Legendary New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael retired from print 20 years ago and died 10 years after. But if you read film criticism online, it's as if she's still with us. She is the subject of a new biography by Brian Kellow, "A Life in the Dark." Salon film critic Andrew O'Hehir and TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz got together this week to talk about Kael's impact on film, criticism and their own sensibilities. Laurels are tossed, darts thrown. Excerpts follow.
Matt: Is there any other critic, dead or alive, who’s as ubiquitous as Pauline Kael?
Andrew: Absolutely not. As we’ll see, I have very mixed feelings about Kael and her legacy, but no other film critic has ever been remotely as popular or as influential. (One could argue that less famous writers like James Agee or Manny Farber are more “important,” in some sense, but that’s a different matter.) Kael’s influence is so pervasive it’s almost unconscious. When I was a younger critic and someone accused me of writing like Kael, I was enraged and responded that I’d never read her, which was almost literally true. When I did read her, I had to admit the guy had a point: I had absorbed some elements of her style and outlook without realizing it, as if through osmosis, because they were so ubiquitous in film criticism.
Matt: I’ve actually struggled with this myself. That prose style is so engaging — so powerful and seductive in some ways because it’s like a heightened version of everyday conversation with a really smart person — that it does sink into your mind, whether you’re a regular filmgoer of somebody who writes criticism for a living. Anybody who’s so inclined can actually track my own shifting feelings about Kael’s influence by looking at my past writing about her. I reviewed her 1994 compilation “For Keeps” for the Dallas Observer, my first employer, and it was pretty much a mash note. Seven years later, I wrote an obituary for her that was a lot tougher — respectful, ultimately, but skeptical of some of the very qualities I praised a few years earlier. This was probably because by that point I’d been living in New York for six years, a much richer moviegoing town with a lot more varied types of film criticism available in print, and I started to figure out that even though Kael was the most prominent and maybe influential voice in criticism, there was more than one way to write about movies. And television. And everything!
Andrew: Let’s talk about some of the distinctive and (perhaps) problematic qualities in Kael’s writing. As you say, her voice is both powerful and seductive. She worked very hard to discover and refine a style that was highly intelligent but also sounded very direct and American, and was not full of $50 academic words and intellectual pretension. And she was very clear about the fact that a critic’s role is to speak truth (as she sees it) to power, to be an oppositional cultural force, never to congratulate the powerful for being on top or the comfortable for having such good taste. I have some misgivings about the direction Kael went with that, ultimately, but it’s an important lesson, and one that too many people in our so-called profession ignore.
Matt: One of Kael’s finest qualities was that independent voice — independent not just of the normally parasitic relationship between print publications and the studios that advertise in them, but independent of the New Yorker itself, which until Kael came along, did not regularly publish prose as loose and lively as hers. Right now I’m rereading her 1983 review of “The Right Stuff,” which as much as I love that film, really nails Philip Kaufman’s odd mix of counterculture satire and very conventional, even square hero-worship. It’s got one of my favorite closing paragraphs: “If having ‘the right stuff’ is set up as the society’s highest standard, and if a person proves that he has it by his eagerness to be locked in a can and shot into space, the only thing that distinguishes human heroes from chimps is that the heroes volunteer for the job. And if they volunteer, as they do in this film, out of personal ambition and for profit, are they different from the chimp who might jump into the can eagerly, too, if he saw a really big banana there?”
Andrew: That’s fascinating, funny and perverse writing. It makes you laugh and offers a take on that movie that no one else would ever have thought of. A wonderful example. It’s also a good example — do I dare to say this? — of what I will suggest are Kael’s intellectual limitations. Of course there is a difference between a chimp and a human in the example she provides! The human goes into space knowing he is going into space, in pursuit of some grand, abstract vision, the idea of going to the moon or whatever, along with all the personal glory and fame and money and women and so on. The chimp is presumably just thinking about the banana. In that sense it’s a cheap equation: She is deliberately ignoring or contradicting Marx’s famous maxim that the worst house built by a person is still superior to the best house built by a beaver. One can argue with that, but you see what he means right away.
I realize I’m getting into a seemingly irrelevant tangent here, Matt, but my point is that I think Kael falls in love with her contrarianism sometimes, with her desire to defy what she sees as the conventional wisdom of the upper-bourgeois readers of the New Yorker. That leads her sometimes into brilliant insights and other times into dunderheaded dead ends.
Matt: Such as what? Everybody who reads her has a list of examples. Mine would include her generalized hostility toward Stanley Kubrick — especially “2001,” which I think she entirely misunderstood — and a sort of anti-intellectual upper-middle-class yahoo-ism, which was quite hostile toward a lot of the 1960s European art cinema without which a lot of the ’70s American films Kael adored would not have existed. And there was also a homophobic strain to a lot of her writing on films with gay characters and themes, which was by no means unique but certainly contrasts poorly with her very advanced, matter-of-fact writing about films with black and Hispanic characters.
The new Pauline Kael biography by Brian Kellow gets into this a bit, and it’s not flattering to Kael at all. At one point he quotes Kael’s review of the 1968 film “The Sergeant,” starring Rod Steiger as a tormented military officer who develops a damaging crush on a private. She writes, “There is something ludicrous and sometimes poignant about many stories involving homosexuals. Inside the leather trappings and chains and emblems and Fascist insignia of homosexual ‘toughs’ — [check out those ironic quotes!] — there is so often hidden our old acquaintance the high-school sissy, searching the streets for the man he doesn’t believe he is. The incessant, compulsive cruising is the true, mad romantic’s endless quest for love.” You can feel her going for empathy and understanding in that passage, but it’s really condescending.
