I think at the time of the showing, I was told that I was going to see two short films that had been featured in the Sundance Film Festival, which is true, but it seems noteworthy and probably intentional that both were Oscar contenders in 2005. One of them won, in fact.

So:

Two Cars, One Night (2003)
written and directed by Taika Waititi
12 min.

A gentle slice of life thing with a couple of kids, Maori Norman Rockwell in a parked car. The kids had charm and the black-and-white was pretty. I think my enjoyment of this particular slice of life was slightly hampered by certain mannered aspects of the whole package, which included some snippets of time-lapse (or otherwise tricked-up) photography, meant to sketch passing impressions of the neon world of adults. Those, and perhaps the all-around black-and-white quiet short-film seriousness itself, put me in mind of artsy/literary aspirations, whereas the very sentimental spirit of the thing (check out the official site and you’ll get the idea) really demanded the most absolutely direct approach. Like Norman Rockwell, whose tableaux of pure sweetness manage not to seem distasteful by virtue of the sobriety and clarity of their craftsmanship.

But the film understood all the basic stuff about how a sentimental tune needs to be a simple one, and other than the sped-up motion, it didn’t make any mistakes. The kids and their moment are genuinely cute, and the overall sense of nostalgia was clearly heartfelt. I drew a connection, possibly absurd, to turn-of-the-century sentimental parlor songs, with their gently wistful recurring sentiments about childhood sweethearts meeting and parting and such. The film found that sort of thing in a more or less contemporary setting.

After the showing, some other people present were saying things like “what a beautiful people they are,” and “what wonderful accents,” and I must admit to feeling uncomfortable about this sort of response. Any sort of aesthetic assessment of racial characteristics seems to me worrisome. Maybe that’s irrational racial anxiety on my self-flagellating white liberal American part, but I don’t think so. At the very least, saying that the Maori are “beautiful” is sweepingly simplistic – surely, many of them, like many of everyone, are ugly. These kids, however, were cute. The “what a beautiful people they are” comment would seem to stem from conflating these kids’ particular cuteness with their general Maoriness, and that sort of confusion seems to me to be genuine kin to the infamous bad kind. Albeit obviously benign.

But I can handle that. My real discomfort comes from the fact that I can readily imagine that Taika Waititi (who is “of Te-Whanau-a-Apanui descent and hails from the Raukokore region of the East Coast”) really did intend to convey “the beauty of his people” or some such thing, and that I was indeed being invited to admire the bone structure and marvel at the regional accents (which were, I must say, THICK and difficult for me to disentangle). And that sort of thing is hard for me to take. The relationship between foreignness as a point of pride and foreignness as an illusion of provincial minds is still troubling to me; no matter how the issue gets sliced, it always seems like somewhere along the way, some irrelevant middlemen got their egos tangled up in it. Does it make a Maori feel good when an American sees a 12 minute movie about kids in a parking lot and decides to say that the Maori are a beautiful people? Or does it make a Maori angry?

For my part, I just have to hope and trust that nobody cares, Maori or otherwise, because any kind of cultural agenda in a work of art, per se, is pretty much doomed to fail. That might be a bit broad, but I don’t think I’m alone in feeling it. This is a politically loaded subject and I don’t want to talk about it right now; I actually don’t feel all that strongly about the general political/cultural questions, which are more complex. I just know that artistically speaking, whatever might allow a work to be classed as “[ethnic] interest” is not, in itself, any kind of interest.

This movie was made in New Zealand starring New Zealanders who looked and sounded it. I watched the film assuming that those facts were context rather than content, and I hope they were, though I know it’s all fuzzy. Admittedly, foreignness is an undeniable element of the experience of watching something foreign, and if it adds to the experience for a viewer, I guess I can’t knock that. But that sort of thing is specific to the individual viewer’s associations and shouldn’t be passed off as part of a general response. The clanging parallel fourths of cheap Charlie Chan “oriental” music are offensive not specifically because they are inaccurate, but because they, as a subjective reworking of real Chinese traditional music, presume to know just how “foreign” that music would sound to a listener and thus reveal an implicitly exclusionary attitude. If my fellow audience-members thought that this movie was wonderfully “New Zealandy,” they needed to recognize that they themselves brought that, not the film. Or if the film brought it intentionally, it, um, shouldn’t have. Hm. Or something. My cranky discomfort seems to be swallowing its own tail here.

All I’m saying is, I didn’t like hearing “what a beautiful people they are” as a response to this film. But maybe I should just get over it.

But doesn’t it just sound so patronizing?

Oh well, I’ve said stuff like that lots of times.

Wasp (2003)
written and directed by Andrea Arnold
26 min.

This one won the Oscar. If you’re so inclined, you can watch it in its entirety here – how’s that for a link?

It’s a “tough stuff” movie that proudly announces “tough stuff, coming through” with rough handheld camerawork and the sort of full-on garish grit that I associate with contemporary art photography. I’m not inclined to like that sort of thing – “we dare you to face the ugly truth” deadpan is an easy, bitter game to play. The world will always be full of ills enough to allow any number of contemporary artists to assault me with their social consciences. But after staring down all my reservations about this particular prodding of the beach rubble, I ultimately came to the conclusion that it had been a respectable and sufficiently humble attempt at capturing a certain depressing social reality. The nightmarish image from whence the title was a bit too much, but once that moment had ventured over the line, the rest of the movie became, retroactively, less abrasive and less indignant than it had at initially seemed. By the final sardonic long shots, I felt pretty sure that the whole thing had been trying for fairness rather than ugliness, despite the relentless ugliness. If I knew more about the subject matter, I might be able to stand up and say, “well, this isn’t how it really is, it’s just been done for shock value,” but I can’t, and I find it entirely believable that this is probably how it really is. Perhaps that’s naive. I feel obligated to keep clearly in mind that a movie, even a real-world-social-ills movie, should not be my primary source of information on any real-world anything, so I must acknowledge that this movie depicted a situation and problem that seemed to purport to be realistic, about which I continue to know very little.

The straightforward narrative style combined with the moral mudpie made for an interesting sort of effect. Our empathy for the protagonist was, rightly, just about nil, and was simultaneously sort of all-encompassing. The movie didn’t pull an “anti-hero” inversion, nor was it dismissive of the character’s humanity. That dismissal was left up to us, and I appreciated that. The ugliness was as unpleasant to her as to us; if we chose to distance ourselves from her, it was by choice and therefore on our own terms. That’s the kind of setup that actually inspires thought about an issue, the sort of thought that artists are always claiming they want to inspire.

Now, I’m pretty sure my thoughts about the issues in this movie aren’t worth anything, but the fact that I was made to engage emotionally with this material is, I think, good. The spreading of “awareness” is still definitely a commendable goal, despite the rampant flakification of the concept. This is how it should be done – through art that induces the viewer to consider the issues in the course of sorting out a reaction to the art itself. A lot of artists are under the misapprehension that shock is a good technique for bringing this about, but it’s not. Shock, generally, just makes me think about the obnoxious artist who shocked me, rather than the implications of the material they used, or (as if!) my own capacity for being shocked.

This film flirted with the lure of the shocking, and I maintain my several reservations, but on balance, I think it was trying to communicate, not offend, and that’s what counts to me. Of course, I’m not about to watch it again any time soon.

