

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

Lovely and Exasperating

Posted Thursday, Jan. 2, 2003, at 1:29 PM ET

Who are these people?

Dear Ndugu—I mean, Sarah and Roger and Tony,

I'll let Tony speak up for Storytelling, which seemed to me at best a great sick joke and at worst (more often) an ugly and feeble one. But you needn't have gone to Gogol for examples of grotesquerie. You could have looked at Payne's own marvelous Citizen Ruth, which has a rollicking parade of stereotypes and caricatures. I didn't mind that in that case, however, because the movie has a neat farce structure and keeps a lot of balls in the air. In About Schmidt the tone is a little more searching and the themes more ambitious, and I expected a different kind of characterization—one in which the characters (even the dull-witted characters) were at least allowed to present themselves in the best possible light. "Tough comic inspection" involves something more than Kathy Bates eviscerating her ex-husband, extolling the virtues of her cretinous son, then climbing naked into a hot tub and coming on to our protagonist. And while I concede your point about Hope Davis (there are flashes of something more in the role), the movie needed a better, more climactic scene between father and daughter—a scene in which she made her perspective on him compelling enough to take us for a stretch out of his head. And what would a woman like that ever see in Dermot Mulroney's character? (Let me say for the record that I liked About Schmidt well enough and look forward to seeing it again. And I can't wait for Payne's next movie.)

You asked whether the women in Lovely & Amazing were meant to be representative or nut cases—and wondered why, in the latter case, you'd want to spend time in their company. I'm sympathetic because my wife had the same response, and I agree that they are not fully realized. But I found what was there to be tantalizing, and the movie a fascinating case study of three sisters (one of them adopted and radically different) not getting what they need from their parents and acting out in startling and individual ways. (I didn't mind spending time in Igby's company for much the same reasons.)

Let me add in relation to Tony's point that I love that movies are finally "foregrounding" women's needs over men's—although there is a bit of a PC double standard here. When a mother in The Hours announces that her choice was leaving her husband and children or dying, we are meant to feel sympathy for her no-win spiritual predicament. (Ibsen's A Doll House is still with us.) A man making the same declaration would be regarded, justly I think, as a monstrous narcissist and a coward. I like how Rebecca Miller handles Parker Posey's implacably selfish character in Personal Velocity better. (I haven't made up my mind if Unfaithful fits in here because I think this film about a woman's sexual rapture outside her marriage was made with a male gaze. Anyone disagree?)

Thanks for making the point twice about music. We are in a golden age of composing, with a lot of the best orchestral writing showing up in movies. (The great composers often wrote incidental music for plays. Does anyone doubt that today they would be writing for film?) In addition to John Williams' most resourceful score in decades (although I think his work was fascinating in A.I., too), the year has given us first-rate scores by the likes of Eliot Goldenthal, Carter Burwell, and the great Jerry Goldsmith. I loved James Newton Howard's main title for Signs. One reason I think that Philip Glass' music for The Hours stands out is that a distractingly bad score is pretty rare these days.

Later,
David

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

Lovely and Exasperating

Posted Thursday, Jan. 2, 2003, at 1:29 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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