SEEING
Ten – HEPBURN AND GARBO
1. THE NATURAL
Katharine Hepburn was the star of my favorite film, The Philadelphia Story. And she appeared in a large proportion of the other movies I can stand to watch without throwing something at the screen or falling asleep. The sheer scarcity, in cinema, of women who in any way resemble those unusual creatures we meet every day (our mothers, sisters, wives, lovers, daughters) has only intensified in the twenty years since Katharine Hepburn ceased making movies, and this has served to make her legacy more precious as time has passed.
From the earliest age I was devoted to her. My teenage bedroom, a shrine to the Golden Age of Hollywood, reserved a whole half wall for her alone. Amid the pictures of Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Donald O’Connor, Ava Gardner and the rest, Ms. Hepburn-imperious, regal and redheaded (although this last was often disguised in the publicity shots)-sat high up by the cornice of the ceiling, like a Madonna looking over the lesser saints. I spent too much time worrying over her health and wanting assurance from my father (also a fan and only eighteen years her junior) that she would outlive us all. When she sailed through her late eighties without incident, I became partially convinced of her immortality. Possibly because she got to me so young, her effect is out of proportion with what any movie star should mean to anyone, but I am grateful for it. The kind of woman she played, the kind of woman she was, is still the kind of woman I should like to be, and an incidental line of hers, from the aforementioned The Philadelphia Story, remains my lodestar every time I pick up a pen to write anything all: “The time to make your mind up about people is never!”
In that film the question is class; Hepburn’s Tracy Lord is trying to convince a class-conscious Jimmy Stewart that virtue is not restricted to the work ingmen of the world, any more than honor rests solely with the rich. Similarly, it was Hepburn’s unique real-life position in Hollywood to chip away at some of America’s more banal and oppressive received ideas. Whenever Hollywood thought it knew what a woman was, or what a black man was, or what an intellectual might be, or what “sexiness” amounted to, Hepburn made a movie to turn the common thinking on its head, offering always something irreducibly singular. Sometimes they liked it, but more often than not-especially in the early days-they didn’t. It was another trait of Hepburn’s never to give an inch. When David O. Selznick told her she couldn’t have the role of Scarlett O’Hara because he “couldn’t see Rhett Butler chasing you for ten years,” she told him snootily that “some people’s idea of sex appeal is different from yours” and stormed out of his office. It was never a question of Hepburn changing to suit Hollywood; Hollywood had to change to suit Hepburn.
Her bullheadedness can be traced to her East Coast upbringing: Protestant, hardworking, sporty, intellectual, liberal, but severe. Cold showers were a staple of her childhood. Hepburn said that her family “gave [her] the impression that the bitterer the medicine, the better it was for you,” and this strikes us as absolutely commensurate with her image on the big screen; never indulgent, always somehow utilitarian; only doing and using what was necessary. Ava Gardner you see in a big tub of bubbles, Hepburn in the Connecticut cold, standing in a bucket of ice water. Attributing to her childhood all her positive virtues, Hepburn always looked to her parents’ lives and relationship as the model for her own. Her mother, Katharine Martha Houghton, known as Kit, was a committed feminist and an early graduate of Bryn Mawr College, one of the first institutions to offer women a PhD. She was good friends with Mrs. Pankhurst, became the president of the Connecticut Women’s Suffrage Association and, in later years, was a vocal supporter of Planned Parenthood, despite giving birth to three boys and three girls. Her husband, Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn, could trace his ancestry back to James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell and third husband of Mary, Queen of Scots (whom Hepburn played in 1936, rather lumpenly. Later she recognized that fiery Elizabeth would have been more her bag). From him, Hepburn got her hair and her family nickname, Redtop, a great enthusiasm for all things physical and absolutely no understanding of feminine restriction. Dr. Hepburn made few distinctions between his sons and daughters. All of them played touch football, learned to wrestle, swim and sail and were encouraged in the idea that intellect and action are two sides of the same coin, for either sex. Her father was the kind of man Hepburn most admired: “There are men of action and men of thought, and if you ever get a combination of the two, well, that’s the top-you’ve got someone like Dad.” Born in 1907, two years after her parents’ first child, Tom, Hepburn grew up as a very jolly, tree-climbing, trouser-wearing, straight-talking tomboy, devoted to her older brother and awkward with people outside her family circle. When she was twelve a tragedy occured, one that changed her life and seems to have gone some way to forming the actress she became. During a trip to New York, Katharine and Tom went to see the play A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, in which there is a scene of a hanging. The next morning, when Katharine went into her brother’s room to wake him, she found him hanging from the rafters by a bedsheet, already dead five hours. He was fifteen. There was a history of suicide on both sides of the family, but her father always believed it a stunt gone wrong. Either way, Hepburn was deeply affected by it. She began to attempt to take on many of her brother’s traits, and in some way to replace him; she spoke of taking up medical studies at Yale, as he had intended to, and became involved in the sports he liked-golf and tennis and diving. Having no real academic ability, she never took that Yale place, but scraped through her exams sufficiently to follow her mother to Bryn Mawr. This college, often ridiculed for its supposed snobbery and bluestocking atmosphere, was where Hepburn began to act, and also-or so her later critics complained-where she picked up that unbelievable accent, that “Bryn Mawr twang,” with its Anglified vowels that combine oddly with the sense that one is being spoken to from a pinnacle of high-Yankee condescension. Her class and ambivalent femininity were to become central to Hepburn’s screen persona and were also the qualities that made her “box office poison” for the best part of a decade. Selznick’s reluctance to let her play Scarlett referred pretty obviously to her body, and we should begin with that. Her great love, Spencer Tracy, put it this way: “There ain’t much meat on her, but what there is, is choice.” And so it was. Slender without being remotely skinny, Hepburn was pretty much one long muscle, devoid of bust, but surprisingly shapely if seen from the back. She could work a dress like any Hollywood starlet, but your heart stopped to see her in a pair of wide slacks and crisp, white shirt. Her face was feline without being flirty, her cheekbones sepulchral but her lips full and generous. Her eyes-and there isn’t a movie star who doesn’t come down to the eyes in the end-had that knack of looking intelligently and passionately into the middle distance, a gaze that presidents strive for and occasionally attain. Her nose was more problematic. It struck some people as noble and full of sprightly character, but for a great deal of others it was too refined, hoydenish and superior. There are certain of her early films where a good 70 percent of the acting is coming from the nose down, and the average 1930s Depression-era moviegoer was not in the mood to be looked down upon through quite so straight and severe an instrument. They didn’t like her much as an aristocratic aviatrix in Christopher Strong (1933), and they liked her even less as an illiterate mountain girl in Spitfire (1934). But to really make them hate you, you might try spending an entire movie dressed as a boy and making Brian Aherne fall in love with you-while you are still dressed as a boy-and then have him say things like, “I don’t know what it is that gives me a queer feeling when I look at you,” as Hepburn did in the transvestite comedy flop Sylvia Scarlett (1935). The Shakespearean references were pretty much lost on her Depression-era American audience, who had other worries and were unwilling to allow much brain space to the homoerotic possibilities of Katharine Hepburn dressed in green suede. Time magazine took the opportunity to point out, “Sylvia Scarlett reveals the interesting fact that Katharine Hepburn is better looking as a boy than a woman.” There were hits during the 1930s, most notably Little Women, in which Hepburn played the greatest, most empathic and beautiful Jo March there ever has been or ever will be. But she was only playing good roles in hit movies-she could not yet carry a movie alone. Hepburn didn’t help herself, either, with her on-set behavior, which was noted and commented upon by the usual L.A. gossip columnists sent by the magazines to investigate the potential starlet. They had been spun a red-haired, East Coast, high-society goddess by the studios and so were somewhat surprised to find a makeup-free woman striding around between takes in a pair of dungarees. The RKO publicity department asked her to stop wearing them. She refused. The next day, when she found them vanished from her dressing room, she walked around set in her knickers until they were returned to her. On another occasion, when denying to reporters that she was married (she was, but very briefly, to Ludlow Ogden Smith, a man she met at a college dance) and asked whether she had children, she replied: “Yes, two white and three colored.”
It was around this time that Hepburn decided to return to the stage in a play called The Lakes and found herself on the receiving end of Dorothy Parker’s poisonous little put-down: “Katharine Hepburn ran the gamut of emotion from A to B.” In its way, this comment is true-Hepburn could not be stretched far beyond herself. But her triumph, like all the Golden Age actors, was to figure out that screen acting, in opposition to stage acting, has got nothing to do with range. The present-day enthusiasm for actors who can play anything from the severely disabled to the heroic to the romantic and so on, with their multiple accents and tedious gurning-this all meant nothing to Bogart or Grant or Stewart or, in the end, to Hepburn. It was by learning to play herself, and by continuing to do so, more or less, for the rest of her career, that Hepburn became a screen icon and a goddess.
Of The Philadelphia Story, Life magazine wrote, “When Katharine Hepburn sets out to play Katharine Hepburn, she is a sight to behold. Nobody is her equal,” and I write now that if there is a greater pleasure in this world than watching her drunkenly singing “Somewhere over the Rainbow” (she was many things, that girl, but she was no singer) while wearing a dressing gown and being carried by Jimmy Stewart, well, I don’t know it. There is another line in that movie that seems key to Hepburn. George Kittredge (John Howard), her soon-to-be-jilted fiancé, complains that “a husband expects his wife to behave herself, naturally.” To which C. K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant), the ex-husband, offers a pointed correction: “To behave herself naturally.” In this vanished comma and subsequent shift of emphasis, we find the womanly wonder of Hepburn’s 1940s comedies.
She was thirty-six when she made her first comedy with Spencer Tracy, and to see her in Woman of the Year (1942) is to put a tongue to that great lie of our contemporary culture, that women are at their most beautiful between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. To say she is in her prime doesn’t begin to cover it. She is a woman behaving herself naturally, without fear, without shame and with the full confidence of her abilities. The battle and paradox of those Tracy/Hepburn vehicles is the same one they had to deal with in life: how to tame a great passion without either party submitting entirely to the other. This makes Woman of the Year, Adam’s Rib (1949) and Pat and Mike (1952) sound like dry stuff-nothing could be less true. Adam’s Rib is simultaneously so funny and so sharp-and I mean, to the bone-on the subject of the gender war that I have watched it with two different lovers and ended the night, on both occasions, in separate bedrooms. The question of competition in a marriage of equals is so accurately skewered you feel yourself writhing on the pin. You will recall that Hepburn and Tracy play two lawyers, who find themselves defending and prosecuting against each other on the same case. One evening, after a long day in court, a supposedly friendly smack on Hepburn’s backside from Tracy (he is giving her a massage) results in this unbeatable snatch of dialogue:
Tracy: What, d’you don’t want your rub now? What are you-sore about a little slap?
Hepburn: You meant that, didn’t you?
Tracy: Why, no…
Hepburn: Yes you did, yes, I can tell a… a slap from a slug!
Tracy: Well, OK… OK…
Hepburn: No, I’m not so sure it is, I’m not so sure I care to… expose myself to typical, instinctive, masculine aggression!
Tracy: Oh, calm down…
Hepburn: And it felt not only as if you meant it but as if you felt you had a right to! I can tell!
Tracy: What’ve you got back there? Radar equipment?
Oh, just go out and rent it.
Although I am particularly susceptible to Kate in the 1940s, every decade of her career throws up humbling performances. She held the record for Oscar nominations until Meryl beat her, and any Hepburn devotee finds a place in his or her heart for the grand guignol of Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), despite the fact that she despised both the film and her treatment on the set-she spat in the director’s face on the last day of filming. Also, the dynamite partnership with Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen (1951) is the equal of anything she did with Tracy. In Bogart, she found the action-man dimension of her father that she loved, and he found a woman with similar chutzpah to his own wife, Bacall, who followed them to the difficult, insect-ridden location, reportedly a little nervous of how good a match her husband and his costar looked on paper. She needn’t have worried: Hepburn’s romantic dedication to Tracy is now legendary, and I remember, again, as a child, hoping for the sort of relationship that seemed symbolized in the fact that even as he lay dying, Hepburn spent every day with him, lying on the floor beside his bed. They never married because he was already married, and as a Catholic and family man, he never divorced. One can only feel horror and pity for the kind of wife forced before the whole world to recognize the shimmering immortality of that adulterous relationship. Tracy claimed, “My wife and Kate like things just the way they are,” and the truth or otherwise of this remained between the three of them, never publicly discussed. Tracy and Hepburn’s last film together, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), was the first Hepburn movie I ever saw, aged about five, with a running commentary from my mother on the physical perfection of Sidney Poitier. The movie is sentimental, but the sentiment, both political and personal, is at least genuine; I struggle to think of another film of which this is so true. Tracy, a long-term alcoholic, was basically dying during filming, and when he delivers the last line, “If what they feel for each other is even half what we felt, then that is everything,” Hepburn cries real tears. Six months later he was dead. They were both nominated for Oscars, and when she heard she had won again (Hepburn was not at the ceremony; she never picked up any of her four Oscars), her first and only question was “Did Spence get one too?” He did not, but she considered it a shared award.
So physical in her youth, always determined to perform her own stunts, old age struck Hepburn as one hell of a bore. She never hid like a starlet or felt destroyed by lost looks (she never really lost her looks), but she was frequently frustrated by not being able to do what had once come so easily. She once cried with frustration at having to employ a twenty-four-year-old stunt double to ride a bike for her in a film. At the time, Hepburn herself was seventy-two. Two days ago she died, aged ninety-six. I don’t know why I should be surprised, but I was, and when I found out, I wept, and felt ridiculous for weeping. How can someone you have never met make you cry? Two years ago I went to see The Philadelphia Story play on a big screen in Bryant Park. It was July and so hot my brother and I had been spending the day in the penguin exhibit at the zoo (we had no air-conditioning), but then we heard about the film-my favorite film-playing outdoors and rushed downtown.
We were too late to get a seat. It was packed like I have never seen any New York open space since the Dalai Lama came to Central Park. We were disconsolately looking for a wall to sit on, when suddenly two unholy fools, two morons, changed their minds and gave up their second-row seats. Hard to describe how happy we were. And then over the loudspeakers came some news: Hepburn had been taken ill in the night-gasps, I mean, real gasps-but it was okay-happy sighs-she was back from the hospital and wished us all well. We roared! And then the film started, and I said all the lines before they came, and my brother asked me to shut up. But I wasn’t the only one at it. When Katharine whispered to Jimmy Stewart, “Put me in your pocket, Mike!” a thousand people whispered with her. That was the best night at the movies I’ve ever had.
My teenage life was periodically dotted by melancholy little funerals, attended by me alone. I held one for Fred Astaire and one for Bette Davis and Cary Grant. On these occasions I would light candles in my room, cry a bit and mark the photo on the wall with a little cross in the right-hand corner. This time, less psychotically, I plan to spend the next few weeks watching every Hepburn movie and documentary that graces the television screen. I strongly recommend you watch as many as you can manage. She is the last of the great stars, the very last, and my God, I will miss the thrilling feeling of rewatching Adam’s Rib and knowing her to be still on the planet, still in that East Forty-ninth Street brownstone, still fabulous. When people truly feel for a popular artist-when they follow in their thousands behind Dickens’s coffin or Valentino’s-it is only the dues returned for pleasure given, and it never feels like enough. Few artists in any medium have given me as much pleasure as Hepburn. In fact, the marvelous weight of the pleasure ennobles all clichés, and I hope to see the obituaries full of “the last of her kind,” “the greatest star in the firmament” and the rest of that sort of guff because, for once, it is all true.
2. NATURE’S WORK OF ART
September 18, 2005, marks the centenary of the birth of Greta Garbo, an icon both resonant and remote to us. It feels a perilous centenary. In twenty years’ time, no one will need to make an argument for the centenary of Marilyn Monroe, with her hourglass silhouette, her voluptuous blondness. It is different with Garbo: you have to make a case for Garbo. She resonates because hers was ultimately a career of photographs, and this we recognize. She is remote because the great photographs of Garbo are abstractions; they are not of a woman, they are of a face. Garbo’s body was an irrelevance. From our twenty-first-century icons we demand bodies: bodies are to be admired, coveted and-if one works hard enough-gained. You can have something resembling Madonna’s body, if you try. But you cannot have Garbo’s face. It was hers alone, a gift she used for as long as she could make it signify and then, aged only thirty-six, withdrew from public view, keeping it hidden until she died.
This face was memorably described by the philosopher Roland Barthes, who identified it as a transition between two semiological epochs, two ways of seeing women. Garbo marked the passage from awe to charm, from concept to substance: “The face of Garbo is an idea, that of [Audrey] Hepburn an event.” There was something essential, Platonic and unindividuated in Greta’s face. She was Woman, as opposed to Audrey, who was a woman, whom we loved precisely because her beauty was so quirky, so particular. Garbo has no quirks at all. A close-up of her face appears to reveal fewer features than the rest of us have-such an expanse of white-punctuated by the minimum of detail, just enough to let you know that this is flesh, not spirit. Her vulnerable, changeable face is what comes prior to the emphatic mask of a beautiful woman-she is the ideal of beauty that those masks attempt to capture. Post-Garbo, we have taken what resonated in Garbo’s fluid sexuality and mystery and hardened it, made it a commodity. Take Garbo’s heavy, deep-set eyelids: these have become the mark of the diva, passing down through Marlene, to Marilyn and, more recently, to Madonna, in whom they have become ironic. Hers is the ultimate modern Garbo face, attached to a worked-out body, and also to the idea of female ambition, will and talent. The idea of Garbo is somehow more elevated than that-it doesn’t even condescend itself to the pursuit and fulfillment of talent. It merely is. Garbo was not an actress in the way Bette Davis was an actress. Garbo was a presence. In fact, is it okay to say, a hundred years on, that Garbo was not a very good actress? That some of her best work was still and silent? It could be said that her best director was, in fact, a still photographer, MGM’s famous Clarence Bull. He did not try to know her or “uncover” her, as her movie directors sometimes did, giving her those awkward, wordy speeches that revealed less than one raised eyebrow could manage. Bull understood the attraction of her self-containment. Years later he recalled that where other photographers had tried to penetrate the mystery, “I accepted it for what it was-nature’s work of art… She was the face and I was the camera. We each tried to get the best out of our equipment.”
Garbo’s equipment was not always so sublime. She grew up Greta Gustafs son, a lanky, overweight, big-footed girl from Sweden. Despite Hollywood’s later intimations of an aristocratic lineage, she was poor, sharing a four-room, cold-water flat with her family in a Stockholm tenement. When her gardener father died of kidney failure, fourteen-year-old Greta dropped out of school and began work in the millinery department at the Paul Bergstrom department store. She wanted to be an actress, always. Discovered by her manager modeling hats in the mirror, she was asked to appear in a commercial film to promote millinery, How Not to Dress. This led to other commercial shorts. In her capacity as shopgirl, she would look out for famous Swedish actresses in the store and make sure she waited on them.
It was through a connection she made here that she secured an audition for the state-sponsored Dramatic Theatre Academy, where she was accepted at age seventeen. There she met director Mauritz Stiller, the first of many Garbo mentors. He changed her name and told her to lose twenty pounds. He cast her in The Saga of Gosta Berling (1924), which was a success in Sweden and Germany and brought Stiller to the attention of Louis B. Mayer at MGM. They met in Germany. Mayer’s original interest was Stiller, who had directed more than forty-five films, but he saw something in Garbo. He invited them both to America, although not before a word in Stiller’s ear: “In America, we don’t like fat women.” Garbo went on a diet of spinach for three weeks, was terribly sick, lost the weight and replaced it with no muscle. She stayed that way-slender, shapeless, suggestive of a dangerous lack of physical vitality-throughout her movie career. With her newly revealed cheekbones and wispy frame, she embarked upon her first photo shoots in New York. Any other hopeful starlet would have posed for cheesecake shots, swimsuits, “come hither” glances-the whole Hollywood routine. Garbo’s shots, lit with the “Rembrandt lighting” that would make her famous, are sculptural portraits, more Rodin than raunch. The Garbo image is yet unformed, but the beginnings of an iconic persona are here. She had a relationship with light like no other actress; wherever you directed it on her face, it created luminosity. She needed no soft or diffuse lighting to disguise defects. There were no defects. And then there is that sense of European ennui, of weltschmerz, that no MGM player had projected before. They had vamps, they had sex bombs, but they’d never had existential depression. “In America you are all so happy,” she told a reporter. “Why are you all so happy all the time? I am not always happy. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. When I am angry, I am very bad. I shut my door and do not speak.”
Once she reached Hollywood, the fan magazines responded enthusiastically, not as much to the fiery sexuality she was asked to play in those early silents, but to the sadness that seemed to lie behind it. A typical headline: “What is wrong with Greta Garbo?” Whatever it was, she was unable to articulate it. She refused all interviews, and her few private letters are banal-she often complained about the vulgarity of American film but had few ideas of her own to bring to the table. To the director of Queen Christina (the story of the abdication of the Swedish queen, a pet project that Garbo was very anxious about), she could only offer the suggestion that there should be a scene with trousers. She put herself in others’ hands. First Stiller, then the actor John Gilbert, the lesbian clique of Mercedes de Acosta, and the producer Irving Thalberg. Louis B. Mayer was driven mad by all these advisers and intercessors; he thought she was too easily influenced. And yet what comes across on film is a resolute, inviolable selfhood, ultimately impenetrable by other people. The public felt it, and expressed it in their popular nicknames: “The Swedish Sphinx” and “The Divine.”
Flesh and the Devil (1926) was her smash hit, creating a Garbo model that the studio exploited for the next fifteen years. It is silent and possibly her best film. She was only twenty-one, but her world-weariness on-screen suggests an older woman, longed for and chased after by the puppyish John Gilbert, who was to become her real-life lover. This romance, as it was rendered on-screen, scandalized America: a young man lying underneath a more experienced woman who seemed to literally feed from his mouth as she kissed him. It was a ravishment-female moviegoers loved it. This was a new kind of woman. For this reason she was punished in the movies (in Flesh and the Devil she drowns in ice water; in Camille it’s tuberculosis; in Anna Karenina it’s that pesky train), but she was free in life. It was Gilbert who suffered when she refused to marry him; it was Mayer who went crazy when she went on strike rather than make a corny movie (Women Love Diamonds) that she didn’t like the look of.
What was the matter with Garbo? Mayer couldn’t understand it. Why wasn’t she thankful? But after Flesh and the Devil, the power had changed hands: Garbo was an MGM gold mine. Garbo’s imperial aloofness appealed to Depression-era women on a scale that even Mayer could not have predicted. They were dependent; she was beyond dependence. Whatever made her happy or sad, it came from within. Film critics often mention her unusual responses: where another actress would laugh, she cries, when they would be serious, she plays it light. She seems to respond to something deep inside herself, not to the actor she plays opposite. It was a world of her own she was in, and it was wonderful to watch.
There are two halves of Garbo’s career: before and after sound. She made the transition as late as she possibly could, in 1930. “GARBO TALKS!” announced the publicity, and luckily for MGM, the voice matched the face. Her first line (“Gimme me a visky, ginger ale on the side-and don’t be stingy, baby!”) was delivered in that deep, miserable, sexy baritone that delighted her fans because they had, subconsciously, expected it. But a talking Garbo also revealed less fortunate traits. Her line readings are offbeat, bizarre; she had an unsteady grasp of the English language. She is a terrible reactor to spoken dialogue. If someone else is speaking, she simply looks bored. For the next ten years, her success in talkies depended on how much she was allowed to use her real strengths: her face, her eyes. This is why the silent final scene of Queen Christina (1933) is justly famous. Her lover, for whom she has renounced the throne, has just been killed by a jealous rival; she walks to the prow of the ship she is on and becomes a part of its helm-you may remember the image from Titanic. Where DiCaprio announces himself to the world, Garbo does nothing. Says nothing. Moves nothing on her face. It is a Swedish mix of cold water and private thoughts. The camera gets closer and closer. What you see there is humanized stoicism; she is going through what she is going through, deeply, personally and without public expression. She is resolutely herself.
This kind of interiority was soon to be under threat from a new breed of actress, women such as Joan Crawford, who projected everything they had outward to the public, leaving nothing in reserve. Crawford admired Garbo greatly but was already preparing to supplant her as the queen of MGM. She described an encounter on a staircase during the filming of Grand Hotel (1932): “She stopped and cupped my face in her hands and said, ‘What a pity. Our first picture together, and we won’t work with each other. I am so sorry. You have a marvelous face.’ If there was ever a time in my life I might have become a lesbian that was it.”
Crawford did not succumb, but many others did, including Marlene Dietrich, the playwright Mercedes de Acosta and Louise Brooks, who described Garbo as a “completely masculine dyke.” Closer friends thought of her androg yny as more complicated, nearer to the character of Queen Christina, who, disguised as a man, shares a bed with John Gilbert. Gore Vidal, an acquaintance from the last twenty years of her life, claims: “She thought of herself as a boy with another boy, that was her sexual fantasy.” She habitually referred to herself in the masculine, as a “bachelor”; at parties she would ask: “Where’s the little boy’s room?”
In the movies they were still determined to make a lady of her. In Ninotchka (1939), playing a Soviet apparatchik, she goes from macho, humorless Russian to glamorous Parisian party girl. Famously, she laughs. She can’t laugh. When she satirizes her own European dolor, she is hilarious. (“The show trials were a great success,” she deadpans. “We are going to have fewer but better Russians.”) But when she becomes gay and carefree, the movie dies. Ninotchka was a huge success (mostly thanks to an ingenious marketing campaign), but the studio picked up on the wrong trait, the newfound gaiety. Two-Faced Woman (1941), in which a newly happy Garbo does the rumba and goes swimming, was a disaster. You don’t put the sphinx in a swimsuit.
It was to be her last movie. The uniformly bad reviews for Two-Faced Woman were terribly wounding to her, but more than this, she had spotted something in the mirror. Two faint lines on either side of her mouth, connecting her nose to her chin. The face was no longer eternal, ethereal. It was over. Garbo after 1941 is simply a tale of withdrawal. She stands high in the roll call of twentieth-century recluses. But it would be more accurate, her biographer Barry Paris suggests, to call her a “hermit-about-town.” She walked for miles through New York every day, window-shopping. In the 1960s, almost every Manhattanite had a Garbo-spotting story to tell. She described herself at this time as “a mollusc. I don’t move, I don’t do anything. I just am.” This is not quite true: she had friends, walking partners. She went to auctions and bought paintings and antiques for her lavish apartment (when she died she left a $32 million estate, which included two Renoirs). It is no story of tragedy. She wished to live, only not publicly. She dressed as she liked, did as she liked. In her own later years, Crawford told a journalist: “I never go out unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star. If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.” Garbo didn’t even look as good as the girl next door. Her face (though she refused to believe it) was still beautiful, her wardrobe less so: sweaters, hats, scarves, slacks, raincoats. She kept a screwed-up piece of Kleenex in her left hand to cover her face should anyone try to photograph her. If she saw a fan approaching, she would say to her walking companion, “We’ve got a customer,” and change direction. She wanted to be alone. Garbo, the icon, was over. Age made of Greta a person, and the personhood of Garbo was never for sale. She would be myth or nothing at all.
1. THE NATURAL
Katharine Hepburn was the star of my favorite film, The Philadelphia Story. And she appeared in a large proportion of the other movies I can stand to watch without throwing something at the screen or falling asleep. The sheer scarcity, in cinema, of women who in any way resemble those unusual creatures we meet every day (our mothers, sisters, wives, lovers, daughters) has only intensified in the twenty years since Katharine Hepburn ceased making movies, and this has served to make her legacy more precious as time has passed.
From the earliest age I was devoted to her. My teenage bedroom, a shrine to the Golden Age of Hollywood, reserved a whole half wall for her alone. Amid the pictures of Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Donald O’Connor, Ava Gardner and the rest, Ms. Hepburn-imperious, regal and redheaded (although this last was often disguised in the publicity shots)-sat high up by the cornice of the ceiling, like a Madonna looking over the lesser saints. I spent too much time worrying over her health and wanting assurance from my father (also a fan and only eighteen years her junior) that she would outlive us all. When she sailed through her late eighties without incident, I became partially convinced of her immortality. Possibly because she got to me so young, her effect is out of proportion with what any movie star should mean to anyone, but I am grateful for it. The kind of woman she played, the kind of woman she was, is still the kind of woman I should like to be, and an incidental line of hers, from the aforementioned The Philadelphia Story, remains my lodestar every time I pick up a pen to write anything all: “The time to make your mind up about people is never!”
In that film the question is class; Hepburn’s Tracy Lord is trying to convince a class-conscious Jimmy Stewart that virtue is not restricted to the work ingmen of the world, any more than honor rests solely with the rich. Similarly, it was Hepburn’s unique real-life position in Hollywood to chip away at some of America’s more banal and oppressive received ideas. Whenever Hollywood thought it knew what a woman was, or what a black man was, or what an intellectual might be, or what “sexiness” amounted to, Hepburn made a movie to turn the common thinking on its head, offering always something irreducibly singular. Sometimes they liked it, but more often than not-especially in the early days-they didn’t. It was another trait of Hepburn’s never to give an inch. When David O. Selznick told her she couldn’t have the role of Scarlett O’Hara because he “couldn’t see Rhett Butler chasing you for ten years,” she told him snootily that “some people’s idea of sex appeal is different from yours” and stormed out of his office. It was never a question of Hepburn changing to suit Hollywood; Hollywood had to change to suit Hepburn.