The acting is again quite good.

directed by Boaz Yakin
written by Gregory Allen Howard

Who here remembers the Titans? Raise your hands if you remember the Titans.

I actually don’t remember the Titans very well because they were such a by-the-book genre movie, in a genre that I haven’t learned and loved well enough to file subtle variations separately in my brain. Did this one play the race card and the football card into some new hand? Maybe, maybe this was the first movie ever made that dealt this particular setup. But if it was, it succeeded at not seeming like it was, which is probably exactly the sort of milkshake-smooth ride that they aspired to.

My thoughts watching the movie and thinking back on it all revolve around the idea of old-fashioned genre moviemaking. In Barton Fink, the title character loses his existential bearings because he is assigned to write a “wrestling picture” that remains unimaginable to him, a symbol of the inscrutable absurdity of the universe. If I’m remembering Barton Fink correctly, which I may not be. Anyway, genre movies do exist in a strange half-world. It would seem like this movie was all about people and their lives, and race and loyalty and teamwork and whatever, the things that count to humans. And then again it was entirely that other thing, a “feel-good” formula flick, and what are we to it? If Denzel Washington looked in at our lives, what could he possibly think? That’s not where he comes from.

This is the essence of art, I guess, back to the Greeks, who I must always remind myself, reading Sophocles or whoever, did not actually live and speak in masks. But what is the connection between life and the Titans? I guess they serve us better by not being like us; the bible is a best-selling advice column because it’s so weird, and kids read fairy tales because their applicability is always and only metaphorical. Kids on IMDB are telling me that they watched Remember the Titans in high school health class. Barton Fink gets lost because he believes that art should be a mirror, but art can also be a tool, carved roughly in our own image only because that makes it more obvious how to apply it. Remember the Titans (and most of the classic Hollywood output of which it reminded me) makes a lot more sense to me as a quasi-functional artifact done up with a relatively sophisticated trompe l’oeil facade than as a rendition of reality that’s been abstracted down to its essentials (or to its crowd-pleasing components). But this model is stupid; obviously all art is the fusion of the tool and the mirror. This is the meaning of “pageantry,” no? At some level I still haven’t quite gotten my head all the way around the issue, and maybe I never will, and maybe that’s the fascination of art for everyone. But here I am watching a pleasant enough, by-the-numbers Hollywood pageant and feeling uncertain what manner of thing it is. I mean, what are we, life on earth, trying to do, making movies like this and showing them to ourselves? I guess I am saved from these sorts of questions during other movies by the fact that they provoke thoughts on their own terms. But this was a very simple movie and it didn’t have anything up its sleeve, and I knew that it didn’t, so I was free to feel like I was in someone else’s temple watching their lovely ceremonies with interest. But then I thought, well, actually, this is my temple too, isn’t it, and I don’t know what any of these rites mean.

I kind of want to read this, but oh man, that’ll be heavy going.

There, I found a thought to think about Remember the Titans, albeit a roaringly pretentious one. I’d been putting this one off a long time, because, really, what is there to say? I don’t need to tell you that I didn’t actively choose to watch this.

It was very well done, I thought.

directed by Richard Marquand
written by Joe Eszterhas

Onward through my backlog. Why did I watch Jagged Edge of all things? We were at the beach and we wanted to take advantage of the On-Demand movie service, but they cleverly deny you the option of watching anything good. That Jagged Edge seemed like our best bet indicates the quality of the selection.

The movie was serious junk, and, given that we were at the beach and had thus lost our capacity for feeling our time was being wasted, slightly amusing as such. Joe Eszterhas is one of these simple folk who thinks that when people say “fuck” a lot, things become more gritty, exciting, and fun. That sort of thinking governed not only the amount of swearing but much of the plot, which revolves excitedly around rape-murder-mutilations. They get described in delighted detail; just as with saying “fuck,” there’s the sense that Joe, like 10-year-olds, still can’t believe how cool it is that if you call it “forensics” you get to talk about naked women and cutting people with knives and other stuff that, oh man, is totally wrong! But, as every 10-year-old knows, when you get to stay home sick from school, you’re not supposed to act like it’s fun; you’re supposed to act like you’re indifferent – and when grownups talk about rape, or say “fuck,” they don’t enjoy it, so to be really mature you should just say fuck whenever the fuck you want and not make a big fucking deal about it. And so this movie goes its ridiculous way.

It’s hard for me to build up any annoyance with director Richard Marquand, because, knowing that he was also the nominal director of Return of the Jedi (a poster for which appears on a kid’s door in this movie), I’m inclined to think of him only as a simple pawn caught up in someone else’s crazy scheme; in this case, Joe Eszterhas’s.

The movie attempts only to be “one of those movies” and is nonetheless a little too stupid to pull it off. The “answer” to the mystery isn’t decisively revealed until the very very very end, which adds absolutely nothing to the movie and in fact only heightens the viewer’s overall impression that any given detail of the plot has been completely arbitrary. Watching the movie isn’t like being drawn into any kind of story or world or experience; it’s like watching some idiot moving chess pieces around, concentrating hard with his tongue sticking out. He manages to win the game, after starting with the wrong number of pieces and making a few illegal moves. And playing both sides.

Is it possible that in 1985 this genre (Bleached Noir, it should be called) was so new, and its proper form so incompletely established, that Jagged Edge could pass as clever and intriguing? What was Roger Ebert thinking? Something about the movies of the 80s is genuinely different; every era has its own set of superficial things that are passed off as sufficient and vital – but 80s Hollywood picked such a weird set of those things. It’s not just their superficiality; it’s that they don’t even seem to relate to basic human desires – not like the much-mocked superficial nonsense of the 50s, which at least was meant to evoke security, luxury, and confidence. These Jagged Edge folk were neither perfect nor troubled; they were just characters. The focus seemed to be somewhere slightly to the left or right of them, on something I couldn’t quite place, like maybe the movie was actually, secretly, about their curtains. A lot of movies from the period seem to share that quality.

I was there but I wasn’t watching Jagged Edge at the time so I can’t call on any memories to help make sense of it all. By the time I was old enough to really notice what was going on in movies, things had changed, so this remains a historical puzzle for me to figure out.

written and directed by Roman Polanski
based on the novel by Ira Levin (1967)

This movie is great.

I’m going to start off with the first edition book cover this time, instead of saving it for the end.

Sorry I couldn’t find a cleaner image, but you get the idea. For once, I actually know who designed this cover: Paul Bacon, whose work (click on the ‘image gallery‘ link), now that I’ve googled my way through a bunch of it, readily coheres into an “okay, that guy.” One of those figures whose importance is indicated by the fact that I was aware of his work’s significance before I was aware that it was any one person’s work. It’s always a bit exciting to discover that some vague part of the aesthetic landscape in one’s mind can actually be quantified and ascribed to a specific point of origin. This recent piece on jacket design by John Updike includes a brief assessment of Paul Bacon. It’s got some other interesting stuff in it too – the thing at the end about the possible legitimacy of a “deceptively conceptual… nonexistent point of view” is going to ring in my head for a while. But it has nothing to do with Rosemary’s Baby so let’s move on.