Andrew: That’s really pretty awful. One probably shouldn’t resort to biography in a case like this, but it may be instructive to remember that Kael lived for several years as a young woman with the poet and radical filmmaker James Broughton, who was primarily gay but fathered a child with her. It’s extremely tempting to reconsider her attitudes about homosexuality and her hostility to avant-garde or art cinema in that light!
Matt: The biography barely gets into that, by the way.
Andrew: “Anti-intellectual upper-middle-class yahoo-ism” is stronger than whatever I was going to use, but pretty well sums it up. You know, I can understand where she was coming from, as a girl from a modest and relatively rural California background, who often felt alienated by the phony-baloney tastes of the Eastern elite establishment. She believed passionately in movies as mass entertainment that could still be humane, and believed that the power of actors and even movie stars could transport us emotionally in a way no other craft could or would. It isn’t precisely my aesthetic, but I completely respect that.
But as you say, she couldn’t see why cinema that was more formal in its orientation, and wasn’t aiming for a mass audience, was important in a different way, and that the possibilities of the medium were not limited to the upper-middle Hollywood and off-Hollywood movies she loved best. She rejected most of the most ambitious areas of European art cinema, as you say — with the bizarre exception of early Godard. (She was a sucker for a certain strain of French movies, maybe because of the sexual frankness.) You mentioned her inability to get Kubrick, and you could extend that to Terrence Malick. I could be wrong about this, but I think she never even wrote about Andrei Tarkovsky, and may never have seen his films. (She certainly would not have enjoyed them!) And then there is the question of the directors who could do no wrong, in her eyes.
Matt: If you look back over her collected work, yeah, it is pretty light on foreign films after the late ’70s. She seemed to almost lose interest entirely in anything non-Hollywood after about 1982, with the exception of certain American independents that she championed. She wrote one of the best and least condescending reviews of Spike Lee’s first film “She’s Gotta Have It,” a great example of where her sexual frankness and her wannabe-boho fascination with images of blackness converged in a really distinctive, fun way. She was more comfortable writing about African-American characters and stories than almost any other prominent film critic of the time, except maybe Roger Ebert. That makes up for some of the exoticism that hampers other reviews — describing Louis Gossett Jr. in “An Officer and a Gentleman” as being like Woody Strode — a superior being or a representative of a more evolved race or something. But I like that she just puts that kind of stuff in reviews — “Did I say that out loud?”-type comments. So many major critics are much more careful, so obviously very worried about how they come off in print, as if they’re running for office. Kael didn’t care about any of that, for better or worse.
Andrew: Yeah, the uninhibited quality of her voice is something I largely admire, partly because anybody who’s written a lot of reviews understands how much work was required to make it sound artless. And yes, she was a fearless champion of what we might call American independent cinema, long before the term existed or the concept became trendy. (I’m guessing she disliked the label.)
And amid the criticisms that we might have, let’s remember that she was absolutely ruthless in attacking the greed and stupidity of Hollywood’s blockbuster mentality, especially because she believed the commercial enterprise of movies was capable of producing a beautiful and unique kind of alchemy. As the studios increasingly defaulted to formula from the late ’70s onward — or, let’s say, to a set of formulas Kael saw as a betrayal of Hollywood’s soul — I think she began to see that attacking the highbrow tastes of people on the Upper West Side was less and less relevant. Didn’t she remark at one point that had she known trash culture would become the only culture, she wouldn’t have defended it so vehemently?
Matt: Yes, she did say that. Quite a mea culpa, really.
You’re really not a fan of hers, are you? I mean, you defend her in the abstract, but I get the sense that you’re very distrustful of what her kind of accessible, personal criticism represents, even though you’ve learned a lot from it.
Andrew: I appreciate what she represents and her influence on the craft and form of film criticism, mine very much included, is almost oxygen-like. But I’m not really on her wavelength. Even when I agree with her about certain movies or directors I often don’t see them the same way, and don’t really get what she’s talking about. I’ve honestly never known what she means by “humanist” movies, and I don’t understand her passion for, say, Brian De Palma or James Toback. Such weird and ultimately minor choices! And the way she uses the first-person plural or the second-person plural, to implicitly include the reader in her highly eccentric emotional response — that drives me nuts. It’s manipulative and a little creepy, like she’s saying all right-thinking people will have the same opinion about a motion picture.
Matt: I used to do that all the time, using the royal “you” — then I started trying to break myself of it, and finally I started using it again without guilt, as an alternative to “one,” which is grammatically correct and more accurate but always sounds stuffy to me.
As recently as 10 years ago, there were certain critics who knew Kael or who were directly mentored by her who all got grouped under the heading of “Paulettes” — people like our former colleague Stephanie Zacharek, and Charles Taylor, Michael Sragow, David Edelstein, my former New York Press colleague Armond White, and David Denby, who inherited Kael’s chair at the New Yorker. That’s funny to me, because the reality of film criticism is that lot of critics are, to some extent, Paulettes, even if the critic never personally knew her. Her voice is just that strong. Even if you choose to define yourself against Kael, you’re acknowledging her influence. It’s like deciding to become a jazz trumpeter and not be influenced by Miles Davis, or becoming an actor and trying not to be influenced by Brando. She has that kind of effect, an elemental effect, transformative and deep. The most recent crop of young film critics definitely have a touch of her style or outlook. They could not avoid it if they wanted to. Reading them, you might also detect bits and pieces of other critics who had an impact of some sort: Manny Farber, James Agee, Molly Haskell, Roger Ebert, Andrew Sarris, Francois Truffaut, even the borderline stand-up comedy-type reviewers like Anthony Lane, and Outlaw Vern and his spiritual godfather, Joe Bob Briggs. They all meant something to writers who came later. They had an impact, though perhaps not on the level of Kael who has been absorbed into the collective subconscious.
