One of Matt Weiner’s favorite shots in all of “Mad Men” arrives in the second episode of the second season: Peggy Olson, prim secretary turned crack copywriter, lies on the bed of her cramped Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment the morning after a late-night bash. She is still wearing her smart, modest red party dress, now billowing out across the rumpled sheets. “It’s just luscious,” Weiner says of the shot, and he’s right: The camera peers down at her from high above — her right arm splayed to the side, knees collapsed to the left, her room an artful tangle of clothes tossed across furniture and abandoned in heaps on the floor. Lasting all of 15 seconds, it’s a scene even a careful viewer might miss, but for anyone fascinated by the ever-evolving Peggy, one of the show’s most compelling characters, it contains a clue: The tightly coiled good girl and relentless worker bee turns out to be a bit of a slob.
I’ve never much gone for DVD commentary — too often a forced, awkward affair for both creator and fan alike — but I make an exception for “Mad Men,” where the analysis of each episode becomes like mini-master classes on my favorite TV obsession. With his amiable, slightly nasal, utterly obsessive patter, creator Matthew Weiner makes a passionate tour guide for the show’s second season, appearing on the commentary track for nearly every one of its 13 episodes to help trace the tale’s bleak trajectory and drop little gems of insidery info: That Duck and Don’s accounts-vs.-creative conflict was based on a clash between Bruce Crawford and Jim Jordan at the BBDO ad agency, for instance, or that he based the Peggy-Don mentorship on his own experiences as both master and apprentice (working with, among others, David Chase of “The Sopranos”).
This might sound like mundane stuff, but it’s a tall drink of water for those of us who consider season breaks to be more like a barefoot march through the Sahara. And Weiner has a bit of the charming adman in him, too — he’s not exactly Don Draper pitching Kodak the carousel, but he can still speak eloquently on this dark American landscape all cluttered with thwarted dreams and lust and, you know, vintage tiki bars.
I must also cop to adoring the actor commentary: The girlish Elisabeth Moss, who plays Peggy, talking about each scene as if she’s presenting her exhibit at the science fair; the purring Christina Hendricks, who plays Joan, rightfully perturbed that the day after her rape scene aired a fan ran up to gush about what she was wearing (“I thought, ‘That’s all you have to say?” she asks); Jon Hamm, who undercuts his dashing stoicism with a penchant for sheer goofiness; the underrated Vincent Kartheiser, who enjoys making fun of his character — the dear, despised Pete — as much as the rest of us. (Poor January Jones, bless her heart, is conversational deadwood.)
The audience knows it’s a game-changing moment when Don’s lover, Bobbie Barrett, tells Peggy, “You can’t be a man. Don’t even try. Be a woman. It’s powerful business, when done correctly.” But it’s still fascinating to hear the actress Elisabeth Moss reflect on the moment: “That’s when everything begins to change,” she says. “Everything that happens to her, even into next season, stems from that bit of advice.”
“Nostalgia is denial — denial of the painful present,” says a philosopher (Michael Sheen) in Woody Allen’s surprise hit “Midnight in Paris.” “The name for this denial is Golden Age thinking: the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one [that] one’s living in. It’s a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.”
If nostalgia is indeed a flaw, it’s one that many 2011 films and TV programs shared. Some of the year’s most talked-about movies and shows gave themselves over to some form of nostalgia — unabashedly reveling in, and idealizing, not just an earlier time, but the artists and artistic styles that we associate with that time, and the rush of emotion that accompanies our fantasies of same. Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” — his top grossing movie ever — is Exhibit A. It’s an immensely likable reworking of his short story “A Twenties Memory” in which an Allen stand-in, screenwriter Gil (Owen Wilson), magically gets to travel back to the time of Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. But it’s merely the keynote address in a year of budget-busting, production-design-showcasing, time-tripping cinema and television, a year that invited viewers not merely to experience stories from another time but to slip into them with deep pleasure and savor their restorative power.