Next on the list is Krzysztof “Christopher” Komeda, composer of the movie’s excellent score. I’ve seen the movie quite a few times and the distinguishing thing about this viewing was that the score “popped,” for me. I remembered the main lullaby theme (sung, I have only since learned, by Mia Farrow herself), but I don’t think I had ever listened closely to the other cues, which all sounded sort of familiar but now revealed themselves as really interesting, clever choices, especially the squeaky freaky jazz elements under scenes of horror. I love the little cue when she eats the raw liver, without which the scene wouldn’t work. Komeda’s straight jazz compositions are less interesting to me, and even his other movie work, from what I can hear of it, sounds pretty similar in style to Rosemary’s Baby. But his dramatic sense seems to have been strong, and of course a smart musician can get a lot of emotional range out of a limited style. I’d be curious to see some of the many other movies he scored – they’re pretty much all in Polish, though, but several of Polanski’s are still available. Komeda was apparently a major jazz figure in Poland and might well have been just on the verge of becoming an international big deal, what with this movie and Polanski’s career in general, but he died less than a year after its release, from injuries sustained in a car crash.

The best thing about the movie is John Cassavetes’ thrilling performance, which constitutes a perfect, archetypal caricature of a certain popular blend of impenetrable bullshit and misogyny-by-default, and which frequently comes to mind when I am trying to figure why I hate some guy so much. For me, one of the most upsetting sequences in the whole thing, I’m not entirely sure why, is when Rosemary asks Guy to show her his shoulder (suspecting that he has been hiding some kind of satanic tattoo), and he complies, as though he can’t imagine why she’s asking, in faux good humor, smirking “that’s as far as I go without a blue light.” I think what gets me is the fact that even his malicious and unfunny joking is, itself, bullshit; even the part of his personality that’s a dismissive asshole is only bullshit. Even his cruel display of disinterest is just a mask for the true blackness of his fundamental, cosmic, deadly disinterest. Yes, he is after all a “bad guy,” but there’s something scary there that goes well beyond the issue of Rosemary’s baby or Rosemary’s Baby. To me, there’s something truly, philosophically dark in that performance that I want to attribute to Cassavetes himself. The role as written (as it appears in the book) is just a hateful, frivolous, self-serving jerk. In the movie, he’s a pit of darkness that has decided to act the part of a hateful, frivolous, self-serving jerk because that seems like a good idea.

More than any paranoid fear of conspiracies or of the devil, the horror in Rosemary’s Baby is of the possibility of complete isolation. It’s the fear that nobody cares about you, regardless of what they might say – nobody.* While, in the movie, the reason for all the lying is a conspiratorial plot, the presence of that horrible husband character gets the wider message across – people might be lying to you and using you for their own purposes because that’s all there is out there. Rosemary’s childlike claim to being a sophisticated young woman is terrifying because it’s so insufficient in the face of b) all of them witches and a) her husband and everyone else. Almost nothing scary happens in the movie that we don’t pretty much know is going to happen – the fear comes from the worry that we are all as nitwitted and hopeless as Rosemary, being duped for whatever reasons (the devil is just a nice stand-in for any dark cause) by everyone around us. Ultimately she’s duped by her own baby. In the book the punchline seems to be “and now the world is doomed ’cause of the devil baby!” but in the movie, I read it as “of course, your friend Rosemary can only ever be a witless, hopeless slave – sound familiar?”

Is that just me? Or, alternately, is it of course everyone and I’m the only one who thinks it’s just me? Anyway, it’s me.

* The presence of good ol’ Hutch definitely dilutes this a bit, which is part of the reason that I don’t think this kind of sweeping existential curse was ever quite Ira’s (or Roman’s) intention. But it’s what makes the movie work, to me, and I like to imagine that John Cassavetes was in on it. Assigning the role of Satan to the ridiculous, commonplace Castevets is a gesture that the real horror is elsewhere. I think Ira’s idea was that horror in the present day would take a familiar present-day form, and that its outward mundanity would make it all the more horrific (cf. The Stepford Wives). But by keeping the Castevets silly even to the bitter end – in the theater where we saw this (midnight screening!), Minnie’s gossipy delivery of the grandiose in her climactic line about “he chose you out of all the women in the world!” got the movie’s biggest laugh – the book and the movie don’t make them more horrific, they just indicate that the horror is something above and beyond their specific machinations. Maybe they thought it was the devil, or the whole conspiracy thing. But obviously that stuff is just fun genre stuff. The real scare in the movie, though it may well have arisen only as a serendipitous byproduct of the plotting, is that we are all on our own and the world couldn’t care less.

Oops, okay, so I’m putting this below the footnote because it’s an addendum a few days later and unrelated to the above, but related to Rosemary’s Baby.

In the movie (and in the book), Rosemary proudly tells several people that Guy “was in Luther and Nobody Loves an Albatross and a lot of TV commercials.” Only in googling around for the above post did I learn that both plays were real and both premiered on Broadway in the 1963-4 season. Obviously, the first question was: was there an actor who was in both productions? Answer: no. Luther, by John Osborne, ran from September 1963 to March 1964, and Nobody Loves an Albatross, by Ronald Alexander, ran from December 1963 to June 1964. Obviously, nobody could be in both shows. More likely, in fact, that Ira Levin saw both shows around the same time. He certainly seems to have seen Luther, based on the fact that Roman Castevet calls it “a good picture of the hypocrisy behind organised religion,” and from the sound of the thing, it seems possible that the subject matter of Albatross was meant to connect to Guy’s life of cynical TV-land lies.

So, to the important questions: did Albert Finney play the title role in Luther as reported by Roman Castevet? Answer: yes. (Scroll down to see a press caricature here.) Okay, and does his character have a fit, as reported by Guy Woodhouse? Answer: Yes, at the end of the first scene, according to the synopsis in this helpful study guide. And now the big question – did Albert Finney have an understudy, and if so, would he have been onstage during the scene when Luther has his fit, so as to make the “involuntary reach” gesture for which Guy Woodhouse is praised? Answer: yes, and most likely, yes. The IDDB page (same link as above) indicates that one John Heffernan was the understudy for the role of Martin Luther, and that he played Weinand, whom, if you read the synopsis carefully, you will see is very likely onstage during the fit.

So, who is John Heffernan? Well, he played Eddie Niles, the bank teller who takes the bets at the end of The Sting. Can anyone find me a picture?

What does this mean? I believe it means nothing. When asked if he was Albert Finney’s understudy, Guy does, after all, say “no.” However, the implication of the scene is that Roman Castevet noticed Guy and identified him in the program, which would have been impossible if he were just one of the six cast members credited only as “Monks, lords, peasants, etc.” On the other hand, the further implication of the scene is that Roman is masterfully manipulating Guy and his praise for Guy’s performance is probably a bluff based on research rather than memory. BUT, since the scene mentions a real event in the play, it seems probable to me that Ira Levin was describing an actual gesture he saw onstage. Perhaps he had Guy say that he was not Albert Finney’s understudy solely to avoid slandering the actual understudy, whose gesture was nonetheless the one described. Or perhaps John Heffernan is a horrible horrible person, the kind who’d sell his wife’s womb to satanists, and I’ve revealed the truth to the world. But I doubt it. He comes off like a pretty nice guy, in The Sting. Plus, remember how he was so reasonable and pleasant that time when he witnessed an explosion on 20th Street? Now that was scary!