But I wonder, Andrew, do you think that deep influence is an altogether good thing? Or is it a bad thing?
Andrew: Well, since I’ve been playing the role of the hater here a little bit, I’ll say that while Kael’s work is a mixed bag and I often find her judgments on individual films, directors and genres baffling, she made film criticism seem relevant and interesting to large numbers of people in a way nobody had before her. She made Roger Ebert possible, and I’m quite sure Roger would agree with that. In a general way, her influence has been highly positive, and what I mean by a general way is that anyone who tries to write about movies in a direct and colloquial voice but also with erudition and style, anyone who seeks to combine personal observations and social or political criticism in a movie review, anyone who is working to situate this peculiar and seductive art form in relation to the world and to human life owes an enormous debt to Pauline Kael.
Now, here’s the downside, Matt: I think when it comes to the highly specific vision of cinema and aesthetics applied by Kael and some (not all) of the admirers you mention, her influence is way more problematic. She wrote so often about valuing beauty and pleasure in the movies — who can argue with that? Well, I can, when beauty and pleasure are defined so narrowly as to refer almost entirely to the kinds of well-made, sophisticated entertainments built around attractive actors playing likable characters, which was what she liked best. I’ve always felt that Kael did not approve of people who found beauty or pleasure in radically different kinds of films — she never used the word “film” of course, as she found it pretentious — and suspected that we were lying about it or fooling ourselves or mistaking suffering for pleasure.
As we’ve discussed, her definition excludes all kinds of things, from European art cinema to horror movies to a lot of crime films and other genre movies. What troubles me about her legacy is the anti-intellectual component you have mentioned, the idea that Kael provides cover for the persistent critical devaluation of movies that challenge her definition of “movies” because they do not set out to please or entertain millions of people, and may be unsettling or incomplete or unfriendly on purpose.
Now it would be ludicrous to suggest that Hou Hsiao-hsien or Alexander Sokurov or Kelly Reichardt or whoever you want to pick from world cinema remains totally obscure because of Pauline Kael’s ghost. But I see her populism — which she meant as a rebuke to the wealthy and powerful — increasingly employed after her death as a weapon of reverse snobbery that makes common cause between critics, moviegoers and major media corporations, a weapon used to support a very limited and mainstream vision of cinema and drive all others ever further into the margins.
Convince me that I’m wrong.
Matt: I don’t think you’re entirely wrong. Kael said near the end of her life that, in effect, that the war described in her piece “Trash, Art and the Movies” ended at some point, and trash won, and that maybe she felt guilty that trash won, and wondered if she’d played a part in that victory. I doubt she would have praised a lot of the big, loud comic book movies that dominate box office charts today — she was negative on the original “Star Wars” films and very mixed on the original Tim Burton “Batman,” which feels quite old-fashioned, even classical, compared to comparable movies today: “The Dark Knight,” “Inception,” “Avatar” and the like. And I am not sure that her definition of a good film necessarily “excludes all kinds of things,” as you claim.
But you’re right that she naturally gravitated toward certain films and filmmakers. That was her nature. I gravitate toward certain kinds of films and filmmakers. You do, too. All critics do. But I don’t know anyone who is a remotely serious movie watcher who only reads one critic. Brian Kellow’s biography gets into this quite a bit. Kael liked to feel overwhelmed by movies. That naturally meant that she clicked with films that were more emotional and visceral than cerebral or analytical. She detested almost everything that smacked of academia, abstraction or agitprop, unless those qualities were subordinated to what the Kellow biography calls “kineticism.” She loved Sam Peckinpah, Robert Altman, Steven Spielberg and early Martin Scorsese, though she felt Scorsese became too arty and careerist too early and lost his way, which is critic code for “became interested in things that I don’t care about.” Her big complaint about “Raging Bull” was that it was “aestheticized pulp” and that it therefore lacked vitality. Vitality was everything to her, so important that it led her to distrust any movie that set out primarily to make one think and reflect.
The titles of a lot of her collections spell this out: “Reeling,” “When the Lights Go Down,” “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” “Taking It All In.” They’re blatantly sexual, teasing. They’re a caricature of what macho guys claim that women “need” — i.e., to get laid. It’s no huge shock that Camille Paglia worships Kael and does her own version of the Dionysius-goes-to-the-multiplex thing when she writes about films. Kael wrote of ”Carrie,” “DePalma is one of the few directors in the sound era to make a horror film that is so visually compelling that a viewer seems to have entered a mythic night world … we can hear the faint, distant sound of De Palma cackling with pleasure.” I think that cackling that she heard was Pauline Kael. The critic was projecting herself onto the movie, and looking for her own reflection in it.
But Andrew, I think it’s really important to point out that this is what all critics do, even if they pretend they aren’t doing it. There is no correct way to review a movie as long as the writer has a moral compass and a firm grasp of film history and aesthetics — which Kael definitely had — and is honest. I wrote a piece for New York Press about Steven Spielberg a number of years ago in which I compared the directors I liked to friends, in the sense that most healthy adults have more than one friend, because we don’t get everything we need from just one friend, humans being so complex and imperfect: “We have friends who are great at giving advice, but whom we wouldn’t trust to feed our cats when we’re out of town. We have friends who’ve deceived or betrayed us, but who are so resourceful and clever that we’d like to have them beside us in an unfamiliar city if our heart suddenly gave out. This same attitude can apply to movies — and moviemakers.”