Her bullheadedness can be traced to her East Coast upbringing: Protestant, hardworking, sporty, intellectual, liberal, but severe. Cold showers were a staple of her childhood. Hepburn said that her family “gave [her] the impression that the bitterer the medicine, the better it was for you,” and this strikes us as absolutely commensurate with her image on the big screen; never indulgent, always somehow utilitarian; only doing and using what was necessary. Ava Gardner you see in a big tub of bubbles, Hepburn in the Connecticut cold, standing in a bucket of ice water. Attributing to her childhood all her positive virtues, Hepburn always looked to her parents’ lives and relationship as the model for her own. Her mother, Katharine Martha Houghton, known as Kit, was a committed feminist and an early graduate of Bryn Mawr College, one of the first institutions to offer women a PhD. She was good friends with Mrs. Pankhurst, became the president of the Connecticut Women’s Suffrage Association and, in later years, was a vocal supporter of Planned Parenthood, despite giving birth to three boys and three girls. Her husband, Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn, could trace his ancestry back to James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell and third husband of Mary, Queen of Scots (whom Hepburn played in 1936, rather lumpenly. Later she recognized that fiery Elizabeth would have been more her bag). From him, Hepburn got her hair and her family nickname, Redtop, a great enthusiasm for all things physical and absolutely no understanding of feminine restriction. Dr. Hepburn made few distinctions between his sons and daughters. All of them played touch football, learned to wrestle, swim and sail and were encouraged in the idea that intellect and action are two sides of the same coin, for either sex. Her father was the kind of man Hepburn most admired: “There are men of action and men of thought, and if you ever get a combination of the two, well, that’s the top-you’ve got someone like Dad.” Born in 1907, two years after her parents’ first child, Tom, Hepburn grew up as a very jolly, tree-climbing, trouser-wearing, straight-talking tomboy, devoted to her older brother and awkward with people outside her family circle. When she was twelve a tragedy occured, one that changed her life and seems to have gone some way to forming the actress she became. During a trip to New York, Katharine and Tom went to see the play A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, in which there is a scene of a hanging. The next morning, when Katharine went into her brother’s room to wake him, she found him hanging from the rafters by a bedsheet, already dead five hours. He was fifteen. There was a history of suicide on both sides of the family, but her father always believed it a stunt gone wrong. Either way, Hepburn was deeply affected by it. She began to attempt to take on many of her brother’s traits, and in some way to replace him; she spoke of taking up medical studies at Yale, as he had intended to, and became involved in the sports he liked-golf and tennis and diving. Having no real academic ability, she never took that Yale place, but scraped through her exams sufficiently to follow her mother to Bryn Mawr. This college, often ridiculed for its supposed snobbery and bluestocking atmosphere, was where Hepburn began to act, and also-or so her later critics complained-where she picked up that unbelievable accent, that “Bryn Mawr twang,” with its Anglified vowels that combine oddly with the sense that one is being spoken to from a pinnacle of high-Yankee condescension. Her class and ambivalent femininity were to become central to Hepburn’s screen persona and were also the qualities that made her “box office poison” for the best part of a decade. Selznick’s reluctance to let her play Scarlett referred pretty obviously to her body, and we should begin with that. Her great love, Spencer Tracy, put it this way: “There ain’t much meat on her, but what there is, is choice.” And so it was. Slender without being remotely skinny, Hepburn was pretty much one long muscle, devoid of bust, but surprisingly shapely if seen from the back. She could work a dress like any Hollywood starlet, but your heart stopped to see her in a pair of wide slacks and crisp, white shirt. Her face was feline without being flirty, her cheekbones sepulchral but her lips full and generous. Her eyes-and there isn’t a movie star who doesn’t come down to the eyes in the end-had that knack of looking intelligently and passionately into the middle distance, a gaze that presidents strive for and occasionally attain. Her nose was more problematic. It struck some people as noble and full of sprightly character, but for a great deal of others it was too refined, hoydenish and superior. There are certain of her early films where a good 70 percent of the acting is coming from the nose down, and the average 1930s Depression-era moviegoer was not in the mood to be looked down upon through quite so straight and severe an instrument. They didn’t like her much as an aristocratic aviatrix in Christopher Strong (1933), and they liked her even less as an illiterate mountain girl in Spitfire (1934). But to really make them hate you, you might try spending an entire movie dressed as a boy and making Brian Aherne fall in love with you-while you are still dressed as a boy-and then have him say things like, “I don’t know what it is that gives me a queer feeling when I look at you,” as Hepburn did in the transvestite comedy flop Sylvia Scarlett (1935). The Shakespearean references were pretty much lost on her Depression-era American audience, who had other worries and were unwilling to allow much brain space to the homoerotic possibilities of Katharine Hepburn dressed in green suede. Time magazine took the opportunity to point out, “Sylvia Scarlett reveals the interesting fact that Katharine Hepburn is better looking as a boy than a woman.” There were hits during the 1930s, most notably Little Women, in which Hepburn played the greatest, most empathic and beautiful Jo March there ever has been or ever will be. But she was only playing good roles in hit movies-she could not yet carry a movie alone. Hepburn didn’t help herself, either, with her on-set behavior, which was noted and commented upon by the usual L.A. gossip columnists sent by the magazines to investigate the potential starlet. They had been spun a red-haired, East Coast, high-society goddess by the studios and so were somewhat surprised to find a makeup-free woman striding around between takes in a pair of dungarees. The RKO publicity department asked her to stop wearing them. She refused. The next day, when she found them vanished from her dressing room, she walked around set in her knickers until they were returned to her. On another occasion, when denying to reporters that she was married (she was, but very briefly, to Ludlow Ogden Smith, a man she met at a college dance) and asked whether she had children, she replied: “Yes, two white and three colored.”
It was around this time that Hepburn decided to return to the stage in a play called The Lakes and found herself on the receiving end of Dorothy Parker’s poisonous little put-down: “Katharine Hepburn ran the gamut of emotion from A to B.” In its way, this comment is true-Hepburn could not be stretched far beyond herself. But her triumph, like all the Golden Age actors, was to figure out that screen acting, in opposition to stage acting, has got nothing to do with range. The present-day enthusiasm for actors who can play anything from the severely disabled to the heroic to the romantic and so on, with their multiple accents and tedious gurning-this all meant nothing to Bogart or Grant or Stewart or, in the end, to Hepburn. It was by learning to play herself, and by continuing to do so, more or less, for the rest of her career, that Hepburn became a screen icon and a goddess.
Of The Philadelphia Story, Life magazine wrote, “When Katharine Hepburn sets out to play Katharine Hepburn, she is a sight to behold. Nobody is her equal,” and I write now that if there is a greater pleasure in this world than watching her drunkenly singing “Somewhere over the Rainbow” (she was many things, that girl, but she was no singer) while wearing a dressing gown and being carried by Jimmy Stewart, well, I don’t know it. There is another line in that movie that seems key to Hepburn. George Kittredge (John Howard), her soon-to-be-jilted fiancé, complains that “a husband expects his wife to behave herself, naturally.” To which C. K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant), the ex-husband, offers a pointed correction: “To behave herself naturally.” In this vanished comma and subsequent shift of emphasis, we find the womanly wonder of Hepburn’s 1940s comedies.
She was thirty-six when she made her first comedy with Spencer Tracy, and to see her in Woman of the Year (1942) is to put a tongue to that great lie of our contemporary culture, that women are at their most beautiful between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. To say she is in her prime doesn’t begin to cover it. She is a woman behaving herself naturally, without fear, without shame and with the full confidence of her abilities. The battle and paradox of those Tracy/Hepburn vehicles is the same one they had to deal with in life: how to tame a great passion without either party submitting entirely to the other. This makes Woman of the Year, Adam’s Rib (1949) and Pat and Mike (1952) sound like dry stuff-nothing could be less true. Adam’s Rib is simultaneously so funny and so sharp-and I mean, to the bone-on the subject of the gender war that I have watched it with two different lovers and ended the night, on both occasions, in separate bedrooms. The question of competition in a marriage of equals is so accurately skewered you feel yourself writhing on the pin. You will recall that Hepburn and Tracy play two lawyers, who find themselves defending and prosecuting against each other on the same case. One evening, after a long day in court, a supposedly friendly smack on Hepburn’s backside from Tracy (he is giving her a massage) results in this unbeatable snatch of dialogue:
Tracy: What, d’you don’t want your rub now? What are you-sore about a little slap?
Hepburn: You meant that, didn’t you?
Tracy: Why, no…
Hepburn: Yes you did, yes, I can tell a… a slap from a slug!
Tracy: Well, OK… OK…
Hepburn: No, I’m not so sure it is, I’m not so sure I care to… expose myself to typical, instinctive, masculine aggression!
Tracy: Oh, calm down…
Hepburn: And it felt not only as if you meant it but as if you felt you had a right to! I can tell!
Tracy: What’ve you got back there? Radar equipment?
Oh, just go out and rent it.
Although I am particularly susceptible to Kate in the 1940s, every decade of her career throws up humbling performances. She held the record for Oscar nominations until Meryl beat her, and any Hepburn devotee finds a place in his or her heart for the grand guignol of Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), despite the fact that she despised both the film and her treatment on the set-she spat in the director’s face on the last day of filming. Also, the dynamite partnership with Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen (1951) is the equal of anything she did with Tracy. In Bogart, she found the action-man dimension of her father that she loved, and he found a woman with similar chutzpah to his own wife, Bacall, who followed them to the difficult, insect-ridden location, reportedly a little nervous of how good a match her husband and his costar looked on paper. She needn’t have worried: Hepburn’s romantic dedication to Tracy is now legendary, and I remember, again, as a child, hoping for the sort of relationship that seemed symbolized in the fact that even as he lay dying, Hepburn spent every day with him, lying on the floor beside his bed. They never married because he was already married, and as a Catholic and family man, he never divorced. One can only feel horror and pity for the kind of wife forced before the whole world to recognize the shimmering immortality of that adulterous relationship. Tracy claimed, “My wife and Kate like things just the way they are,” and the truth or otherwise of this remained between the three of them, never publicly discussed. Tracy and Hepburn’s last film together, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), was the first Hepburn movie I ever saw, aged about five, with a running commentary from my mother on the physical perfection of Sidney Poitier. The movie is sentimental, but the sentiment, both political and personal, is at least genuine; I struggle to think of another film of which this is so true. Tracy, a long-term alcoholic, was basically dying during filming, and when he delivers the last line, “If what they feel for each other is even half what we felt, then that is everything,” Hepburn cries real tears. Six months later he was dead. They were both nominated for Oscars, and when she heard she had won again (Hepburn was not at the ceremony; she never picked up any of her four Oscars), her first and only question was “Did Spence get one too?” He did not, but she considered it a shared award.
So physical in her youth, always determined to perform her own stunts, old age struck Hepburn as one hell of a bore. She never hid like a starlet or felt destroyed by lost looks (she never really lost her looks), but she was frequently frustrated by not being able to do what had once come so easily. She once cried with frustration at having to employ a twenty-four-year-old stunt double to ride a bike for her in a film. At the time, Hepburn herself was seventy-two. Two days ago she died, aged ninety-six. I don’t know why I should be surprised, but I was, and when I found out, I wept, and felt ridiculous for weeping. How can someone you have never met make you cry? Two years ago I went to see The Philadelphia Story play on a big screen in Bryant Park. It was July and so hot my brother and I had been spending the day in the penguin exhibit at the zoo (we had no air-conditioning), but then we heard about the film-my favorite film-playing outdoors and rushed downtown.
We were too late to get a seat. It was packed like I have never seen any New York open space since the Dalai Lama came to Central Park. We were disconsolately looking for a wall to sit on, when suddenly two unholy fools, two morons, changed their minds and gave up their second-row seats. Hard to describe how happy we were. And then over the loudspeakers came some news: Hepburn had been taken ill in the night-gasps, I mean, real gasps-but it was okay-happy sighs-she was back from the hospital and wished us all well. We roared! And then the film started, and I said all the lines before they came, and my brother asked me to shut up. But I wasn’t the only one at it. When Katharine whispered to Jimmy Stewart, “Put me in your pocket, Mike!” a thousand people whispered with her. That was the best night at the movies I’ve ever had.
My teenage life was periodically dotted by melancholy little funerals, attended by me alone. I held one for Fred Astaire and one for Bette Davis and Cary Grant. On these occasions I would light candles in my room, cry a bit and mark the photo on the wall with a little cross in the right-hand corner. This time, less psychotically, I plan to spend the next few weeks watching every Hepburn movie and documentary that graces the television screen. I strongly recommend you watch as many as you can manage. She is the last of the great stars, the very last, and my God, I will miss the thrilling feeling of rewatching Adam’s Rib and knowing her to be still on the planet, still in that East Forty-ninth Street brownstone, still fabulous. When people truly feel for a popular artist-when they follow in their thousands behind Dickens’s coffin or Valentino’s-it is only the dues returned for pleasure given, and it never feels like enough. Few artists in any medium have given me as much pleasure as Hepburn. In fact, the marvelous weight of the pleasure ennobles all clichés, and I hope to see the obituaries full of “the last of her kind,” “the greatest star in the firmament” and the rest of that sort of guff because, for once, it is all true.
2. NATURE’S WORK OF ART
September 18, 2005, marks the centenary of the birth of Greta Garbo, an icon both resonant and remote to us. It feels a perilous centenary. In twenty years’ time, no one will need to make an argument for the centenary of Marilyn Monroe, with her hourglass silhouette, her voluptuous blondness. It is different with Garbo: you have to make a case for Garbo. She resonates because hers was ultimately a career of photographs, and this we recognize. She is remote because the great photographs of Garbo are abstractions; they are not of a woman, they are of a face. Garbo’s body was an irrelevance. From our twenty-first-century icons we demand bodies: bodies are to be admired, coveted and-if one works hard enough-gained. You can have something resembling Madonna’s body, if you try. But you cannot have Garbo’s face. It was hers alone, a gift she used for as long as she could make it signify and then, aged only thirty-six, withdrew from public view, keeping it hidden until she died.
This face was memorably described by the philosopher Roland Barthes, who identified it as a transition between two semiological epochs, two ways of seeing women. Garbo marked the passage from awe to charm, from concept to substance: “The face of Garbo is an idea, that of [Audrey] Hepburn an event.” There was something essential, Platonic and unindividuated in Greta’s face. She was Woman, as opposed to Audrey, who was a woman, whom we loved precisely because her beauty was so quirky, so particular. Garbo has no quirks at all. A close-up of her face appears to reveal fewer features than the rest of us have-such an expanse of white-punctuated by the minimum of detail, just enough to let you know that this is flesh, not spirit. Her vulnerable, changeable face is what comes prior to the emphatic mask of a beautiful woman-she is the ideal of beauty that those masks attempt to capture. Post-Garbo, we have taken what resonated in Garbo’s fluid sexuality and mystery and hardened it, made it a commodity. Take Garbo’s heavy, deep-set eyelids: these have become the mark of the diva, passing down through Marlene, to Marilyn and, more recently, to Madonna, in whom they have become ironic. Hers is the ultimate modern Garbo face, attached to a worked-out body, and also to the idea of female ambition, will and talent. The idea of Garbo is somehow more elevated than that-it doesn’t even condescend itself to the pursuit and fulfillment of talent. It merely is. Garbo was not an actress in the way Bette Davis was an actress. Garbo was a presence. In fact, is it okay to say, a hundred years on, that Garbo was not a very good actress? That some of her best work was still and silent? It could be said that her best director was, in fact, a still photographer, MGM’s famous Clarence Bull. He did not try to know her or “uncover” her, as her movie directors sometimes did, giving her those awkward, wordy speeches that revealed less than one raised eyebrow could manage. Bull understood the attraction of her self-containment. Years later he recalled that where other photographers had tried to penetrate the mystery, “I accepted it for what it was-nature’s work of art… She was the face and I was the camera. We each tried to get the best out of our equipment.”
Garbo’s equipment was not always so sublime. She grew up Greta Gustafs son, a lanky, overweight, big-footed girl from Sweden. Despite Hollywood’s later intimations of an aristocratic lineage, she was poor, sharing a four-room, cold-water flat with her family in a Stockholm tenement. When her gardener father died of kidney failure, fourteen-year-old Greta dropped out of school and began work in the millinery department at the Paul Bergstrom department store. She wanted to be an actress, always. Discovered by her manager modeling hats in the mirror, she was asked to appear in a commercial film to promote millinery, How Not to Dress. This led to other commercial shorts. In her capacity as shopgirl, she would look out for famous Swedish actresses in the store and make sure she waited on them.
It was through a connection she made here that she secured an audition for the state-sponsored Dramatic Theatre Academy, where she was accepted at age seventeen. There she met director Mauritz Stiller, the first of many Garbo mentors. He changed her name and told her to lose twenty pounds. He cast her in The Saga of Gosta Berling (1924), which was a success in Sweden and Germany and brought Stiller to the attention of Louis B. Mayer at MGM. They met in Germany. Mayer’s original interest was Stiller, who had directed more than forty-five films, but he saw something in Garbo. He invited them both to America, although not before a word in Stiller’s ear: “In America, we don’t like fat women.” Garbo went on a diet of spinach for three weeks, was terribly sick, lost the weight and replaced it with no muscle. She stayed that way-slender, shapeless, suggestive of a dangerous lack of physical vitality-throughout her movie career. With her newly revealed cheekbones and wispy frame, she embarked upon her first photo shoots in New York. Any other hopeful starlet would have posed for cheesecake shots, swimsuits, “come hither” glances-the whole Hollywood routine. Garbo’s shots, lit with the “Rembrandt lighting” that would make her famous, are sculptural portraits, more Rodin than raunch. The Garbo image is yet unformed, but the beginnings of an iconic persona are here. She had a relationship with light like no other actress; wherever you directed it on her face, it created luminosity. She needed no soft or diffuse lighting to disguise defects. There were no defects. And then there is that sense of European ennui, of weltschmerz, that no MGM player had projected before. They had vamps, they had sex bombs, but they’d never had existential depression. “In America you are all so happy,” she told a reporter. “Why are you all so happy all the time? I am not always happy. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. When I am angry, I am very bad. I shut my door and do not speak.”
Once she reached Hollywood, the fan magazines responded enthusiastically, not as much to the fiery sexuality she was asked to play in those early silents, but to the sadness that seemed to lie behind it. A typical headline: “What is wrong with Greta Garbo?” Whatever it was, she was unable to articulate it. She refused all interviews, and her few private letters are banal-she often complained about the vulgarity of American film but had few ideas of her own to bring to the table. To the director of Queen Christina (the story of the abdication of the Swedish queen, a pet project that Garbo was very anxious about), she could only offer the suggestion that there should be a scene with trousers. She put herself in others’ hands. First Stiller, then the actor John Gilbert, the lesbian clique of Mercedes de Acosta, and the producer Irving Thalberg. Louis B. Mayer was driven mad by all these advisers and intercessors; he thought she was too easily influenced. And yet what comes across on film is a resolute, inviolable selfhood, ultimately impenetrable by other people. The public felt it, and expressed it in their popular nicknames: “The Swedish Sphinx” and “The Divine.”
Flesh and the Devil (1926) was her smash hit, creating a Garbo model that the studio exploited for the next fifteen years. It is silent and possibly her best film. She was only twenty-one, but her world-weariness on-screen suggests an older woman, longed for and chased after by the puppyish John Gilbert, who was to become her real-life lover. This romance, as it was rendered on-screen, scandalized America: a young man lying underneath a more experienced woman who seemed to literally feed from his mouth as she kissed him. It was a ravishment-female moviegoers loved it. This was a new kind of woman. For this reason she was punished in the movies (in Flesh and the Devil she drowns in ice water; in Camille it’s tuberculosis; in Anna Karenina it’s that pesky train), but she was free in life. It was Gilbert who suffered when she refused to marry him; it was Mayer who went crazy when she went on strike rather than make a corny movie (Women Love Diamonds) that she didn’t like the look of.
What was the matter with Garbo? Mayer couldn’t understand it. Why wasn’t she thankful? But after Flesh and the Devil, the power had changed hands: Garbo was an MGM gold mine. Garbo’s imperial aloofness appealed to Depression-era women on a scale that even Mayer could not have predicted. They were dependent; she was beyond dependence. Whatever made her happy or sad, it came from within. Film critics often mention her unusual responses: where another actress would laugh, she cries, when they would be serious, she plays it light. She seems to respond to something deep inside herself, not to the actor she plays opposite. It was a world of her own she was in, and it was wonderful to watch.
There are two halves of Garbo’s career: before and after sound. She made the transition as late as she possibly could, in 1930. “GARBO TALKS!” announced the publicity, and luckily for MGM, the voice matched the face. Her first line (“Gimme me a visky, ginger ale on the side-and don’t be stingy, baby!”) was delivered in that deep, miserable, sexy baritone that delighted her fans because they had, subconsciously, expected it. But a talking Garbo also revealed less fortunate traits. Her line readings are offbeat, bizarre; she had an unsteady grasp of the English language. She is a terrible reactor to spoken dialogue. If someone else is speaking, she simply looks bored. For the next ten years, her success in talkies depended on how much she was allowed to use her real strengths: her face, her eyes. This is why the silent final scene of Queen Christina (1933) is justly famous. Her lover, for whom she has renounced the throne, has just been killed by a jealous rival; she walks to the prow of the ship she is on and becomes a part of its helm-you may remember the image from Titanic. Where DiCaprio announces himself to the world, Garbo does nothing. Says nothing. Moves nothing on her face. It is a Swedish mix of cold water and private thoughts. The camera gets closer and closer. What you see there is humanized stoicism; she is going through what she is going through, deeply, personally and without public expression. She is resolutely herself.
This kind of interiority was soon to be under threat from a new breed of actress, women such as Joan Crawford, who projected everything they had outward to the public, leaving nothing in reserve. Crawford admired Garbo greatly but was already preparing to supplant her as the queen of MGM. She described an encounter on a staircase during the filming of Grand Hotel (1932): “She stopped and cupped my face in her hands and said, ‘What a pity. Our first picture together, and we won’t work with each other. I am so sorry. You have a marvelous face.’ If there was ever a time in my life I might have become a lesbian that was it.”
Crawford did not succumb, but many others did, including Marlene Dietrich, the playwright Mercedes de Acosta and Louise Brooks, who described Garbo as a “completely masculine dyke.” Closer friends thought of her androg yny as more complicated, nearer to the character of Queen Christina, who, disguised as a man, shares a bed with John Gilbert. Gore Vidal, an acquaintance from the last twenty years of her life, claims: “She thought of herself as a boy with another boy, that was her sexual fantasy.” She habitually referred to herself in the masculine, as a “bachelor”; at parties she would ask: “Where’s the little boy’s room?”
In the movies they were still determined to make a lady of her. In Ninotchka (1939), playing a Soviet apparatchik, she goes from macho, humorless Russian to glamorous Parisian party girl. Famously, she laughs. She can’t laugh. When she satirizes her own European dolor, she is hilarious. (“The show trials were a great success,” she deadpans. “We are going to have fewer but better Russians.”) But when she becomes gay and carefree, the movie dies. Ninotchka was a huge success (mostly thanks to an ingenious marketing campaign), but the studio picked up on the wrong trait, the newfound gaiety. Two-Faced Woman (1941), in which a newly happy Garbo does the rumba and goes swimming, was a disaster. You don’t put the sphinx in a swimsuit.
It was to be her last movie. The uniformly bad reviews for Two-Faced Woman were terribly wounding to her, but more than this, she had spotted something in the mirror. Two faint lines on either side of her mouth, connecting her nose to her chin. The face was no longer eternal, ethereal. It was over. Garbo after 1941 is simply a tale of withdrawal. She stands high in the roll call of twentieth-century recluses. But it would be more accurate, her biographer Barry Paris suggests, to call her a “hermit-about-town.” She walked for miles through New York every day, window-shopping. In the 1960s, almost every Manhattanite had a Garbo-spotting story to tell. She described herself at this time as “a mollusc. I don’t move, I don’t do anything. I just am.” This is not quite true: she had friends, walking partners. She went to auctions and bought paintings and antiques for her lavish apartment (when she died she left a $32 million estate, which included two Renoirs). It is no story of tragedy. She wished to live, only not publicly. She dressed as she liked, did as she liked. In her own later years, Crawford told a journalist: “I never go out unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star. If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.” Garbo didn’t even look as good as the girl next door. Her face (though she refused to believe it) was still beautiful, her wardrobe less so: sweaters, hats, scarves, slacks, raincoats. She kept a screwed-up piece of Kleenex in her left hand to cover her face should anyone try to photograph her. If she saw a fan approaching, she would say to her walking companion, “We’ve got a customer,” and change direction. She wanted to be alone. Garbo, the icon, was over. Age made of Greta a person, and the personhood of Garbo was never for sale. She would be myth or nothing at all.
Eleven – NOTES ON VISCONTI’S BELLISSIMA
“Please don’t retouch my wrinkles. It took me so long to earn them.”
– ANNA MAGNANI
PREFACE
In the Piazza della Madonna dei Monti, in the ombra di colosseo, expats gather to complain. Not about the piazza itself, generally agreed to be among the prettiest in Rome. The central café, shrouded in pink bougainvillea, looks out upon a two-tiered fountain, mercifully cherub free. The thin white column of a Ukrainian orthodox church is discreet, unexpected. Depending on the hour, we watch mighty-calved American kids drink cheap hock straight from the bottle; tanned Roman girls, chain-smoking, dressed in the sunset silks they bought in Mumbai; hipster gays en route to Testaccio; three boxer dogs; delighted German tourists who think themselves the first to discover the place; very old Italians of suspicious vitality; two boys who use the church door as a goal mouth; and a beautiful young man who has been sleeping rough here for six months after a disagreement with his girlfriend. The young man is much appreciated-he is the sort of local color for which we came to Rome in the first place. His stench is monitored: sweet in the first month, eye watering in the fourth, café clearing in the sixth. And we enjoy Sundays, when the Ukrainian church congregation spills outside, bringing with it a close-harmony praise song. Everything else is complaint. Italian bureaucracy is impossible, the TV unwatchable, the government unbelievable, and the newspapers impenetrable. Expats in Rome are somehow able to consistently maintain their sense of outraged wonder, despite all reading The Dark Heart of Italy two years earlier on the plane over. Italian Women is a subject to stretch from morning coffee to midday ravioli. “The land that feminism forgot!” And on cue it all rolls out like an index: the degrading sexualization of, the nightly televisual humiliation of, Berlusconi’s condescending opinion of, perilous abortion rights of, low wages of, minimal parliamentary presence of, invisibility within the church of, et cetera. Yet there exist confusing countersigns. The new mothers with tiny babes-in-arm, welcome at any gathering. The four women chatting at the next table, a frank, practical conversation about sexual pleasure. The handsome lady grocer with her giant biceps and third-trimester belly, unpacking boxes of beer from the delivery truck, separating street fights, bullying her menfolk, lecturing the local drunks, overcharging the tourists, strategizing with the priests, running this piazza and everyone in it. Respected, desired, feared.
Such countersigns are not unified: they do not all point in one direction, and so as expats we find it difficult to process them-which may be the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant sensibility. The strongest countersign of all is Anna’s face. It follows you everywhere, staring out from restaurants, pub bathrooms, private houses, lined up on the display table of the edicolas, and writ large on the walls of the city itself, for this summer marks her centenary. Nannarella. Mamma Roma. La Magnani. Anna is a confusing countersign, in the land that feminism forgot.
1
A chorus of women sing in a radio studio. Plain women, not actresses, of early middle age, and dressed in black, with simple strands of pearls around their necks. The credits identify them as the RAI choir. [60] The lead soprano has a light but discernible mustache. The song is “Saria possibile?” (Could it be possible?) from Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, a silly opera about a peasant who, in his desperation to woo a beautiful, unattainable woman, buys a love potion from a mountebank. (The potion turns out to be red wine.) Visconti pans through this choir dispassionately, even a little cruelly, as it responds with minute precision to the baton of a dashing male conductor. A chorus of Italian women, eager to please. The song ends; we move to a smaller studio. A young man at a desk speaks into the microphone, to announce the premise of the film:
We are looking for a girl between six and eight years. A pretty Italian girl. Take your girls to Stella Films in Cinecittà, Via Tuscolana, km 9. It could be your and her lucky day!
The next shot is unexpected. A great waste ground: what would seem to be the ruins of a city, with the blown-out frames of buildings and a mass of women and girl children, their best clothes on their backs (being transported? fleeing some disaster?). Another beat reveals its true, benign aspect: the outskirts of a movie studio. The frames are for set facades, as yet unfinished. The women are here to audition their girl children. But still men yell at them through megaphones. (“Keep quiet and stay calm!”) The camera stays very high. This is a pared-down, unfamiliar Visconti, a decade before the opulence of Il gattopardo. The borrowed severity of neorealismo is not quite natural to him. His instinctive tendency toward the fantastic has only been transferred from style to content, to the hopes of this great female chorus, who now push as one toward a narrow doorway.
A woman. A woman both like and not like the rest, in a black skirt suit, nipped waspishly at the waist, spilling out at both extremes, with black shoes and wild black hair and black pouches under her eyes, wailing like a heroine of the Greeks. She has lost her child! But the camera remains aloof, a gesture we might mistake for Visconti’s familiar misogyny, if it were not for what Magnani makes of the angle. Think of it as a gift from director to actress. We are so far from Magnani she is practically inaudible, yet this is no obstacle to comprehending her. We see her anger, panic, and desperation-and even that these emotions are both sincere and a little overdone, un po’ esagerato, in a calculated manner, in case the sympathy thus roused might help her case later. All this is put across with her hands (the natural advantage of Italian actors) but also in the stamp of her little foot, the way her hair flies from its bun, the way her hips bend forward and back in pantomime outrage. What a silent star Magnani would have been! Now she leaves the chorus and runs alone, across this desolate city, as she did in Roma, città aperta. The chorus passes through opportunity’s door without her.
Bellissima as a series of formal, ancient gestures, in which an all-female chorus threatens to swallow a single female actor, and from which that actor determinedly separates herself first, and then-by force of will-also a second actor, her child. A cinematic rerun of Aeschylus’s revolutionary innovation.