ADDENDUM 2: Okay, now it’s almost a month later and I’m still adding to this. Enough already! I just wanted to let everyone know that I’ve checked the book itself and the dialogue actually runs like this:

“A good picture of the hypocrisy behind organized religion,” Mr. Castevet said, “was given, I thought, in Luther. Did you ever get to play the leading part, Guy?”

“Me? No,” Guy said.

“Weren’t you Albert Finney’s understudy?” Mr. Castevet asked.

“No,” Guy said, “the fellow who played Weinand was. I just covered two of the smaller parts.”

“That’s strange,” Mr. Castevet said; “I was quite certain that you were his understudy. I remember being struck by a gesture you made and checking in the program to see who you were; and I could swear you were listed as Finney’s understudy.”

“What gesture do you mean?” Guy asked.

“I’m not sure now; a movement of your–“

“I used to do a sort of thing with my arms when Luther had the fit, a sort of involuntary reaching–“

“Exactly,” Mr. Castevet said. “That’s just what I meant. It had a wonderful authenticity to it. In contrast, may I say, to everything Mr. Finney was doing.”

“Oh, come on now,” Guy said.

“I thought his performance was considerably overrated,” Mr. Castevet said. “I’d be most curious to see what you would have done with the part.”

Laughing, Guy said, “That makes two of us,” and cast a bright-eyed glance at Rosemary.

Which very explicitly lets John Heffernan off the hook. I’m not going to do the hard research right now, but if we take Guy’s comment to mean that he understudied two of the smaller parts, which is how I take it, that leaves us with these three, all originally credited as “Monks, lords, peasants, etc.”:

Harry Carlson (understudy for Lucas, Weinand)
Stan Dworkin (Eck, Hans)
Roger Hamilton (Leo, Prior)

Though it doesn’t sound like Guy thought of Weinand as a “smaller part.” My bet is on Roger Hamilton, the only one of the three with a real Broadway career. Thoughts?

written and directed by Noah Baumbach

I thought it was really excellent, the best new movie I’d seen in the theater in a long time.

Something that I always admire about Wes Anderson’s troubled output is that way he has of pushing his characters through a plotted script, with clear, story-progressing events in every scene, and yet keeping the focus on silly superficial details. The overall effect is of slightly bewildered characters who are trying to contend with the fact that they’re caught up in some kind of drama but can only seem to think directly in terms of the frivolous quirky stuff around them. The problem for Wes Anderson is that his movies have been increasingly fetishistic about the frivolous quirky stuff, to the point where it no longer seems justified by the fact that life is full of such stuff; the effect is of a diorama world entirely unlike life, into which this stuff has been placed, and it all becomes as bewildering to the characters as the drama was. In The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, the characters seemed gamely bewildered in relationship to everything about their world, including themselves. Bill Murray was playing a character who always seemed to be on the verge of saying “Hello, I’m [quote marks] Steve Zissou.” Which, I would say, takes the device of bewilderment in the face of the details a bit too far.*

Anyway, so The Squid and the Whale took that sort of approach but took it seriously, and the effect was, I thought, tremendously successful. The progression of events, which was perfectly clear, registered as a kind of dark, steady undercurrent to the actual goings-on, which were all about the eccentricities and petty details. The writing and (especially) the acting were attuned to the eccentric surface life of things in the smartest possible way; I never felt that I was being offered smugly calculated “quirkiness” or, alternately, that I was watching a formulaically “realistic” gloss on something fundamentally simplistic (as in, say, a pseudo-improvised Woody Allen scene with lots of hemming and hawing “because that’s the way people really talk”). By taking seriously this idea that was, it seemed to me, at least latent in Rushmore – that the absurd surface of life is our only interface with (and protection against) the despair that lies underneath it – Noah Baumbach found the ideal device for portraying the coming-of-age struggle that the Noah Baumbach stand-in teenager goes through.** Namely, the pain of facing the fact that one’s parents are fallible and that one is therefore all alone. Kids, even as they hunger to understand what’s really going on with themselves and everyone else, would still much rather believe that their problems have to do with ping-pong, just as audiences, even as they hunger to recognize themselves in drama, would rather believe that their movies are about quirky people doing funny stuff. By not overselling the comic detail-work but still letting it be the life of the movie, The Squid and the Whale allowed a certain desperate and queasy feeling to seep in that I recognized well but hadn’t felt with such force in a movie before.

On the commentary track on the DVD of You Can Count On Me (2000), Kenneth Lonergan says something about how people always say that characters should change and develop, but that actually people in real life don’t change very much, and that if someone really changes in some small way, that’s a big thing, and that he tried to make his movie be about that scale of change. I really admire that movie and that goal, and I think back to that comment often, regarding other movies (and books, etc.). I know someone who complained that the final sequence of The Squid and the Whale came on too suddenly and didn’t seem to suit the movie. I can see ways that it might have seemed a little artificial, from a technical perspective, and while I was watching it, I was preoccupied by stupid thoughts like, “Oh, so it’s one of these things where the music rises up and he has a moment. Is he going to end on that? Will that be the last shot? I’ll bet this will be the end. Or will they show something else? Is this the last shot? No, I bet this is the last shot!” That sort of thing is probably my own fault, but could equally be blamed on the movie’s pulling out a “gesture” for the finale rather than remaining with the more naturalistic scene that precedes it. In any case, it was a gesture that I liked and one that delivered the only possible resolution to a movie like this: one of the characters has changed, internally, in some small way. It’s left up to us to imagine just what that way is, but we have a good idea. Doing it as a lyrical “moment” was actually deserved, because that’s no doubt what the change feels like for this character.

I guess that’s what I enjoyed so much about the movie – it was a movie about fairly unpleasant people that got laughs out of their unpleasantness, and yet we were drawn into empathy for them because movie was to the audience what the world was to the characters.

On a whim, I thought I’d try to find the name of the artist responsible for the “artist’s conception” diorama for which the movie is named, but all I could find was this page. The museum does, however, have a little article and gallery about diorama arts, which is more than I can say for the rest of the internet. For shame, internet! Does nobody care about dioramas anymore?

Hopefully this movie will give a boost to diorama appreciation, and the names of Francis Lee Jaques and James Perry Wilson and Rudolph Zallinger will finally get the recognition they deserve. Okay, so I’m joking, but hey, why not?

* Although I think I was more willing than most people to give The Life Aquatic credit for being a sincere shot at portraying the peculiar paralyzed post-adolescent pseudo-adulthood that Wes Anderson must be experiencing along with everyone else I know. I just think Wes is too deep into it to say anything about it without it getting muddled.