That attitude can apply to critics, too. Kael was a great friend, even though I never personally knew her. I found her infuriating and bizarre and inconsistent a lot of the time, and there was a period of a few years when I was just kind of tired of her and didn’t want to be around her. I needed some space, I guess. Then I went back to her and appreciated her in a new way, and was able to reconcile my youthful worship of her with what I had learned from reading other critics, past and present. Reading Kael made me feel as though I was sitting across from her at a coffee shop or in a bar, listening to her talk about this film or that filmmaker, or about the wider world beyond the screen. Very few critics have her talent for intimacy and directness. She was an amazing person who enlightened, provoked and changed me. I miss her terribly.
Andrew: That’s great! You tell me I’m wrong while denying you’re doing so, a very Kaelian tactic! Well, a film-critic tactic anyway.
It may feel to you as if the summer moviegoing season has only just begun and many months of popcorn-munching delight lie ahead. That’s both true and not true. There’s a degree of pseudo-Calvinist predestination about the whole thing this year that’s unusual even by the standards of Hollywood, where conventional wisdom and guesswork-in-advance count for actual knowledge.
I mean, nobody knows for sure how much money the 1980s big-hair musical “Rock of Ages” will gross or whether “The Dark Knight Rises” will beat out “The Avengers” as the top box-office hit of the year. (My answers: Not enough to be a huge hit, and no.) But pretty much any idiot with a computer — me, for instance — can look at the calendar and figure out what the biggest hits of the summer will be. As I just mentioned, the summer’s No. 1 movie, in all probability, has already been released. (I’ll save the trollery about how it wasn’t really all that great for some other time.) After we get through “Prometheus” and “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” in June, followed by “The Amazing Spider-Man” and “The Dark Knight Rises” in July, well, that’s pretty much it. I exaggerate, but only a little — these days, blockbuster season commences in early May and is over by the end of July, with August reserved as usual for offbeat genre movies, the fourth chapters of trilogies, and the continuing careers of Sylvester Stallone and Jackie Chan. (In other words, the good stuff.)
Now, I’m not copping some elitist attitude — or at least not the one you’re thinking. I’m plenty excited to see Ridley Scott’s “Alien” prequel “Prometheus” later this week, believe me. And I have a funny feeling about Chris Nolan’s last “Dark Knight” chapter, which might wind up being a lot better, and tougher, than skeptics like me are inclined to expect. But there is a lot of smaller-scale summer movie goodness to look forward to, and arthouse-type specialty distributors have learned that packing the season with alternative fare aimed at grownups can definitely pay off. Please note that I do mean “summer movies,” that is, those possessing high entertainment value and ample sensual rewards. Of course I still love three-hour fillums from Turkey about the meaninglessness of existence (like that one some of you will never forgive me for), but I also agree they don’t go all that well with flip-flops, the smell of spray-on sunscreen, and those mind-altering cola-slush concoctions.
So here are 10 terrific blockbuster alternatives for the summer of 2012, ranging from some mildly offbeat studio fare to low-budget indies that will spread slowly and gradually across the country. (Several will also be available on-demand, and I’ve tried to note that.) I should mention that three excellent such options have already opened in major cities and should reach you soon if they haven’t already: Wes Anderson’s blissful, tragicomic mid-1960s fantasy “Moonrise Kingdom”; Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s heartbreaking one-man, one-day character study “Oslo, August 31st”; and Nadine Labaki’s “Where Do We Go Now?” a sweet-natured, mildly experimental retake on “Lysistrata” set in a Lebanese village.
Extraterrestrial A guy wakes up next to a hot chick after an apparent one-night stand — but why can’t he remember anything about it? And why is there a flying saucer hovering over their now-abandoned city? From Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo, who made the deceptively silly and thoroughly enjoyable time-travel heist movie “Timecrimes,” comes this appealing hybrid of indie relationship comedy and alien-invasion flick. (Opens June 15 in Brooklyn, N.Y.; Seattle; Austin, Texas; and on VOD. Other cities will follow.)
Your Sister’s Sister This irresistible indie rom-com from Seattle-based filmmaker Lynn Shelton may be less distinctive than her provocative bromance “Humpday,” but Shelton has stepped up her game, movie-star-wise, while retaining her sharp-edged dialogue and real-life characterizations. Mark Duplass plays a grieving loser who has a fun, drunken one-nighter with a lesbian friend (Rosemarie DeWitt) — but it’s her sister (Emily Blunt), the ex of his late brother, for whom he’s kept a torch burning. (Opens June 15 in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C., with a wider release to follow.)
Beasts of the Southern Wild First-time director Benh Zeitlin’s magic-realist fable is already the year’s most acclaimed debut. Set in an isolated corner of Louisiana’s bayou country, where a six-year-old girl lives in a fantastical harmony with nature — at least until the big storm hits — “Beasts” has won both the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and the Caméra d’Or at Cannes, for best first film in any section of the festival. This is a genuinely visionary work, albeit one that will strike some viewers as a mite too precious. I simply can’t tell whether it’s a breakout hit waiting to happen or this year’s version of “Uncle Boonmee” — a film loved by a handful of cinephile insiders but ignored by most. (Opens June 27 in major markets, with wider release to follow.)
Magic Mike Yeah, picking this one is probably cheating. It’s a studio film (at least at the point of release) that stars Channing Tatum, Alex Pettyfer and Matthew McConaughey as male strippers. In other words, it’s got obvious audience appeal and will probably be a hit, at least at some level — but it’s also a Steven Soderbergh film, meaning it was shot fast and cheap and close to the ground. (Soderbergh shot and edited the whole damn thing himself, as usual.) That also means it’s got at least a bit of clinical, borderline-misanthropic edge to go along with the ample humor and even ampler servings of beefcake. Honestly, what’s not to love? (Opens June 29.)