“Midnight in Paris,” “The Tree of Life,” “Super 8,” “The Artist,” “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” “Hugo” and “The War Horse” were all, to some extent, about nostalgia — about wrapping oneself in the texture of some glorious past, be it an earlier period in a character’s own life or an earlier era in filmmaking. Some of the highest-profile TV — successful and unsuccessful — had nostalgia on the brain, wallowing in luxurious sets, costumes, hairstyles, music and slang from the early- and mid-20th century — even as they repeatedly told and showed us that things weren’t so great Back Then, whenever Back Then was. The short list includes the glossy but unsuccessful network series “The Playboy Club” and “Pan Am,” HBO’s “Mildred Pierce” and “Boardwalk Empire,” ReelzChannel’s “The Kennedys,” PBS’ “Downton Abbey” and “Brideshead Revisited” and “The Hours.” That “Midnight in Paris” quote sums then all up rather nicely. Superficially they’re all so different that it seems crazy to group them together — they vary in setting from the very early 20th century to the early ’60s, and their tones are all over the map: dramatic, melodramatic, droll, shticky, tragic, horrific, you name it.
But there’s something basic and significant connecting all of them, and I think the connection is more aesthetic than historical. It is, as Paul said, about the need to escape the present, and not so much about the particular of the past that’s being escaped into. It’s about tactility — a fear that the virtual world is displacing the real one, and a corresponding conviction that a cinematic or televised re-creation of the past — however stylized or “unreal” — can feel somehow more real than whatever we’re living through now.
To borrow a literary analogy, the texts of these productions were often overwhelmed by the illustrations; even as the plotlines showed us how cruel life could be, and how ignorant and venal the characters were, the viewer’s eye still feasted on those dresses! Those hats! Those cars! Those hissing vinyl records spinning on those elegant Victrolas! And of course the white beams of light slicing through cigarette-befogged darkness in movie theaters and casting black-and-white images up on big screens, images shots on honest-to-God film.
Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo” and Michel Hazanavicius’s “The Artist” both worshiped, even fetishized silent cinema, or more accurately, the idea of silent cinema, and the era that spawned it: a time of steam engines and big black automobiles and stony-faced men in hats and long coats. Like the boozy, smoky, wood-and-wool-and-brass tableaux of “Mildred Pierce” and “Boardwalk Empire” and ABC’s intriguing if ultimately unsuccessful “Pan Am,” these films were not so much about the historical particulars of a time or place as the re-created, fantasized texture of it. Anything prior to the 1990s could still be considered a remnant of the Industrial or Machine Age, an epoch in which things were physical and present — when they were indisputably and obviously there, and not some incredible digital simulation; when some person, or some machine run by people, made things, and when even popular culture was something you could touch, or that you at least knew you could touch: a book, a film, a record. Until as recently as 10 years ago, even television was shot on tape, and could (in a pinch) be cut on tape, with a razor blade and tape — just like film, or a construction paper collage.
This was also the year that we started to hear very serious rumblings about the end of media as a physical object that one could hold in one’s hand: not just the vinyl records and 35mm film prints that old timers like yours truly love to blather on about, but the supposedly more cold and forbidding late 20th century versions, such as videotapes and CDs and DVDs. Those are on their way out, too, if reports — and the maneuverings of industry giants such as Netflix — are to be believed. It’ll all be virtual soon, an endless stream of data held on gigantic servers in undisclosed locations and “licensed” to us for private use on our computers and mobile devices and perhaps soon in the chips that will be installed on the brain stem of every American newborn, along with the port that allows them to jack into the Matrix.
“All men fear death,” says Ernest Hemingway in “Midnight in Paris.” “It’s a natural fear that consumes us all. We fear death because we feel that we haven’t loved well enough or loved at all, which ultimately are one and the same.” The film’s tone is rather jokey as he says this, but from the intensity in his eyes you can tell he’s not kidding — and if you read the words in plain black-and-white, divested of lush celluloid images and piquant music, it sure does feel like a line from a manifesto, or a lament.