The chorus pushes forward toward a makeshift stage. The name of the fictional film is on the wall behind them-Oggi domani mai-but so is the name of the real film: Bellissima. The character of Director is also both fictional and real, Alessandro Blasetti. [61] He walks through the crowd (taking great care over his acting, wanting to get the playing of himself right) to the tune of Donizetti’s “Charlatan’s Theme,” although he did not know this at the time. (Visconti: “One day somebody told him about it. He wrote me an indignant letter: “Really, I’d never have believed you capable of such a thing,” and so on: and I replied: “Why? We’re all charlatans, us directors. It is we who put illusions into the heads of mothers and little girls… We’re selling a love potion which isn’t really a magic elixir: it’s simply a glass of Bordeaux.”) The director, the assistants, the producers, the hangers-on-powerful men with their powerful boredom-climb the elevated stage and prepare to judge, positioning themselves in attitudes of jolly contempt. In Italy, a woman is always the looked-at-thing, always appraised by that measure. Today, tomorrow-this beauty contest is as old as the judgment of Paris. The descendants of these men still audition veline [62] each Roman summer. As any expat will tell you, the queues run for miles. Now, here, in postwar Italy, the first little girl lifts her skirts, gyrates, pouts and rolls her eyes, doing “an impression of Betty Grable.” The men smile. “You’re starting early!” cries Blasetti.
2
Bellissima, in its initial conception (a story by Cesare Zavattini), was intended as a riff on the hypocrisy of cinema. Maddalena Cecconi (Magnani), a working-class woman from Rome’s urban suburbs, wants her daughter, Maria (Tina Apicella), to be a star. She will use whatever she has-her savings, her own sympathetic sex appeal-in the attempt to secure for her daughter what Italians call a raccomandazione di ferro. [63] In the end, she gets what she wants but, in the same moment, turns from it: too much of the empty, cruel, and capitalistic world of Cinecittà has been revealed to her. But though the cruelty of Cinecittà was Zavattini’s neorealistic focus, it did not prove to be Visconti’s. “The story really was a pretext,” he admitted later. “The whole subject was Magnani: I wanted to create a portrait of a woman out of her, a contemporary woman, a mother, and I think we pretty well succeeded because Magnani lent me her enormous talent, her personality.” This is the same as saying Magnani’s personality overwhelmed Zavattini’s concept. To allow Zavattini’s moral tale to function, one would have to feel Magnani’s soul was actually in the hazard. Which is not possible. Magnani as a personality being too self-reliant, too confident, with too constant an access to joy. Even when she is being blackmailed, she laughs. Her character-played by anyone else-is a tragic woman pursuing the dreams of her youth through her child. But no hint of the female zombie, no trace of Norma Desmond, clings to Magnani. Everything she wants- certainly a little money, possibly a little reflected fame-she wants directly, in a straight and open manner, as men are said to want things. Her dream is strategic, not delusional. And in her mind, the child remains only a child, come tutte: “Well, at that age they’re all pretty.” This is her sensible reply to a calculated compliment from the slick young stranger, Annovazzi (Walter Chiari), a production assistant low down in the Cinecittà food chain who is willing to do certain favors in exchange for certain favors-the oldest of Italian stories. “Yes, that’s true,” he agrees. “But I prefer their mothers.” Annovazzi is younger than Maddalena, skinnier, and in a bland cinematic sense, better looking. But she knows as we know: he is the shadow of her shadow. On the other hand, he has access to the director, Blasetti. All this passes through Magnani’s face in a mannerist instant: a sharp glance in which she responds at once to the cheek of the boy and the perfect civility and necessity of the compliment. (It would be rude of him not to notice that she is a goddess!) Few actresses are so directly appreciative of their own earthy, natural attractions. On-screen, Magnani is the opposite of neurotic.
3
The complicated cinematic partnership between straight women and gay men (Irving Rapper and Bette Davis, George Cukor and Joan Crawford) does not usually result in this easy, playful relation between woman and world. For Davis and Crawford the roles came laced with Grand Guignol, campy tragedy, the arch appreciation of female artifice. Both actresses traded what was transient and human in their work for the waxwork grandeur of eternal iconicity. I made her what she is today may be the ultimate Hollywood sentence. Laced always with a little bitterness, perhaps because the woman-muse of the gay Svengali is a double agent. Loving the same impossible men, living in the same impossible patriarchy, but always able to apply for the love and acceptance of the public. (She can become a national treasure.) Magnani-the sexy-maternal, working-class Roman-is Italy as it dreams of itself. Visconti represents a different Italy entirely: gay, aristocratic, Milanese. Inevitably the partnership had its poisonous side. Visconti on Magnani: “Left completely to her own devices, I have to say, she would never have achieved a happy result.” Hard to believe-her own devices seem to be all she has. Hyperani mate, frankly scheming, playing the odds, rolling the eyes, huffing, puffing, bursting the binds of script and taking her costars with her. Mi raccomando, eh?-uffa!-per carità!-abbia pazienza!-O dio mio!-come no?-meno male! Italian is a language packed with verbal fillers. Magnani makes musical use of them. No gap between sentences survives without an exclamation of one sort or another. And witness her making her way back through that chorus, Maria in hand, convincing each pushy mother she pushes past that it really can be no other way; giving each woman just what they need-smile or insult-in order to let her pass. In front of Blasetti at last, Maddalena turns on the charm but with a blatant Roman cunning that no one could mistake for coquetry. Blasetti: “But I said the child has to be six or seven years old, not less… she looks a bit small.” Maddalena: “Really? No, it must be the dress that makes her short.” The legends of Davis and Crawford are built on a camp proposition, equal parts adoration and contempt. All women are artificial. All women are, in the end, actresses. Womanhood itself is an act! But Magnani turns the proposition on its head. She is the incarnation of that paradoxical imperative: act natural. She is always and everywhere apparently without artifice, spontaneous, just another Roman woman come tutte. Which leads to a strange conclusion: the actor isn’t acting-the character is acting. For isn’t it Maddalena, and not Magnani, who puts on a bit of an act now and then, when circumstances call for it?
One morning an eccentric acting teacher approaches the family. She wants to give little Maria lessons that Maddalena can’t afford. Alone in her bedroom, Maddalena considers the offer, combing her unruly hair and addressing her own reflection in the mirror: “To act… after all, what is acting? If I imagined to be somebody else… if I pretended to be somebody else… I’d be acting… But you can act… You’re my daughter and you can become an actress. You really can. I could have, too, if I had wanted to.”
With Magnani, womanhood is utterly real-it simply does what it must to get by.
4
Much Italian cinema revolves around the classic Italian philosophical problem: blonde or brunette? For Fellini, the answer was, usually, both. Antonioni solved the dilemma on an abstract intellectual plane by discovering Monica Vitti, the blonde with the face of a brunette. In Visconti’s Bellissima no counterweight is put up against black-haired Anna Magnani, for what counterweight could there possibly be? Her husband Spartaco (Gastone Renzelli) has the elemental, hulking beauty his name implies (a nonactor, he was picked out by the director’s assistant, a young Zeffirelli, from a crowd of bone merchants in a Roman slaughterhouse). But in character, in personality, he is no match for her. He is left to plot weakly with his mother against her (“Mamma, I won’t even bother with her. She always does what she likes anyway!”), though only for the length of a lunchtime, as he eats the meals his mother still cooks for him. He seeks no real alternative to Magnani.
Bellissima is that rare thing in Italian cinema: a film in which the woman is not a question posed to a man. Even more rare: she is not in question to herself. She finds herself perfectly satisfactory, or at least, her flaws cause her no more than the normal amount of discomfort. A less common trait in a female movie star can hardly be imagined.
In the parrucchiere where little Maria is taken for a haircut:
Hairdresser: (to Maddalena) I could give you a good style, too.
Maddalena: Don’t even try, no one has managed that.
Hairdresser: I could manage.
Maddalena: (laughing) You’d waste your time!
Like Davis and Crawford, Magnani is an unconventional beauty. Unlike them, she is beautiful without any cosmetic effort whatsoever, and moreover, without any interest in the cosmetic. Cosmetic beauty is not the type that attracts her.
To wit: in the courtyard of her grim casa popolare, [64] projected on a giant makeshift screen, a Hollywood blockbuster plays. Maddalena watches, enraptured. Spartaco comes to retrieve her:
Spartaco: Maddalena, leave the cinema alone.
Maddalena: Oh, Spartaco, you don’t understand me. Look at those beautiful things, look at where we live. When I see these things…
Spartaco: Maddalena, it’s a fantasy.
Maddalena: It’s not!
We might expect to see up there Rita Hayworth in Gilda, peeling off those silk elbow-length gloves. But it is Howard Hawks’s Red River, a wild open plain, two cowboys on their horses. The object of Maddalena’s desire, a herd of bulls crossing a creek.
5
The chorus of mothers gossip among themselves. The rumor is that so-and-so has a recommendation of iron (“He was saying how pretty the girl was… but he was looking at her mother!” “Ah, now I understand!” “That’s how it is these days!”); the fix is in; the auditions are worthless-it has all already been decided. A typical Roman inside job. Something must be done: they’ll unite to complain, it’s a vergogna, they’ll confront the producer! However, upon consideration, a more attractive, less violent, solution is found: each woman will look to her own recommendation. For one lady’s husband knows the director of the phone company (“What does that matter?” asks Maddalena. The reply: “He’s important”); someone else’s husband has a friend on set; yet another has a Cinecittà waiter in her family.
And Maddalena knows Annovazzi. They meet in the Borghese gardens, dappled in leafy light, the scene of a Shakespearean comedy. “I never come here!” she says, for there exists a Roman life that does not include and never comes near the expats of Monti, or the Forum, the Pantheon, or even the Colosseum. The pair walk to a tree and lean against it like lovers. Annovazzi plays the cynic: “We’re so used to recommendations, both to making and receiving them… In Italy we rely on recommendations: ‘Please don’t forget.’ ‘I assure you.’ ‘I promise you.’… But who are we supposed to remember and why?” The only safe thing, he concludes, is to “put the person who needs your help in a position to ask for that help.”
He strokes her arm, offering her the possibility of the sexual favor instead of the financial. She removes his hand, laughing. “No, this way is much better.” He takes her fifty thousand lire, supposedly to smooth the ground for Maria, in the form of small favors (“A bunch of flowers to the producer of the film, a bottle of perfume for the lover of the producer”). In the event he will spend it on a Lambretta for himself.
“How shrewd you are!”
“It’s a practical way of getting through life.”
Even as she hands over her pocketbook, she knows he can’t be trusted. Later, when she discovers the deception, she only laughs her big laugh. It is a plot point hard to understand if you are not Italian. She pays him for a favor. He buys a bike. She finds out. But she is not angry, because he will still remember her, especially.
6
“The big mistake of neorealismo,” claimed Visconti, “to my way of thinking, is its unrelenting and sometimes dour concentration on social reality. What neorealismo needs… ‘dangerous’ mixture of reality and romanticism.”
He found the perfect objective correlative in the summer life of the Roman projects: reality on the inside, cinema in the outside (courtyard). Inside, Maddalena’s reality is stark: she earns the little lire she has going door to door, giving injections to invalids and hypochondriac ladies, a business that survives more on Maddalena’s charm than the efficacy of her “medicines.” Otherwise, alliances with other women prove hard to forge. In Italy, your mother-in-law (suocera, a perfectly vile-sounding word) is your nemesis, the other mothers are your competitors and the gossiping neighbors in the stairwell, your daily tormentors. But there is also a practical, strategic sisterhood, which makes itself visible in times of crisis. When Spartaco physically attacks Maddalena (she has spent money they don’t have on a dress for Maria’s screen test), the women of the housing estate invade the Cecconi apartment, another chorus, heavyset and loud-mouthed, outnumbering Spartaco, who has Maria in his arms and is trying to take her away, as his paternal property. Maddalena is hysterical: she screams and weeps. It is, as far as an expat is concerned, a scene of horrific domestic terror. A raging Spartaco calls the women balene, whales (the English translation-one of many poor examples-renders it “cows”), and they sing a whale song of overlapping accusation. Visconti, an opera buff, choreographs the scene as an echo of the RAI choir.
“You only do it because I’m weaker!” cries Maddalena.
“Spartaco, today you really crossed the line!” cry the whales.
“I want my daughter to be somebody… Am I entitled to feel this way or not?… She mustn’t depend on anyone or get beaten like me!”
“Spartaco, she went all the way to Piazza Vittorio to a man with diabetes!”
“I’m full of bruises! I’m all swollen!”
“Spartaco, she’s made so many sacrifices!”
“Maddalena, stop acting,” yells Spartaco, to the outrage of the whales, as Maddalena collapses into a chair. Frightened he may have gone too far, he releases the child to the protection of one of them, and runs from the house.
“Women like me,” said the actress Anna Magnani, “can only submit to men capable of dominating them, and I have never found anyone capable of dominating me.” It is the sort of statement to make an expat sigh. What is this mysterious deflected Italian feminism that can only take power discreetly, without ever saying that this is what it is doing? And what is an expat to make of the sudden evaporation of Maddalena’s tears (Spartaco was right!) as her face creases into a coy smile? The whales, nodding appreciatively at the art of the thing, pass the child, hand to hand, back to its mother. The crisis is averted.
Congratulations are due. Italy is truly the land of the sign and countersign, incomprehensible to outsiders. Maddalena begins to laugh.
“We’ve won, darling. If we didn’t do that, we wouldn’t get an audition. My dear, do you think I’m working for nothing?”
The director Vittorio De Sica called Magnani’s laugh “loud, overwhelming and tragic.” Tragic is a word men will reach for if called upon to describe women outside of their relation to men. In American cinema, a woman’s laugh is almost always flirtatious, a response to a male call. The unexpected thing about Magnani is that she makes herself laugh.
7
In Italy, the right recommendation will get you through the door, to the top of the class, and behind the scenes. Maddalena’s has got her this far, into the editing room (“Mr. Annovazzi told me to come and see you”), where a beautiful young girl lines up the screen tests, ready to take downstairs to Blasetti and the producers. Maddalena, in the process of pleading for one more favor (she wants to be hidden in the projection room to watch her daughter’s test) recognizes the girl. Wasn’t she in that courtyard summer movie? Sotto il sole di Roma? The girl’s face contorts, a mix of pride and dejection. In Italy, a woman is the looked-at-thing, until people tire of looking at her, at which point she is cut loose:
“I don’t make films anymore… I’m not an actress. They only hired me once or twice… as I was the type they needed. I even got my hopes up. And I lost my boyfriend and my job… I convinced myself I was so beautiful and so great, and yet I’m stuck here, doing the editing. Nobody called me, so I’m here.”
Maddalena is shocked, then calms herself. For Maddalena, the dream is the truth: “Surely it can’t be that way for everyone.” In the projection room, she watches, hidden in a corner. Maria’s film rolls. Her tiny face is elaborately painted. She wears the dress for which Maddalena received her bruises. Here are the men again, slouching in their chairs, making their decisions. But on the screen, Maria, stumbling over her words, begins to cry, then scream. A scream of real distress, of protest. The men, finding it very funny, set each other off in rounds of cruel laughter (“What a disaster!” “She’s a dwarf. Look!”), Annovazzi first among them.
A little later there is the sentimental neorealist ending: Maddalena nobly refuses the contract that is eventually offered to Maria (“I didn’t bring her into this world to amuse anyone. To her father and me she’s beautiful!”), an impossibility given her situation and the money involved. It would be pleasant to give oneself fully to this conclusion, and to the marital, erotic frisson that seems to spring up between Spartaco and Maddalena in the final frames, but a dusting of political idealism covers it. For he does not blame her and she needn’t explain herself, and as the moneymen go off with their tails between their legs, these two Romans collapse on the bed together (“This crazy wife of mine,” murmurs Spartaco as his hand reaches out, not to hit her this time, but to caress her) and hold on to each other for dear life. The vitality and mystery of a working-class marriage (hearing the voice of Burt Lancaster through the window, Maddalena, forgetting her worries for a moment, murmurs: “How simpatico he is!” Spartaco: “Now Maddalena, you really deserve a slap!” Maddalena: “What? Can’t I joke now?”) is not natural territory for Visconti, and the implied Marxist sentiment (They have nothing! But they need nothing!) is too smoothly sold.
Really the movie ends fifteen minutes earlier. Here where Maddalena covers her child’s eyes with a palm like a priest over the face of a dead man. Lowering Maria down to floor, she removes her entirely from view, out of that little chink of reflected illumination cast in this dark room by the light of the screen. There is still the power of refusal. There is still the possibility of removing the looked-at-thing from the gaze of those who care for nothing but its surface. Today? Tomorrow? Never! But Magnani’s own face stays where it is, oppressively close to us and to the camera, makeup free, wrinkled, bagged under the eyes, shadowed round the mouth, masculine and feminine in equal parts, a hawk nose splitting it down the middle, a different kind of challenge to the male gaze. How beautiful she is! Then she, too, turns away.
“Please don’t retouch my wrinkles. It took me so long to earn them.”
– ANNA MAGNANI
PREFACE
In the Piazza della Madonna dei Monti, in the ombra di colosseo, expats gather to complain. Not about the piazza itself, generally agreed to be among the prettiest in Rome. The central café, shrouded in pink bougainvillea, looks out upon a two-tiered fountain, mercifully cherub free. The thin white column of a Ukrainian orthodox church is discreet, unexpected. Depending on the hour, we watch mighty-calved American kids drink cheap hock straight from the bottle; tanned Roman girls, chain-smoking, dressed in the sunset silks they bought in Mumbai; hipster gays en route to Testaccio; three boxer dogs; delighted German tourists who think themselves the first to discover the place; very old Italians of suspicious vitality; two boys who use the church door as a goal mouth; and a beautiful young man who has been sleeping rough here for six months after a disagreement with his girlfriend. The young man is much appreciated-he is the sort of local color for which we came to Rome in the first place. His stench is monitored: sweet in the first month, eye watering in the fourth, café clearing in the sixth. And we enjoy Sundays, when the Ukrainian church congregation spills outside, bringing with it a close-harmony praise song. Everything else is complaint. Italian bureaucracy is impossible, the TV unwatchable, the government unbelievable, and the newspapers impenetrable. Expats in Rome are somehow able to consistently maintain their sense of outraged wonder, despite all reading The Dark Heart of Italy two years earlier on the plane over. Italian Women is a subject to stretch from morning coffee to midday ravioli. “The land that feminism forgot!” And on cue it all rolls out like an index: the degrading sexualization of, the nightly televisual humiliation of, Berlusconi’s condescending opinion of, perilous abortion rights of, low wages of, minimal parliamentary presence of, invisibility within the church of, et cetera. Yet there exist confusing countersigns. The new mothers with tiny babes-in-arm, welcome at any gathering. The four women chatting at the next table, a frank, practical conversation about sexual pleasure. The handsome lady grocer with her giant biceps and third-trimester belly, unpacking boxes of beer from the delivery truck, separating street fights, bullying her menfolk, lecturing the local drunks, overcharging the tourists, strategizing with the priests, running this piazza and everyone in it. Respected, desired, feared.
Such countersigns are not unified: they do not all point in one direction, and so as expats we find it difficult to process them-which may be the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant sensibility. The strongest countersign of all is Anna’s face. It follows you everywhere, staring out from restaurants, pub bathrooms, private houses, lined up on the display table of the edicolas, and writ large on the walls of the city itself, for this summer marks her centenary. Nannarella. Mamma Roma. La Magnani. Anna is a confusing countersign, in the land that feminism forgot.
1
A chorus of women sing in a radio studio. Plain women, not actresses, of early middle age, and dressed in black, with simple strands of pearls around their necks. The credits identify them as the RAI choir. [60] The lead soprano has a light but discernible mustache. The song is “Saria possibile?” (Could it be possible?) from Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, a silly opera about a peasant who, in his desperation to woo a beautiful, unattainable woman, buys a love potion from a mountebank. (The potion turns out to be red wine.) Visconti pans through this choir dispassionately, even a little cruelly, as it responds with minute precision to the baton of a dashing male conductor. A chorus of Italian women, eager to please. The song ends; we move to a smaller studio. A young man at a desk speaks into the microphone, to announce the premise of the film:
We are looking for a girl between six and eight years. A pretty Italian girl. Take your girls to Stella Films in Cinecittà, Via Tuscolana, km 9. It could be your and her lucky day!
The next shot is unexpected. A great waste ground: what would seem to be the ruins of a city, with the blown-out frames of buildings and a mass of women and girl children, their best clothes on their backs (being transported? fleeing some disaster?). Another beat reveals its true, benign aspect: the outskirts of a movie studio. The frames are for set facades, as yet unfinished. The women are here to audition their girl children. But still men yell at them through megaphones. (“Keep quiet and stay calm!”) The camera stays very high. This is a pared-down, unfamiliar Visconti, a decade before the opulence of Il gattopardo. The borrowed severity of neorealismo is not quite natural to him. His instinctive tendency toward the fantastic has only been transferred from style to content, to the hopes of this great female chorus, who now push as one toward a narrow doorway.
A woman. A woman both like and not like the rest, in a black skirt suit, nipped waspishly at the waist, spilling out at both extremes, with black shoes and wild black hair and black pouches under her eyes, wailing like a heroine of the Greeks. She has lost her child! But the camera remains aloof, a gesture we might mistake for Visconti’s familiar misogyny, if it were not for what Magnani makes of the angle. Think of it as a gift from director to actress. We are so far from Magnani she is practically inaudible, yet this is no obstacle to comprehending her. We see her anger, panic, and desperation-and even that these emotions are both sincere and a little overdone, un po’ esagerato, in a calculated manner, in case the sympathy thus roused might help her case later. All this is put across with her hands (the natural advantage of Italian actors) but also in the stamp of her little foot, the way her hair flies from its bun, the way her hips bend forward and back in pantomime outrage. What a silent star Magnani would have been! Now she leaves the chorus and runs alone, across this desolate city, as she did in Roma, città aperta. The chorus passes through opportunity’s door without her.
Bellissima as a series of formal, ancient gestures, in which an all-female chorus threatens to swallow a single female actor, and from which that actor determinedly separates herself first, and then-by force of will-also a second actor, her child. A cinematic rerun of Aeschylus’s revolutionary innovation.
The chorus pushes forward toward a makeshift stage. The name of the fictional film is on the wall behind them-Oggi domani mai-but so is the name of the real film: Bellissima. The character of Director is also both fictional and real, Alessandro Blasetti. [61] He walks through the crowd (taking great care over his acting, wanting to get the playing of himself right) to the tune of Donizetti’s “Charlatan’s Theme,” although he did not know this at the time. (Visconti: “One day somebody told him about it. He wrote me an indignant letter: “Really, I’d never have believed you capable of such a thing,” and so on: and I replied: “Why? We’re all charlatans, us directors. It is we who put illusions into the heads of mothers and little girls… We’re selling a love potion which isn’t really a magic elixir: it’s simply a glass of Bordeaux.”) The director, the assistants, the producers, the hangers-on-powerful men with their powerful boredom-climb the elevated stage and prepare to judge, positioning themselves in attitudes of jolly contempt. In Italy, a woman is always the looked-at-thing, always appraised by that measure. Today, tomorrow-this beauty contest is as old as the judgment of Paris. The descendants of these men still audition veline [62] each Roman summer. As any expat will tell you, the queues run for miles. Now, here, in postwar Italy, the first little girl lifts her skirts, gyrates, pouts and rolls her eyes, doing “an impression of Betty Grable.” The men smile. “You’re starting early!” cries Blasetti.
2
Bellissima, in its initial conception (a story by Cesare Zavattini), was intended as a riff on the hypocrisy of cinema. Maddalena Cecconi (Magnani), a working-class woman from Rome’s urban suburbs, wants her daughter, Maria (Tina Apicella), to be a star. She will use whatever she has-her savings, her own sympathetic sex appeal-in the attempt to secure for her daughter what Italians call a raccomandazione di ferro. [63] In the end, she gets what she wants but, in the same moment, turns from it: too much of the empty, cruel, and capitalistic world of Cinecittà has been revealed to her. But though the cruelty of Cinecittà was Zavattini’s neorealistic focus, it did not prove to be Visconti’s. “The story really was a pretext,” he admitted later. “The whole subject was Magnani: I wanted to create a portrait of a woman out of her, a contemporary woman, a mother, and I think we pretty well succeeded because Magnani lent me her enormous talent, her personality.” This is the same as saying Magnani’s personality overwhelmed Zavattini’s concept. To allow Zavattini’s moral tale to function, one would have to feel Magnani’s soul was actually in the hazard. Which is not possible. Magnani as a personality being too self-reliant, too confident, with too constant an access to joy. Even when she is being blackmailed, she laughs. Her character-played by anyone else-is a tragic woman pursuing the dreams of her youth through her child. But no hint of the female zombie, no trace of Norma Desmond, clings to Magnani. Everything she wants- certainly a little money, possibly a little reflected fame-she wants directly, in a straight and open manner, as men are said to want things. Her dream is strategic, not delusional. And in her mind, the child remains only a child, come tutte: “Well, at that age they’re all pretty.” This is her sensible reply to a calculated compliment from the slick young stranger, Annovazzi (Walter Chiari), a production assistant low down in the Cinecittà food chain who is willing to do certain favors in exchange for certain favors-the oldest of Italian stories. “Yes, that’s true,” he agrees. “But I prefer their mothers.” Annovazzi is younger than Maddalena, skinnier, and in a bland cinematic sense, better looking. But she knows as we know: he is the shadow of her shadow. On the other hand, he has access to the director, Blasetti. All this passes through Magnani’s face in a mannerist instant: a sharp glance in which she responds at once to the cheek of the boy and the perfect civility and necessity of the compliment. (It would be rude of him not to notice that she is a goddess!) Few actresses are so directly appreciative of their own earthy, natural attractions. On-screen, Magnani is the opposite of neurotic.
3
The complicated cinematic partnership between straight women and gay men (Irving Rapper and Bette Davis, George Cukor and Joan Crawford) does not usually result in this easy, playful relation between woman and world. For Davis and Crawford the roles came laced with Grand Guignol, campy tragedy, the arch appreciation of female artifice. Both actresses traded what was transient and human in their work for the waxwork grandeur of eternal iconicity. I made her what she is today may be the ultimate Hollywood sentence. Laced always with a little bitterness, perhaps because the woman-muse of the gay Svengali is a double agent. Loving the same impossible men, living in the same impossible patriarchy, but always able to apply for the love and acceptance of the public. (She can become a national treasure.) Magnani-the sexy-maternal, working-class Roman-is Italy as it dreams of itself. Visconti represents a different Italy entirely: gay, aristocratic, Milanese. Inevitably the partnership had its poisonous side. Visconti on Magnani: “Left completely to her own devices, I have to say, she would never have achieved a happy result.” Hard to believe-her own devices seem to be all she has. Hyperani mate, frankly scheming, playing the odds, rolling the eyes, huffing, puffing, bursting the binds of script and taking her costars with her. Mi raccomando, eh?-uffa!-per carità!-abbia pazienza!-O dio mio!-come no?-meno male! Italian is a language packed with verbal fillers. Magnani makes musical use of them. No gap between sentences survives without an exclamation of one sort or another. And witness her making her way back through that chorus, Maria in hand, convincing each pushy mother she pushes past that it really can be no other way; giving each woman just what they need-smile or insult-in order to let her pass. In front of Blasetti at last, Maddalena turns on the charm but with a blatant Roman cunning that no one could mistake for coquetry. Blasetti: “But I said the child has to be six or seven years old, not less… she looks a bit small.” Maddalena: “Really? No, it must be the dress that makes her short.” The legends of Davis and Crawford are built on a camp proposition, equal parts adoration and contempt. All women are artificial. All women are, in the end, actresses. Womanhood itself is an act! But Magnani turns the proposition on its head. She is the incarnation of that paradoxical imperative: act natural. She is always and everywhere apparently without artifice, spontaneous, just another Roman woman come tutte. Which leads to a strange conclusion: the actor isn’t acting-the character is acting. For isn’t it Maddalena, and not Magnani, who puts on a bit of an act now and then, when circumstances call for it?
One morning an eccentric acting teacher approaches the family. She wants to give little Maria lessons that Maddalena can’t afford. Alone in her bedroom, Maddalena considers the offer, combing her unruly hair and addressing her own reflection in the mirror: “To act… after all, what is acting? If I imagined to be somebody else… if I pretended to be somebody else… I’d be acting… But you can act… You’re my daughter and you can become an actress. You really can. I could have, too, if I had wanted to.”
With Magnani, womanhood is utterly real-it simply does what it must to get by.
4
Much Italian cinema revolves around the classic Italian philosophical problem: blonde or brunette? For Fellini, the answer was, usually, both. Antonioni solved the dilemma on an abstract intellectual plane by discovering Monica Vitti, the blonde with the face of a brunette. In Visconti’s Bellissima no counterweight is put up against black-haired Anna Magnani, for what counterweight could there possibly be? Her husband Spartaco (Gastone Renzelli) has the elemental, hulking beauty his name implies (a nonactor, he was picked out by the director’s assistant, a young Zeffirelli, from a crowd of bone merchants in a Roman slaughterhouse). But in character, in personality, he is no match for her. He is left to plot weakly with his mother against her (“Mamma, I won’t even bother with her. She always does what she likes anyway!”), though only for the length of a lunchtime, as he eats the meals his mother still cooks for him. He seeks no real alternative to Magnani.
Bellissima is that rare thing in Italian cinema: a film in which the woman is not a question posed to a man. Even more rare: she is not in question to herself. She finds herself perfectly satisfactory, or at least, her flaws cause her no more than the normal amount of discomfort. A less common trait in a female movie star can hardly be imagined.
In the parrucchiere where little Maria is taken for a haircut:
Hairdresser: (to Maddalena) I could give you a good style, too.
Maddalena: Don’t even try, no one has managed that.
Hairdresser: I could manage.
Maddalena: (laughing) You’d waste your time!
Like Davis and Crawford, Magnani is an unconventional beauty. Unlike them, she is beautiful without any cosmetic effort whatsoever, and moreover, without any interest in the cosmetic. Cosmetic beauty is not the type that attracts her.