Take This Waltz Actress-turned-director Sarah Polley’s second film (the first was the wonderful “Away From Her”) is an almost ruthless examination of one woman’s journey out of an apparently happy marriage into a stormy new relationship, featuring 2011 Oscar nominee Michelle Williams in what I think is her best role to date. (And Seth Rogen is so terrific as her jilted husband that I hereby forgive him his willfully dumb comedy roles.) By turns erotic, comic, tragic and even experimental, “Take This Waltz” has divided critics and audiences at festivals so far. I think it’s one of the year’s best movies, and it announces Polley’s arrival in the front rank of North American filmmakers. What will you think? (Now available on VOD; opens June 29 in theaters.)
Ballplayer: Pelotero Summer simply isn’t summer without an unconventional take on the baseball movie. In this acclaimed documentary, already a hit at numerous festivals, directors Ross Finkel, Trevor Martin and Jonathan Paley take us inside the rarely seen world of Major League Baseball’s training camps in the Dominican Republic, where teenagers from the poor island nation are bred to become future diamond superstars (or, more likely, to wash out somewhere along the way). The filmmakers follow two highly ranked prospects as they approach their 16th birthday — the moment they can sign professional contracts. (Opens July 13 in New York, with other cities and home video release to follow.)
The Queen of Versailles A Florida real-estate tycoon and his appealing, immensely flawed wife try to build the country’s biggest McMansion in photographer-turned-filmmaker Lauren Greenfield’s documentary, which is stranger than any work of fiction. Surrounded by controversy since well before its Sundance premiere (when subject David Siegel tried to sue the festival), “Queen of Versailles” veers from profound human compassion to domestic horror as Siegel’s wife Jackie wanders through her enormous but trashed home scraping dog crap off the carpets. It’s like a Theodore Dreiser novel for our time, infused with the vivid, vulgar spirit of reality TV. (Opens in theaters July 20; VOD release is likely but has not been announced.)
Killer Joe A mean-spirited plot about a guy who takes out a hit on his own mother, a delightful-sounding cast headed by the resurgent Matthew McConaughey (what a big year for him!), and an NC-17 rating. Add that all up, and this Coens-flavored tale of backwater deviance, written by playwright Tracy Letts, could finally be the comeback film that onetime Oscar-winner William Friedkin (“The Exorcist,” “The French Connection”) has been pointing toward for decades. Mind you, like all of Friedkin’s recent movies, “Killer Joe” was made on the cheap, far away from Hollywood and its piles of money. That only makes me want to see it more, especially with Emile Hirsch, Juno Temple, Thomas Haden Church and Gina Gershon all along for the ride. (Scheduled to open July 27 in limited release.)
Premium Rush This one’s another studio movie, technically speaking — but everything about this Manhattan chase thriller screams irresistible August sleeper, from its indie-rific star (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, still a niche-oriented leading man) to its director (A-list screenwriter David Koepp, who’s made several other films, none of them hits). Gordon-Levitt plays a bike messenger who picks up a mysterious envelope that lures a dubious cop (the inimitable Michael Shannon) into an extended street pursuit, complete with BMX-style bike acrobatics and action-movie clichés galore. (Scheduled to open Aug. 24 in wide release.)
Lawless This bootlegging saga set in Depression-era Virginia, from the Aussie duo of director John Hillcoat and screenwriter Nick Cave (yes, the post-punk music legend, who also wrote Hillcoat’s “The Proposition”), has run through three titles during its brief existence, which often signals a troubled production. (It was previously “The Wettest County in the World” and then just “The Wettest County” — and the filmmakers only switched to “Lawless” after Terrence Malick agreed to give it up.) Reviews and reactions at the Cannes premiere ran the gamut from raves to outrage, but with an ensemble that includes Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Jessica Chastain, Guy Pearce and Mia Wasikowska (along with the much-mocked Shia LaBeouf), I can’t believe it won’t be fascinating. (Scheduled to open Aug. 29.)
The best movies act as a kind of amber, trapping the life of their times. Sometimes, you get jewels, other times you get, well, amber.
It was hard to read anything about “We Need to Talk About Kevin” without some reference to its distinguished antecedents in the “there’s something about that boy, June” school of demon child cinema. “The Omen,” “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Problem Child” all got their time on deck, but one film in particular gets mentioned, for it invented this entire genre. And that film is Mervyn LeRoy’s 1956 epic “The Bad Seed.” This is one of those movies embedded in our consciousness that perhaps should stay embedded and not actually be pried loose.
Which brings us to this week’s double bill. “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” just out today, is an unrelentingly grim, absolutely depressing, difficult-to-recommend-to-anyone work of sublime, essential filmmaking. Say again? OK. In the words of Preston Sturges, there is “nothing like a deep-dish movie to drive you out into the open.” “We Need to Talk About Kevin” is that kind of movie, an absolutely brilliant work of narrative and deliberately elliptical narrative storytelling. It takes this trope of the bad seed and plants it so it grows into some kind of hallucinatory kudzu. It cannot be easily eradicated once it is experienced first-hand. Not since Billy Mumy wished those pesky adults into the cornfield in one of the all-time creepiest works of TV Noir has a demon child been depicted as being quite so, well, “hellish.”