Allen ultimately deflates the very nostalgia that his movie indulges; the film’s comic climax takes Gil and his girlfriend Adriana, a ’20s Frenchwoman, back to Paris during the Belle Epoque era, the period that she worships as brazenly as Gil worships the Paris of her own time. “I’m from the ’20s, and I’m telling you the golden age is la Belle Epoque,” she insists. But really: “Midnight in Paris” is not a hit because of the director’s clear-headed attitude about the blind worship of earlier, supposedly more interesting times. It’s a hit because of the clothes, the music, the cultural references and the comic star power of the Paris writers and artists we’ve read about in school. It’s a hit because it’s a warm bath in another era, and a blessed escape from this one.
J.J. Abrams’ Steven Spielberg pastiche “Super 8″ was not merely a paean to the filmmaker’s adolescence in the late ’70s and early ’80s — an era that spawned such early Spielberg classics as “Jaws” and “Close Encounters” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “E.T.” — but a valentine to the last great age of analog media, the Carter-Reagan-Bush I era, when records were on vinyl and films were shot on film, and both could be looked at, lifted, touched. Abrams went so crazy re-creating Spielbergian, late’70s lens flares that there were times when the actors’ faces were partly obscured by horizontal bands of blue light. A telling moment at a drugstore showed the teenage hero waiting to get his Super 8mm film back; in the days — days!! — leading up to that glorious moment, he looked as anxious as a young father in some mid-20th century sitcom, pacing around in a hospital waiting room and smoking cigarette after cigarette until the doctor arrived with the good news. And while Abrams’ “Super 8″ was playing in multiplexes this past summer, Spielberg himself was finishing his epic “War Horse,” which is set during World War I but strains to evoke the shots, camera moves, music, pacing and tone of a 1940s Hollywood prestige picture. (During a recent New York preview screening, Spielberg said he was hugely influenced by 1940s John Ford films, particularly “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” and “How Green Was My Valley.”)
“You’ll never be a great writer if you fear dying,” Hemingway tells Gil in “Midnight in Paris.” “Do you?”
“Yeah, I do,” Gil replies. “I would say it’s my greatest fear.”
A more ruminative, searching, open-ended take could be found in Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” a Proustian reverie by way of suburban Texas in the 1950s and ’60s. To watch this movie is to be completely immersed in the mind of another person: ostensibly the narrator, Jack (Sean Penn), but really Malick himself, a generous filmmaker who seems to be remembering his own past because he can’t remember anyone else’s. It’s a tough movie in some ways, filled with confusion, pain, regret and messy Oedipal resentments and desires. But ultimately the look and sound of the film eclipses all of that. What predominates is an overwhelming, at times helpless-seeming urge to escape this horrible, sterile modern prison of virtual being-and-nothingness, and go back to a more casually physical time, a time when you could stay outside all day and all night without your parents worrying about your being raped or doped up or kidnapped by sex slavers or organ thieves or converted to Shariah Law or whatever bugaboo is obsessing modern parents at this very moment; a time when you could fall down and scab your knees, tear-ass through woods and vacant lots, roll around in grass, even strap a poor frog to a rocket and then feel horrible about it later, then come home and clean the dirt out from under your fingernails and sit down to supper with Mom and Dad, who maybe didn’t know quite what to do with you, and perhaps even resented you at times, but loved you unconditionally.
Well, maybe not your parents, but somebody’s.
“The Tree of Life” ends on a beach that might represent the afterlife or that might simply be a metaphorical or figurative space — a place where all Jack’s most beloved fellow beings can gather in one place and just be loved, admired, embraced. It’s a place where the virtual becomes real and the dead return to us, if only for a moment. A place where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.
“That’s what the present is,” Gil says in “Paris,” responding to the quote that opens this article. “It’s a little unsatisfying because life is unsatisfying.”