** I know, I sound silly saying that this idea comes from Rushmore when of course it’s a basic idea in all comedy back to Shakespeare and before. I just mean that the specific aesthetic-cinematic execution of that idea in The Squid and the Whale seemed to be of a piece with Rushmore as opposed to, say, with Twelfth Night. Also, Noah Baumbach co-wrote The Life Aquatic and Wes Anderson was a producer on The Squid and the Whale. So this comparison is, um, reasonable.

directed by Jaume Collet-Serra
screenplay by Chad Hayes and Carey W. Hayes
after a story/play by Charles Belden (1933?)*

A bunch of us were in a hotel room and chose this off the pay-per-view service because something really trashy seemed to be in order. We got what we paid for. I don’t know the original but I’m sure that as a remake this is a horrible embarrassment. Obviously, the filmmakers couldn’t have cared less. Movies like this are dumb on arrival, so they tend to get away with being dumb even within their own dumbness, and I guess I’m going to let this one off the hook too – what would be the point of complaining that the twist at the end was only superficially a twist, or that we got to know way too much about the bad guys too early on for them to remain satisfyingly scary, or that all the “hey it’s Paris Hilton, get it?” attention to Paris Hilton was a drag on the script…? I’m ignoring the “none of them are looking at the road while they’re driving” and “you can’t touch melting wax like that, it’s burning hot” type of problems – I’m just talking about the storytelling problems, the stuff that actually hurts the movie. Does anyone care? I guess not, and I don’t want to be the loser who misses the point. But: just because the target audience is only here for the cheap shocks doesn’t mean they wouldn’t still have more fun if the movie were better thought-out. Even those of us who came in search of trash would have been more satisfied if we’d found, to our surprise, a clever thrill-ride. But we didn’t! We did, however, find some over-the-top gore that we weren’t entirely expecting. A bunch of it was supposed to be goofily horrid, in an Itchy & Scratchy vein, but two slashed Achilles tendons in one movie is just in bad taste. Not to mention the completely gratuitous finger-severing. John Ottman’s score was fun in a junky, unmemorable way. That’s what the whole movie wanted to be, but only parts of it were. But I guess when junk is your stated goal and your audience already expects trash, it’s hard to know what counts as success. For our “hey let’s watch something really dumb” purposes, this was a grand slam.

* I swore I’d review this in one paragraph, so I have to put this stuff down here in a footnote: This movie is based on the 1953 movie House of Wax, which was based on the 1933 movie Mystery of the Wax Museum, which was “based on a play by Charles Belden.” I can find no record (online at least) of this “play” ever having been produced or published in an original form. I’m betting it was never performed as a play and Belden sold it directly to the movies. But that’d be quite a play!

directed by Robert Wise
screenplay by Nelson Gidding
after the novel by Shirley Jackson (1959)

The book was better, but was the movie any good? I think it was, but in a weaker way. The biggest problem with the book was that it wasn’t perfect, so to speak – it was trying for an effect of carefully controlled atmosphere, but there were little gaps and irregularities in the cloth. Maybe the more eccentric choices were all intentional, but they still tended to dilute the spell, and the spell would seem to be the whole point. The movie suffered from the same problem, but moreso. We’re there for the atmosphere, so every time we have to think “that came off a little odd; oh well, I’m going to be a good sport and go along with it…” the experience falls a notch.

Was it that the movie had aged poorly? Not particularly, though it’s definitely full of dated mannerisms in the writing and staging. In the movie, dialogue that in the book had seemed atmospherically peculiar just seemed clumsy and unlikely. Maybe there’s just something more self-assured about text on a page that helps it age better. Or maybe, as I suspect, this movie was always clunkier than the book.

The score was by Humphrey Searle – whom you may know as the “S” in Franz Liszt’s “19 Hungarian Rhapsodies, S. 244” et al. – and while a good deal of the music was interesting on its own terms, it was a bad score that, I think, hurt the movie considerably. This movie could make an excellent case study in the difference between incidental music and independent music – rather than adding to the effect of the visual, Searle consistently describes it, as though he’s writing for radio. As we’re being shown several “forbidding” shots of the house, meant to convey the immediate aversion of our heroine upon her arrival, we hear a little discordant fanfare figure in each shot. The music here emphasizes the artifice of the editing, and comments on the significance of the shots, rather than contributing to the feeling of the scene – good way to bring a viewer out of the moment. Furthermore, when Searle does try for scary effects, he doesn’t have a good sense of which avant-gardisms “sound” and which just come off like an orchestra doing something weird. All too often this music registers to the viewer as “some kind of weird music,” because of the distracting trombone-iness and harp-iness of what’s going on, if you know what I mean. Stravinsky talked about wanting to write for violin in a way that captured its inherent “violin-iness” (okay, so he didn’t use that word – I’m just saying that real composers care about this concept) – and that’s exactly the sort of writing that shouldn’t be employed in incidental music. The effect is everything; the means should be invisible, or at least ignorable.

That said, I like his main theme* – it very successfully captures what the book is going for, I think – and wish he had known better how to deploy it.

The black and white looks great and the sets, costumes and location are nicely done, especially considering that the book relies so heavily on the reader’s imagination to make this stuff more unnerving than any actual image could ever be. The book is about feeling upset and scared while looking at very mild things – so the movie has a very hard task, since the viewer is much more likely to feel the way any normal person would feel, looking at, say, a wall. I think Robert Wise did a fine job in his struggle against that problem; I admire the scene that’s just a shot of the wall. In fact there are a lot of striking, well-shot, pleasantly eerie visuals throughout. But turning insinuations into actual imagery is still an uphill battle and the movie doesn’t exactly make it to the top.

I should however mention that this movie has an excellent scare in it that made me shout out loud in shock, which I never ever do. I don’t want to give it away – I’ll just say that it conformed exactly to a theory of mine about how to make the worst possible scare in a movie: first give the audience about one second of not being sure what’s happening and then hit them with the scare image. It’s the unknown that’s scary, not the surprise itself – surprise is just a means of making something unfamiliar. A jump scare that comes in a tense context, where the audience is already braced for a scare, isn’t nearly as terrible as a jump scare that comes when everyone’s guard is down – as long as you prime your audience with that one second of “oh, what’s this?” so that when it shows up, they know without a doubt what’s happening – they’re getting caught with their guard down. Terrifying. Robert Wise and his editor pulled it off exactly.

Julie Harris makes the main character suitably pathetic, but doesn’t quite bring the sympathetic quality that comes for free in the book just from the fact that she’s narrating. Claire Bloom does the cruelly unpredictable stuff that’s written for her, but like I said, behavior that’s jarring in the book is ridiculous on the screen unless we’re convinced of it, and I wasn’t at all convinced. Russ Tamblyn seems to be present. The best thing in the movie is Richard Johnson as Dr. Markway**. I haven’t seen him in anything else – given his filmography I guess that’s not surprising – and I thought he was a really entertaining presence, a well-bred British fellow with absolutely no shame about raising an eyebrow and saying things as though they’re really interesting. He goes about his business with a sort of constant, non-sequitur dignity; it’s a pleasure to watch. The DVD commentary track has all the major cast members plus the director and screenwriter showing up for at least a few words, but the majority of it is a 75-year-old Johnson waxing on about his career in general. He comes off more or less exactly like Dr. Markway. I enjoyed it.

One thing he mentions is that he was offered the role of James Bond before Sean Connery, but turned it down. He says something like, “at first glance, I do seem like a more obvious choice for the role,” which at first sounds absurd but on second consideration makes sense – he’s an actual debonair fellow, rather than a smirking rogue. He goes on to say that the rougher quality “Sean” brought to the role was a big part of the success of the James Bond series, which is also certainly true. However, IMDB tells me that Richard Johnson went on to star in two “Bulldog Drummond” movies. Drummond, whose name rings the tiniest of bells for me, was a longstanding detective character who was retooled in Bond’s image in the late 60s. I think I’d enjoy seeing Deadlier Than the Male (1966) and Some Girls Do (1969), both as period James Bond ripoffs and for the chance to imagine what the Richard Johnson Bond movies might have been like. But apparently they’re not easy to come by.