To wit: in the courtyard of her grim casa popolare, [64] projected on a giant makeshift screen, a Hollywood blockbuster plays. Maddalena watches, enraptured. Spartaco comes to retrieve her:
Spartaco: Maddalena, leave the cinema alone.
Maddalena: Oh, Spartaco, you don’t understand me. Look at those beautiful things, look at where we live. When I see these things…
Spartaco: Maddalena, it’s a fantasy.
Maddalena: It’s not!
We might expect to see up there Rita Hayworth in Gilda, peeling off those silk elbow-length gloves. But it is Howard Hawks’s Red River, a wild open plain, two cowboys on their horses. The object of Maddalena’s desire, a herd of bulls crossing a creek.
5
The chorus of mothers gossip among themselves. The rumor is that so-and-so has a recommendation of iron (“He was saying how pretty the girl was… but he was looking at her mother!” “Ah, now I understand!” “That’s how it is these days!”); the fix is in; the auditions are worthless-it has all already been decided. A typical Roman inside job. Something must be done: they’ll unite to complain, it’s a vergogna, they’ll confront the producer! However, upon consideration, a more attractive, less violent, solution is found: each woman will look to her own recommendation. For one lady’s husband knows the director of the phone company (“What does that matter?” asks Maddalena. The reply: “He’s important”); someone else’s husband has a friend on set; yet another has a Cinecittà waiter in her family.
And Maddalena knows Annovazzi. They meet in the Borghese gardens, dappled in leafy light, the scene of a Shakespearean comedy. “I never come here!” she says, for there exists a Roman life that does not include and never comes near the expats of Monti, or the Forum, the Pantheon, or even the Colosseum. The pair walk to a tree and lean against it like lovers. Annovazzi plays the cynic: “We’re so used to recommendations, both to making and receiving them… In Italy we rely on recommendations: ‘Please don’t forget.’ ‘I assure you.’ ‘I promise you.’… But who are we supposed to remember and why?” The only safe thing, he concludes, is to “put the person who needs your help in a position to ask for that help.”
He strokes her arm, offering her the possibility of the sexual favor instead of the financial. She removes his hand, laughing. “No, this way is much better.” He takes her fifty thousand lire, supposedly to smooth the ground for Maria, in the form of small favors (“A bunch of flowers to the producer of the film, a bottle of perfume for the lover of the producer”). In the event he will spend it on a Lambretta for himself.
“How shrewd you are!”
“It’s a practical way of getting through life.”
Even as she hands over her pocketbook, she knows he can’t be trusted. Later, when she discovers the deception, she only laughs her big laugh. It is a plot point hard to understand if you are not Italian. She pays him for a favor. He buys a bike. She finds out. But she is not angry, because he will still remember her, especially.
6
“The big mistake of neorealismo,” claimed Visconti, “to my way of thinking, is its unrelenting and sometimes dour concentration on social reality. What neorealismo needs… ‘dangerous’ mixture of reality and romanticism.”
He found the perfect objective correlative in the summer life of the Roman projects: reality on the inside, cinema in the outside (courtyard). Inside, Maddalena’s reality is stark: she earns the little lire she has going door to door, giving injections to invalids and hypochondriac ladies, a business that survives more on Maddalena’s charm than the efficacy of her “medicines.” Otherwise, alliances with other women prove hard to forge. In Italy, your mother-in-law (suocera, a perfectly vile-sounding word) is your nemesis, the other mothers are your competitors and the gossiping neighbors in the stairwell, your daily tormentors. But there is also a practical, strategic sisterhood, which makes itself visible in times of crisis. When Spartaco physically attacks Maddalena (she has spent money they don’t have on a dress for Maria’s screen test), the women of the housing estate invade the Cecconi apartment, another chorus, heavyset and loud-mouthed, outnumbering Spartaco, who has Maria in his arms and is trying to take her away, as his paternal property. Maddalena is hysterical: she screams and weeps. It is, as far as an expat is concerned, a scene of horrific domestic terror. A raging Spartaco calls the women balene, whales (the English translation-one of many poor examples-renders it “cows”), and they sing a whale song of overlapping accusation. Visconti, an opera buff, choreographs the scene as an echo of the RAI choir.
“You only do it because I’m weaker!” cries Maddalena.
“Spartaco, today you really crossed the line!” cry the whales.
“I want my daughter to be somebody… Am I entitled to feel this way or not?… She mustn’t depend on anyone or get beaten like me!”
“Spartaco, she went all the way to Piazza Vittorio to a man with diabetes!”
“I’m full of bruises! I’m all swollen!”
“Spartaco, she’s made so many sacrifices!”
“Maddalena, stop acting,” yells Spartaco, to the outrage of the whales, as Maddalena collapses into a chair. Frightened he may have gone too far, he releases the child to the protection of one of them, and runs from the house.
“Women like me,” said the actress Anna Magnani, “can only submit to men capable of dominating them, and I have never found anyone capable of dominating me.” It is the sort of statement to make an expat sigh. What is this mysterious deflected Italian feminism that can only take power discreetly, without ever saying that this is what it is doing? And what is an expat to make of the sudden evaporation of Maddalena’s tears (Spartaco was right!) as her face creases into a coy smile? The whales, nodding appreciatively at the art of the thing, pass the child, hand to hand, back to its mother. The crisis is averted.
Congratulations are due. Italy is truly the land of the sign and countersign, incomprehensible to outsiders. Maddalena begins to laugh.
“We’ve won, darling. If we didn’t do that, we wouldn’t get an audition. My dear, do you think I’m working for nothing?”
The director Vittorio De Sica called Magnani’s laugh “loud, overwhelming and tragic.” Tragic is a word men will reach for if called upon to describe women outside of their relation to men. In American cinema, a woman’s laugh is almost always flirtatious, a response to a male call. The unexpected thing about Magnani is that she makes herself laugh.
7
In Italy, the right recommendation will get you through the door, to the top of the class, and behind the scenes. Maddalena’s has got her this far, into the editing room (“Mr. Annovazzi told me to come and see you”), where a beautiful young girl lines up the screen tests, ready to take downstairs to Blasetti and the producers. Maddalena, in the process of pleading for one more favor (she wants to be hidden in the projection room to watch her daughter’s test) recognizes the girl. Wasn’t she in that courtyard summer movie? Sotto il sole di Roma? The girl’s face contorts, a mix of pride and dejection. In Italy, a woman is the looked-at-thing, until people tire of looking at her, at which point she is cut loose:
“I don’t make films anymore… I’m not an actress. They only hired me once or twice… as I was the type they needed. I even got my hopes up. And I lost my boyfriend and my job… I convinced myself I was so beautiful and so great, and yet I’m stuck here, doing the editing. Nobody called me, so I’m here.”
Maddalena is shocked, then calms herself. For Maddalena, the dream is the truth: “Surely it can’t be that way for everyone.” In the projection room, she watches, hidden in a corner. Maria’s film rolls. Her tiny face is elaborately painted. She wears the dress for which Maddalena received her bruises. Here are the men again, slouching in their chairs, making their decisions. But on the screen, Maria, stumbling over her words, begins to cry, then scream. A scream of real distress, of protest. The men, finding it very funny, set each other off in rounds of cruel laughter (“What a disaster!” “She’s a dwarf. Look!”), Annovazzi first among them.
A little later there is the sentimental neorealist ending: Maddalena nobly refuses the contract that is eventually offered to Maria (“I didn’t bring her into this world to amuse anyone. To her father and me she’s beautiful!”), an impossibility given her situation and the money involved. It would be pleasant to give oneself fully to this conclusion, and to the marital, erotic frisson that seems to spring up between Spartaco and Maddalena in the final frames, but a dusting of political idealism covers it. For he does not blame her and she needn’t explain herself, and as the moneymen go off with their tails between their legs, these two Romans collapse on the bed together (“This crazy wife of mine,” murmurs Spartaco as his hand reaches out, not to hit her this time, but to caress her) and hold on to each other for dear life. The vitality and mystery of a working-class marriage (hearing the voice of Burt Lancaster through the window, Maddalena, forgetting her worries for a moment, murmurs: “How simpatico he is!” Spartaco: “Now Maddalena, you really deserve a slap!” Maddalena: “What? Can’t I joke now?”) is not natural territory for Visconti, and the implied Marxist sentiment (They have nothing! But they need nothing!) is too smoothly sold.
Really the movie ends fifteen minutes earlier. Here where Maddalena covers her child’s eyes with a palm like a priest over the face of a dead man. Lowering Maria down to floor, she removes her entirely from view, out of that little chink of reflected illumination cast in this dark room by the light of the screen. There is still the power of refusal. There is still the possibility of removing the looked-at-thing from the gaze of those who care for nothing but its surface. Today? Tomorrow? Never! But Magnani’s own face stays where it is, oppressively close to us and to the camera, makeup free, wrinkled, bagged under the eyes, shadowed round the mouth, masculine and feminine in equal parts, a hawk nose splitting it down the middle, a different kind of challenge to the male gaze. How beautiful she is! Then she, too, turns away.
Twelve – AT THE MULTIPLEX, 2006
For a single season I reviewed movies. Each week the section editor gave me a couple of the mainstream releases to choose from. Occasionally, if there was space, I got to squeeze in a second title. No fancy stuff, no art movies, no foreign films and only one documentary. I wish this explained some of the enthusiasms recorded below but I don’t think it does. All I can say in my defense is if you’ve ever seen Date Movie, V for Vendetta starts to look like a masterpiece.
MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA
The opening scenes of Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha are washed in a gray blue light, the same light that is to be found in Million Dollar Baby, Mystic River and the city shots of Marshall’s own Chicago. Back in the 1970s, Oscar hopefuls had a yellowy glow to their film stock; now the color of Oscar is mineral blue. Serendipitously, this is the exact same shade as the unusual eyes of our hero, young Chiyo (Suzuka Ohgo), a nine-year-old Japanese girl from a poor fishing village. Chiyo’s mother is dying. In Japan, all is tumult: it is raining, the sea is crashing, the camera wobbles. A strange man arrives. Chiyo’s father is crying. He weeps for Chiyo and her elder sister, both of whom he has decided to sell to the strange man. He weeps for the 150 pages of the original novel now crowbarred into this four-minute sequence. A panpipe plays its melancholy tune of longing. This pipe was also in Titanic.
Soon, sooner than anyone could imagine, the girls are dropped off at an okiya, a house of repute (depending on whom you ask) where girls are taught to be geisha. The owners, Mother (Kaori Momoi) and Auntie (Tsai Chin), examine the sisters. One girl has lovely gray blue eyes. She can stay. The other does not. She must go and become a common prostitute on the other side of town. Chiyo, who is to become an uncommon prostitute, is therefore the fortunate one, and is shown her brand-new world by fellow trainee Pumpkin (Zoe Weizenbaum), as they climb up onto the roof and look out across miles of handsome gray blue CGI rooftops. These rooftops were also in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
In a musical, the form in which Rob Marshall, originally a choreographer, was trained, this would be the moment for a song. But there’s no time: five hundred pages of plot remain. So: downstairs in the okiya lurks the evil Hatsumomo (Gong Li), a violent, imperious, gorgeous young harridan who is here to make Chiyo’s life hell. She teaches our heroine an important lesson: old geisha, like Mother, are Japanese. Young geisha, like Hatsumomo, are Chinese and do not look like geisha but rather like willowy Vivienne Westwood models.
To escape the wrath of Hatsumomo, Chiyo wanders into the first of many ravishing street scenes, staged with all the indoor artifice of a Vincente Min nelli production. On a bridge, she comes across a dashing man in his forties called Chairman (Ken Watanabe). He is Japanese, as all men are. The nine-year-old Chiyo conceives a passion for Chairman that will outlast the film itself. Why she feels this way is unclear. Perhaps it is because he buys her an ice cone. She is decided: one day she will become a geisha so that she might be bought by the Chairman himself (thus becoming, in the coy terminology, her danna) and they can be together forever.
Sadly, things are not so easy: being Japanese, it is Chiyo’s fate to be a maid. Only after a number of vicious beatings at the hands of Hatsumomo does Chiyo finally get the message and grow up to be a bewitching Chinese actress (Ziyi Zhang). She is also in Crouching Tiger. Chiyo’s name is changed to Sayuri and she is taken under the wing of a successful geisha from another okiya called Mameha (Michelle Yeoh), who is neither Chinese nor Japanese but rather Malaysian. She is also in Crouching Tiger.
There has been a hoo-ha in Japan regarding the racial origins of these three geisha, much of which seemed to me a case of oversensitivity, until I found lurking within me the conviction that I, as an Englishwoman, can tell the difference between an Irishman and a Welshman at forty paces. I see how it must be galling, if you are Japanese, to look at three long-faced, high-cheekboned, patently not Japanese women and be told that they are Japanese. Although the Chinese, too, have cause for complaint: Ziyi Zhang, to Western eyes, is only slightly Chinese in the way that Lena Horne was slightly black.
This is no fault of the actress herself, whose comeliness is as self-evident and insistent as the wafting cherry blossom and the orange lanterns floating on pellucid water, the sumptuous silk of the kimono and the trimmed perfection of the formal gardens-all of which we are repeatedly encouraged to appreciate until you begin to feel that if something ugly does not appear on-screen soon you might go quite out of your mind. Japanese sliding screens neatly reveal the various beauties, opening on one action and closing on another as formally as the red velvet curtains in a musical revue. But inauthenticity of this kind, so well placed in Chicago, is all to naught here. Without songs, without pleasure, without humor, all the artifice in the world goes to waste.
At times the film suffers from a lack of sufficient artifice: there is more white powder in Dangerous Liaisons than there is here, with each actress apparently following her own personal taste in the matter of geisha stylings. You can imagine the debate on set (“Oh, Rob… do we have to…?”). Ziyi Zhang is a good sport-ish; she’ll wear quite a bit of white paint but won’t black her eyebrows; Gong Li will wear a little, but she’s not having her hair in that ludicrous bouffant; Michelle Yeoh eschews the entire conceit and goes about in much the same makeup she wore for The World is Not Enough. Yet the merest Google search reveals that real geisha are square-jawed, ghost-faced, stocky women swathed in shapeless fabric and wearing six-inch clogs. In Geisha only the clogs remain. The kimono is nipped in at the waist and hugs the abdomen, the mad bud lip is gone, the big hair has been made small. Everything that makes geisha truly alien (and alienating) has been removed.
The plot pushes on: war arrives. The gray blue is back, and so is the wobbly camera. The okiya closes and we find Sayuri reduced to dyeing kimonos in a village far, far away that still does not look like Japan. An old client arrives. He wants to help her recreate the geisha glory days. An American general is in town who wants entertaining. They hatch a plan: “We’ll show the Americans just how hospitable we can be!” As a battle cry this lacks something, even as a substitute for “We’ll put the show on right here!” But so begins that convention beloved of the movies, especially movie musicals: the comeback. The plot turns one part 42nd Street to three parts Lethal Weapon, except this time the lethal weapon is a kimono. Mameha is dug up; she’s running a guesthouse and wants no part of it. She left all that behind, long ago. She’s given away all her kimonos. All except one…
In the end, it is poor plotting and not cultural inauthenticity that is the true problem here. Authenticity is not everything in cinema. (Who cared about the authenticity of culture and locale in Yentl? In Meet Me in St. Louis?) Memoirs of a Geisha hurts the heart and the brain with its crushing monotony, inert, subhuman dialogue (made more ridiculous by being spoken in English with a faux Japanese accent) and Marshall’s calculated attempt to sell us another Hollywood fairy tale of prostitution. This tale was also in Pretty Woman.
Marshall manages only one scene that dispenses with the fantasy. Sayuri is welcomed back to the okiya by Mother, having sold her virginity to the highest bidder. “Now you are a geisha!” crows Mother, but her eyes are wet. Sayuri’s gray blue eyes are dead. A noxious tradition continues. It is a beautiful scene. It makes the endless blossom look like scrub.
SHOPGIRL AND GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN’
Mirabelle is not your average L.A. girl. She works in the glove department of Saks selling a product that nobody buys anymore. Actually, gloves are Mirabelle’s day job: she is an artist. However, due to a hefty student-loan debt, and a productivity rate of three etchings a year, Mirabelle has had to seek other employment. To her right, the disembodied arm of a mannequin is on display, seeming to reach for somebody who is not there. Mirabelle is lonely. She drives a beat-up truck. She is from Vermont. She has a cat she never sees. She takes antidepressants. She is unassuming, clever, innocent, kind. She would like to be in love. Most important, in Shopgirl, she is played by Claire Danes. Ms. Danes is not your average actress. She has a graceful, natural body. She is in possession of a frankly enormous and unexpected nose, which she has never fixed and for which we thank the Lord. Her elastic face is kind, beautiful and expressive. Danes is to this movie what Mirabelle is to L.A.-a diamond in the rough. The rough first manifests itself in the form of her new lover Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman), a rock groupie loser whom she met in a launderette. His dream-which he has fulfilled-is to stencil logos onto amplifiers. When he can’t find a condom he suggests using a plastic bag. Yet Mirabelle is optimistic about Jeremy, as she is about all things. “Are you one of those people,” she asks, “who, if you get to know them, turns out to be… fantastic?” Alas, with Schwartzman, familiarity breeds contempt. He was spectacular in the hipster classic Rushmore, but the emotional autism played for laughs there now reveals itself as a tic of the actor himself: he cannot say a line without mentally enclosing it in quotation marks. Anyway, the end result is the same: we are meant to despair for lovely Mirabelle, and we do. Where is her white knight?
Nothing can prepare you for what comes next, not even reading the original Steve Martin novel: Ray Porter (Steve Martin himself) walks up to the glove counter and asks Mirabelle for a date. Steve Martin’s face. I can’t explain it. You have to see it. But whatever he has done to it, he does not look one day younger than he is. He has, however, succeeded in leaving himself only one facial expression: smug. No, that’s not fair. He also looks creepy. And yet the creepy, intrusive voice-over (also voiced by Martin) assures us: “Mirabelle sizes him up and no alarm bells ring.” Really? Not even the one that tolls: “He’s forty years older than me”? The voice-over continues: “She doesn’t ask the question foremost in her mind: why me?” Good point. Why would a successful man like Ray Porter wish to date twenty-four-year-old, exquisite, milky-skinned Mirabelle? We are at the mercy of a delusional voice-over.
This film is not entirely delusional. It is selectively truthful. As far as May-to-December love stories are concerned, Steve Martin has made a quantum leap in male self-awareness. He understands that what happens between Ray and Mirabelle is fundamentally an exchange of services. Ray Porter wants an innocent girl with whom to have a short affair. Mirabelle is vulnerable and depressed, enjoys receiving expensive gifts and is thankful when her student loan is paid off. Jeremy could do none of these things for her. So: older rich man helps young poor girl out of a rut (while sleeping with her) and then mercifully ends the relationship so both parties can go on to date someone who is their true “peer”: a redeemed Jeremy for Mirabelle, and some classy older woman for Ray. In the (very good) novel, Martin’s writing is so sparse and elegant you can almost excuse the concept. But here on film Ray Porter’s unmoving, waxy face is on top of hers, he is running his crepe fingers (one place where Botox will not work) over the perfection of Mirabelle’s backside-it is intolerable.
So we turn to Jeremy as Mirabelle’s only escape route, but the script has overwhelmingly stacked the odds against him. His lines are moronic, his clothes are foul. He is four or five inches shorter than Mirabelle. His late redemption (he reads a self-help book called How to Love a Woman and buys a white suit) cannot obscure these facts, and as the inappropriate swirling violins crescendo and Ray graciously allows Mirabelle to leave him for her “peer,” too much has already been set against Jeremy. What is styled as a happy ending looks more like the exchange of a rock for a hard place. “How do you turn yourself into a person capable of loving another person?” muses the voice-over, as if this were the universal problem. But it is only Ray’s problem. It is Ray who thinks it appropriate-nay, educational-to use a person for pleasure without giving any piece of yourself apart from your credit card. Mirabelle doesn’t have that problem. Mirabelle loves Ray. She accepts his gifts without guilt or neurosis because she needs them. When Jeremy is redeemed, she loves him. In her last scene she made me cry as she said good-bye to Ray’s inert face and walked away, unsullied by the vanity project that surrounds her. It’s hard to act your way out of so much bad faith, but somehow she manages it. In conclusion, here’s that bad faith in full: (1) Ray Porter tells Mirabelle he is “past fifty.” The actor who plays him was born on the August 14, 1945; (2) Steve Martin’s script sneers at the vanity of fake L.A. girls and their plastic surgery; he is in no position to sneer; (3) The line that precipitates Mirabelle and Ray’s breakup is this: “I’m looking for a three-bedroom place, in case I want to have a serious relationship, have some kids.” Mirabelle dissolves into tears. This is meant to reveal that Ray is not serious about her. The truth is, this film is not serious. Ray Porter does not want a relationship with a peer. His real peer would be too old to have a child. He wants someone young, but not so young as to make him look foolish. Sure enough, at the end of the movie, Ray Porter turns up with a well-preserved woman in her early forties. If he’d turned up with a real peer, then this would not be a self-satisfied little indie drama. It would be a comedy.
Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson. My brain is giving you one star, but my heart wants to give five. I want you to know that Get Rich or Die Tryin’ is to ghetto movies what Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot was to Mafia movies, and I love, love, love it. I love that there are more naked men in this movie than in Brokeback. I love that you keep getting your fellow gangsters to admit that they love you. Really loudly. In the middle of robberies. I love the Beckettian dialogue: “I’m in it for the money.” “For what?” “Sneakers.” “Anything else?” “A gun.” “What you need that for?” “I don’t know.” I love that you watched GoodFellas and Scarface, like, a million times and decided to ditch all that narrative arc crap and get straight to the point with a minimalist voice-over: “Crack meant money. Money meant power. Power meant war.” I love how your acting style makes Bogart look animated. I love that the boss of your gang is dressed like Brando and is doing the voice from The Godfather. And then there is this: “So that was the crew. Four niggas dedicated to one thing and one thing only: getting paid and getting laid.” Tupac, you can sleep easy. Richard Pryor, watch out.
MUNICH
Steven Spielberg is sometimes condescendingly described as a “family filmmaker,” as if family were not one of the more profound aspects of our experience. His instinct for the family dynamic has offered intimacy to many a big-budget premise-the struggling single mother in E.T., the couple teetering on divorce in Close Encounters, Indiana Jones’s Oedipal struggles. In the 1990s there seemed to come a tipping point: family was no longer a metaphor for the action, it was the action. This became explicit as Spielberg grew ambitious for larger clans-the African slaves of Amistad, the six million Jews memorialized in Schindler’s List, the lost generation of American men in Saving Private Ryan. Depending on whom you talk to, this was either an extension of his emotional reach or a grandiose exercise in cinematic grandstanding.
I should lay my cards on the table: I think Spielberg is one of the great popular artists of our time, and I base this upon the stupidity/pleasure axis I apply to popular artists: how much pleasure they give versus how stupid one has to become to receive said pleasure. The answer with Spielberg is usually: “not that stupid.” His films bring pleasure where they most engage. Of course, when reviewing Munich, the cards the critic lays down are expected to be of another kind. As it happens, the film itself is neither “pro-Israeli” nor “pro-Palestinian,” but this is precisely why, in the opinion of many American reviewers, it is inherently aggressive toward Israel, under the logic that anything that isn’t pro is, by definition, anti. There is no way out of that intellectual cul-de-sac, which is why Tony Kushner’s and Eric Roth’s script does its best to avoid that road.
Munich is a film about a truly horrific terrorist attack and the response to that terrorist attack. It is not about moral equivalence. It is about what people will do for their families, for their clans, in order to protect and define them. It is about how far we will go in the service of the people we come from and the narratives we tell ourselves to justify what we have done. Those who have sympathies with either side will go away retaining their sympathies: that is the nature of the argument. And it is exactly this, the nature of the argument-what it does to those who are involved in it-and not the argument itself that Munich is interested in. Crucially, it is billed as “historical fiction,” which will permit those who cling to their separate, mutually exclusive and antagonistic set of facts to call the film a “fantasy.” This film has made groups on both sides uncomfortable because the truths it tells are of a kind that transcend facticity. Whichever family you belong to, national or personal, these truths are recognizable and difficult to dismiss.
Munich is an imagined reconstruction of a program of assassination that Mossad implemented against the organizers and surviving participants of the 1972 Munich massacre. If you are too young to remember that massacre, rent the documentary One Day in September, because Munich wastes no time setting up context. Unusually for Spielberg, he treats us as historical grown-ups (though not, as we shall see, geographical ones). At the heart of the movie is Avner (Eric Bana), a young Israeli who loves his families, both small-his pregnant wife, Daphna (a wonderful English-language debut from Ayelet Zurer)-and large: Israel itself. He is an inexperienced but dedicated soldier chosen by Mossad agent Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush) to head up a ragtag team of four operatives: a brash, South African-born getaway driver called Steve (Daniel Craig), a Belgian toy maker turned explosives expert (Mathieu Kasso vitz), a German-Jewish document forger (Hanns Zischler) and a “cleanup” guy (Ciarán Hinds). Together they roam through a series of 1970s European cities meticulously re-created, although too laboriously symbolized (in Spielberg’s Paris, wherever you are, you can always see the Eiffel Tower), doing unto their enemies as their enemies have done unto them.
In the process we begin to understand the biblical imperative “an eye for an eye” as something more deadly than simple revenge: it is of the body. It permits us the indulgence of thinking with our blood. And Spielberg understands the blood thinkers in his audience: for every assassination of an Arab, we return-lest we forget-to a grim flashback of that day in September, when eleven innocent Israeli athletes met their deaths in brutal and disgusting fashion. Flashbacks repeatedly punctuate the film’s (slightly overlong) running time. We are not allowed to forget. But neither can we ignore what is happening to Avner as he progresses through his mission. Eric Bana gives a convincing portrayal of a man traveling far from who he is in order to defend who he is. His great asset is a subtle face that is not histrionic when conveying competing emotions. The scene where Avner is offered a double mazel tov-once for the arrival of his new baby, and once for the death of a target-is a startling example of this. Through Avner, Spielberg makes a reluctant audience recognize a natural and dangerous imperative in the blood, a fury we all share. “I did it for my family” is the most repeated line in this film. Its echo is silent, yet you can’t help hearing it: what would you do for yours? The perverse nullity of the cycle of violence is made clear. Death is handed out to those who handed out death and from whose ashes new death dealers will rise. Children repeatedly wander into the line of fire. Normal human relations are warped or discarded. When Black September launches a letter-bomb campaign in response to Avner’s assassinations, there is a twisted satisfaction. “Now we’re in dialogue,” says one Mossad agent. Thirty years later we are familiar with this kind of dialogue and where it leads.
The technical achievements of the film are many. Most notable is Janusz Kaminski’s photography, which gives a subtle color palette to each city while lighting the whole like The Third Man, with bleached-out windows and skies that the actors shy away from, preferring the darker corners of the frame. The play of shadow and light looks like a church, a synagogue, a mosque. In the shadows, the cast debates the ethics of their situation and offer as many answers as there are speakers. If the audience recoils from South African Steve’s assessment, “The only blood that matters to me is Jewish blood!” it understands Avner when he says, “I’m not comfortable with confusion.” It is easier to think with the blood. It is easier to be certain.
But how many of us know what to do with these two competing, equally true facts we hear exchanged between Ephraim and Avner: “Israelis will die if these men live. You know this is true!” says Ephraim. Avner replies, “There is no peace at the end of this. You know this is true!”
WALK THE LINE AND GRIZZLY MAN
Arkansas, 1944. Two brothers walk the long, flat corridor of earth between one cornfield and another. Jack Cash, the elder, is memorizing the Bible. His little brother prefers the music of the hymnals; he worries that Jack’s talent for stories is the nobler enterprise. Jack wants to be a preacher. “You can’t help nobody,” he explains, “if you don’t tell them the right story.” Yet we already know it is his little brother, Johnny, who will grow up to tell the memorable stories, the kind you sing, the kind that matter most.
In their own generic way, musical biopics are always the right story: the struggle toward self-actualization. With songs. They are as predictable and joyful as Bible stories: the Passion of Tina Turner, the Ascension of Billie Holiday. It is a very hard-hearted atheist indeed who does not believe that Music Saves. Walk the Line-although conspicuously well acted-is really no different from previous efforts, and that’s a good thing. It shares the charm of the genre. It has Cash abandoning the music of the church for the devil’s tunes. It has Cash falling down drunk onstage and smashing up a dressing room. It has the low times (“Didn’t you used to be…?”) and the times when Cash’s name rode high on the hit parade.
It has the greatest of all musical biopic tropes: the instrument endangered by a parent. One begins to suspect a reverse psychology ploy: parents ambitious of turning a daughter into a future Jacqueline du Pré would do well to smash up a cello in front of her. In Cash’s case, he has a hick father who wants to hock the family piano and buy whatever hicks buy with piano money-chewing tobacco, maybe. It’s Johnny’s downtrodden mother who saves it, but worse is to come: beloved brother Jack is killed in a farming accident for which Johnny feels responsible. Daddy Cash reckons the devil took the wrong son. Next time we see those cornfields, the boy Johnny has turned into Joaquin Phoenix, walking that line alone.
Joaquin alone is, for many women, the reason to see this film. For this reviewer, his elemental masculinity strays rather too far into Victor Mature territory-still, I respect the majority opinion. Certainly when he is covered in water or sweat (which he frequently is) and filling the screen with his ungainly bulk, he possesses a certain Old Testament style. He looks as if he’s struggling with himself-he’d make a good Abraham. For Johnny Cash, he’s perfect. On those early tours, when we see Cash playing alongside Elvis (Tyler Hilton) and Jerry Lee Lewis (Waylon Payne), Phoenix works the difference between those two coltish, flamboyant stars and the bullish man in black whose sole piece of stagecraft was his no-frills introduction: “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.” It’s fun to see three musical pilgrims at the beginning of their journey, before their places in history were settled. “How about that Johnny Cash, everybody?” cries Elvis, with the magnanimous generosity of a man confident that he himself has the greater talent. While Elvis launches into “Hound Dog,” Cash watches from the wings with a face that encapsulates Bing Crosby’s sentiment re Sinatra: “I know one great singer is born into every generation, but why’d he have to be born into mine?”