The fifth season of “Mad Men” may have been delayed until 2012 by contentious negotiations between AMC and series creator Matthew Weiner, but fans desperate for their fixes of fashion, Old Fashioneds and nascent feminism have three new shows set in the late 1950s and early 1960s to tide them over.
This week, NBC’s “The Playboy Club” and ABC’s “Pan Am” join “The Hour,” a stylish look at a British TV news show that premiered in August on BBC America. It’s easy to suggest that these shows are trying to capitalize on “Mad Men’s” popularity — which has spawned everything from paper dolls to a Banana Republic clothing line — and it’s certainly true. But it’s more accurate to say that “Mad Men” tapped a vein of gender trouble that no one expected ran so deep. The clothes and the cocktails may be appealing, but they’re a way of setting us up to revisit a moment when women were starting to remake the world, and to take on the knotty questions of where the fight for women’s equality got derailed. The success of “Mad Men’s” imitators will depend on whether they give viewers substance to go with that style, or whether they build a series of arid, period theme parks.
That’s not to say that our stylistic fantasies of an earlier age can’t be valuable. There’s something refreshing about the late ’50s and early ’60s standard of beauty, an era when Marilyn Monroe, the world’s sexiest woman, fluctuated between a size 8 and a size 12. On “Mad Men,” the sexiest woman, Christina Hendricks’ Joan Holloway, is also the biggest, clad in costumes that emphasize her curves. Romola Garai, the tough and sensuous female star of “The Hour,” refuses to diet and has spoken repeatedly about food as a source of joy rather than anxiety. They may not have succeeded in permanently shifting the fashion world — Hendricks still has trouble finding dresses for premieres and events — but they are a powerful counterpoint to a world where a deviation from a sample size sparks pregnancy rumors and female news anchors confess to eating Cheerios as if they’re binging on candy.
But if shows set in the 1960s usefully debunk the idea that women need to starve themselves to be stylish, they also let us indulge in less healthy fantasies. Don Draper may turn himself into an anti-tobacco crusader as a strategic move and Bel Rowley may be shut out of smoke-filled rooms on account of her gender. But “Pan Am’s” stewardesses still serve martinis on orchid-adorned trays, and “The Playboy Club’s” waitresses still shill steaks for the menu’s standard buck-and-a-half price. When you’re fretting over the assassination of the president or the rearrangement of society’s hierarchies of race and class, who has time to fret over cholesterol or cirrhosis? In an uncertain world, who doesn’t need a tipple, or in the case of Peggy Olson, to smoke some marijuana?
But even if we don’t want to go back to work in sex-segregated offices (and clubs and planes), there is something appealing about an era where, in the battle of the sexes, it was easy to pick out bad guys, and single out bad behavior. It’s impossible to miss the sexism in advertising executives’ treatment of Joan and Peggy; in the doubts that dog Bel as she sets out to make “The Hour” a vital and challenging news show; in the leers of young men who think themselves sexually sophisticated simply by perusing a Playboy Club menu; in a world that seems so stifling that escaping into a Pan Am-issue girdle feels like freedom.
And while there may be no perfect solution to the sexism these characters face at home and at work, we at least see the characters learning lessons that we’ll benefit from a generation later. The Playboy bunnies may get a little bit further than the Joan Holloways of the world by packaging their sex appeal for sale beyond a market of only one man. But as “The Playboy Club” makes clear, the freedom not to marry every man you shook your bunny tail at did not mean freedom from sexual harassment. There’s no question that trailblazers like Bel and Peggy opened up new professions and responsibilities for women, but we know now, from persistent pay gaps and underrepresentation of women in powerful positions, that their victories were the first salvos in a battle that is far from won. And the “Pan Am” stewardesses won their freedom of mobility by conforming rigidly to a corporate standard of beauty.
