The moviegoers

Film critics let us know what's worth seeing on the big screen, but they've also been fighting our fiercest cultural battles for nearly a century

By Laura Miller

Read more: Books, Laura Miller, Pauline Kael, Reviews, Book reviews

March 28, 2006 | Movies are America's great, bestriding cultural form, a popular entertainment that sometimes aspires to -- and occasionally achieves -- the status of art. So you might expect the movies to have given rise to America's best criticism. But to judge from the Library of America's new anthology, "American Movie Critics," edited by Phillip Lopate, film criticism has always been a fraught, tricky enterprise, something that few writers manage to excel at -- and those who do may come to regret it.

The problem, as Lopate remarks in his fine introduction, is that "the job of the American film critic is complicated by the fact that virtually all Americans regard themselves as astute judges of movies." Lopate thinks this is because we've all seen so many films in theaters and on TV, but I suspect it's really because reviewing combines an activity that almost everybody does -- watching movies -- with an activity that almost everybody thinks they can do: writing. The rub here is that almost nobody has to see as many movies of such widely varying quality as film critics do, and that writing well turns out to be a lot harder than it looks.

Film critics are first and foremost writers -- the craft is, as Lopate puts it, "the operation of one art form (literature) on another (the movies)." If you can't write an interesting or amusing essay on pretty much any piece of crap committed to celluloid, you're out of your depth. Although I'm primarily a literary critic, I've done stints as a film reviewer for weekly and daily newspapers and I'm here to tell you that as a job, film criticism has only one advantage over reviewing books: it's a lot less time-consuming. (It takes about two hours to watch most films and much longer to read most books.)

Otherwise: ugh. The daily grind of the movie reviewer consists of trying to drum up something worth saying about films that are stupendously ordinary and supremely forgettable -- tepid romantic comedies with no laughs or style; respectful, well-mounted adaptations of plays and novels no one cares about; incoherent action movies populated by annoying stock figures whose every line of dialogue can be predicted in advance, and so on. A terrible movie gives a critic something to be funny about (that's assuming you can be funny, on command, and honestly -- can we assume that?), and a fine movie gives you something to praise, but the vast majority of new films are utterly mediocre, and that's what wears you down. Anyone can turn being chased by a tiger into a good story, but almost no one can do the same for an afternoon of standing in line at the post office.

Of course, for indiscriminate journalists -- the sorts of writers who have filled the post of movie reviewer at a lot of American newspapers and some American magazines for decades -- the preponderance of dull, average movies isn't a problem. They can't tell much difference between "Wedding Crashers" and "Failure to Launch" to begin with and are happy to be dazzled by the stars. But good reviewers, remember, must also be good writers, and good writers want subjects that fire them up. The kind of person who sees, say, "Ultraviolet," then goes home, looks up a review online, marvels at the critic's vitriol and fires off an e-mail saying, "Chill out, dude, it's just a movie. It was fun," is not someone whose opinions anyone wants to read at length, on a regular basis -- or ever, really. (And, confidentially, if you are the kind of person who sends those e-mails: What gives? If you don't think certain movies should be taken so seriously, why even bother to read the reviews?)

"American Movie Critics" is doomed to be a frustrating book if only because it offers us just a few samples of work -- presumably the crhme de la crhme -- from writers who showed their quality by never, or rarely, being boring. They do this (to invert Zelda Fitzgerald's formula) by never being bored, but the only way we can ever get to know this about a critic is by reading his or her work regularly, over time. Film criticism, even the kind that appears in small-circulation quarterlies and scrutinizes masterpieces of past decades, is a product of now. We don't see "Imitation of Life" (the hugely successful 1959 remake, Douglas Sirk's last film and the subject of a long, engrossing essay by James Harvey in this anthology) the same way audiences saw it when it first came out, or even the way it was seen in the 1970s.

So it is a major, and entirely avoidable, flaw of "American Film Critics" that the selections in it are undated -- even in cases when the selected pieces by a given author were written decades apart. If you want to find out where and when a piece appeared, you'll have to dig through the inconvenient, small-print credit section at the back of book. Did the criticism first appear a daily metropolitan newspaper? In one of the more intellectual weeklies like the Nation or the New Republic, long-standing venues for brainier film critics? In a small-circulation cineaste's journal, a free alternative paper or as a passage in a book?

A reader shouldn't have to stop and root around in an appendix to find this information every time she starts reading a new selection; it's crucial information. Many of the reviews in "American Film Critics" that appear to have been written in the '30s, for example, seem to presume the reader has already seen the movie. Was this because they appeared in magazines days after the film's release, or was it part of a common style -- a familiar, elbow-jogging vernacular reviewer's manner? Or was it a reflection of the day, a time when many people didn't pick and choose films but saw everything and anything playing at the local theater, much as we now aimlessly flip on the TV for something to do?

Since "American Film Critics" is meant to give us a feeling for the breadth and depth of American film writing (academia excluded), this omission of dates and publication venues hobbles it, but you can still glimpse some outlines. One surprising revelation is that every argument that has ever raged among film lovers -- technique vs. content, the purely "cinematic" vs. the "literary," American vs. foreign films, etc. -- has been with us from Day One, which in this case is the 1920s. Of course the biggest, oldest and fiercest battle in all quarters of American culture is highbrow vs. lowbrow, and film criticism has been the place where those hostilities have raged with the highest of dudgeon.

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