But Cash has bigger problems than Elvis. In a recent interview, Woody Allen put the trouble well: “The thing standing between me and genius is me.” The bad guy in every musician’s biopic is the musician himself. Cash is stuck in a bad marriage, he drinks and he never got over Jack’s death. One night he is offered amphetamines on the assurance that “Elvis takes them,” surely one of the worst celebrity health tips ever recorded. Once the addiction takes hold, Phoenix is free to give us what he does best: a very dark night of the soul.
It is presumptuous to speak of the parallels between Phoenix’s biography and Cash’s, but there is no doubt that whenever the plot returns to the trauma of the missing brother, Phoenix’s game raises and the audience grows tense. Several scenes are of an emotional intensity out of all proportion to the humdrum musical biopic one expects.
And then, at just the right moment, Reese Witherspoon takes over and brings the film home. Witherspoon has the kind of maniacal feminine perkiness that people of a Woosterish temperament cannot abide. I like her. I like her triangular chin and her head-girl, can-do attitude. Here she plays Cash’s savior and eventual second wife, June Carter, and it’s a great piece of casting: Witherspoon is a twelve-step program in and of herself. She’s so capable, so hardworking, so upright and practical-underrated virtues among actresses. Physically, and in all other ways, Witherspoon makes the best of what she has. She has June’s steely self-sufficiency down pat. “Marry me, June,” begs Cash, not for the first time. “Oh, please, get up off your knees; you look pathetic” is the sensible response.
There is in this film the serious notion that nothing is as existentially fatal as a miserable relationship. And no redemption like a good one. But to get the good one, you’ve got to work harder than Job. Before the successful prison concerts and the comeback and the hagiography of the very movie we’re watching, we see Cash taken low. Real low. Drugs, poverty, despair, violence. Each biopic digs its own way out of this hole. Black soul singers are redeemed differently from white punks-everyone’s got their own groove-but the principle is the same: keep it real, get back on track. Here’s Johnny at his lowest ebb, just before the turnaround, begging his bank for money: “I need this, see? To get my phone on… cos I got a woman… and I need to speak to her.” That’s country music logic, and it’s really quite beautiful.
After the cultural violence of much nineteenth-century anthropology, there came a twentieth-century emphasis on reticence-we should no longer seek to explain people definitively, but rather observe them, respecting their otherness. Fortunately, no one told Werner Herzog, and that is why his Grizzly Man is so damn cool. Herzog (whose voice-over perfectly matches The Simpsons’s hard man, Rainier Wolfcastle) is an infamous egomaniacal, auteur nutjob (i.e., a great European director) with a bent for the Germanically literal. (To pay off a bet he once made a movie called Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. It did not disappoint.) Herzog is hard-core. He’s not interested in your interpretation of why American nutjob Timothy Treadwell lived among bears. Who cares what you think? Herzog has his documentary in hand, explaining that what we have here “iz on astone-ishing story of beauty and depth.” He’s not wrong. The footage itself is mostly Treadwell’s, but the film is a discordant duet of two voices: Herzog’s old-world Schopenhaurian pessimism versus Treadwell’s new-world optimism (which, Herzog believes, masks a deep despair).
Herzog calls bears a “primordial encounter.” Timothy calls them Mr. Chocolate and Aunt Melissa. Herzog believes Timothy was “fighing against the civilization that cast Thoreau out of Walden.” According to Timothy’s parents, the motivation was more prosaic. Not to give the specifics away, but “failed TV actor” is at the root of the crisis. Still, Herzog is determined to spin grandeur out of poor Timmy. And fabulous though it is to hear Herzog shouting about the “ooltimatt indifference of nature,” it’s Timothy saying to a fox, “I love you. Thanks for being my friend. I like this-do you like this?” that brings real joy. All you need to know about indifference is right there in that fox’s face.
BRIEF ENCOUNTER AND PROOF
In the spring of 1945, when David Lean’s Brief Encounter was first released, my father was nineteen. I envy him that vintage year of cinema and all opening weekends between, say, 1933 and 1955. Instead of Memoirs of a Geisha, he saw Woman of the Year. Instead of Shopgirl, he got Top Hat. The first film he ever saw was King Kong, and it was a merciful hour and a half shorter than the beast I slept through in January. In New York and Paris, we can revisit the films of our fathers any night of the week in dozens of fine revival cinemas; in London we rely on the occasional largesse of film festivals and the BFI. To those who love them, any rerelease of a 1940s film is a draught of sunshine. I have never seen a movie of this period in which there was not something to like, just as I have never come across a cheese I wouldn’t eat. Brief Encounter is a Wensleydale: a lovely slice of English fare, familiar, inadvertently comic. It has become its own parody. The English are slightly ashamed of it, as the Aus trians are annoyed by The Sound of Music. In fact, its reputation as a period piece is unfair. It is not all cut-glass diction and antediluvian good manners. The film is really about the dream life of the English, those secret parts of us that are most important and to which we have least access. It’s a shame to go to the cinema only to laugh (as modern audiences laugh at the supposed camp excess of another sincere movie, Now, Voyager). If you pass over the superficial culture shocks of sixty years passed (A lending library in Boots the chemist! A string quartet in a railway café!), it is as astute about the English character as it ever was.
The story is easily paraphrased: Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) and Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) meet in a railway station and fall in love. Unfortunately, they are married to other people. Laura has a stolid, suburban husband, Fred, whose only connection to the Keatsian strain in English life is via the Times crossword, the clue in question being “When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high… (seven letters).” Laura suggests “romance.” It’s right-but it doesn’t fit with the other answers. In this moment the entire film is contained. There are many things that the English want and dream and believe. But they do not fit in with our other answers.
Lean’s sad, buttoned-up account of unconsummated love is about all of us and our cautious natures. It’s not that the English don’t want true love or self-knowledge. Rather, unlike our European cousins, we will not easily give up the real for the dream. We remain skeptical about throwing away a concrete asset like Fred in favor of “the faery power of unreflecting love,” no matter how much Keats may recommend it. Laura, a Midlands mother of two, is certainly not a fairy by temperament, despite her pixie face. She will not give up the reality of Fred for the dream of Alec. Alec, gentleman that he is, quite agrees. An Italian (or indeed, the modern English viewer of this film) will diagnose Laura and Alec as morbidly repressed. The film offers a different hypothesis: that the possibility of two people’s pleasure cannot override the certainty of other people’s pain. Primum non nocere is the principle upon which the film operates. As a national motto we could do a lot worse.
These days, carpe diem is more popular, and self-sacrifice invites sniggers. But the impulse behind Laura’s and Alec’s sacrifice seems to me neither smug, religious nor self-satisfied. Brief Encounter is not about English sexual repression or Christian values. It’s about personal grandeur. By the end of the film, Alec and Laura are truly grand; they are their best selves. And if there is a moral lesson, it is not about the sin of sexual infidelity but the secular sin of being unfaithful to oneself.
In the last few minutes of their good-bye, they are interrupted by Dolly, a silly woman whom Laura knows. She sits down uninvited and starts to talk about train timetables. She represents all the petty horror of English life, the inconsequential stuff and nonsense that gets in the way of our real lives and separates us from that “high romance” Keats knew the English have within them. It is sad that Alec and Laura must part, but what makes this an English tragedy is that they will politely listen to Dolly as they do it. They should be showing their souls. Instead they discuss the weather.
Hollywood recycles its actresses. Ava Gardner turned into Angelina Jolie. Claudette Colbert reincarnated as Reese Witherspoon. Cate Blanchett may one day prove worthy of the Katharine Hepburn echoes she evokes. Gwyneth Paltrow, star of the depressing misfire Proof, is Grace Kelly’s replacement, and that’s a poisoned chalice if ever there was one. The qualities of Grace and Gwyneth, as I see them, are as follows: a sense of entitlement, a glacial physical beauty and an apparently genuine submissive attitude to the opposite sex. They worship the men they play opposite and don’t so much act as react to them. It is this talent for silent reaction that won Paltrow an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love, one of the least verbal Oscar-winning performances in recent memory. Her face flushes, her eyes flood. If you hold her in your arms, she trembles. It’s all good old-fashioned movie actress stuff. If you were a male moviegoer looking for someone to love you, to just love you, and not drive you crazy with questions and smart talk like Bette Davis or Renée Zellweger, then Gwyneth’s your girl. Classy as she is, she’ll love you even if you’re completely unsuitable, even if you’re Ripley or Ted Hughes. But just as Grace did, Gwyneth has grown tired of the princess gig. She wants to be an actress. Proof sees her acting and acting and acting. I’m sure it’s true that on stage she made this role her own, wowing audiences with her portrayal of Catherine, the emotionally and mentally vulnerable daughter of a math genius who has lost his mind. Did the father write the mathematical proof posthumously found in a desk drawer-or did the daughter? The theatrical script uses the word proof as a metaphorical launchpad for discussions of work and love and life, as plays will. It’s that kind of verbal swordplay that so impresses onstage while seeming so redundant and brittle on-screen. Everyone involved tries really hard, and Jake Gyllenhaal is puppyishly excited by the whole project, but dominating it all is Paltrow’s voice, with its hipsterish high-rising terminals that sound as if she is saying only one thing, over and over: “Like, I can act, right?” She has something to prove, but it has nothing to do with math.
The best course of action for Paltrow is to remember her antecedent and follow her example. There is a way out of the princess gig. Grace Kelly cracked it in High Society and Rear Window. Paltrow glimpsed it in Emma, which was, in truth, the role that deserved an Oscar. Keep the vulnerability, but don’t be coy about the self-possession that is so obviously there. He goes down on his knees because you have something of value-and you know it. And if he left, you’d survive. Grace Kelly proved that princesses have power, too.
GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK AND CASANOVA
First, a disclaimer. With regard to Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney’s strident political docudrama, I find myself in a difficult position. I watched it and liked it. Then I spent two hours on the Internet and changed my mind.
What remains is still the review I intended, but it is qualified by the obvious fact that liberal films like this are made to please liberals like me. In terms of historical content, the film is neither quite honest nor quite true. That’s a shame, because it’s a good film. I don’t have space to discuss the several disappointing inaccuracies, elisions of fact and deliberate obfuscations. All I can do is direct you to the Internet and to Joseph E. Persico’s 1988 biography Edward R. Murrow: An American Original. What follows, then, is a glowing review of a fine piece of agitprop leftist cinema, which I very much enjoyed in the same spirit a person of the opposite sensibility will enjoy Ann Coulter’s recent celebratory defense of McCarthyism, Treason, not because it is entirely true but because she’s fighting in your corner. Clooney’s fighting in mine, and doing it in style.
And how. This is a beautifully made, superficially coherent, effective movie, and you have to pinch yourself to believe an actor directed it, wrote it and produced it. The generosity of the ensemble casting, the control of the heavily verbal material, the expert pacing-it is a mature work. Clooney understands that style is what you leave out, and in its taut ninety minutes he leaves out so much of what we have come to expect that Warner refused to fund the film. He left out the color. He left out the subplots. He left out the love interest. He sidelined historical reenactments in favor of the real thing: archive footage.
What remains is strongly reminiscent of Citizen Kane, not simply for its loquacious, crusading journalists, but because it is both visually luscious and aurally self-sufficient. You could close your eyes and understand everything. But don’t close your eyes. Here in sumptuous black and white is a perfectly recreated Capraesque newsroom. Here are quick-fire conversations à la Pres ton Sturges. The period detail is given a kick in the pants by the witty camera work (borrowed from Soderbergh and the Coen brothers), shooting faces from below, zooming in on a finger worrying a shirt button.
Clooney himself avoids the camera, slinking through the film as unobtrusively as a star can. In a film that is about editorializing and is itself heavily editorialized, Clooney edits himself out for the sake of the material. Into the Clooney-shaped hole slips an accomplished ensemble cast-Tate Donovan, Reed Diamond, Jeff Daniels, Robert Downey Jr., Patricia Clarkson-all of whom back up David Strathairn’s pitch-perfect Murrow impersonation by being entirely convincing newshounds. Well, all but one. I think you know who I’m talking about. Mr. Downey remains the most aggressive scene stealer in Hollywood. He’s barely restrained here, but if someone doesn’t give him free rein soon, there’s a danger of auto-combustion.
I digress. Like Murrow-the campaigning television broadcaster who squared off against Senator McCarthy in the mid-1950s-Clooney uses the “wires and lights” of his medium to make simple, forceful arguments. His case against McCarthy is familiar and correct: the paranoid fervor of McCarthyism placed the right to fair trial and the rights of the First Amendment under serious threat. Today, these rights are endangered once more. “We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home,” argues Murrow in 1956, foreshadowing our present concerns. Clooney doesn’t have to push hard for analogies like this-they’re everywhere. In fact, they’re a little too easy, and so admiring is he of Murrow that he follows his hero’s editorial style to the letter. (Clooney has always seemed boyishly prone to masculine hero worship, from his consecration of his own newscaster father to the re-creation-both on- and offscreen-of Sinatra’s rat-pack heyday.) Just as Murrow gave McCarthy enough rope to hang himself by allowing him “right to reply” on Murrow’s own prime-time show, See It Now, so Clooney refrains from casting an actor as McCarthy and simply replays the archive film. The edited archive film. He chooses all the same shots as Murrow did for his TV show: the off-guard, twitching, sweating, hysterical McCarthy, asking pointless questions, chasing phantoms that were not there.
Clooney clearly believes, like Murrow, that his editorializing has truth on its side. He has a case. Sometimes there is no “other side of the argument.” Nazis have no right of reply. Ed Murrow made a bet that what was pinko liberal thinking in 1956 would prove to be a condition of basic humanity fifty years later. He was wrong. The basic human rights he defended are once again assailed. Clooney is angry about that.
This must be why he cuts into his movie Murrow’s selectively edited footage of McCarthy’s interrogation of Annie Moss, an elderly, uneducated black woman whose Communist connections-McCarthy believed-had led her to seek a job inside the Pentagon. We see this meek woman verbally bullied and cheated of her right to see the evidence put against her. We are led to believe she knows nothing of the charges. One senator tries to help her. McCarthy leaves the hearing. Bobby Kennedy sits at the end of the table of senators, failing to come to her aid.
What evil breeds where good men stay silent! So we are meant to think. And this is a true liberal principle, as is the principle that no one should be tried without seeing the evidence held against them. Yet it remains disappointing to go on the Internet, in a shameful state of historical innocence, and discover that Bobby Kennedy was a good friend of Senator McCarthy and that Annie Moss was, as it happens, a member of the Communist Party. Clooney could have included gray areas such as this and still have made a fine liberal argument. It’s a sure sign that things are bad when the Left, like the Right, wants its history black and white.
Casanova is a silly film. Half Carry On, half Shakespearean comedy, everyone in it is perfectly nice and should reassemble to make a lively Twelfth Night. The trouble here is that the words are not by Shakespeare but rather by one Kimberly Simi, who worked as an attorney before selling this script. It has Heath Ledger sounding like James Mason with a soupçon of Peter O’Toole. It has tights and bosoms. It has mistaken identity, gender switching, girls wearing mustaches, a shrew tamed, hearts sundered then reattached and finally a journey by sea. Some of the best writing is in the program notes: “Sienna Miller… catapulted into the public eye when she appeared in the BBC comedy Bedtime.” Strange. That’s not how I remember it. Speaking of the young actress, she might ask hair and makeup how it is possible to make a preternaturally pretty twenty-two-year-old look like a dull matron. In the film, Francesca Bruni, for that is the character’s name, is secretly writing a feminist tract called “The Subjugation of Women” under a nom de plume-maybe that was the reasoning. Feminists can’t be blond and must have big eyebrows. I would love it if Miss Miller was secretly the author of the works of Elaine Showalter. I fear it is not so.
CAPOTE AND DATE MOVIE
Some cinematic seasons throw up abstract questions. In the early 1990s a clutch of movies asked: What is adulthood? Children found themselves in the bodies of adults, and vice versa. Adults left children home alone. Children were shrunk by careless fathers. Babies started talking with the voice of John Travolta. It may be vocational myopia on my part, but this year I hear the question “What is a writer?” In Hidden (released in the United States as Caché) the answer is painful: writers are petty bourgeois. In Good Night, and Good Luck it’s the writer as hero, noble champion of the people. In Casanova she’s a harmless firebrand, in Memoirs of a Geisha, a naïf who simply records events as they happen. In both Get Rich or Die Tryin’ and Walk the Line the writer is an alchemist, turning pain into gold.
Why all the sudden concern with scribblers? Writers like to flatter themselves that in times of communal trauma people turn to the written word for comfort and direction. Maybe once. But in the noughties we’ve begun to legislate against language itself: writers are not to be trusted. They are double-dealers. For this reason, Capote, despite its 1950s setting, is timely. When people rail against the “media,” the bogeymen they have in mind owe not a little to the specter of Truman Capote. What is a writer? He knocks on your door with a smile, a pen and a shard of ice in his heart. Around that shard Philip Seymour Hoffman molds his tremendous Capote impersonation, by turns fey, friendly, oleaginous, deadly. He is Janus-faced. In New York, he’s a quixotic queen laughing in smoky nightclubs at the stupidity of his own readers; in Holcomb, Kansas, he does a damn good impression of being the boy next door. He’ll turn up at the sheriff’s house early in the morning with doughnuts and coffee, find the sheriff’s wife alone and explain he came on a whim to eat breakfast with her. She wanders off to get plates. Slowly the camera and Hoffman slink to the left into a side room where little Perry Smith, multiple murderer, is locked up in a cell.
The sea change that comes over Hoffman’s face during this pan shot is as close as silence comes to narrative. His Capote coolly dissembles, yet he is impassioned; he lied to get into the house, and yet he came to uncover truths. He is a writer: a man who tells the truth by lying. An actor of Hoffman’s caliber, who also tells the truth that way, can’t help but have a deep understanding of writerly psychology. “When I think of how good it could be,” wrote Capote of his unwritten book, “I can hardly breathe.” When Hoffman says these lines-sexually, venally, desperately-you fear him and yourself. How far will he go for a good story? How far will you go with him to hear it?
Hoffman has been vocal in his praise of the writer, Dan Futterman, and director, Bennett Miller, but this is an actor’s traditional demurral: the lion’s share of the praise belongs to Hoffman. Everything looks lovely and period and prestige, but shots linger ponderously, keen that we should fully appreciate them, as predictable a tic of a first-time director as the first-time novelist compulsively inserting adjectives. It’s the acting that sings, especially when Hoffman duets with luminous Catherine Keener (playing another writer, Harper Lee), the lady with the loveliest laugh in cinema. Hoffman’s writer is a self-serving egoist; Keener’s a restrained, wise soul. But just as in life, cinema’s Capote trumps Harper Lee. We admire those who refrain, but we make movies about personae. Capote’s persona was enormous and, unusually, his talent was almost its equal. Yet we still tell Capote’s story with pity and use his life as a parable: talent can’t buy you morals. The film implies Truman couldn’t finish another book after In Cold Blood because he never got over his betrayal of Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. To my mind, the problem was less moral and more writerly: stage fright. Capote stumbled across a true story that suited him perfectly and dressed himself up in it to fabulous effect. Without it, he felt naked.
I could have seen a lot of good films this week. I chose Date Movie, and actually I’m thankful because it allows me to say with certainty something I had not decided until this moment: Date Movie is the worst movie I have ever seen. I really mean that. Forty minutes in, I fled the cinema feeling dazed, aggrieved and strangely weepy, as if a stranger had just physically threatened me. I took Date Movie personally. The actress who stars in it means a lot to me. She is Alyson Hannigan, a petite redhead with goofy good looks, who cos-tarred in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the only TV show I have truly loved. I have tried to convince people that she is one of the finest tragicomic actresses in L.A. I have persisted in this despite American Pie and its sequels. At the very least, I expected her to step effortlessly into the shoes Meg Ryan left empty. Ms. Hannigan shares Ms. Ryan’s triumvirate of talents-quick wit, deep soul and gummy smile-and is happily free of the emotional neediness with which Ms. Ryan occasionally oppresses the audience. When I dared to dream, I pictured Alyson at a podium, thanking her parents. But there will be no prizes for Date Movie. The very fact of its existence forces a wedge between Alyson and anything resembling mainstream or indie Hollywood. And for that she has Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer to thank, two “filmmakers” whom I can only name and shame in the full knowledge it will not stop them.
In the first forty minutes of Date Movie, Hannigan beats up a homeless man for sport, wears a grotesque fat suit, watches a cat eat a dead woman’s face, has a carpet of ginger hair waxed from her backside and takes part in a parody of The Bachelor, in which women the bachelor “doesn’t want to bang” are “eliminated” by submachine gun. The humor is so broad it’s less than human-it’s the laughter of monkeys as they fall out of trees. To imagine the audience for this film, one has to envision new levels of adolescent nullity. Who are these kids? Why are they evolving backward? American Pie was an amusing gross-out. Scary Movie was a gross-out, funny piece of nothing. Date Movie is less than nothing. It’s a new concept in crap: a film that is in itself an absence of film. For Hannigan, it’s cinema suicide. The worst humiliation comes when she sits opposite her date as he laboriously spoofs the orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally. Eventually he finishes. Hannigan says: “I’ll have what he’s having.” As a metacomment on Hannigan’s career, it’s the cruelest joke of all. And yes, I know this movie wasn’t meant for me, but I’m repulsed by the children it’s meant for and dread the adults they will become. On the Internet the little darlings are legion, defending Date Movie against all attackers. I reproduce one such review: “OK I’m a 13-year-old girl and I thought the movie was hillarious [sic]. That kind of stuff is what kids joke about and talk about now a days [sic]. Its [sic] a comedy so stop acting like a 50-year-old spinster with a stick up your ass and get on with your life.”
SYRIANA AND THE WEATHER MAN
What is Clooney saying? A sentence he began sparklingly with Ocean’s Eleven (2001), which stumbled at Intolerable Cruelty (2003), grew lamentable at Ocean’s Twelve (2004), having seemed almost to make sense with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002), now reaches its conclusion with the impressive Good Night, and Good Luck and the rigorous Syriana. I judged too quickly, thinking him one of those actors who prides himself on making the big bad movies in order to fund the small good ones-a kind of vanity tax upon the audience, whereby the pointless shoot-’em-up is the price we supposedly pay for the chilly little chamber piece about divorce.
Clooney is not that actor. He doesn’t make sterile, unlovable vanity projects. In a cultural climate that ridicules and is repulsed by intellectual and moral commitment, in his way he pursues both. With his role as executive producer and front-of-shop “face” of Syriana, he has now created an unprecedented scenario: the most popular actor in Hollywood is also the man who wants to agitate us most. Something like this has happened only once before, with Marlon Brando, an actor whose personal failings and self-regard overran all his most serious ambitions. Clooney appears to have no such tragic flaw. He is making real American films instead of American products; he is helping real American films to get made. At a time when most people with half a brain cell have long given up on the products of the American multiplex, Clooney gives us a reason to put our foot back through the door and cautiously buy some popcorn. Rarely in the history of Hollywood has so much personal charm been put to such good use.
Syriana is the first film this season that demands and deserves to be rewatched as soon as it has concluded. Unless your mind naturally turns to the economic and political intrigues of the global oil industry, much of this film will remain obscure to you upon first viewing. Writer/director Stephen Gaghan has followed the same narrative policy as he did in Traffic (2000), connecting the dots between the alienating anonymity of great power and its human cost. But where Traffic was neat and pleasingly didactic, Syriana is as murky and multifaceted as our present historical moment. The story revolves around a Justice Department investigation into the merger of two giant oil companies, an investigation that is for appearances only (“We’re looking for the illusion of due diligence”), for the merger will ultimately benefit the American consumer. Gaghan’s talent is for Marxist explication, demonstrating how one transaction contains within it elements of the entire system it supports. He knows one drug deal on the streets of Brooklyn can be traced back to the rich dealers in Florida, to the desperate backstreets of Mexico City, to the peasants who slave in the cocaine fields of Colombia. So it is in Syriana, where a dull piece of political stagecraft is shown to contain multitudes: Arab princes, CIA agents, Texas oil barons, energy analysts, Washington attorneys and two young Pakistani boys who lose their pitifully paid jobs in the oil fields when the merger causes huge layoffs. Guerrilla camera work and bravura acting fuse to create a realism not unlike the edgy, off-kilter work of Cassavetes, a particularly striking achievement when one considers the fame of many of the actors involved. Playing an all-American, square-chinned energy analyst, Matt Damon joins Clooney, here fat, bearded and sluggish as a U.S. agent with a conscience, and both appear to be just what they claim to be-real players in this dark world.
My complaint is clarity: it is evident that the sociopolitical contexts of this film have been closely observed, so much so that at times it feels like an overresearched novel, the writer having forgotten that we have not shared in his research. This film treats its audience not merely as adults but as experts. I was frequently thrown into scenes on the back foot; only understanding what had passed when it was almost over. You don’t walk out of Syriana outraged and decided, as from Traffic, but this is part of its sophistication. It prompts you to begin thinking, not to finish. Ultimately, what is most impressive about Syriana is the scrupulousness of its production: the genuinely multicultural casting; the sensitivity and nuance of its use of languages, accents, vocabulary; the clothes people wear in each city; the respectful attention to the smallest cultural details.
Syriana is an American movie that reaches out beyond itself. Watching it made me feel hopeful-a rare sensation in a multiplex. Of course, no one film or book will make of us a reasonable, decent people, and what we are living through is not simply a war of ideas; but ideas are no small part of our troubles, and the American film industry is, for better or worse, among the largest engines and disseminators of ideas on the planet. Films like Syriana are not revolutions, but they are contributions. And if this film reaches the countries of which it speaks-on illegal DVDs or in backroom cinemas-a novel message will be passed to the people who live there: we believe you exist and are human, as we are. “When I grew up the only time you would see Arabs on-screen would be in something like Sinbad, where they’re climbing over the side of the ship with a saber in their mouth,” says Alexander Siddig, who plays the character of Prince Nasir, a young, reform-minded emir-in-waiting who has an idea about halting the sale of cheap oil to Americans and getting a better deal for the people of his country. To deal fairly with other humans one must first see them as human. American movies disseminate more images of humans than any other medium. Here Hollywood has something approaching a responsibility; Syriana goes some way to honoring that.
The Sunday Telegraph does not hold with the idea of half stars. I understand the thinking, but it makes it difficult for this reviewer to rate a certain kind of “quirky” American film set in the suburbs, of which half a dozen are released each year and for which two and a half stars is precisely the correct denomination. The Weather Man is one of those films; in fact, it might be the ür-quirky film, for it is an exact splicing of two mild giants of the genre: American Beauty and About Schmidt.
I think I found this film palatable because I read it perversely. As I see it, this film’s central concept is the aversion most right thinking people have to the actor Nicolas Cage. And he accepts this mantle so honorably and humbly in this film that I think maybe now I quite like him. It’s an honest and comic performance and seems filled with all the genuine humiliations that one imagines Cage himself has suffered in the past ten years. I don’t want to tell you any more about it-it’s best stumbled upon without expectations but with my reading kept in mind. One recommendation, though: Nicholas Hoult (the kid from About a Boy) is almost grown and is possibly on the cusp of becoming better looking than the original teenage Leo DiCaprio. Oh, and one warning: Michael Caine’s American accent will make your eyes bleed. Again.
V FOR VENDETTA AND TSOTSI
As a rule, film critics fondly place themselves at a slight remove from the passive mass of cinema audiences. The fortunate among us have pens with lights on them and, while you let the medium of film simply wash over you, we are making notes on such aesthetic minutiae as the Aryan Band-Aid on the big black head of Marsellus Wallace, or the Damoclean slice of light that falls over Harry Lime in a gloomy alleyway.
Cinema-the most pleasurable of mediums-is made to jump through the same hoops of theme, argument and “imagery” as its more resistant cousin, the novel; necessarily so-otherwise there would be little to critique. No one is asked to review roller coasters. And yet the truth is some films affect you so viscerally and with such fluidity that a pen with a light on it is no match for them. I barely made a note during V for Vendetta, unless “Wow!” and “Awesome!” and “This is so fucking cool!” count as notes.
In the face of this film something adolescent in me surged to the surface, and I mean that as a great compliment: adolescence is a state I hold in high regard. After the fact, I saw what other critics have seen-portentousness, absurdity, misogyny, political naïveté-but the truth is during the film I was utterly engaged, somewhat radicalized and very excited. To me, the film, like the original graphic novel from which it comes, is about personal integrity and, more important, about how that notion might be parlayed into our political lives.
It pursues this idea violently, without humor, and with a bald Natalie Portman onboard. It’s easy to ridicule. Personal integrity is always ridiculed by adults and worshipped by adolescents, because principles are the only thing adolescents, unlike adults, really own. I first read V for Vendetta, by the writer Alan Moore and illustrator David Lloyd, when I was an adolescent myself, back when pieces of its dialogue, rendered faithfully in this film, were of great personal importance to me: “Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we ever have-it is the last inch of us. The only inch that matters!”
It is clear that Moore, who has removed his name from the credits, feels his own integrity has been damaged by the streamlining Andy and Larry Wachowski (of the Matrix trilogy) have made to his crowded narrative. The brothers have ditched the supporting cast that tends to proliferate in graphic novels and moved Moore’s English dystopia from its original post-Thatcher, postnuclear era to a world not long after Blair and Bush. Eighty thousand Londoners have died in an act of germ warfare for which terrorists have been blamed. The state has turned from “nanny” to monolithic; the media show a Goebbelsian respect for the truth and a zeal for censorship; homosexuals, “ethnics” and dissidents are mysteriously “vanished”; the people are in the long sleep of fear and lethargy.