What’s both depressing and powerfully nostalgic about these shows is not necessarily that sexism was so virulent — though that’s certainly upsetting — but that we failed to capitalize on the nascent momentum that all of these shows explore. Some of those failures, like the inability to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, are a testament to the persistence of sexism in American society. And some of them are the result of fighting with ghosts. Should women and men be represented exactly equally in all industries? Are we really going to tell women that it’s wrong to take time out of the workforce to raise their children? Shows like “Mad Men,” “The Hour,” “The Playboy Club” and “Pan Am” resonate with us not because we want to return to the bad old days, but because we wish we had a clearer path toward a better future.
Screenwriter Brian McGreevy did a guest stint on Vulture today with a diatribe on the emasculation of vampires in modern media, specifically in “True Blood” and “Twilight.” “True Blood,” at least, began with McGreevy’s ideal sexy/dangerous vampire — if not in Bill Compton, than in Eric Northman. Of course, now that Eric has lost his memory and Bill is playing at being a prissy little king, it’s totally reasonable for McGreevy to assert that these characters “have taken the Romantic vampire and cut off his balls, leaving a pallid emo pansy with the gaseous pretentiousness of a perfume commercial. We are now left with the Castrati vampire.”
Unfortunately, this argument smacks of chauvinism. McGreevy (currently adapting Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” for the big screen) blames this on a new, dangerous “female gaze” — as opposed to the misogynistic “male gaze” as defined by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” The female gaze, he suggests, makes these non-threatening vampires “pornography for tweens.” When he asserts that “Mad Men’s” Don Draper is actually more of a vampire than any of the “True Blood” or “Twilight” characters, what he’s saying is that Draper is more of a man.
“It is a killer’s heart that is the motive force of masculinity and predation its spirit. This is not to suggest nature is immutable, or that one ought to act in blind obeisance to it, but that ‘ought’ is not in the vocabulary of want, and choosing is meant to have consequences.”
But one could argue that original vamps like Stoker’s “Dracula” and Max Schreck’s Nosferatu are way more emo than Draper: They both are obsessed and stalkerish with women they like, stay secluded from the rest of society instead of engaging in it, and are ultimately tragic figures because they are so sexy, yet so sad. And if we want to get technical about the timeline, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” actually predates “Dracula” by 25 years, and revolves around lesbian vampires. So maybe that “female gaze” will come in handy after all.
McGreevy is arguing for vampires who are manipulative, coldhearted Patrick Bateman types — charming sociopaths like the “American Psycho” character who understand the human morality structure and can play the game, but whose nature compels them to kill in order to live.
In that way, maybe there is one television character that would be less of a “Castrati” vamp than Edward Cullen or Bill Compten: Cersai Lannister from “Game of Thrones.” That soul-sucking pit of evil puts on a pretty face in public while using her sexuality to stay in power. Her only desire is to protect her progeny; behind closed doors, she engages in incestuous taboos. She knows what’s expected of her in public, but could care less once the curtains have drawn. “You win, or you die,” says Cersai about the game in question, implying that holding onto power is its own version of immortal life — and the mark of a true vampire.
In this publicity image released by AMC, Jon Hamm portrays Don Draper in the AMC series, "Mad Men." The series was nominated for an Emmy for best drama series, and Jon Hamm was nominated for best actor in a drama series on Thursday, July 14, 2011. The Emmy awards will be presented on Sept. 18. (AP Photo/AMC) (Credit: AP)
“Mad Men,” the sharply observed drama of a changing 1960s America, captured 19 Emmy nominations Thursday morning to lead the series pack, with the melodramatic miniseries “Mildred Pierce” starring Kate Winslet grabbing a top 21 bids.
“Mad Men” has a chance to repeat for a fourth consecutive year as best drama. “Modern Family,” last year’s top comedy series, was the most-nominated sitcom with 17 bids.
Other leading nominees include the Prohibition-era drama “Boardwalk Empire” with 18 nominations, “Saturday Night Live” with 16 and 13 bids each for the sex-and-swords fantasy “Game of Thrones” and the sitcom “30 Rock.”
“OK, keep it together,” a surprised nominations co-announcer Melissa McCarthy said when she realized she was a nominee for her sitcom “Mike & Molly.”