Based on the 2004 novel by Lionel Shriver, “We Need to Talk About Kevin” is told from the point of view of worldly travel writer Eva Khatchadourian. Besides having to cope with a difficult-to-spell last name, Eva has to endure a nightmarish life as the mother of perhaps the worst child in cinema history. This slow-motion torture of Eva is capped with a Columbine-style school massacre that tears this movie’s heart wide open. No surprise there, but the brilliance of the film is the way the chronology of catastrophe coils around itself, yet propels relentlessly forward. I must mention here that the editing of the film is wonderful. I also must mention that the editor of this film is my friend and colleague Joe Bini, but I’m not just saying this to butter Joe up so he takes my notes seriously next time. If anything, the editing in this film makes me nervous to ever suggest anything to Joe ever again — it is that good. But there is enough praise to go around. The film’s director, Lynn Ramsey, has a command of film vocabulary that keeps it from becoming the Art House “Omen” it so easily might have been. Yes, there are many scenes of mannered excess, but what manners, what excess!
Now, no film about a Bad Seed can succeed with a bad child actor – and “We Need to Talk About Kevin” has two extraordinary seeds. Ezra Miller plays the teenage Archer from Hell, and Jasper Newell is simply terrifying as a Satan in Snuggies. Both not only look alike and talk alike, at times they even glare alike. You can lose your mind, as Tilda Swinton does, thoroughly, across two excruciating hours. Any parent who read the recent New York Times Magazine article on 9-year-old newly diagnosed psychopaths cannot help but empathize with Swinton’s Eva. Those same parents also should not — repeat not — watch this movie. Cherish your pet hamster and let this one go. Trust me on this.
This brings us to the only real problem with “We Need to Talk About Kevin” — the reason for its existence. One wonders just why this story demanded to be told and why so many consummate craftsmen felt compelled to tell a story of such absolute darkness and despair. It reminds me of another work of scary excellence that was pretty much a career black-hole for all connected with it, Bob Fosse’s “Star 80.” Perhaps the worst first-date movie of all time, “Star 80” worked brilliantly on just about every level, except for the basic story it told, which had even Fosse disciples screaming for the exits and pretty much torpedoed the career of Julia Roberts’s far more talented brother.
Both “Star 80″ and “We Need to Talk About Kevin” get the “Michael Powell Peeping Tom” award for Excellence In Service of Repulsion, and both are great films. I really just wonder what the filmmakers thought they were doing, what audiences they thought they were going to reach, and why they wanted to reach them in the first place. I’m not going to ask my friend Joe, but, God bless Lynn Ramsey and her creative team, and Bob Fosse and Michael Powell, for going for it – whatever they thought “it” might be.
“The Bad Seed,” on the other hand, did nothing to derail the career of its director, Mervyn LeRoy. Perhaps it should have. A too-faithful translation of the 1954 hit Broadway play, it’s a film best consigned to legend and not actually watched, unless, of course, as the first part of this double bill with “We Need to Talk About Kevin.” LeRoy was the ’50s king of Broadway adaptations, with “The Bad Seed” following “Mister Roberts” and leading into his translation of “No Time for Sergeants.” His best work helming Warner Brother’s Pre-Code quickies was 25 years behind him, not to mention a guest shot at the “Wizard of Oz.” LeRoy brought very little to the “The Bad Seed.” Most of the cast of the play were imported to LeRoy’s set, and most were still delivering their lines to the far balcony. LeRoy’s camera just got in the way.
And what lines they delivered! “The Bad Seed” is one long pulled punch.
Remember the ending of “Psycho” where all of the delicious crimes are explained away in a long exposition scene? This film is stuffed with what Orson Welles called “dollar-book Freud,” apparently necessary for 1950s audiences who could not – or would not – imagine a child who actually did enjoy pulling the wings off flies. Even Bosley Crowther, the arteriosclerotic film critic for the New York Times, called the movie out on its staginess and over-the-top acting — and this was in 1956. Sadly, the film isn’t really bad enough to be really good. With the exception of Patty McCormack’s trailblazing performance as Rhoda Tasker, the titular Bad Seed in question, all the other performances are mannered beyond belief. Henry Jones, in particular, must be signaled out for essaying the role of Leroy, the dimwitted proto-pervert maintenance man. Leroy has Rhoda’s number early on, but keeps forgetting to add it up correctly, until Rhoda demonstrates convincingly why children should not play with matches.
But, rejoice, fans of Hollywood tacked-on Hays Code endings. You will absolutely love the very end of this film, where the cast takes an actual curtain call (!) and demon Rhoda gets an actual spanking (!!) from a smiling mom. And all this after God smites Evil in just about that amount of time. Astonishing now, and I have to believe astonishing then. This is as complete an act of dramatic self-negation as ever appended to a Hollywood movie. When TCM junkies pine for the days of classic old Hollywood, movies like “The Bad Seed” do not help them make their case. “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” on the other hand, is a fully realized work of committed cinematic virtuosity, in the service of a story that many simply do not want to hear. It has the courage of its convictions, and in this era of focus-group-driven filmmaking, courage is more than enough.
Watching this double bill shows just how far we have come – on a journey we may not want to make.
Worst first-date movie of all time? I suggested “Star 80,” but perhaps you, dear readers, can help with other titles, and, perhaps, the saga of other disastrous movie dates. See you in the comments section!!
“Oslo, August 31st” is, as the title suggests, an evocation of one day in the Norwegian capital, as experienced by a troubled young man who’s facing the end of summer and the end of his youth. It’s a marvelously constructed personal journey, both wrenching and bittersweet, whose emotional ripple effects stay with you for days and weeks afterward. While much of international art cinema can seem overly talky or conceptually alien to American viewers, this second feature film from Norwegian director Joachim Trier is a dynamic, even breathtaking visual experience without much dialogue or any philosophical heavy lifting, following the bony, handsome, exceedingly vulnerable Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie) through coffee shops, nightclubs and bodies of water, en route to an ambiguous final destination.