Into this bleak world comes V, a man in a white clown mask who takes as his model a long-forgotten English terrorist: Guy Fawkes. The original novel’s respect for Fawkes is one of its sillier aspects-Fawkes was no truth-loving anarchist destroying in order to create, but a Catholic with a grudge against the Protestant majority. And Che Guevara was no prince among men either, but then, adolescents aren’t sticklers for history.
What they are, however, is impassioned. They believe, like V, that “everything is connected,” that “a revolution without dancing isn’t worth having” and that “truth, freedom and justice are more than mere words-they are perspectives.” They find it quite reasonable that V should alight upon tiny, porcelain beauty Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman), lock her up, torture her and allow her to believe she will be executed if she doesn’t give the state a piece of information-all in order to set her (existentially speaking) free.
Without spoiling anything, I think I can tell you that during her incarceration, Evey is sent pieces of a story, pushed through a hole in the prison wall, and this story gives her the strength to resist her torture, to find an integrity she didn’t know she had, and radicalizes her in a manner that you either believe or you don’t. The story she reads is a gift (the person who wrote it is about to die and can expect nothing in exchange) and therefore also an act of love. Acts of love, because they are unattached to the world of commodities, are radical propositions. The complaint that a girl is put through a sadomasochistic experience by a man in a mask misses a key element of the story that is in both book and film: the man in the mask was radicalized in the exact same way. The gender is irrelevant; the gift is everything.
And that’s not even factoring in the pleasure of the massive explosions, Buffyesque fight scenes, a sharp cast of British talent (John Hurt, Sinéad Cusack, Stephen Rea) and the pleasantly subversive fact that the adolescent son of our present prime minister, Euan Blair, was a runner for a film that takes great pleasure in blowing up the Houses of Parliament. The letdown-and I am sad to say it-is Portman herself, who continues to suffer under the weight of a beauty so great it makes Audrey Hepburn look dowdy. Even her bald-headed mug shot looks like a Vogue shoot. Compounding the problem is the kind of English accent only ever found in Swiss finishing schools and the offices of dialect coaches in Hollywood-and Long Island lingers in it still. There is a film for this beautiful girl out there somewhere. I’m just not sure what it is.
In the meantime, she throws a wrench in the works of V for Vendetta by being both too feminine and too mild for a story that in book form was an act of fury and lit a fire under the Thatcher-era kids who read it. Its message was not “Blow up the Houses of Parliament” or “Wear a white mask and knife people,” for kids are not morons and understand what an allegory is. The message of V for Vendetta is “Change is possible.” In its film form this is a truly radical notion to be filed in the adolescent brain right next to the message of the first Matrix movie: the world is other than it seems. If this film makes kids think that way again, that’ll be, like, totally awesome.
The premise of Tsotsi is terrific. A young thug from a South African township shoots a middle-class black woman in the stomach and drives off in her car. A mile down the road he hears a baby crying in the backseat. The audience gasps in that odd mixture of surprise and recognition that great storytelling affords. Everything flows from this point with the inevitability and moral didacticism of the Moses story. But the setting is fascinating; everything is news: the township shacks, the glamorous black middle class, the tube station, the concrete rings in which orphaned children sleep out in the open air. At the center is Tsotsi himself (Presley Chweneyagae), who needs no mask to commit his acts of terror-his face is a mask. In a scene so menacing it outpaces the deadliest moments of Scarface itself, he stalks a crippled man through a train station, a beast on the hunt. Frantic local hip-hop, kwaito, choreographs his frenetic impulse to violence; gospel swells as we glimpse the possibility of redemption in a boy who seemed lost to all pity. I wept throughout the last fifteen minutes. Unfortunately, unlike the woeful 50 Cent movie, this film-from which young black men could genuinely profit-will be seen by Ekow Eshun and nobody else. It will not sell for five quid on the Kilburn High Road, and no one will pass it around a playground.
TRANSAMERICA AND ROMANCE & CIGARETTES
Sometimes it’s the little things that matter. Just before Humbert Humbert meets Mrs. Haze, the mother of the girl who will go on to obsess and destroy him, his gaze falls on “an old gray tennis ball that lay on an oak chest.” This tennis ball has nothing whatsoever to do with the grand themes of Lolita-it “just is,” and in this is beautiful. Many films attempt to master the art of the little moment, the unnecessary aside, the “just is” that makes the work human, and not merely a contrivance of art.
Transamerica is almost entirely contrived, desperately panting after the Oscars it did not, in the end, win-but hidden within its improbable plot and grotesqueries dressed up as humans, there is a policeman looking at the duty roster of the previous night and finding the crime for which a seventeen-year-old drug-using hustler has been locked up overnight: “This is a new one: apparently he shoplifted a frog.” Neither the frog nor the incident is mentioned again, but I gift a whole extra star to this film for that line alone: it is a piece of human business that will stay with me long after many of the season’s films have passed from my mind.
And what else? Well, like Lolita, Transamerica spends much of its time on the road traveling from East Coast to West in a beat-up car, passing tourist joints and freshwater lakes and pausing in roadside bars and motels. Two people who don’t much like each other in New York get closer in Kentucky and learn to love each other in L.A. That one of these people is a pre-op male-to-female transsexual and the other is her son does not, in and of itself, rescue this film from an intense overfamiliarity. To watch this film go through its paces is a reminder that all cultures, no matter how alternative, petrify into cliché in the end. Part of this is in their desire for mainstream affirmation, which requires that they develop a “line” about their “issue” and not deviate from it.
From this film we divine that the present line on transgendered people is that they have a genetic disorder and not a psychological one, and therefore neither the script nor the audience is allowed even momentarily to consider the possibility that the operation Bree (Felicity Huffman) is about to undertake is anything other than a necessary and correct procedure. Nor are we allowed to wonder why, if transsexuality is (as a character puts it) “a radically evolved state of being,” Bree wants to take this radical male/female double-ness and reduce it into a singularity. What if the “problem” is neither genetic nor psychological, but social? For what did “women trapped in a male body” do three hundred years ago? Maybe they expanded the social category of what it is to be male so that it was expansive enough to include the “female” traits they longed for.
Well, so I think privately-but I’d never say it in front of Bree, who is a film character in need of near-constant affirmation. For this she has an extraordinary therapist-possibly unique to American shores-whom she is encouraged to phone whenever she needs the equivalent of a therapeutic cheerleading session. “It hurts,” says Bree. “That’s what hearts do,” says her therapist. “Let it out-this is good, this is so good.”
But is it? It’s finely acted by Felicity Huffman, who has exactly the careful, overstylized physical movements used by those who aspire to the feminine and feel they do not naturally possess it. She has her icky wardrobe of light pink separates and chiffon neckerchiefs, a Harry Belafonte basso and the prickly vulnerability of the permanently self-conscious. But around a bold performance shelter cardboard cutouts: a sassy old black woman and a wise Native American, an unsupportive Suburban Mom in an electric blue shell suit and a street-kid son (Kevin Zegers) who has gone off the rails.
When this son, Toby, attempts to make the road trip go faster by explaining how the subtext of The Lord of the Rings is “totally gay,” I felt we were driving dangerously close to contemporary cliché land. When Bree took him to task for using the word like in every sentence, we’d made a camp in cliché land and bedded down for the night. The film thinks it brings cultural news, with its talk of “stealth” transsexuals who “walk amongst us,” but really none of these characters walks among us-they haven’t the imaginative breadth to survive in our world. They walk in another land, a mirror land through which Charlize Theron and Hilary Swank (two actresses the official publicity notes shamelessly compare to Huffman) have walked before, a place where the fact that the central female role is “unflattering” is considered a daring artistic act in and of itself.
If you are one of those people who, like me, found Hilary Swank better looking in Boys Don’t Cry than she ever is on the red carpet, you too might find it surprising that we are meant to think Felicity Huffman’s brown hair and lack of backless Versace dress a terrible deprivation. She has a handsome beauty that is not obscured in this film and a gift for characterization that deserves a better script. But Bree’s journey was never intended to genuinely challenge ideas of female beauty or femininity itself or gender dysmorphia or the surgery now regularly practiced to “correct” it. It was meant to be a nice hook to hang a movie on. And so it is.
Romance & Cigarettes is the last film I am to review for this paper, and I had hopes that it would be the best. It is a musical-a form shamefully close to my heart-and has the most remarkable cast: James Gandolfini, Kate Wins-let, Susan Sarandon, Christopher Walken and Steve Buscemi, to name half. When a respected actor-turned-writer-director such as John Turturro cashes in fifteen years’ worth of art-house chips, the result is stellar. And so I can say nothing against any performance in this film-who could object to Winslet’s luscious, humorous, genuinely sexy naturalism! Or malign Gandolfini’s side glance of self-loathing that makes watching Tony Soprano as penetrating an emotional experience as watching Othello and King Lear combined! Christopher Walken is a madman and an anarchic delight, Susan Sarandon is still an obscenely attractive and intelligent performer and Steve Buscemi is the greatest addition to the character actor’s art since Peter Lorre-fact is, he’s better. But the play’s the thing. John Turturro conceived this script while sitting at Barton Fink’s desk pretending to be a writer. It is a real-life role he should have left alone. Turturro is, however, a very talented actor, and maybe this is why he has faith that actors alone can transform lines such as “You made your bed; now lie in it” and “I love you-maybe I don’t know how to show it” and “Life doesn’t give you second chances” and “His lips fill my dreams.” And then there is the fact that a musical is an act of pure chutzpah. You can’t do a half-assed musical, with people half singing, half lip-syncing, sort of dancing but sort of not. Good dancing is never shameful-it’s awe inspiring. To watch Astaire is to gasp. It’s bad, uncertain dancing that makes us cringe. No American musical in the past ten years (with the exception of Chicago) has had the courage of its convictions, and that’s the whole problem. Ditch the irony and you’re right back with awe, as Christopher Walken proved in that wonderful Spike Jonze music video of a few years back that revived the true spirit of the musical. Anyway, enough.
For a single season I reviewed movies. Each week the section editor gave me a couple of the mainstream releases to choose from. Occasionally, if there was space, I got to squeeze in a second title. No fancy stuff, no art movies, no foreign films and only one documentary. I wish this explained some of the enthusiasms recorded below but I don’t think it does. All I can say in my defense is if you’ve ever seen Date Movie, V for Vendetta starts to look like a masterpiece.
MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA
The opening scenes of Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha are washed in a gray blue light, the same light that is to be found in Million Dollar Baby, Mystic River and the city shots of Marshall’s own Chicago. Back in the 1970s, Oscar hopefuls had a yellowy glow to their film stock; now the color of Oscar is mineral blue. Serendipitously, this is the exact same shade as the unusual eyes of our hero, young Chiyo (Suzuka Ohgo), a nine-year-old Japanese girl from a poor fishing village. Chiyo’s mother is dying. In Japan, all is tumult: it is raining, the sea is crashing, the camera wobbles. A strange man arrives. Chiyo’s father is crying. He weeps for Chiyo and her elder sister, both of whom he has decided to sell to the strange man. He weeps for the 150 pages of the original novel now crowbarred into this four-minute sequence. A panpipe plays its melancholy tune of longing. This pipe was also in Titanic.
Soon, sooner than anyone could imagine, the girls are dropped off at an okiya, a house of repute (depending on whom you ask) where girls are taught to be geisha. The owners, Mother (Kaori Momoi) and Auntie (Tsai Chin), examine the sisters. One girl has lovely gray blue eyes. She can stay. The other does not. She must go and become a common prostitute on the other side of town. Chiyo, who is to become an uncommon prostitute, is therefore the fortunate one, and is shown her brand-new world by fellow trainee Pumpkin (Zoe Weizenbaum), as they climb up onto the roof and look out across miles of handsome gray blue CGI rooftops. These rooftops were also in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
In a musical, the form in which Rob Marshall, originally a choreographer, was trained, this would be the moment for a song. But there’s no time: five hundred pages of plot remain. So: downstairs in the okiya lurks the evil Hatsumomo (Gong Li), a violent, imperious, gorgeous young harridan who is here to make Chiyo’s life hell. She teaches our heroine an important lesson: old geisha, like Mother, are Japanese. Young geisha, like Hatsumomo, are Chinese and do not look like geisha but rather like willowy Vivienne Westwood models.
To escape the wrath of Hatsumomo, Chiyo wanders into the first of many ravishing street scenes, staged with all the indoor artifice of a Vincente Min nelli production. On a bridge, she comes across a dashing man in his forties called Chairman (Ken Watanabe). He is Japanese, as all men are. The nine-year-old Chiyo conceives a passion for Chairman that will outlast the film itself. Why she feels this way is unclear. Perhaps it is because he buys her an ice cone. She is decided: one day she will become a geisha so that she might be bought by the Chairman himself (thus becoming, in the coy terminology, her danna) and they can be together forever.
Sadly, things are not so easy: being Japanese, it is Chiyo’s fate to be a maid. Only after a number of vicious beatings at the hands of Hatsumomo does Chiyo finally get the message and grow up to be a bewitching Chinese actress (Ziyi Zhang). She is also in Crouching Tiger. Chiyo’s name is changed to Sayuri and she is taken under the wing of a successful geisha from another okiya called Mameha (Michelle Yeoh), who is neither Chinese nor Japanese but rather Malaysian. She is also in Crouching Tiger.
There has been a hoo-ha in Japan regarding the racial origins of these three geisha, much of which seemed to me a case of oversensitivity, until I found lurking within me the conviction that I, as an Englishwoman, can tell the difference between an Irishman and a Welshman at forty paces. I see how it must be galling, if you are Japanese, to look at three long-faced, high-cheekboned, patently not Japanese women and be told that they are Japanese. Although the Chinese, too, have cause for complaint: Ziyi Zhang, to Western eyes, is only slightly Chinese in the way that Lena Horne was slightly black.
This is no fault of the actress herself, whose comeliness is as self-evident and insistent as the wafting cherry blossom and the orange lanterns floating on pellucid water, the sumptuous silk of the kimono and the trimmed perfection of the formal gardens-all of which we are repeatedly encouraged to appreciate until you begin to feel that if something ugly does not appear on-screen soon you might go quite out of your mind. Japanese sliding screens neatly reveal the various beauties, opening on one action and closing on another as formally as the red velvet curtains in a musical revue. But inauthenticity of this kind, so well placed in Chicago, is all to naught here. Without songs, without pleasure, without humor, all the artifice in the world goes to waste.
At times the film suffers from a lack of sufficient artifice: there is more white powder in Dangerous Liaisons than there is here, with each actress apparently following her own personal taste in the matter of geisha stylings. You can imagine the debate on set (“Oh, Rob… do we have to…?”). Ziyi Zhang is a good sport-ish; she’ll wear quite a bit of white paint but won’t black her eyebrows; Gong Li will wear a little, but she’s not having her hair in that ludicrous bouffant; Michelle Yeoh eschews the entire conceit and goes about in much the same makeup she wore for The World is Not Enough. Yet the merest Google search reveals that real geisha are square-jawed, ghost-faced, stocky women swathed in shapeless fabric and wearing six-inch clogs. In Geisha only the clogs remain. The kimono is nipped in at the waist and hugs the abdomen, the mad bud lip is gone, the big hair has been made small. Everything that makes geisha truly alien (and alienating) has been removed.
The plot pushes on: war arrives. The gray blue is back, and so is the wobbly camera. The okiya closes and we find Sayuri reduced to dyeing kimonos in a village far, far away that still does not look like Japan. An old client arrives. He wants to help her recreate the geisha glory days. An American general is in town who wants entertaining. They hatch a plan: “We’ll show the Americans just how hospitable we can be!” As a battle cry this lacks something, even as a substitute for “We’ll put the show on right here!” But so begins that convention beloved of the movies, especially movie musicals: the comeback. The plot turns one part 42nd Street to three parts Lethal Weapon, except this time the lethal weapon is a kimono. Mameha is dug up; she’s running a guesthouse and wants no part of it. She left all that behind, long ago. She’s given away all her kimonos. All except one…
In the end, it is poor plotting and not cultural inauthenticity that is the true problem here. Authenticity is not everything in cinema. (Who cared about the authenticity of culture and locale in Yentl? In Meet Me in St. Louis?) Memoirs of a Geisha hurts the heart and the brain with its crushing monotony, inert, subhuman dialogue (made more ridiculous by being spoken in English with a faux Japanese accent) and Marshall’s calculated attempt to sell us another Hollywood fairy tale of prostitution. This tale was also in Pretty Woman.
Marshall manages only one scene that dispenses with the fantasy. Sayuri is welcomed back to the okiya by Mother, having sold her virginity to the highest bidder. “Now you are a geisha!” crows Mother, but her eyes are wet. Sayuri’s gray blue eyes are dead. A noxious tradition continues. It is a beautiful scene. It makes the endless blossom look like scrub.
SHOPGIRL AND GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN’
Mirabelle is not your average L.A. girl. She works in the glove department of Saks selling a product that nobody buys anymore. Actually, gloves are Mirabelle’s day job: she is an artist. However, due to a hefty student-loan debt, and a productivity rate of three etchings a year, Mirabelle has had to seek other employment. To her right, the disembodied arm of a mannequin is on display, seeming to reach for somebody who is not there. Mirabelle is lonely. She drives a beat-up truck. She is from Vermont. She has a cat she never sees. She takes antidepressants. She is unassuming, clever, innocent, kind. She would like to be in love. Most important, in Shopgirl, she is played by Claire Danes. Ms. Danes is not your average actress. She has a graceful, natural body. She is in possession of a frankly enormous and unexpected nose, which she has never fixed and for which we thank the Lord. Her elastic face is kind, beautiful and expressive. Danes is to this movie what Mirabelle is to L.A.-a diamond in the rough. The rough first manifests itself in the form of her new lover Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman), a rock groupie loser whom she met in a launderette. His dream-which he has fulfilled-is to stencil logos onto amplifiers. When he can’t find a condom he suggests using a plastic bag. Yet Mirabelle is optimistic about Jeremy, as she is about all things. “Are you one of those people,” she asks, “who, if you get to know them, turns out to be… fantastic?” Alas, with Schwartzman, familiarity breeds contempt. He was spectacular in the hipster classic Rushmore, but the emotional autism played for laughs there now reveals itself as a tic of the actor himself: he cannot say a line without mentally enclosing it in quotation marks. Anyway, the end result is the same: we are meant to despair for lovely Mirabelle, and we do. Where is her white knight?
Nothing can prepare you for what comes next, not even reading the original Steve Martin novel: Ray Porter (Steve Martin himself) walks up to the glove counter and asks Mirabelle for a date. Steve Martin’s face. I can’t explain it. You have to see it. But whatever he has done to it, he does not look one day younger than he is. He has, however, succeeded in leaving himself only one facial expression: smug. No, that’s not fair. He also looks creepy. And yet the creepy, intrusive voice-over (also voiced by Martin) assures us: “Mirabelle sizes him up and no alarm bells ring.” Really? Not even the one that tolls: “He’s forty years older than me”? The voice-over continues: “She doesn’t ask the question foremost in her mind: why me?” Good point. Why would a successful man like Ray Porter wish to date twenty-four-year-old, exquisite, milky-skinned Mirabelle? We are at the mercy of a delusional voice-over.
This film is not entirely delusional. It is selectively truthful. As far as May-to-December love stories are concerned, Steve Martin has made a quantum leap in male self-awareness. He understands that what happens between Ray and Mirabelle is fundamentally an exchange of services. Ray Porter wants an innocent girl with whom to have a short affair. Mirabelle is vulnerable and depressed, enjoys receiving expensive gifts and is thankful when her student loan is paid off. Jeremy could do none of these things for her. So: older rich man helps young poor girl out of a rut (while sleeping with her) and then mercifully ends the relationship so both parties can go on to date someone who is their true “peer”: a redeemed Jeremy for Mirabelle, and some classy older woman for Ray. In the (very good) novel, Martin’s writing is so sparse and elegant you can almost excuse the concept. But here on film Ray Porter’s unmoving, waxy face is on top of hers, he is running his crepe fingers (one place where Botox will not work) over the perfection of Mirabelle’s backside-it is intolerable.
So we turn to Jeremy as Mirabelle’s only escape route, but the script has overwhelmingly stacked the odds against him. His lines are moronic, his clothes are foul. He is four or five inches shorter than Mirabelle. His late redemption (he reads a self-help book called How to Love a Woman and buys a white suit) cannot obscure these facts, and as the inappropriate swirling violins crescendo and Ray graciously allows Mirabelle to leave him for her “peer,” too much has already been set against Jeremy. What is styled as a happy ending looks more like the exchange of a rock for a hard place. “How do you turn yourself into a person capable of loving another person?” muses the voice-over, as if this were the universal problem. But it is only Ray’s problem. It is Ray who thinks it appropriate-nay, educational-to use a person for pleasure without giving any piece of yourself apart from your credit card. Mirabelle doesn’t have that problem. Mirabelle loves Ray. She accepts his gifts without guilt or neurosis because she needs them. When Jeremy is redeemed, she loves him. In her last scene she made me cry as she said good-bye to Ray’s inert face and walked away, unsullied by the vanity project that surrounds her. It’s hard to act your way out of so much bad faith, but somehow she manages it. In conclusion, here’s that bad faith in full: (1) Ray Porter tells Mirabelle he is “past fifty.” The actor who plays him was born on the August 14, 1945; (2) Steve Martin’s script sneers at the vanity of fake L.A. girls and their plastic surgery; he is in no position to sneer; (3) The line that precipitates Mirabelle and Ray’s breakup is this: “I’m looking for a three-bedroom place, in case I want to have a serious relationship, have some kids.” Mirabelle dissolves into tears. This is meant to reveal that Ray is not serious about her. The truth is, this film is not serious. Ray Porter does not want a relationship with a peer. His real peer would be too old to have a child. He wants someone young, but not so young as to make him look foolish. Sure enough, at the end of the movie, Ray Porter turns up with a well-preserved woman in her early forties. If he’d turned up with a real peer, then this would not be a self-satisfied little indie drama. It would be a comedy.
Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson. My brain is giving you one star, but my heart wants to give five. I want you to know that Get Rich or Die Tryin’ is to ghetto movies what Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot was to Mafia movies, and I love, love, love it. I love that there are more naked men in this movie than in Brokeback. I love that you keep getting your fellow gangsters to admit that they love you. Really loudly. In the middle of robberies. I love the Beckettian dialogue: “I’m in it for the money.” “For what?” “Sneakers.” “Anything else?” “A gun.” “What you need that for?” “I don’t know.” I love that you watched GoodFellas and Scarface, like, a million times and decided to ditch all that narrative arc crap and get straight to the point with a minimalist voice-over: “Crack meant money. Money meant power. Power meant war.” I love how your acting style makes Bogart look animated. I love that the boss of your gang is dressed like Brando and is doing the voice from The Godfather. And then there is this: “So that was the crew. Four niggas dedicated to one thing and one thing only: getting paid and getting laid.” Tupac, you can sleep easy. Richard Pryor, watch out.
MUNICH
Steven Spielberg is sometimes condescendingly described as a “family filmmaker,” as if family were not one of the more profound aspects of our experience. His instinct for the family dynamic has offered intimacy to many a big-budget premise-the struggling single mother in E.T., the couple teetering on divorce in Close Encounters, Indiana Jones’s Oedipal struggles. In the 1990s there seemed to come a tipping point: family was no longer a metaphor for the action, it was the action. This became explicit as Spielberg grew ambitious for larger clans-the African slaves of Amistad, the six million Jews memorialized in Schindler’s List, the lost generation of American men in Saving Private Ryan. Depending on whom you talk to, this was either an extension of his emotional reach or a grandiose exercise in cinematic grandstanding.
I should lay my cards on the table: I think Spielberg is one of the great popular artists of our time, and I base this upon the stupidity/pleasure axis I apply to popular artists: how much pleasure they give versus how stupid one has to become to receive said pleasure. The answer with Spielberg is usually: “not that stupid.” His films bring pleasure where they most engage. Of course, when reviewing Munich, the cards the critic lays down are expected to be of another kind. As it happens, the film itself is neither “pro-Israeli” nor “pro-Palestinian,” but this is precisely why, in the opinion of many American reviewers, it is inherently aggressive toward Israel, under the logic that anything that isn’t pro is, by definition, anti. There is no way out of that intellectual cul-de-sac, which is why Tony Kushner’s and Eric Roth’s script does its best to avoid that road.
Munich is a film about a truly horrific terrorist attack and the response to that terrorist attack. It is not about moral equivalence. It is about what people will do for their families, for their clans, in order to protect and define them. It is about how far we will go in the service of the people we come from and the narratives we tell ourselves to justify what we have done. Those who have sympathies with either side will go away retaining their sympathies: that is the nature of the argument. And it is exactly this, the nature of the argument-what it does to those who are involved in it-and not the argument itself that Munich is interested in. Crucially, it is billed as “historical fiction,” which will permit those who cling to their separate, mutually exclusive and antagonistic set of facts to call the film a “fantasy.” This film has made groups on both sides uncomfortable because the truths it tells are of a kind that transcend facticity. Whichever family you belong to, national or personal, these truths are recognizable and difficult to dismiss.
Munich is an imagined reconstruction of a program of assassination that Mossad implemented against the organizers and surviving participants of the 1972 Munich massacre. If you are too young to remember that massacre, rent the documentary One Day in September, because Munich wastes no time setting up context. Unusually for Spielberg, he treats us as historical grown-ups (though not, as we shall see, geographical ones). At the heart of the movie is Avner (Eric Bana), a young Israeli who loves his families, both small-his pregnant wife, Daphna (a wonderful English-language debut from Ayelet Zurer)-and large: Israel itself. He is an inexperienced but dedicated soldier chosen by Mossad agent Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush) to head up a ragtag team of four operatives: a brash, South African-born getaway driver called Steve (Daniel Craig), a Belgian toy maker turned explosives expert (Mathieu Kasso vitz), a German-Jewish document forger (Hanns Zischler) and a “cleanup” guy (Ciarán Hinds). Together they roam through a series of 1970s European cities meticulously re-created, although too laboriously symbolized (in Spielberg’s Paris, wherever you are, you can always see the Eiffel Tower), doing unto their enemies as their enemies have done unto them.
In the process we begin to understand the biblical imperative “an eye for an eye” as something more deadly than simple revenge: it is of the body. It permits us the indulgence of thinking with our blood. And Spielberg understands the blood thinkers in his audience: for every assassination of an Arab, we return-lest we forget-to a grim flashback of that day in September, when eleven innocent Israeli athletes met their deaths in brutal and disgusting fashion. Flashbacks repeatedly punctuate the film’s (slightly overlong) running time. We are not allowed to forget. But neither can we ignore what is happening to Avner as he progresses through his mission. Eric Bana gives a convincing portrayal of a man traveling far from who he is in order to defend who he is. His great asset is a subtle face that is not histrionic when conveying competing emotions. The scene where Avner is offered a double mazel tov-once for the arrival of his new baby, and once for the death of a target-is a startling example of this. Through Avner, Spielberg makes a reluctant audience recognize a natural and dangerous imperative in the blood, a fury we all share. “I did it for my family” is the most repeated line in this film. Its echo is silent, yet you can’t help hearing it: what would you do for yours? The perverse nullity of the cycle of violence is made clear. Death is handed out to those who handed out death and from whose ashes new death dealers will rise. Children repeatedly wander into the line of fire. Normal human relations are warped or discarded. When Black September launches a letter-bomb campaign in response to Avner’s assassinations, there is a twisted satisfaction. “Now we’re in dialogue,” says one Mossad agent. Thirty years later we are familiar with this kind of dialogue and where it leads.
The technical achievements of the film are many. Most notable is Janusz Kaminski’s photography, which gives a subtle color palette to each city while lighting the whole like The Third Man, with bleached-out windows and skies that the actors shy away from, preferring the darker corners of the frame. The play of shadow and light looks like a church, a synagogue, a mosque. In the shadows, the cast debates the ethics of their situation and offer as many answers as there are speakers. If the audience recoils from South African Steve’s assessment, “The only blood that matters to me is Jewish blood!” it understands Avner when he says, “I’m not comfortable with confusion.” It is easier to think with the blood. It is easier to be certain.
But how many of us know what to do with these two competing, equally true facts we hear exchanged between Ephraim and Avner: “Israelis will die if these men live. You know this is true!” says Ephraim. Avner replies, “There is no peace at the end of this. You know this is true!”
WALK THE LINE AND GRIZZLY MAN
Arkansas, 1944. Two brothers walk the long, flat corridor of earth between one cornfield and another. Jack Cash, the elder, is memorizing the Bible. His little brother prefers the music of the hymnals; he worries that Jack’s talent for stories is the nobler enterprise. Jack wants to be a preacher. “You can’t help nobody,” he explains, “if you don’t tell them the right story.” Yet we already know it is his little brother, Johnny, who will grow up to tell the memorable stories, the kind you sing, the kind that matter most.
In their own generic way, musical biopics are always the right story: the struggle toward self-actualization. With songs. They are as predictable and joyful as Bible stories: the Passion of Tina Turner, the Ascension of Billie Holiday. It is a very hard-hearted atheist indeed who does not believe that Music Saves. Walk the Line-although conspicuously well acted-is really no different from previous efforts, and that’s a good thing. It shares the charm of the genre. It has Cash abandoning the music of the church for the devil’s tunes. It has Cash falling down drunk onstage and smashing up a dressing room. It has the low times (“Didn’t you used to be…?”) and the times when Cash’s name rode high on the hit parade.
It has the greatest of all musical biopic tropes: the instrument endangered by a parent. One begins to suspect a reverse psychology ploy: parents ambitious of turning a daughter into a future Jacqueline du Pré would do well to smash up a cello in front of her. In Cash’s case, he has a hick father who wants to hock the family piano and buy whatever hicks buy with piano money-chewing tobacco, maybe. It’s Johnny’s downtrodden mother who saves it, but worse is to come: beloved brother Jack is killed in a farming accident for which Johnny feels responsible. Daddy Cash reckons the devil took the wrong son. Next time we see those cornfields, the boy Johnny has turned into Joaquin Phoenix, walking that line alone.