I leave you with this promotional still from Deadlier Than the Male. If you set out intentionally to take a photo for the caption “The poor man’s James Bond,” I don’t think you could do better than this.

* Listen to the excerpt of track 2 here.

** For no good reason, the movie changes “Dr. Montague” to “Dr. Markway” and “Eleanor Vance” to the significantly inferior “Eleanor Lance.” This is corroborated on the DVD commentary by the screenwriter, who says he can’t remember why he did it.

directed by Andrew Adamson
screenplay by Andrew Adamson, Ann Peacock, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely
after the novel by C.S. Lewis (1950)

My self-assignment here has been to talk about every book and movie in the order that I experience them, but I’m going to make an exception and talk about this one right away, even though I have still to talk about The Haunting (old), House of Wax (new), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (book), The Squid and the Whale, and Rosemary’s Baby (movie). But this one’s jumping the queue because I have the opportunity, here, to be one of the first people anywhere to write up a review/response to this thing. Not counting those aint-it-cool-news.com types. Yeah, one of them already saw it, of course.

But let me emphasize that this was an extremely advance screening! The aint-it-cool dude reported that his screening, last Saturday, was announced as the first public screening, and I know that the child actors from the movie didn’t see it until Monday. I saw it on Thursday, in a really enormous theater with only a few people in it, many of them holding scripts. It won’t be released for another three weeks. Pretty exclusive stuff, right??? I want to thank all those who made this possible. Thanks, Jon.*

That said, I found the movie intensely unpleasant. Really, really bad. That’s my review. You heard it here first!

There are two principal problems: first, with the material, and second, with the production itself. Or really, there was one problem, which was that the problems with the material and with the production amplified each other. The mismatch between style and content was, to me, near-nauseating.

There are gonna be three types of audience for this movie – 1. People who love the book and know it backward and forward. 2. People who read the book when they were in fourth grade and don’t remember it too well – that’s me! – and 3. People who have never read the book. Then for each of those there are the subcategories, a and b: people who are pleased by the “Christian content” and people who are not. Mark me down as “put off.”

When I was a kid, I only read the first two books in the series, I believe, or maybe the first three. Whatever I read, it was with rapidly diminishing interest. I remember liking the setup of the first book: when you pushed past the fur coats in the magical wardrobe, you found yourself in a snowy, mysterious forest where a lamppost was lit. But the fun of that, you’d think, would be the contrast between fantasy-land and life, or the excitement of this portal between them. Or, in the Alice in Wonderland vein, just the sheer craziness of what could happen in that fantasy-land. Well, after a few chapters of playing the fun correctly, the book veers off in an epic direction that was a complete disappointment to me in fourth grade. The kids start loving – I mean, really loving – this heavenly magical lion, and they get all excited about being kings and queens and fighting in an army of mythical creatures… By the end, they have forgotten all about the wardrobe and even about their real lives. I only had room in my heart for one exposition per book, at that age; it was unthinkable to me that I should care about what happened within Narnia in and of itself. And I didn’t understand why the kids in the story did, either. And how dare they forget their parents and love a lion instead – a fairly aloof one, at that. It was almost nightmarish.

Well, now, having found out a bit more about C.S. Lewis and these books, now I know why the kids loved a lion instead of their parents, and I also know why I didn’t understand it at the time – because that lion is an example of a type that did not figure in any of my other childhood reading, though it certainly does for many other children. He is a Savior, with a capital C, and their love for him is religious love. Perhaps some will think that I am only revealing my own degraded secularity here… but I for one find depictions of this emotion, religious love, upsetting. It’s especially upsetting in this Narnian form, when it’s not depicted in the context of religion, but just as a way of relating to, say, a lion. It’s very hard for me to see it as a heartwarming or stirring thing. It’s creepy. Because religious love is never reciprocal; it is not like love for a person who might well love you back in the same way. Neither is it a rational, justified love for something inherently admirable. It’s the love of cult members for their cult leader, it’s an affiliation masquerading as an emotion. It’s obligation so overwhelming that it can’t help but feel like it must be related to love.

I’m not about to go into whether or not this sort of thing is “good” in the context of religion, but certainly I’ve been brought up to think that it has its place there; in any other context, it sets off alarm bells. Who is this creep asking for pledges of undying devotion? How dare he conscript these gullible kids to fight in his army?

When a bedraggled, wild-eyed Father Christmas showed up and HO HO HO gave the kids marvelous, wondrous weapons so that they could go to war, I couldn’t help but feel that I was watching some kind of sick, shameless recruiting film. Similar feelings when the evil wolves, taunting the eldest boy, tell him that they aren’t afraid of his sword because they know he doesn’t have it in him, that it’s smarter to listen to them rather than just kill them… and then, when he does the right thing and kills one (woo-hoo!), the holy lion tells him solemnly to clean his bloody sword in the earth, which he does while the music swells.** Yes! Feel the power of Aslan, dude! All the kids eventually get to kill fairyland creatures – that, says Mr. Lewis, is a real coming of age, of real moral importance.

This is all made much much worse by the fact that it walks and quacks like all the most excessive Hollywood schlock, maxed-out on CGI. The lion to whom these poor kids pledge their eternal souls (more or less) isn’t a real lion, or a puppet, or a man in a suit – it’s just another projection of that slick, shimmering ectoplasm that wolfs down entire movies these days. It’s not just that CGI looks fake and flat – it’s that it all clearly emanates from the same dead, digital no-man’s-land. Yoda wasn’t actually in the Star Wars prequels – instead, the CGI blob that ate the movies just formed one of its many tendrils into a puppet that looked like him. In the same way, part of me didn’t feel like there was any real Aslan in Narnia – there was just a lot of cartoon stuff. All the worse, then, that these kids wept over it and put their lives on the line for it.

All in all, the movie looked, sounded and felt exactly like one of those commercials for the Marines, wherein young men battle monsters and work their way through ridiculous CG landscapes in order to get a military uniform zapped on to them by wicked-awesome lightning. Videogame trash aesthetics in the service of dead-serious propaganda. It’s easy to say that Lewis is selling Christ’s salvation here; but from the movie, at least, it seems like he’s selling more than that – a moral mishmash of everything that to him seemed good, human, British, and necessary. Including going into battle with shiny swords. Seems like a classic case of confusing/conflating nostalgia with ethics. A dangerous fallacy and a common one – is there a name for it?

I was complaining about certain unsavory aspects of the story (Aslan is killed in a pagan blood-altar ceremony?? How did I miss that as a kid?) to a friend who responded by sending me a quote from a recent article; the writer pointed out that kids are generally oblivious to moral lessons in their literature and gave the example that C.S. obviously wanted kids to recognize Edmund’s wickedness in themselves – but kids never do. It’s a good point; that kind of presumptuous moralizing is so offensive that a kid can’t even conceive of it. So what do kids get out of these books? Atmosphere, mystery, that sort of thing. The warm British-y stuff that’s left over underneath the epic. I might have been annoyed with the weird misuse of those elements, when I was a kid, but I did recognize that atmosphere as worthwhile and fun.