I saw “Oslo, August 31st” last year at Cannes and found it powerfully affecting, but I never would have guessed that this small movie from a small country would have touched an international nerve the way it apparently has. In the wake of a breathless profile of doctor-turned-actor Lie and his supermodel wife, Iselin Steiro, in the New York Times’ style magazine — which made the film sound rather like a fashion accessory, or a handbook to Oslo architecture — I almost feel the need to dial back expectations a little. Yes, there are drugs and dance clubs and traveling shots but, honest to Pete, we’re not talking stylish, scenic, lovable hipster romp here, people. While “Oslo, August 31st” definitely has the dynamism and street-level energy of, say, an early Godard picture, and may indeed leave you eager to visit Norway, it’s first and foremost an intimate tragedy about a likable young man who has wandered off the path of life into some very dark woods, and isn’t necessarily finding his way back.
As in Trier’s equally wonderful first film, the 2006 “Reprise” — I’m pretty much the president of the cult on that one — the director is interested in exploring the existential dark side of Scandinavian social democracy, with its largely homogeneous character and devotion to equal opportunity. When I talked to Trier about that film, which featured Lie and Espen Klouman-Hoiner as a pair of arrogant, doomed aspiring novelists, he observed that in Norway “there are a lot of people with a lot of choices. It sounds wonderful but there’s a darker side to that. Lots of people are not dealing with those choices very well.” Anders in “Oslo, August 31st” is something like the worst-case outcome for Lie’s character in “Reprise”; he’s a guy from a loving, middle-class family who’s got looks, health, intelligence and education, but for unknowable reasons finds himself on the edge of middle age as a penniless, unemployable, supposedly recovering junkie.
Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt adapted their central premise from “Le Feu Follet,” a 1930s novella about alcoholism by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, but “Oslo, August 31st” could really be set anywhere at any time. It’s about the painful necessity of adapting to change, every single day that we’re alive, and if we identify with Anders even as we rage against his despair, it’s because every living human has at some point considered the possibility that it’s just too much and the struggle isn’t worth it. Anders is doing well in drug rehab, and has cautiously been granted a one-day leave to visit Oslo friends and apply for a job. But we can tell from the first moments of the film that his agenda is more complicated than that; Anders is in the position of a certain Danish prince, evaluating the reasons for being against the reasons for ceasing to be. (Trier, by the way, is cousin to another famous Dane, “Melancholia” director Lars von Trier, and one could argue their visions of the world are related as well.)
“Oslo, August 31st” runs a lean, mean 95 minutes, and not one second seems unimportant. Anders moves through the streets of Oslo looking for reasons to live and reasons to die, and even though we don’t know those streets as he does, we can tell that they’re haunted with memories and private agonies. The city is dotted with construction cranes and demolition sites, remorselessly regenerating itself while he appears to stand still. Indeed, Anders’ family home will soon be sold, and one of his personal missions is to pay a final visit. (The fluid, poetic cinematography is by Jakob Ihre.) He insults a prospective employer, refuses to make peace with his alienated sister, falls off the wagon — at first tentatively, and then enthusiastically — and leaves increasingly pathetic messages for his lost love, a woman who’s now in New York. (It’s the voice of Steiro, Lie’s real-life spouse.) On the other hand, he flirts with a younger girl who seems affectionate and charming, and who seems to open for him the promise of a new beginning. Their scene together at an Oslo swimming pool that has just closed for the season, so suggestive of both death and rebirth (and, literally, of baptism) is so gorgeous I wanted to cry. OK, I did cry, and that wasn’t the only time.
But none of that, not even the scenes where we feel that Anders is in imminent danger of taking his own life, are quite as painful as his visit with Thomas (Hans Olav Brenner), an old friend and veteran of long literary discussions and booze-and-drug sessions. Thomas has a wife and a kid now, and his vices involve an occasional bottle of beer. In the manner of one-time bohemians who’ve more or less grown up, he’s kind of an ostentatious jerk about it — but then admits to Anders, when they’re alone, that he’s desperately unhappy. Perhaps that’s the “ordinary unhappiness” Freud wrote about, the unhappiness we all have to accept to get from the last day of August into the first day of September, in Oslo or anywhere else. But is that enough? Is that ever enough, for anybody? And can we forgive those who decide that it isn’t?
“Oslo, August 31st” opens this week at the IFC Center in New York, and June 1 at Laemmle’s Playhouse 7 and Laemmle’s NoHo 7 in Los Angeles, with more cities and DVD release to follow.
All the details of Wes Anderson’s rapturous and hilarious mid-1960s New England summer romance “Moonrise Kingdom,” taken one at a time, are plausible. Indeed they are more than plausible; they’re perfect, from the fitted uniforms and yellow canvas tents of the troop of “Khaki Scouts” headed by cigarette-smoking Edward Norton to the achingly picturesque island home where the brood of children belonging to Bill Murray and Frances McDormand sit around listening to the Leonard Bernstein recording of “A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.” (I’m not going to bother questioning whether that record existed in 1965; some production intern probably spent half a day tracking down its history.)
Yet, as usual with an Anderson movie, this meticulous and convincing detail does not add up to realism but — depending on your perspective — to something either much less or much more than that. Something that could be described, and has been, in all kinds of ways: As fantasy or fairytale; as a whimsical miniature under glass; as a diorama created by a brilliant, obsessive-compulsive child. All reasonable descriptions, at least up to a point — and I’m on board for all of it. I’ve pretty much been on Anderson’s wavelength from Day One — or at least from “Rushmore,” which isn’t quite Day One. That’s not the same thing as saying that I think all his movies work equally well, or that he doesn’t occasionally lapse into laziness or self-indulgence. (I’ll have to give “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” another chance one of these days, but I feel pretty confident that was a misstep.)