Joaquin alone is, for many women, the reason to see this film. For this reviewer, his elemental masculinity strays rather too far into Victor Mature territory-still, I respect the majority opinion. Certainly when he is covered in water or sweat (which he frequently is) and filling the screen with his ungainly bulk, he possesses a certain Old Testament style. He looks as if he’s struggling with himself-he’d make a good Abraham. For Johnny Cash, he’s perfect. On those early tours, when we see Cash playing alongside Elvis (Tyler Hilton) and Jerry Lee Lewis (Waylon Payne), Phoenix works the difference between those two coltish, flamboyant stars and the bullish man in black whose sole piece of stagecraft was his no-frills introduction: “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.” It’s fun to see three musical pilgrims at the beginning of their journey, before their places in history were settled. “How about that Johnny Cash, everybody?” cries Elvis, with the magnanimous generosity of a man confident that he himself has the greater talent. While Elvis launches into “Hound Dog,” Cash watches from the wings with a face that encapsulates Bing Crosby’s sentiment re Sinatra: “I know one great singer is born into every generation, but why’d he have to be born into mine?”
But Cash has bigger problems than Elvis. In a recent interview, Woody Allen put the trouble well: “The thing standing between me and genius is me.” The bad guy in every musician’s biopic is the musician himself. Cash is stuck in a bad marriage, he drinks and he never got over Jack’s death. One night he is offered amphetamines on the assurance that “Elvis takes them,” surely one of the worst celebrity health tips ever recorded. Once the addiction takes hold, Phoenix is free to give us what he does best: a very dark night of the soul.
It is presumptuous to speak of the parallels between Phoenix’s biography and Cash’s, but there is no doubt that whenever the plot returns to the trauma of the missing brother, Phoenix’s game raises and the audience grows tense. Several scenes are of an emotional intensity out of all proportion to the humdrum musical biopic one expects.
And then, at just the right moment, Reese Witherspoon takes over and brings the film home. Witherspoon has the kind of maniacal feminine perkiness that people of a Woosterish temperament cannot abide. I like her. I like her triangular chin and her head-girl, can-do attitude. Here she plays Cash’s savior and eventual second wife, June Carter, and it’s a great piece of casting: Witherspoon is a twelve-step program in and of herself. She’s so capable, so hardworking, so upright and practical-underrated virtues among actresses. Physically, and in all other ways, Witherspoon makes the best of what she has. She has June’s steely self-sufficiency down pat. “Marry me, June,” begs Cash, not for the first time. “Oh, please, get up off your knees; you look pathetic” is the sensible response.
There is in this film the serious notion that nothing is as existentially fatal as a miserable relationship. And no redemption like a good one. But to get the good one, you’ve got to work harder than Job. Before the successful prison concerts and the comeback and the hagiography of the very movie we’re watching, we see Cash taken low. Real low. Drugs, poverty, despair, violence. Each biopic digs its own way out of this hole. Black soul singers are redeemed differently from white punks-everyone’s got their own groove-but the principle is the same: keep it real, get back on track. Here’s Johnny at his lowest ebb, just before the turnaround, begging his bank for money: “I need this, see? To get my phone on… cos I got a woman… and I need to speak to her.” That’s country music logic, and it’s really quite beautiful.
After the cultural violence of much nineteenth-century anthropology, there came a twentieth-century emphasis on reticence-we should no longer seek to explain people definitively, but rather observe them, respecting their otherness. Fortunately, no one told Werner Herzog, and that is why his Grizzly Man is so damn cool. Herzog (whose voice-over perfectly matches The Simpsons’s hard man, Rainier Wolfcastle) is an infamous egomaniacal, auteur nutjob (i.e., a great European director) with a bent for the Germanically literal. (To pay off a bet he once made a movie called Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. It did not disappoint.) Herzog is hard-core. He’s not interested in your interpretation of why American nutjob Timothy Treadwell lived among bears. Who cares what you think? Herzog has his documentary in hand, explaining that what we have here “iz on astone-ishing story of beauty and depth.” He’s not wrong. The footage itself is mostly Treadwell’s, but the film is a discordant duet of two voices: Herzog’s old-world Schopenhaurian pessimism versus Treadwell’s new-world optimism (which, Herzog believes, masks a deep despair).
Herzog calls bears a “primordial encounter.” Timothy calls them Mr. Chocolate and Aunt Melissa. Herzog believes Timothy was “fighing against the civilization that cast Thoreau out of Walden.” According to Timothy’s parents, the motivation was more prosaic. Not to give the specifics away, but “failed TV actor” is at the root of the crisis. Still, Herzog is determined to spin grandeur out of poor Timmy. And fabulous though it is to hear Herzog shouting about the “ooltimatt indifference of nature,” it’s Timothy saying to a fox, “I love you. Thanks for being my friend. I like this-do you like this?” that brings real joy. All you need to know about indifference is right there in that fox’s face.
BRIEF ENCOUNTER AND PROOF
In the spring of 1945, when David Lean’s Brief Encounter was first released, my father was nineteen. I envy him that vintage year of cinema and all opening weekends between, say, 1933 and 1955. Instead of Memoirs of a Geisha, he saw Woman of the Year. Instead of Shopgirl, he got Top Hat. The first film he ever saw was King Kong, and it was a merciful hour and a half shorter than the beast I slept through in January. In New York and Paris, we can revisit the films of our fathers any night of the week in dozens of fine revival cinemas; in London we rely on the occasional largesse of film festivals and the BFI. To those who love them, any rerelease of a 1940s film is a draught of sunshine. I have never seen a movie of this period in which there was not something to like, just as I have never come across a cheese I wouldn’t eat. Brief Encounter is a Wensleydale: a lovely slice of English fare, familiar, inadvertently comic. It has become its own parody. The English are slightly ashamed of it, as the Aus trians are annoyed by The Sound of Music. In fact, its reputation as a period piece is unfair. It is not all cut-glass diction and antediluvian good manners. The film is really about the dream life of the English, those secret parts of us that are most important and to which we have least access. It’s a shame to go to the cinema only to laugh (as modern audiences laugh at the supposed camp excess of another sincere movie, Now, Voyager). If you pass over the superficial culture shocks of sixty years passed (A lending library in Boots the chemist! A string quartet in a railway café!), it is as astute about the English character as it ever was.
The story is easily paraphrased: Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) and Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) meet in a railway station and fall in love. Unfortunately, they are married to other people. Laura has a stolid, suburban husband, Fred, whose only connection to the Keatsian strain in English life is via the Times crossword, the clue in question being “When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high… (seven letters).” Laura suggests “romance.” It’s right-but it doesn’t fit with the other answers. In this moment the entire film is contained. There are many things that the English want and dream and believe. But they do not fit in with our other answers.
Lean’s sad, buttoned-up account of unconsummated love is about all of us and our cautious natures. It’s not that the English don’t want true love or self-knowledge. Rather, unlike our European cousins, we will not easily give up the real for the dream. We remain skeptical about throwing away a concrete asset like Fred in favor of “the faery power of unreflecting love,” no matter how much Keats may recommend it. Laura, a Midlands mother of two, is certainly not a fairy by temperament, despite her pixie face. She will not give up the reality of Fred for the dream of Alec. Alec, gentleman that he is, quite agrees. An Italian (or indeed, the modern English viewer of this film) will diagnose Laura and Alec as morbidly repressed. The film offers a different hypothesis: that the possibility of two people’s pleasure cannot override the certainty of other people’s pain. Primum non nocere is the principle upon which the film operates. As a national motto we could do a lot worse.
These days, carpe diem is more popular, and self-sacrifice invites sniggers. But the impulse behind Laura’s and Alec’s sacrifice seems to me neither smug, religious nor self-satisfied. Brief Encounter is not about English sexual repression or Christian values. It’s about personal grandeur. By the end of the film, Alec and Laura are truly grand; they are their best selves. And if there is a moral lesson, it is not about the sin of sexual infidelity but the secular sin of being unfaithful to oneself.
In the last few minutes of their good-bye, they are interrupted by Dolly, a silly woman whom Laura knows. She sits down uninvited and starts to talk about train timetables. She represents all the petty horror of English life, the inconsequential stuff and nonsense that gets in the way of our real lives and separates us from that “high romance” Keats knew the English have within them. It is sad that Alec and Laura must part, but what makes this an English tragedy is that they will politely listen to Dolly as they do it. They should be showing their souls. Instead they discuss the weather.
Hollywood recycles its actresses. Ava Gardner turned into Angelina Jolie. Claudette Colbert reincarnated as Reese Witherspoon. Cate Blanchett may one day prove worthy of the Katharine Hepburn echoes she evokes. Gwyneth Paltrow, star of the depressing misfire Proof, is Grace Kelly’s replacement, and that’s a poisoned chalice if ever there was one. The qualities of Grace and Gwyneth, as I see them, are as follows: a sense of entitlement, a glacial physical beauty and an apparently genuine submissive attitude to the opposite sex. They worship the men they play opposite and don’t so much act as react to them. It is this talent for silent reaction that won Paltrow an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love, one of the least verbal Oscar-winning performances in recent memory. Her face flushes, her eyes flood. If you hold her in your arms, she trembles. It’s all good old-fashioned movie actress stuff. If you were a male moviegoer looking for someone to love you, to just love you, and not drive you crazy with questions and smart talk like Bette Davis or Renée Zellweger, then Gwyneth’s your girl. Classy as she is, she’ll love you even if you’re completely unsuitable, even if you’re Ripley or Ted Hughes. But just as Grace did, Gwyneth has grown tired of the princess gig. She wants to be an actress. Proof sees her acting and acting and acting. I’m sure it’s true that on stage she made this role her own, wowing audiences with her portrayal of Catherine, the emotionally and mentally vulnerable daughter of a math genius who has lost his mind. Did the father write the mathematical proof posthumously found in a desk drawer-or did the daughter? The theatrical script uses the word proof as a metaphorical launchpad for discussions of work and love and life, as plays will. It’s that kind of verbal swordplay that so impresses onstage while seeming so redundant and brittle on-screen. Everyone involved tries really hard, and Jake Gyllenhaal is puppyishly excited by the whole project, but dominating it all is Paltrow’s voice, with its hipsterish high-rising terminals that sound as if she is saying only one thing, over and over: “Like, I can act, right?” She has something to prove, but it has nothing to do with math.
The best course of action for Paltrow is to remember her antecedent and follow her example. There is a way out of the princess gig. Grace Kelly cracked it in High Society and Rear Window. Paltrow glimpsed it in Emma, which was, in truth, the role that deserved an Oscar. Keep the vulnerability, but don’t be coy about the self-possession that is so obviously there. He goes down on his knees because you have something of value-and you know it. And if he left, you’d survive. Grace Kelly proved that princesses have power, too.
GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK AND CASANOVA
First, a disclaimer. With regard to Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney’s strident political docudrama, I find myself in a difficult position. I watched it and liked it. Then I spent two hours on the Internet and changed my mind.
What remains is still the review I intended, but it is qualified by the obvious fact that liberal films like this are made to please liberals like me. In terms of historical content, the film is neither quite honest nor quite true. That’s a shame, because it’s a good film. I don’t have space to discuss the several disappointing inaccuracies, elisions of fact and deliberate obfuscations. All I can do is direct you to the Internet and to Joseph E. Persico’s 1988 biography Edward R. Murrow: An American Original. What follows, then, is a glowing review of a fine piece of agitprop leftist cinema, which I very much enjoyed in the same spirit a person of the opposite sensibility will enjoy Ann Coulter’s recent celebratory defense of McCarthyism, Treason, not because it is entirely true but because she’s fighting in your corner. Clooney’s fighting in mine, and doing it in style.
And how. This is a beautifully made, superficially coherent, effective movie, and you have to pinch yourself to believe an actor directed it, wrote it and produced it. The generosity of the ensemble casting, the control of the heavily verbal material, the expert pacing-it is a mature work. Clooney understands that style is what you leave out, and in its taut ninety minutes he leaves out so much of what we have come to expect that Warner refused to fund the film. He left out the color. He left out the subplots. He left out the love interest. He sidelined historical reenactments in favor of the real thing: archive footage.
What remains is strongly reminiscent of Citizen Kane, not simply for its loquacious, crusading journalists, but because it is both visually luscious and aurally self-sufficient. You could close your eyes and understand everything. But don’t close your eyes. Here in sumptuous black and white is a perfectly recreated Capraesque newsroom. Here are quick-fire conversations à la Pres ton Sturges. The period detail is given a kick in the pants by the witty camera work (borrowed from Soderbergh and the Coen brothers), shooting faces from below, zooming in on a finger worrying a shirt button.
Clooney himself avoids the camera, slinking through the film as unobtrusively as a star can. In a film that is about editorializing and is itself heavily editorialized, Clooney edits himself out for the sake of the material. Into the Clooney-shaped hole slips an accomplished ensemble cast-Tate Donovan, Reed Diamond, Jeff Daniels, Robert Downey Jr., Patricia Clarkson-all of whom back up David Strathairn’s pitch-perfect Murrow impersonation by being entirely convincing newshounds. Well, all but one. I think you know who I’m talking about. Mr. Downey remains the most aggressive scene stealer in Hollywood. He’s barely restrained here, but if someone doesn’t give him free rein soon, there’s a danger of auto-combustion.
I digress. Like Murrow-the campaigning television broadcaster who squared off against Senator McCarthy in the mid-1950s-Clooney uses the “wires and lights” of his medium to make simple, forceful arguments. His case against McCarthy is familiar and correct: the paranoid fervor of McCarthyism placed the right to fair trial and the rights of the First Amendment under serious threat. Today, these rights are endangered once more. “We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home,” argues Murrow in 1956, foreshadowing our present concerns. Clooney doesn’t have to push hard for analogies like this-they’re everywhere. In fact, they’re a little too easy, and so admiring is he of Murrow that he follows his hero’s editorial style to the letter. (Clooney has always seemed boyishly prone to masculine hero worship, from his consecration of his own newscaster father to the re-creation-both on- and offscreen-of Sinatra’s rat-pack heyday.) Just as Murrow gave McCarthy enough rope to hang himself by allowing him “right to reply” on Murrow’s own prime-time show, See It Now, so Clooney refrains from casting an actor as McCarthy and simply replays the archive film. The edited archive film. He chooses all the same shots as Murrow did for his TV show: the off-guard, twitching, sweating, hysterical McCarthy, asking pointless questions, chasing phantoms that were not there.
Clooney clearly believes, like Murrow, that his editorializing has truth on its side. He has a case. Sometimes there is no “other side of the argument.” Nazis have no right of reply. Ed Murrow made a bet that what was pinko liberal thinking in 1956 would prove to be a condition of basic humanity fifty years later. He was wrong. The basic human rights he defended are once again assailed. Clooney is angry about that.
This must be why he cuts into his movie Murrow’s selectively edited footage of McCarthy’s interrogation of Annie Moss, an elderly, uneducated black woman whose Communist connections-McCarthy believed-had led her to seek a job inside the Pentagon. We see this meek woman verbally bullied and cheated of her right to see the evidence put against her. We are led to believe she knows nothing of the charges. One senator tries to help her. McCarthy leaves the hearing. Bobby Kennedy sits at the end of the table of senators, failing to come to her aid.
What evil breeds where good men stay silent! So we are meant to think. And this is a true liberal principle, as is the principle that no one should be tried without seeing the evidence held against them. Yet it remains disappointing to go on the Internet, in a shameful state of historical innocence, and discover that Bobby Kennedy was a good friend of Senator McCarthy and that Annie Moss was, as it happens, a member of the Communist Party. Clooney could have included gray areas such as this and still have made a fine liberal argument. It’s a sure sign that things are bad when the Left, like the Right, wants its history black and white.
Casanova is a silly film. Half Carry On, half Shakespearean comedy, everyone in it is perfectly nice and should reassemble to make a lively Twelfth Night. The trouble here is that the words are not by Shakespeare but rather by one Kimberly Simi, who worked as an attorney before selling this script. It has Heath Ledger sounding like James Mason with a soupçon of Peter O’Toole. It has tights and bosoms. It has mistaken identity, gender switching, girls wearing mustaches, a shrew tamed, hearts sundered then reattached and finally a journey by sea. Some of the best writing is in the program notes: “Sienna Miller… catapulted into the public eye when she appeared in the BBC comedy Bedtime.” Strange. That’s not how I remember it. Speaking of the young actress, she might ask hair and makeup how it is possible to make a preternaturally pretty twenty-two-year-old look like a dull matron. In the film, Francesca Bruni, for that is the character’s name, is secretly writing a feminist tract called “The Subjugation of Women” under a nom de plume-maybe that was the reasoning. Feminists can’t be blond and must have big eyebrows. I would love it if Miss Miller was secretly the author of the works of Elaine Showalter. I fear it is not so.
CAPOTE AND DATE MOVIE
Some cinematic seasons throw up abstract questions. In the early 1990s a clutch of movies asked: What is adulthood? Children found themselves in the bodies of adults, and vice versa. Adults left children home alone. Children were shrunk by careless fathers. Babies started talking with the voice of John Travolta. It may be vocational myopia on my part, but this year I hear the question “What is a writer?” In Hidden (released in the United States as Caché) the answer is painful: writers are petty bourgeois. In Good Night, and Good Luck it’s the writer as hero, noble champion of the people. In Casanova she’s a harmless firebrand, in Memoirs of a Geisha, a naïf who simply records events as they happen. In both Get Rich or Die Tryin’ and Walk the Line the writer is an alchemist, turning pain into gold.
Why all the sudden concern with scribblers? Writers like to flatter themselves that in times of communal trauma people turn to the written word for comfort and direction. Maybe once. But in the noughties we’ve begun to legislate against language itself: writers are not to be trusted. They are double-dealers. For this reason, Capote, despite its 1950s setting, is timely. When people rail against the “media,” the bogeymen they have in mind owe not a little to the specter of Truman Capote. What is a writer? He knocks on your door with a smile, a pen and a shard of ice in his heart. Around that shard Philip Seymour Hoffman molds his tremendous Capote impersonation, by turns fey, friendly, oleaginous, deadly. He is Janus-faced. In New York, he’s a quixotic queen laughing in smoky nightclubs at the stupidity of his own readers; in Holcomb, Kansas, he does a damn good impression of being the boy next door. He’ll turn up at the sheriff’s house early in the morning with doughnuts and coffee, find the sheriff’s wife alone and explain he came on a whim to eat breakfast with her. She wanders off to get plates. Slowly the camera and Hoffman slink to the left into a side room where little Perry Smith, multiple murderer, is locked up in a cell.
The sea change that comes over Hoffman’s face during this pan shot is as close as silence comes to narrative. His Capote coolly dissembles, yet he is impassioned; he lied to get into the house, and yet he came to uncover truths. He is a writer: a man who tells the truth by lying. An actor of Hoffman’s caliber, who also tells the truth that way, can’t help but have a deep understanding of writerly psychology. “When I think of how good it could be,” wrote Capote of his unwritten book, “I can hardly breathe.” When Hoffman says these lines-sexually, venally, desperately-you fear him and yourself. How far will he go for a good story? How far will you go with him to hear it?
Hoffman has been vocal in his praise of the writer, Dan Futterman, and director, Bennett Miller, but this is an actor’s traditional demurral: the lion’s share of the praise belongs to Hoffman. Everything looks lovely and period and prestige, but shots linger ponderously, keen that we should fully appreciate them, as predictable a tic of a first-time director as the first-time novelist compulsively inserting adjectives. It’s the acting that sings, especially when Hoffman duets with luminous Catherine Keener (playing another writer, Harper Lee), the lady with the loveliest laugh in cinema. Hoffman’s writer is a self-serving egoist; Keener’s a restrained, wise soul. But just as in life, cinema’s Capote trumps Harper Lee. We admire those who refrain, but we make movies about personae. Capote’s persona was enormous and, unusually, his talent was almost its equal. Yet we still tell Capote’s story with pity and use his life as a parable: talent can’t buy you morals. The film implies Truman couldn’t finish another book after In Cold Blood because he never got over his betrayal of Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. To my mind, the problem was less moral and more writerly: stage fright. Capote stumbled across a true story that suited him perfectly and dressed himself up in it to fabulous effect. Without it, he felt naked.
I could have seen a lot of good films this week. I chose Date Movie, and actually I’m thankful because it allows me to say with certainty something I had not decided until this moment: Date Movie is the worst movie I have ever seen. I really mean that. Forty minutes in, I fled the cinema feeling dazed, aggrieved and strangely weepy, as if a stranger had just physically threatened me. I took Date Movie personally. The actress who stars in it means a lot to me. She is Alyson Hannigan, a petite redhead with goofy good looks, who cos-tarred in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the only TV show I have truly loved. I have tried to convince people that she is one of the finest tragicomic actresses in L.A. I have persisted in this despite American Pie and its sequels. At the very least, I expected her to step effortlessly into the shoes Meg Ryan left empty. Ms. Hannigan shares Ms. Ryan’s triumvirate of talents-quick wit, deep soul and gummy smile-and is happily free of the emotional neediness with which Ms. Ryan occasionally oppresses the audience. When I dared to dream, I pictured Alyson at a podium, thanking her parents. But there will be no prizes for Date Movie. The very fact of its existence forces a wedge between Alyson and anything resembling mainstream or indie Hollywood. And for that she has Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer to thank, two “filmmakers” whom I can only name and shame in the full knowledge it will not stop them.
In the first forty minutes of Date Movie, Hannigan beats up a homeless man for sport, wears a grotesque fat suit, watches a cat eat a dead woman’s face, has a carpet of ginger hair waxed from her backside and takes part in a parody of The Bachelor, in which women the bachelor “doesn’t want to bang” are “eliminated” by submachine gun. The humor is so broad it’s less than human-it’s the laughter of monkeys as they fall out of trees. To imagine the audience for this film, one has to envision new levels of adolescent nullity. Who are these kids? Why are they evolving backward? American Pie was an amusing gross-out. Scary Movie was a gross-out, funny piece of nothing. Date Movie is less than nothing. It’s a new concept in crap: a film that is in itself an absence of film. For Hannigan, it’s cinema suicide. The worst humiliation comes when she sits opposite her date as he laboriously spoofs the orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally. Eventually he finishes. Hannigan says: “I’ll have what he’s having.” As a metacomment on Hannigan’s career, it’s the cruelest joke of all. And yes, I know this movie wasn’t meant for me, but I’m repulsed by the children it’s meant for and dread the adults they will become. On the Internet the little darlings are legion, defending Date Movie against all attackers. I reproduce one such review: “OK I’m a 13-year-old girl and I thought the movie was hillarious [sic]. That kind of stuff is what kids joke about and talk about now a days [sic]. Its [sic] a comedy so stop acting like a 50-year-old spinster with a stick up your ass and get on with your life.”
SYRIANA AND THE WEATHER MAN
What is Clooney saying? A sentence he began sparklingly with Ocean’s Eleven (2001), which stumbled at Intolerable Cruelty (2003), grew lamentable at Ocean’s Twelve (2004), having seemed almost to make sense with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002), now reaches its conclusion with the impressive Good Night, and Good Luck and the rigorous Syriana. I judged too quickly, thinking him one of those actors who prides himself on making the big bad movies in order to fund the small good ones-a kind of vanity tax upon the audience, whereby the pointless shoot-’em-up is the price we supposedly pay for the chilly little chamber piece about divorce.
Clooney is not that actor. He doesn’t make sterile, unlovable vanity projects. In a cultural climate that ridicules and is repulsed by intellectual and moral commitment, in his way he pursues both. With his role as executive producer and front-of-shop “face” of Syriana, he has now created an unprecedented scenario: the most popular actor in Hollywood is also the man who wants to agitate us most. Something like this has happened only once before, with Marlon Brando, an actor whose personal failings and self-regard overran all his most serious ambitions. Clooney appears to have no such tragic flaw. He is making real American films instead of American products; he is helping real American films to get made. At a time when most people with half a brain cell have long given up on the products of the American multiplex, Clooney gives us a reason to put our foot back through the door and cautiously buy some popcorn. Rarely in the history of Hollywood has so much personal charm been put to such good use.
Syriana is the first film this season that demands and deserves to be rewatched as soon as it has concluded. Unless your mind naturally turns to the economic and political intrigues of the global oil industry, much of this film will remain obscure to you upon first viewing. Writer/director Stephen Gaghan has followed the same narrative policy as he did in Traffic (2000), connecting the dots between the alienating anonymity of great power and its human cost. But where Traffic was neat and pleasingly didactic, Syriana is as murky and multifaceted as our present historical moment. The story revolves around a Justice Department investigation into the merger of two giant oil companies, an investigation that is for appearances only (“We’re looking for the illusion of due diligence”), for the merger will ultimately benefit the American consumer. Gaghan’s talent is for Marxist explication, demonstrating how one transaction contains within it elements of the entire system it supports. He knows one drug deal on the streets of Brooklyn can be traced back to the rich dealers in Florida, to the desperate backstreets of Mexico City, to the peasants who slave in the cocaine fields of Colombia. So it is in Syriana, where a dull piece of political stagecraft is shown to contain multitudes: Arab princes, CIA agents, Texas oil barons, energy analysts, Washington attorneys and two young Pakistani boys who lose their pitifully paid jobs in the oil fields when the merger causes huge layoffs. Guerrilla camera work and bravura acting fuse to create a realism not unlike the edgy, off-kilter work of Cassavetes, a particularly striking achievement when one considers the fame of many of the actors involved. Playing an all-American, square-chinned energy analyst, Matt Damon joins Clooney, here fat, bearded and sluggish as a U.S. agent with a conscience, and both appear to be just what they claim to be-real players in this dark world.
My complaint is clarity: it is evident that the sociopolitical contexts of this film have been closely observed, so much so that at times it feels like an overresearched novel, the writer having forgotten that we have not shared in his research. This film treats its audience not merely as adults but as experts. I was frequently thrown into scenes on the back foot; only understanding what had passed when it was almost over. You don’t walk out of Syriana outraged and decided, as from Traffic, but this is part of its sophistication. It prompts you to begin thinking, not to finish. Ultimately, what is most impressive about Syriana is the scrupulousness of its production: the genuinely multicultural casting; the sensitivity and nuance of its use of languages, accents, vocabulary; the clothes people wear in each city; the respectful attention to the smallest cultural details.
Syriana is an American movie that reaches out beyond itself. Watching it made me feel hopeful-a rare sensation in a multiplex. Of course, no one film or book will make of us a reasonable, decent people, and what we are living through is not simply a war of ideas; but ideas are no small part of our troubles, and the American film industry is, for better or worse, among the largest engines and disseminators of ideas on the planet. Films like Syriana are not revolutions, but they are contributions. And if this film reaches the countries of which it speaks-on illegal DVDs or in backroom cinemas-a novel message will be passed to the people who live there: we believe you exist and are human, as we are. “When I grew up the only time you would see Arabs on-screen would be in something like Sinbad, where they’re climbing over the side of the ship with a saber in their mouth,” says Alexander Siddig, who plays the character of Prince Nasir, a young, reform-minded emir-in-waiting who has an idea about halting the sale of cheap oil to Americans and getting a better deal for the people of his country. To deal fairly with other humans one must first see them as human. American movies disseminate more images of humans than any other medium. Here Hollywood has something approaching a responsibility; Syriana goes some way to honoring that.
The Sunday Telegraph does not hold with the idea of half stars. I understand the thinking, but it makes it difficult for this reviewer to rate a certain kind of “quirky” American film set in the suburbs, of which half a dozen are released each year and for which two and a half stars is precisely the correct denomination. The Weather Man is one of those films; in fact, it might be the ür-quirky film, for it is an exact splicing of two mild giants of the genre: American Beauty and About Schmidt.
I think I found this film palatable because I read it perversely. As I see it, this film’s central concept is the aversion most right thinking people have to the actor Nicolas Cage. And he accepts this mantle so honorably and humbly in this film that I think maybe now I quite like him. It’s an honest and comic performance and seems filled with all the genuine humiliations that one imagines Cage himself has suffered in the past ten years. I don’t want to tell you any more about it-it’s best stumbled upon without expectations but with my reading kept in mind. One recommendation, though: Nicholas Hoult (the kid from About a Boy) is almost grown and is possibly on the cusp of becoming better looking than the original teenage Leo DiCaprio. Oh, and one warning: Michael Caine’s American accent will make your eyes bleed. Again.
V FOR VENDETTA AND TSOTSI
As a rule, film critics fondly place themselves at a slight remove from the passive mass of cinema audiences. The fortunate among us have pens with lights on them and, while you let the medium of film simply wash over you, we are making notes on such aesthetic minutiae as the Aryan Band-Aid on the big black head of Marsellus Wallace, or the Damoclean slice of light that falls over Harry Lime in a gloomy alleyway.
Cinema-the most pleasurable of mediums-is made to jump through the same hoops of theme, argument and “imagery” as its more resistant cousin, the novel; necessarily so-otherwise there would be little to critique. No one is asked to review roller coasters. And yet the truth is some films affect you so viscerally and with such fluidity that a pen with a light on it is no match for them. I barely made a note during V for Vendetta, unless “Wow!” and “Awesome!” and “This is so fucking cool!” count as notes.
In the face of this film something adolescent in me surged to the surface, and I mean that as a great compliment: adolescence is a state I hold in high regard. After the fact, I saw what other critics have seen-portentousness, absurdity, misogyny, political naïveté-but the truth is during the film I was utterly engaged, somewhat radicalized and very excited. To me, the film, like the original graphic novel from which it comes, is about personal integrity and, more important, about how that notion might be parlayed into our political lives.
It pursues this idea violently, without humor, and with a bald Natalie Portman onboard. It’s easy to ridicule. Personal integrity is always ridiculed by adults and worshipped by adolescents, because principles are the only thing adolescents, unlike adults, really own. I first read V for Vendetta, by the writer Alan Moore and illustrator David Lloyd, when I was an adolescent myself, back when pieces of its dialogue, rendered faithfully in this film, were of great personal importance to me: “Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we ever have-it is the last inch of us. The only inch that matters!”