Which is why this movie is so particularly inexcusably bad – because it absolutely gets the atmosphere wrong. Its technique is all schlock and smarm, studio-slick in the worst possible way. I had my first twinge of concern when the prologue (in a bomb shelter during the London Blitz) ended with a snap-bang power edit blackout on a door-slam – what was the point of that? I thought – and then a general sense of doom as the main title music kicked in with some synth drum loops and a bunch of “new age Hollywood poignant” chords rising one after another. What was the point of that? No point, it’s just all part of the standard playbook these days. That, the CGI, the whole deal – it’s just what movies are like! Didn’t you see Lord of the Rings? Just hire those guys and film it in New Zealand and it’ll be perfect. I cannot forgive their insensitive, second-hand approach to tone and atmosphere.

Andrew Adamson was the director of Shrek, which was also built out of borrowed, junky new-Hollywood gestures (slow-mo running from a giant explosion, etc.). At the time, I (and most other people, I think) thought they were making fun of that stuff – they certainly got away with it because they framed it that way. But at the time, one of my friends complained that Shrek seemed to him truly secondhand, nerdy and ingrown, and in retrospect, I think he may have been right. In Narnia, which has no claim to being a “parody” of anything, the bullshit is still slathered on suffocatingly thick in every scene. The final battle begins with a near-silent shot of the two armies racing at each other, whooshing into violent sound when they hit. You know what I’m talking about because you’ve seen it before. Like, on Xbox. The whole movie seemed to have been directed that way: “Yeah, then the wolves will, like, run at the camera and we’ll do one of those things where the middle one, like, jumps over it, you know what I mean?” “I totally know what you mean.” “Yeah, and then when he’s fighting this guy, he’ll like whip the sword around before he gets him with it, like, whop whop whop BOOM, you know?” “Totally.”

Production design was pretty good. Some CGI animals were better than others; talking animal effects were done well. The goat-leg effect was very nicely handled. Tilda Swinton did a good bad guy, I thought, actually playing the personality traits of selfishness and cruelty rather than just “being evil.” The kids were okay – the little girl had the heaviest screen-time-to-age ratio to carry and did a very good job. The other girl was very conscientious but didn’t seem to know how best to maneuever the big lips that got her cast in the first place. The “bad” kid, Edmund, had the right young Brit look and used it serviceably. The eldest brother, Peter, looked like Prince William and that was about it for him.

After the screening, the director, the producer, the four kids, the ice queen, and the goat man were all present. The ice queen and the goat man both made a point of referring to their own “bad acting” and sliding sideways out of questions about their thoughts on the film. Even the kids – who at this early stage of their long publicity tour were, we imagined, practicing their faux-interview skills on us – even the kids seemed reluctant to say outright that they liked the movie, though they eventually found their way into saying stuff like “it actually surpassed my expectations.” The youngest girl, Georgie Henley, was extremely composed and well-spoken for a 10-year-old, which of course got chuckles from the audience. I thought she was charming too, and also felt guilty that I was participating in this “isn’t that precocious!” response that was probably fairly demeaning to her. When asked whether she wanted to stick with acting as a career, she answered, seriously, “Well, I’m still very young. I’m interested in many different things – right now I just think of acting kind of as an option.” Everyone chuckled, even though this was a perfectly reasonable, intelligent answer. Georgie, I’m sorry. I’m also sorry that the movie is so junky, but you seemed like you’ll rise above it.

Tilda Swinton, by the way, had her hair dyed a violent, flourescent yellow and, in this context, came off as an alien visitor from celebrity-fashion land, possibly dangerous. Adamson, by contrast, seemed like a total long-haired tech geek. But that’s superficial of me.

One of his comments, I think, sheds some light on the movie’s horribleness. He said that unlike The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, this book posed problems for an adaptation not because it required cutting back but because it required fleshing-out: C.S. Lewis leaves important things unsaid and sketches his characters lightly. As examples of things that were added, Adamson mentioned various creature designs and the cracking-ice action sequence in the middle of the movie. But he missed the broader problem: Lewis didn’t create real characters or give us real reasons to care about them. The movie needed to show us something to get us involved; instead it dumps the same old garbage on us.

Ugh – I could just keep going on about this but I guess I should move on with my life.

Here is the only picture I could find of the first edition cover. Now, I’m not saying the movie should have looked like this illustration… but still, something to think about.

* It’s taken more than another whole week for me to actually write this and post it. Oops.

** Beth is telling me that, in fact, Aslan just told him to “clean his sword” (in the river, we must assume), and the next shot, of the sword entering the ground, was a cut-ahead to later, as he prepared to be knighted. Yeah, maybe. Whatever.

directed by Michael Winterbottom
screenplay by Martin Hardy
after the novel by Laurence Sterne (1759-1767)

After finishing the book just recently, obviously I had to see this.

With adaptations the question is always “is it a good adaptation?” This means: does the movie fulfill whatever fantasies are called to mind by the phrase “movie version of Tristram Shandy?” In this case I think that the answer is almost entirely yes. The main things I would want from a movie version of Tristram Shandy: visualizations of the characters and locations, and reenactments of some of the funny dialogue. Definitely there. My one reservation would be that the overall 18th-century “look” was just the same natural-light on-location-at-a-manor-house stuff that I’ve seen on PBS so many times, and the various actors never exactly disappeared into the parts, so I didn’t quite get that full feeling that I was getting to see it really happen. I just got the feeling that I was seeing a very charming performance of it. But that was good enough. Given the film-within-a-film construction (about which more in just a second), that kind of remove was probably appropriate (and/or inevitable).

Let me be clear: you get to see all kinds of stuff from the book that you’d want to see: the siege of Namur, Uncle Toby whistling Lillabullero, a slideshow of famous men with long noses, etc. etc. A good part of the long scene with Toby, Walter Shandy, and Dr. Slop preparing for Tristram’s birth is included, but what takes 100 pages in the book is here only a few seconds – as you might imagine – and I ended up worrying that as a result, a lot of the fairly absurd dialogue, quickly delivered, was probably flying over the heads of the audience members who hadn’t read the book. And I think that might have been the case. This movie is certainly going to be more satisfying to those who read the book first. But my moviegoing companion, who had not read the book, thoroughly enjoyed the movie, even though she said that she did indeed feel a little removed from it at the beginning.

So far, I have only been talking about the beginning. If you’ve read anything about this movie, you already know that it’s an adaptation in the Adaptation sense – after a little while, the movie veers off into meta-movie land and thereafter only returns to Tristram Shandy for brief interludes. The movie is, in fact, mostly about Steve Coogan (played by Steve Coogan), the lead actor in a movie version of Tristram Shandy. Yup, it’s one of those. But the lovely thing is that, just as in Adaptation, the movie-about-a-movie still has claim to being an adaptation of the source material, which itself is more concerned with “the making of” than it is with telling a story. Just as in the book, the meta- play is partly meant to get at philosophical issues of the interactions between life and its own representation, and partly just for fun.