The controversial sitcom “The Kennedys,” which was dropped by the History channel and given a second chance by the lesser-known ReelzChannel, received 10 nominations, including best miniseries.
Familiar faces have a chance to claim — or reclaim — Emmys, including last year’s lead comedy actress winner Edie Falco of “Nurse Jackie” and Jim Parsons, best actor for a comedy for “The Big Bang Theory.” Both were nominated this year.
Jon Hamm received his fourth lead acting bid for “Mad Men,” and this time the competitor who denied him the award three times before isn’t in the category. Bryan Cranston and “Breaking Bad” weren’t eligible for this year’s awards because the series took a break between seasons.
Steve Carell earned a best comedy actor for his final season of “The Office,” his last chance to win an Emmy statuette for his role as TV’s most clueless boss.
Matt LeBlanc, best known for his role as Joey in “Friends,” received a lead comedy actor bid for playing a screen version of himself in the satiric show business series “Episodes.”
There were fresh faces as well, including best drama actress nominee Mireille Enos of “The Killing” and best drama actor Timothy Olyphant of “Justified.”
The turning point in Tony Kaye’s new movie, “Detachment” — which, despite many nameable flaws, is a wrenching and powerful achievement — comes when Lucy Liu, playing a high school guidance counselor, suffers a major breakdown in front of a student. It’s easy to be callous, she shrieks at the bored and bewildered girl in front of her, easy not to give a shit. What takes courage is actually caring about yourself and the world. Sure, you can call that a hackneyed sentiment, and some people won’t get past the fact that “Detachment” is delivering a familiar message in a familiar setting. But two things redeem the scene, at least for me: 1) What Liu says is absolutely true, and it is one of the central problems in contemporary life, and 2) she’s not saying it from some position of cool, removed wisdom; she’s pissed off, filled with rage, and completely losing her shit at a girl whose only crime was announcing that she doesn’t care about school and wants to be a model.
“Detachment” might be the biggest conversation piece I’ve seen so far at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. It’s a scattershot, melodramatic would-be epic set in and around a New York high school, with a tremendous cast headed by Oscar-winner Adrien Brody as a substitute teacher struggling with his own barren emotional life. (It also stars Christina Hendricks of “Mad Men,” James Caan, Marcia Gay Harden, Blythe Danner and Liu.) It’s an everything-including-the-kitchen-sink kind of movie with a Fellini level of ambition. Kaye blends animated sequences along with dreams, memories and fantasies, mini-interviews with real-life teachers, dogmatic lectures about the failings of our society, and quotations from Albert Camus and Edgar Allan Poe. Carl Lund’s screenplay hits a lot of flat notes and the acting is uneven, but ultimately I didn’t much care — I was swept along by the spectacular visual journey and the wrenching emotional experience. People will either love “Detachment” or hate it, and either way it provides powerful testimony to the unrivaled passion and undiminished craft of director Kaye, whose notoriety in the film industry is matched by his near-total invisibility to the general public.
If you’ve heard of Kaye at all, it’s almost certainly because of his 1998 debut feature “American History X,” which is now a revered cult film but was a historic flop on its initial release, plagued by an entertaining and highly public three-way feud between Kaye, star Edward Norton Jr. and distributor New Line Cinema. Kaye tried to get his name taken off the film and replaced with the credit “Humpty Dumpty” (even threatening to legally change his name to that effect). He reportedly suggested — after the film was shot, edited and in the can — commissioning a new script from Caribbean poet Derek Walcott and starting over again from scratch.
Indeed, once you start with the Tony Kaye stories, you don’t want to stop. He spent $100,000 of his own money on ads in the Hollywood trade papers abusing Norton and the film’s producers, which I guess echoes the time when — as a nearly unknown advertising director — he bought an ad in a London broadsheet announcing that “Tony Kaye Is the Greatest English Director Since Hitchcock.” He once shot more film for a 30-second Volvo commercial than Woody Allen had used in making “Hannah and Her Sisters.” At the peak of his advertising success in the mid-’90s, he used to buy one of every item in the seasonal Comme des Garçons catalog. As he told a British interviewer a few years ago, “I did a lot of very insane things. A lot of very, very, very insane things.”