I understand why Anderson’s films drive some viewers nuts, in fact, and I would simply respond that it should be clear by now that his vision of cinema and the world is idiosyncratic and not to everyone’s taste and that there’s no point sitting around hoping he’ll become more normal. But here’s what I reject completely: The idea that the artificiality or hyperrealism (a better word, I think) of Anderson’s worlds — which is admittedly cranked up pretty high here — is fundamentally pretentious and insincere, or that it reflects some kind of “kidult” refusal of grown-up emotion. Yes, Anderson’s principal subject, and arguably his only subject, is the collision between the emotional lives of adults and children and the paradoxical tragicomedy it can so often produce. But if Anderson’s adults yearn for the comparative simplicity of childhood while his children long for the big, important feelings they believe (wrongly) go with growing up, that in itself is a distinctly adult perspective.
“Moonrise Kingdom” takes place at the tail-end of summer — that season which is more charged with a rueful sense of passage than any other. Its preteen lovers, Sam and Suzy (played by newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, respectively), most certainly aspire to the grand passions of Tristan and Isolde or Abelard and Heloise, and it’s entirely possible they’ve heard of them. They first met backstage during a performance of Britten’s “Noye’s Fludde” at the island of New Penzance’s only church, when Sam was in his Khaki Scout uniform and coonskin cap, and Suzy was wearing a bird costume. (The use of Britten, of all possible composers, as this film’s musical muse is wonderfully unlikely, and totally Andersonian.) After a hot and heavy epistolary romance, they conspire to run away together — as it happens (so we are told by on-screen narrator Bob Balaban), just three days before a major hurricane will hit New Penzance.
As irresistible as our young lovers are — Sam with his corncob pipe and camp-tested scouting skills, Suzy in her saddle shoes and with her dangerous pre-Lolita sexuality — this isn’t a movie about kids, and they are Potemkin protagonists. Against the certainty and clarity of the childhood world, we see the real heroes of New Penzance: Norton’s upright Scout Master Ward, who confesses his secret fears to a reel-to-reel tape recorder in the depths of the night; Bruce Willis’s Captain Sharp, the island’s only cop, who’s in love with Kara’s artsy, bespectacled mother, Laura (McDormand); Murray as the gentle, lawyerly Walt (Laura’s husband and Kara’s dad), who knows he is being cuckolded but can’t quite bring himself to do anything about it. All these lonely people are portrayed with wonderful delicacy and sensitivity, right in the middle of an artificial construction that contains plenty of shtick. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen Norton and Willis, in particular, be better than they are here.
Sam and Suzy’s tempestuous love affair, along with that looming act of God that’s boiling up out there in the Atlantic, will not merely bring all these people together but will give them an excuse to escape their everyday routine and their ingrained fears. In that sense, and in others too, “Moonrise Kingdom” is a deeply romantic film, perhaps the sweetest and most compassionate Anderson has ever made. What has evidently confused some viewers is the fact that it’s also an obsessively curated re-creation of an era that never quite existed, a meticulous storybook version of 1965 that’s more perfect than the original. In real life, Boy Scout tents of that era were made of canvas but were never yellow, and government social workers never wore Salvation Army-style uniforms, as Tilda Swinton’s officious character (whose only name appears to be “Social Services”) does here. And so on.
I suspect that people conflate the artificiality of Anderson’s movies with inauthenticity or insincerity (different things, to be sure) because his artificiality is obvious and worn on the surface, whereas the highly mannered films of, say, Martin Scorsese masquerade as realism. I’m not picking that example at random, by the way; Scorsese has identified Anderson as his favorite among younger American directors, I suspect because he sees a kindred spirit. The two men have very different aesthetics, but both are visionaries who see the world through a personal lens, and both are technical virtuosi concerned with managing every detail of their created universes. You’re free to prefer one director’s work to the other’s, of course, but “Raging Bull” and “Goodfellas” are every bit as obsessed with style and production design as any Anderson film. (The cinematography in “Moonrise Kingdom” is by Robert D. Yeoman, who has shot all of Anderson’s live-action films. The production designer is Adam Stockhausen, the art director is Gerald Sullivan and the spectacular costumes are by Kasia Walicka-Maimone.)
To the extent that “Moonrise Kingdom” can be described as nostalgia, it isn’t personal nostalgia, since Anderson himself was not born until 1969. Very likely it’s an attempt to create a fantasy version of the lost world of his own parents. I wonder whether Scout Master Ward, when the magical summer of ’65 fades into memory, will get married, move to Texas and have a son. The island cabin of Walt and Laura feels like a creation out of a classic children’s novel, but it is imbued with the sadness of a failing adult marriage. In the third act, it feels like Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola get a little lost in plot shenanigans, and they introduce several extra characters (Jason Schwartzman, Harvey Keitel and Swinton all show up in small roles) to little effect. But all of “Moonrise Kingdom” — from Sam’s miniature stolen canoe to the Benjamin Britten excerpts to Captain Sharp’s heartbreaking bachelor trailer home — is a labor of love, as pure and sweet as the lovelorn letters of its young runaways. Wes Anderson can fool some people, maybe, but he’s not fooling me.
“Moonrise Kingdom” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, with wider release to follow.
From top: stills from "Beasts of the Southern Wild," "Take This Waltz" and "Lawless" 
Tilda Swinton, Bruce Willis and Edward Norton in "Moonrise Kingdom" 
(Credit: iStockphoto/IBushuev) 