In fact, as far as layering goes, the movie complicates things well beyond the book. The PBS-ish movie-within-the-movie is itself a playful affair, wherein adult Tristram walks into a scene of his childhood and complains that the child representing him is not playing the part correctly, etc. If carried out throughout, THAT movie could well have stood alone as a complete representation of the complexities of the book. But then the “real” actors are added on top of that, and then finally at the end we see the “real” real actors coming out of a screening room where they seem to have watched the meta-movie itself. I was reminded of, yes, The Muppet Movie, which is a movie about a bunch of characters in a screening room watching a movie about themselves wherein they come to Hollywood and make a movie about themselves. A similar kind of playfulness here, though it obviously creates a different emotional effect. It’s also worth saying that it creates a different emotional effect from the comparatively claustrophobic Adaptation.

The whole movie is played very mildly, emotionally low-key (just like actual on-set documentaries and, indeed, most real social life), and yet in a few key places flirts tastefully with having sentimental content. I thought this was exactly in keeping with Sterne’s worldview. That’s the other thing I would want from an adaptation of Tristram Shandy – something that captured that particular feeling of how the world is both delightfully and distressingly frivolous. A good deal of the screen time is taken up by chatty British humor and some Christopher Guest-ish deadpan character comedy, but the construction, and the grounding of Tristram Shandy, make it all add up to more than that as a whole. It’s really a sort of portrait of an everyman type, this Steve Coogan/Tristram Shandy/Laurence Sterne guy, a self-centered guy not entirely sure what is worth wanting, trying to figure out what kind of order can possibly be imposed on life. The closest thing to a dramatic plot involves him flirting with a production runner named Jennie while his girlfriend Jenny is visiting the set with their baby, and even that is played as low to the ground as possible.

It’s actually quite remarkable to me, thinking back on it, that a balance was struck that made all these elements seem to cohere and serve a worthy thematic purpose. I can see a thousand ways that a movie like this could have fallen apart at the seams. But somehow it all just felt right – so natural almost as to seem slight, while I was watching it. My appreciation for it has, I think, grown in retrospect.

Music was all borrowed from other movies, including several cues by Michael Nyman, whose smart/stupid classical/minimal style, which often rubs me the wrong way, was here exactly right.

I do however think that the title is ungainly, though I understand how they ended up with it (the movie being neither Tristram Shandy nor NOT Tristram Shandy).

I saw this at the New York Film Festival screening (which, at time of writing, is pretty much the only thing mentioned on the movie’s official website) and so Michael Winterbottom, the two leads, and some downplayed dude (I believe it was producer Andrew Eaton) came up on stage for a little Q & A thingy afterward. Actually, they first showed themselves when they stood up from box seats to receive applause, and I thought “Whoa, did they just watch their own movie so that they could listen to our response?” I think I would have found myself laughing louder had I known. My understanding was that after the first couple showings, filmmakers didn’t do that. Though I suppose that this was probably only the 20th showing, or something, so perhaps they weren’t quite completely fed up with it yet.

The Q’s were, as always, fairly embarrassing. It must be some kind of principle of self-selection at work – Q & A session questions seem always to be either 1) eccentric and/or ornery, 2) not questions, or 3) questions that have already been answered. In 2000 I saw Woody Allen give what was being promoted as a “rare” Q & A session to promote Small Time Crooks, during which he was 1) asked where he got the glasses that appeared in one character’s apartment (A: I don’t know) and 2) badly told one of his own jokes from his stand-up act of 35 years ago (A: Yeah). I wish there was a 3) so that I could round this out, but I don’t recall any more; I just remember cringing through the whole thing.

For Tristram, the ornery question came from a guy who asked “This obviously wasn’t the book, why didn’t you just film the book?” and then when given the expected answer, pressed the question again with obvious irritation, and then grumbled audibly when the director wrapped up his second version of the answer. The 2) non-question came from a woman who told everyone what she thought the “womb” sequence meant. The moderator did her the favor of turning this around in his on-mike rephrase, as “basically, what was the meaning of the womb sequence?”

At this point, it occurred to me that I had a question to ask, so I raised my hand, and got called on, but as I started to speak I was cut off by some guy shouting out 3) a question that had already been answered. Namely, were any scenes actually improvised? The moderator had started things off by asking that very question. The answer, by the way, is pretty much, “just the obviously-improvised silly conversations that bookend the movie.”

Then I finally got my chance. I’m leading up to this like my asking a question was a big event, but, well, for me it was. For those three seconds, I ran the risk of annoying everyone in Alice Tully Hall, not to mention some minor celebrities whose movie I had just seen. For a non-famous, non-performing-in-Alice-Tully-Hall guy like me, having that many ears on you at once is a rare occasion, and primitive social-structure instincts come to the foreground. It’s hard to fight that inner law of conformity that says: When there are 700 people present, you will not call undue attention to yourself. So, sad to say, that sort of moment feels significant both before and after, even though it adds up to nothing.

Well, it does add up to my getting an answer from Michael Winterbottom, so, in order to turn my moment of glory into a public service, and also to hopefully exorcise the moment from my brain, where I keep running over it (apparently just to be really really sure that I did not make a 700-person faux pas, which I obviously did not) – I offer you the exchange in its entirety, as best I can remember it:

Me: How do you see the Jenny character as relating to the original book?

Moderator: The question is how the character of Jenny as she appears in the movie compares to the character from the book. I guess that’s a question for Michael.

Beth: (to me, quietly, during the pause) There are two. [i.e. there are two characters named Jenny in the movie, so my question is perhaps ambiguous]

Me: (full voice) Either one, really.

[I then proceed to be distracted from the answer because I worry that it sounded like I was saying that the question could be directed to “either one” of the men on stage – though there are four – and that maybe saying “either” about four men made me sound crazy and people are annoyed with me, just as I have been annoyed with pretty much everyone to ask a question thus far]

Winterbottom: Well, Jenny in the book is his wife* and Tristram is really writing it all to her. She doesn’t actually appear, but there are these sort of apostrophes to her scattered through the book. When Sterne wrote the book he was just a parish priest, he wasn’t famous at all, and then the book was a huge success [he said some other stuff here, while my mind was racing distractedly] and he would leave his wife at his house in Sutton-in-the-Forest**, and he took a place in London and began to spend all his time in high society. And he dealt with a lot of the same issues that would come up for a celebrity today. So there are connections there, just not necessarily to the book.

I had asked because I felt like the sad/creepy possibility of romantic unfaithfulness that hung over the character in the movie was not really something that showed up in the world of the novel, and I wondered whether they had intended it as extrapolation from or contrast to the book. But it makes some sense that it both seemed foreign to the book and yet was intended as relevant to Sterne’s own life – his unfaithfulness to his own wife was apparently a blind spot for him. Here’s a related dumb anecdote that has been reprinted in several places. For all I know it’s completely apocryphal:

Sterne, who used his wife very ill, was one day talking to Garrick in a fine sentimental manner, in praise of conjugal love and fidelity. “The husband,” said Sterne, “who behaves unkindly to his wife, deserves to have his house burnt over his head.” “If you think so,” said Garrick, “I hope your house is insured.”

Garrick = David Garrick (1717-1779), actor, playwright, theater producer.

* Apparently, though not necessarily. In fact, Shandy ends one chapter by pointing out that we are jumping to conclusions if we simply make the obvious assumption that she is his wife.

** Of course, I don’t actually remember him saying that, but that’s where Sterne lived, and I trust that Winterbottom got it right.