With his filmmaking career in ruins after the “American History X” debacle, Kaye briefly came under the wing of Marlon Brando, who hired him to film a series of seminars Brando was leading with Michael Jackson, Sean Penn and Jon Voight. (Of all the unfinished Kaye projects, that one may be the strangest.) But Kaye’s penchant for showing up at Los Angeles nightclubs dressed as Osama bin Laden — in the fall of 2001 — succeeded in alienating even the legendarily antisocial Brando, who died before the two could manage any reconciliation. So began Kaye’s period in the outer wilderness of the entertainment industry, before he began to work his way back by actually completing his memorably gruesome 2007 abortion documentary “Lake of Fire,” most of which had been shot during the Clinton administration.
I’m not Tony Kaye’s shrink and I’m not sure it’s worth speculating about why he did all the crazy things he did; when I interviewed him at the time “Lake of Fire” was released, he explained it all as a kind of act, in emulation of idols like Erich von Stroheim or Francis Ford Coppola. “All the work of the directors I really liked,” he said, “those directors seemed to be tyrannical, egotistical, arrogant, mad. They were my gods, so I thought, ‘Well, I’d better be like that.’ I’m not really like that.” That sounds like clear-sighted rearview analysis, but I’m not sure it’s adequate. When I ran into Kaye the other day in the Tribeca press room, I didn’t recognize him. When we met in 2007 he was bald, but he now has a Rasputin beard and non-haircut, and was approaching journalists with a hand-lettered paper sign that read, “I HAVE A SPEECH PROBLEM. MY NAME IS TONY KAYE (‘American History X’). I WANT TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT MY MOVIE ‘DETACHMENT.’” (Kaye did have a speech impediment in childhood and says he avoids talking on the phone, but you’d never notice it in ordinary conversation.)
Yes, it would be great if we could talk about “Detachment,” because the other side of the Tony Kaye story is that he’s such an intriguing and irresistible character that he throws his own movies into the shade, and that’s not serving his interests or anybody else’s. The thing is, in announcing himself as the greatest English director since Hitchcock back in 1980-whatever, Kaye was being an arrogant jackass, but his insight into his own potential wasn’t necessarily wrong. In some alternate universe a few ticks away from ours, things went a little differently before or during or after “American History X” and Kaye is now widely seen as one of the greatest living filmmakers, along with Scorsese and the Coens and Darren Aronofsky and whomever else you’d like to nominate.
But that universe isn’t this one, and it’s anybody’s guess how much of a comeback Tony Kaye can mount at age 58, with the manner of a 19th-century European anarchist and a heavily allegorical high school drama that’s going to sound, the more I describe it to you, like about seven (or 17) other movies you’ve already seen. It’s got a terrific central performance from Brody, maybe his best since “The Pianist,” but many of the other elements — the sympathetic fellow teacher he starts dating (Hendricks), the hardass but well-meaning principal (Harden), the teen hooker he adopts off the street (newcomer Sami Gayle) — seem like stock archetypes, at least until you actually sit down and watch the film.
Some distributor is going to have to take a chance on “Detachment” and endure a certain amount of critical derision. It’s probably worth it, partly because Tony Kaye still has cinematic talent to burn, but even more because of what he can do with it, even in a highly imperfect movie that uses the pointless but noble struggle of high school to stand in for lots of other pointless and noble forms of struggle, like making movies and being alive. What I take away from Tony Kaye’s struggle is that he may have been a difficult personality — and may still be one — and expended way too much energy early in his career on behaving like an asshole, but he has never, ever, surrendered to cynicism or callousness. He cares passionately and prodigiously about everything he’s ever done, arguably too much. If he has thrown away a once-promising career as a result, then his failure is better than most people’s success.
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