It is clear that Moore, who has removed his name from the credits, feels his own integrity has been damaged by the streamlining Andy and Larry Wachowski (of the Matrix trilogy) have made to his crowded narrative. The brothers have ditched the supporting cast that tends to proliferate in graphic novels and moved Moore’s English dystopia from its original post-Thatcher, postnuclear era to a world not long after Blair and Bush. Eighty thousand Londoners have died in an act of germ warfare for which terrorists have been blamed. The state has turned from “nanny” to monolithic; the media show a Goebbelsian respect for the truth and a zeal for censorship; homosexuals, “ethnics” and dissidents are mysteriously “vanished”; the people are in the long sleep of fear and lethargy.
Into this bleak world comes V, a man in a white clown mask who takes as his model a long-forgotten English terrorist: Guy Fawkes. The original novel’s respect for Fawkes is one of its sillier aspects-Fawkes was no truth-loving anarchist destroying in order to create, but a Catholic with a grudge against the Protestant majority. And Che Guevara was no prince among men either, but then, adolescents aren’t sticklers for history.
What they are, however, is impassioned. They believe, like V, that “everything is connected,” that “a revolution without dancing isn’t worth having” and that “truth, freedom and justice are more than mere words-they are perspectives.” They find it quite reasonable that V should alight upon tiny, porcelain beauty Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman), lock her up, torture her and allow her to believe she will be executed if she doesn’t give the state a piece of information-all in order to set her (existentially speaking) free.
Without spoiling anything, I think I can tell you that during her incarceration, Evey is sent pieces of a story, pushed through a hole in the prison wall, and this story gives her the strength to resist her torture, to find an integrity she didn’t know she had, and radicalizes her in a manner that you either believe or you don’t. The story she reads is a gift (the person who wrote it is about to die and can expect nothing in exchange) and therefore also an act of love. Acts of love, because they are unattached to the world of commodities, are radical propositions. The complaint that a girl is put through a sadomasochistic experience by a man in a mask misses a key element of the story that is in both book and film: the man in the mask was radicalized in the exact same way. The gender is irrelevant; the gift is everything.
And that’s not even factoring in the pleasure of the massive explosions, Buffyesque fight scenes, a sharp cast of British talent (John Hurt, Sinéad Cusack, Stephen Rea) and the pleasantly subversive fact that the adolescent son of our present prime minister, Euan Blair, was a runner for a film that takes great pleasure in blowing up the Houses of Parliament. The letdown-and I am sad to say it-is Portman herself, who continues to suffer under the weight of a beauty so great it makes Audrey Hepburn look dowdy. Even her bald-headed mug shot looks like a Vogue shoot. Compounding the problem is the kind of English accent only ever found in Swiss finishing schools and the offices of dialect coaches in Hollywood-and Long Island lingers in it still. There is a film for this beautiful girl out there somewhere. I’m just not sure what it is.
In the meantime, she throws a wrench in the works of V for Vendetta by being both too feminine and too mild for a story that in book form was an act of fury and lit a fire under the Thatcher-era kids who read it. Its message was not “Blow up the Houses of Parliament” or “Wear a white mask and knife people,” for kids are not morons and understand what an allegory is. The message of V for Vendetta is “Change is possible.” In its film form this is a truly radical notion to be filed in the adolescent brain right next to the message of the first Matrix movie: the world is other than it seems. If this film makes kids think that way again, that’ll be, like, totally awesome.
The premise of Tsotsi is terrific. A young thug from a South African township shoots a middle-class black woman in the stomach and drives off in her car. A mile down the road he hears a baby crying in the backseat. The audience gasps in that odd mixture of surprise and recognition that great storytelling affords. Everything flows from this point with the inevitability and moral didacticism of the Moses story. But the setting is fascinating; everything is news: the township shacks, the glamorous black middle class, the tube station, the concrete rings in which orphaned children sleep out in the open air. At the center is Tsotsi himself (Presley Chweneyagae), who needs no mask to commit his acts of terror-his face is a mask. In a scene so menacing it outpaces the deadliest moments of Scarface itself, he stalks a crippled man through a train station, a beast on the hunt. Frantic local hip-hop, kwaito, choreographs his frenetic impulse to violence; gospel swells as we glimpse the possibility of redemption in a boy who seemed lost to all pity. I wept throughout the last fifteen minutes. Unfortunately, unlike the woeful 50 Cent movie, this film-from which young black men could genuinely profit-will be seen by Ekow Eshun and nobody else. It will not sell for five quid on the Kilburn High Road, and no one will pass it around a playground.
TRANSAMERICA AND ROMANCE & CIGARETTES
Sometimes it’s the little things that matter. Just before Humbert Humbert meets Mrs. Haze, the mother of the girl who will go on to obsess and destroy him, his gaze falls on “an old gray tennis ball that lay on an oak chest.” This tennis ball has nothing whatsoever to do with the grand themes of Lolita-it “just is,” and in this is beautiful. Many films attempt to master the art of the little moment, the unnecessary aside, the “just is” that makes the work human, and not merely a contrivance of art.
Transamerica is almost entirely contrived, desperately panting after the Oscars it did not, in the end, win-but hidden within its improbable plot and grotesqueries dressed up as humans, there is a policeman looking at the duty roster of the previous night and finding the crime for which a seventeen-year-old drug-using hustler has been locked up overnight: “This is a new one: apparently he shoplifted a frog.” Neither the frog nor the incident is mentioned again, but I gift a whole extra star to this film for that line alone: it is a piece of human business that will stay with me long after many of the season’s films have passed from my mind.
And what else? Well, like Lolita, Transamerica spends much of its time on the road traveling from East Coast to West in a beat-up car, passing tourist joints and freshwater lakes and pausing in roadside bars and motels. Two people who don’t much like each other in New York get closer in Kentucky and learn to love each other in L.A. That one of these people is a pre-op male-to-female transsexual and the other is her son does not, in and of itself, rescue this film from an intense overfamiliarity. To watch this film go through its paces is a reminder that all cultures, no matter how alternative, petrify into cliché in the end. Part of this is in their desire for mainstream affirmation, which requires that they develop a “line” about their “issue” and not deviate from it.
From this film we divine that the present line on transgendered people is that they have a genetic disorder and not a psychological one, and therefore neither the script nor the audience is allowed even momentarily to consider the possibility that the operation Bree (Felicity Huffman) is about to undertake is anything other than a necessary and correct procedure. Nor are we allowed to wonder why, if transsexuality is (as a character puts it) “a radically evolved state of being,” Bree wants to take this radical male/female double-ness and reduce it into a singularity. What if the “problem” is neither genetic nor psychological, but social? For what did “women trapped in a male body” do three hundred years ago? Maybe they expanded the social category of what it is to be male so that it was expansive enough to include the “female” traits they longed for.
Well, so I think privately-but I’d never say it in front of Bree, who is a film character in need of near-constant affirmation. For this she has an extraordinary therapist-possibly unique to American shores-whom she is encouraged to phone whenever she needs the equivalent of a therapeutic cheerleading session. “It hurts,” says Bree. “That’s what hearts do,” says her therapist. “Let it out-this is good, this is so good.”
But is it? It’s finely acted by Felicity Huffman, who has exactly the careful, overstylized physical movements used by those who aspire to the feminine and feel they do not naturally possess it. She has her icky wardrobe of light pink separates and chiffon neckerchiefs, a Harry Belafonte basso and the prickly vulnerability of the permanently self-conscious. But around a bold performance shelter cardboard cutouts: a sassy old black woman and a wise Native American, an unsupportive Suburban Mom in an electric blue shell suit and a street-kid son (Kevin Zegers) who has gone off the rails.
When this son, Toby, attempts to make the road trip go faster by explaining how the subtext of The Lord of the Rings is “totally gay,” I felt we were driving dangerously close to contemporary cliché land. When Bree took him to task for using the word like in every sentence, we’d made a camp in cliché land and bedded down for the night. The film thinks it brings cultural news, with its talk of “stealth” transsexuals who “walk amongst us,” but really none of these characters walks among us-they haven’t the imaginative breadth to survive in our world. They walk in another land, a mirror land through which Charlize Theron and Hilary Swank (two actresses the official publicity notes shamelessly compare to Huffman) have walked before, a place where the fact that the central female role is “unflattering” is considered a daring artistic act in and of itself.
If you are one of those people who, like me, found Hilary Swank better looking in Boys Don’t Cry than she ever is on the red carpet, you too might find it surprising that we are meant to think Felicity Huffman’s brown hair and lack of backless Versace dress a terrible deprivation. She has a handsome beauty that is not obscured in this film and a gift for characterization that deserves a better script. But Bree’s journey was never intended to genuinely challenge ideas of female beauty or femininity itself or gender dysmorphia or the surgery now regularly practiced to “correct” it. It was meant to be a nice hook to hang a movie on. And so it is.
Romance & Cigarettes is the last film I am to review for this paper, and I had hopes that it would be the best. It is a musical-a form shamefully close to my heart-and has the most remarkable cast: James Gandolfini, Kate Wins-let, Susan Sarandon, Christopher Walken and Steve Buscemi, to name half. When a respected actor-turned-writer-director such as John Turturro cashes in fifteen years’ worth of art-house chips, the result is stellar. And so I can say nothing against any performance in this film-who could object to Winslet’s luscious, humorous, genuinely sexy naturalism! Or malign Gandolfini’s side glance of self-loathing that makes watching Tony Soprano as penetrating an emotional experience as watching Othello and King Lear combined! Christopher Walken is a madman and an anarchic delight, Susan Sarandon is still an obscenely attractive and intelligent performer and Steve Buscemi is the greatest addition to the character actor’s art since Peter Lorre-fact is, he’s better. But the play’s the thing. John Turturro conceived this script while sitting at Barton Fink’s desk pretending to be a writer. It is a real-life role he should have left alone. Turturro is, however, a very talented actor, and maybe this is why he has faith that actors alone can transform lines such as “You made your bed; now lie in it” and “I love you-maybe I don’t know how to show it” and “Life doesn’t give you second chances” and “His lips fill my dreams.” And then there is the fact that a musical is an act of pure chutzpah. You can’t do a half-assed musical, with people half singing, half lip-syncing, sort of dancing but sort of not. Good dancing is never shameful-it’s awe inspiring. To watch Astaire is to gasp. It’s bad, uncertain dancing that makes us cringe. No American musical in the past ten years (with the exception of Chicago) has had the courage of its convictions, and that’s the whole problem. Ditch the irony and you’re right back with awe, as Christopher Walken proved in that wonderful Spike Jonze music video of a few years back that revived the true spirit of the musical. Anyway, enough.
Thirteen – TEN NOTES ON OSCAR WEEKEND
1
Hollywood is vulgar. Every Englishman knows that. He knows it as he knows there is no comedy in Germany, as he knows that the Italians “get it right,” if “it” includes food, marriage, weather and landscape but excludes governance, work, driving and God. David Hockney’s aquamarine L.A. swimming pools strike the correct English attitude to Los Angeles: affectionate contempt for sparkling surfaces. La La Land! Red carpets; semisacred actors in an exclusive Valhalla; parties beyond imagination; jewels beyond price. Over Oscar weekend, an automatic journalism rehashes these eternal ideas, the accounts in newspapers precisely matching the tall tales of the cab driver who brings you in from the airport.
It’s oddly oppressive to set off on a journey into a place so thoroughly imagined by other people. I have already in my dress bag the very picture of someone else’s Hollywood dream, having made the mistake of telling the women in Bond Street that I am on a journalistic assignment to the Oscars. It is single strapped and red; a huge bow sits on its hip; it has a bustle, a train. It is a dress that misunderstands Hollywood, its complex tiers of power and display, its careful politics and manners, which feel at times as intricate as any eighteenth-century France had to offer. On the plane my airplane steward approves, folding the bag carefully over his arm (“I can tell by the weight-it’s fabulous”) and hanging it reverentially in the little closet for which it is too long by a foot and a half.
2
A New Yorker cartoon: a delighted man in a bathtub is proclaiming “It’s Oscar time-there’s that special tingle in the air!” Meanwhile his wife is ironing in the kitchen, surrounded by cats. As you land in Hollywood, a strange inverse relation takes hold between involvement and anticipation: the more degrees removed a person is from the Oscars themselves, the more excited he or she is. Oscar-nominated directors sigh and speak wistfully of going instead to a ball game. The boys who valet park are putting bets on best actor. In the cab to the hotel the driver has this to say: “You gotta understand: when you can imagine that everyone around you has the same goal, one focus, that’s a shared spirituality. It’s beautiful!” My driver, like many in Hollywood, is a screenwriter. He has two scripts at the moment. The first is described as “a shoot-’em-up for the Xbox generation.” The second concerns itself with a hypothetical meeting between the comedian Harpo Marx and the millionaire Armand Hammer. He has done his research and can prove that both men were in Hamburg in September of 1933.
“And you? You here for work?” Well, I’m assigned to write this piece and there is some, mild, talk of turning a book of mine into a screenplay. This is dismissed out of hand, correctly-the article is not yet written, the film is not made. This is not work. My driver can speak with real pity of some of the most famous actors in Hollywood for the simple reason that he or she has had no film releases so far this year. Success is success and is not mistaken for anything else. The town is bigger than any individual, even the superstars, and in that it is the exact opposite of vulgarity.
3
Friday afternoon at the Mondrian Hotel on Sunset Boulevard. The Mondrian is a true fantasy Hollywood hotel and this is evinced by the fact that few people in the industry choose to stay there. The front door crawls with photographers; the pool is surrounded by bougainvillea and blond bathing beauties; just below my room in the hotel’s precipitous “sky bar”-from which you can look out over the whole of Hollywood-a DJ starts the party at six and keeps on going till three in the morning. The music is gangsta rap, played for a mostly white crowd who see in the “pimp” the model of smart business practice. The rooms are white, as are all the fittings; every sheet and chair and table and pillowcase, every vase, every flower in each vase. Actors screw up their faces in displeasure at the mention of the Mondrian: “It’s a little bit too… much somehow.”
Hollywood has many tiers. Sitting by the pool are hot girls in bikinis and their jock guys, ordering twenty-dollar cocktails and lobster maki rolls, watching the dreamy water of the Hockney pool lap at the edges of the terra-cotta tile surround. Nobody swims. A young black couple, dressed in the Versace knockoffs they believe appropriate to this scene, pose in a lounger and get a waitress to photograph them, living the dream. This is repeated several times that afternoon, by Italians, English, Australians. Everybody speaks of the Oscars, loudly. It’s the only conversation in town. The hot girls check their watches and turn over. These girls create a Hollywood frisson by the pool, but they are quite different from actresses. Hot girls are perfect-actresses are not. Actresses are too short; their faces are lopsided, their noses askew. Actresses are charming. They are not tanned to a brown crisp; they do not wear sarongs with Gucci symbols on them. Their breasts are real, or else the work they have had done is of a tremendous subtlety. There is a depressing disconnect between these girls who wish to be actresses and what a successful Hollywood actress actually is. It is the strangest thing to sit by a fabulous L.A. pool in a fabulous hotel and understand that as far as Hollywood is concerned, these are the have-nots.
4
Friday night brings a private party in the hills. The house is in the prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright; wide, low and elegantly extended. At the end of a wide vista of lawn lies a dimly lit swimming pool, a long thin rectangle cut out of plain white stone. Steam rises off the water. The many connecting doors are wide open: you can stand outside the bathroom and see right through the building to the garden, two hundred feet away. Freshly cut purple poppies are in their simple stone vases. Saul Steinberg is on the walls. Everyone is cold-even for the desert, this is a chilly night. People gather under heat lamps and squeeze four to a bench, keeping close for warmth. It is an effort to be continually amazed; these are humans, after all, and in a celebrity party without any press, the celebrity aspect fades, having nothing to contrast with. After passing through the shock of their normal human scale and all that Photoshop obscures-smallness, wrinkles, slightly smeared mascara-you are left with something like a golden wedding anniversary party at which no one can identify the happy couple. The young actors goof off, tease their elders, threaten to play the piano. Elder statesmen greet one another with respectful formality, listing one another’s achievements, discussing future projects. The nominees are, by now, battle-scarred companions-they’ve been through half a dozen award shows since January. People drink little and eat less. Music plays and an infamous wild-child starlet tries to encourage dancing but gets no takers. The atmosphere is civilized to the point of suffocation. In two aspects it is reminiscent of a party in a university town. First, it is entirely self-referential. People talk about Hollywood in Hollywood as they speak of Harvard at Harvard. Second, there is a great fear of the ridiculous. People take care not to say anything that might make them look foolish. This fear manifests itself in a strange impulse to narrate events as they happen and thereby hold fast to a shared understanding of their meaning. Jokes are met not with laughter but with the statement “That’s hilarious. That is so funny.” Interesting or risqué anecdotes are neutralized by saying “That is darling. She’s completely darling.” People are friendly, polite, but never frivolous. Joan Didion, a West Coast believer but a Hollywood skeptic, has the last word on such events: “Flirtations between men and women, like drinks after dinner, remain largely the luxury of character actors out from New York, one-shot-writers… and others who do not understand the mise of the local scene.”
5
At about one in the morning, the young waiters, who have worked discreetly all night, now begin to approach: “I just wanted to say, I really dig your work. I think you’re totally amazing. Good luck on Sunday!” The actors, caught midway through conversations about their families, their dogs, a book they’ve read, a good restaurant in New York, now have to put their game face back on and become whoever it is the waiter thinks they are. They do this, for the most part, graciously. Confronted with such an embarrassment of riches, each waiter has chosen his virtual intimate to harass-that special actor who made him cry in the cinema, the singer whose tunes he plays when he clocks off work.
Outside the party the paparazzi have arrived. They do not have to chase anybody-there is nowhere to run. We are on a dark hillside in the middle of night. “And what would happen,” asks a rueful young director, “If an actor just stood out there all night? Took a photo from every possible angle, naked, told them every last thing they wanted to know. Would that be it? Would they be finished then?” It’s a long process; the huddle under heat lamps, the wait for cars. The actors themselves are relaxed about both the wait and the photographers outside; it’s their drivers who are anxious and defensive, projecting desires onto their charges that don’t seem to be there: “Can I get this guy out of the way for you? Shall I move him out of your face?” An actor goes out into the scrum and then comes back a minute later. “They don’t recognize me-I got fat for a role and now they don’t recognize me. I’m fasting now. Eight days so far.” To which comes the reply, “Me too! I just did five. Isn’t it great!”
6
A few of the nominees adjourn to Canter’s, a sprawling Jewish diner where you can get good chicken soup at two in the morning. I order one such soup with a matzo ball the size of my fist swimming in the center. The nominees order a plate of pickles and corned beef sandwiches; they drink beer and joke with a gang of teenage girls behind them. They talk about an actor’s distant family correction to the poet Wordsworth, about Hollywood, the house prices in Brooklyn and who has the largest fry on their plate. How to explain the fact that the same kinds of kids who on Sunday will scream their lungs out on the bleachers outside the Kodak Theatre are, right now, at two in the morning in Canter’s, sitting perfectly calmly while several globally famous actors eat home fries in the booth right next to them?
7
On morning TV, some of the human beings from the night before are being described in Olympian terms by a pretty girl with a microphone. The detail is obsessive and alienating: what they might wear, eat and drink this coming Sunday is carefully itemized and salivated over; how they exercise, what they think about, whom they kiss, how they speak, where they go. The answers to these questions are all different, but one truth reigns: they are other. In relation to them, the only correct position is incomprehending awe. One cannot imagine their world, their ways.
I take my laptop out in an attempt to work by the water. A hot girl is loudly telling another hot girl that “Brokeback is so fucking awesome,” which is the consensus of the town, though little satisfaction can be drawn from this. That Brokeback, Capote and Crash are fucking awesome is neither here nor there for Hollywood: these films were all privately funded. This pool, like every pool in town, is now more frequently visited by excited young writers with laptops who have been cheered by the year’s “maverick” wave. This is the time for telling the world how Harpo Marx met Armand Hammer. Up in the hills the mood is less joyous. Strung up all over town are giant posters for Paramount’s new romantic comedy Failure To Launch, which is exactly the kind of underperforming, studio-made film that is causing the problem. These posters, with their airbrushed, smiling stars, flutter above the highway like the standards of a king who has been deposed, at least for this weekend.
8
Brunch with the nominated writers. Like everybody else, I have my Hollywood fantasy, and this it: a 1920s Spanish-style villa with original Mexican red and blue tiles in the fountain, with a living room Jimmy Stewart may have sat in once. It’s next to a golf course; every few years a ball breaks a window. The weather is darling: eggs and bacon and omelets are served in the courtyard. Being with writers instead of actors is like sitting in the pits instead of in the gods-one can speak freely, without fear. This is not their lives, but only an interlude. They make sure to tell you how they have kept their Manhattan apartments. Occasionally you meet a delusional Hollywood screenwriter who believes that without people like him there would be no movie business at all. Factually, of course, this is true-but it is delusional to draw any real conclusions from it. Scripts will be written, if need be, by fifteen people and the producer, or one million monkeys and a typewriter. Most screenwriters understand this and are wry about their Hollywood interludes. They are full of warnings and horror stories. “Do a first draft, but don’t touch it after that-unless you want your heart broken.” Or, alternatively, “Do the final polish, but that’s it. You’ll never write another novel if you get in too deep.” One writer nods and smiles encouragingly as some structural plans are outlined. “That’s very nice. But it doesn’t mean shit once an actor gets hold of it.” There is a campy relish for the Hollywood experience among the writers that is inaccessible to the “front-of-house” actors, who must live every day with the fantasies that are pressed upon them. “I weigh myself four times daily!” a man screeches, laughing as he says it. His companion wants to know if he has ever found that he weighs something different by the end of the day than he did at the start.
“Frequently!”
9
Oscar morning arrives and it is impossible not to succumb to the thrill of the thing. A man comes to do my makeup. Here is his assessment of my dress: “If you were collecting the all-time queen of Hollywood lifetime achievement award, you would be overdressed.” A cocktail dress is substituted. At four o’clock in the afternoon, I get in a car and pick up two writers who are writing a film that actually has a shot at getting made. We are going to the Vanity Fair dinner at Morton’s to watch the ceremony on video screens, eat some great tuna and then wait for everybody to leave the Kodak Theatre and join us. The Oscar ceremony most resembles Christmas in its sense of anticlimax. Everyone was so excited earlier; now they are subdued, and grow more subdued as prizes are won and the potential web of alternative futures gets smaller and smaller, until there are only the people who won and everyone else who didn’t. There is a chorus of “Well, that’s just hilarious” from every table as the Oscar host makes his jokes, although few people actually laugh, and everyone is made tense by occasional jibes against individuals, studios or Hollywood itself. When it is over people seem relieved. The consensus is that it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. One girl text messages through the entire event.
And then they come. We are told to vacate our tables and walk forward, where we will find Morton’s magically extended by the addition of a huge tarpaulin tent. At the mouth of the tent, the same TV girl with the microphone interviews the stars as they appear. Her MO is extreme naïveté: “What goes on in there?” she keeps asking, although she is as famous as many of the people inside and will soon join the party. “Can you just give us some idea of what kind of thing happens at a party like this?” Most of the invitees are at a loss to answer this question. An action star thinks about it and then indulges her: “It’s like Vegas: what goes on in there stays in there.” But “in there” there is only a charming, if tame, cocktail party, with a good deal of free booze and stilted conversation and a Porta-Potty. Everywhere people are trying to get introduced to other people, and feel glad when they are. These are melancholy victories, though. At a normal party we befriend people with the hope of seeing them again, of having a friendship, even a love affair. A “celebrity” encounter is more like a badge to be collected and then shown to other people. A whole night of collecting such badges grows demoralizing. You begin to understand the angry people you meet in Hollywood, who by choice or necessity regularly submit themselves to these one-way charm offensives, speaking with other human beings whom the world believes to be more than that. Yet there are people who seem to enjoy it; who work the room collecting all the badges and have no time to waste. At this party, a very short man who had been talking to a star and then, through a subtle shift in the circle, got stuck with me, actually asked to be released from his bondage. “Is it okay if I talk to someone else over there?”
This party is fun, all are beautiful, except for the old men who are powerful. People are drinking, finally, and the room is full of indiscreet conversation, much of it about where people will go next. Are you following the rappers with the thirty-thousand-dollar grills on their teeth and their newest accessory-a gold statuette in the palm? Or are you following the Frenchmen holding plush toy penguins above their heads? Committed badge collectors follow the whisper of the hope of an invitation up into the Hollywood Hills, in someone else’s car, with no clear idea of how they will get home.
Outside Morton’s, waiting for my car back to the hotel, I meet an old actor, a favorite of the late John Cassavetes, smoking a cigar and explaining how things are with him. “He chose me, you see?” he says of Cassevetes. “Me. It was a thing to be chosen by him, I can tell you that.” He is full of soul, and his eyes are rheumy and beautiful. “This town’s treated me well. I was never a star, no one knows my name, but I always worked, and now it’s given me a retirement plan. I’m the old dude in any movie you care to mention. Make nine or ten a year.” He smiled joyfully. We stood together on the forecourt with a lot of other people less joyful: losing nominees, yesterday’s news, TV stars, hungry models and people so famous they couldn’t get to their car without causing a riot. Of all the fantasies and dreams people have of a life in Hollywood, it seemed odd that no one had thought to dream a career like the one just described.
10
The next day I woke at eight. In the name of research I watched an hour of fantasy television about the Oscars that in no way described the evening I had just had. I went back to sleep and woke at eleven. I checked out and dragged my hangover and my laptop down to the pool. It was empty. I ordered a quesadilla, but the speedy service that had been in place only yesterday had vanished. It took half an hour to get some Tabasco sauce. And then it began to rain, softly at first and then dramatically. I moved in under the glass roof and thought of nearby San Fernando Valley, where the American porn industry-a fantasy industry even larger and more remunerative than Hollywood-is located. The pool boys packed up the loungers around me. The rain drummed the surface of the pool and forced water over its edge, soaking the feet of the waitresses as they cleared the tables.
I packed up myself and went outside to wait for a cab. Three New York hipster kids ran into the hotel with their coats above their heads, one of them complaining: “It’s not supposed to rain!” The dream persists, even as reality asserts itself. I looked to my right and for the first time that weekend spotted someone I actually knew: Bret Easton Ellis. He asked what I was doing in L.A. and I told him. I asked what he was doing, and he looked at me with a kind of beatific insanity, as if he didn’t quite believe what he was about to say: “I’m moving back to L.A.!” I wanted to a share a novelist’s joke with him: what if you got assigned to write about the Oscars and you didn’t mention a single actor? You know, as a kind of demystifying strategy? How about that? But he had to get in his car. Anyway, Bret’s been there, done that: his own Glamorama tried another demystifying strategy, with fifty celebrities name-dropped in the first five pages. But the fantasies of fame cannot be dislodged by anyone’s pen. It’ll have to be a collective effort; we’ll have to wake from this dream together. It’ll be darling.
1
Hollywood is vulgar. Every Englishman knows that. He knows it as he knows there is no comedy in Germany, as he knows that the Italians “get it right,” if “it” includes food, marriage, weather and landscape but excludes governance, work, driving and God. David Hockney’s aquamarine L.A. swimming pools strike the correct English attitude to Los Angeles: affectionate contempt for sparkling surfaces. La La Land! Red carpets; semisacred actors in an exclusive Valhalla; parties beyond imagination; jewels beyond price. Over Oscar weekend, an automatic journalism rehashes these eternal ideas, the accounts in newspapers precisely matching the tall tales of the cab driver who brings you in from the airport.
It’s oddly oppressive to set off on a journey into a place so thoroughly imagined by other people. I have already in my dress bag the very picture of someone else’s Hollywood dream, having made the mistake of telling the women in Bond Street that I am on a journalistic assignment to the Oscars. It is single strapped and red; a huge bow sits on its hip; it has a bustle, a train. It is a dress that misunderstands Hollywood, its complex tiers of power and display, its careful politics and manners, which feel at times as intricate as any eighteenth-century France had to offer. On the plane my airplane steward approves, folding the bag carefully over his arm (“I can tell by the weight-it’s fabulous”) and hanging it reverentially in the little closet for which it is too long by a foot and a half.
2
A New Yorker cartoon: a delighted man in a bathtub is proclaiming “It’s Oscar time-there’s that special tingle in the air!” Meanwhile his wife is ironing in the kitchen, surrounded by cats. As you land in Hollywood, a strange inverse relation takes hold between involvement and anticipation: the more degrees removed a person is from the Oscars themselves, the more excited he or she is. Oscar-nominated directors sigh and speak wistfully of going instead to a ball game. The boys who valet park are putting bets on best actor. In the cab to the hotel the driver has this to say: “You gotta understand: when you can imagine that everyone around you has the same goal, one focus, that’s a shared spirituality. It’s beautiful!” My driver, like many in Hollywood, is a screenwriter. He has two scripts at the moment. The first is described as “a shoot-’em-up for the Xbox generation.” The second concerns itself with a hypothetical meeting between the comedian Harpo Marx and the millionaire Armand Hammer. He has done his research and can prove that both men were in Hamburg in September of 1933.
“And you? You here for work?” Well, I’m assigned to write this piece and there is some, mild, talk of turning a book of mine into a screenplay. This is dismissed out of hand, correctly-the article is not yet written, the film is not made. This is not work. My driver can speak with real pity of some of the most famous actors in Hollywood for the simple reason that he or she has had no film releases so far this year. Success is success and is not mistaken for anything else. The town is bigger than any individual, even the superstars, and in that it is the exact opposite of vulgarity.
3
Friday afternoon at the Mondrian Hotel on Sunset Boulevard. The Mondrian is a true fantasy Hollywood hotel and this is evinced by the fact that few people in the industry choose to stay there. The front door crawls with photographers; the pool is surrounded by bougainvillea and blond bathing beauties; just below my room in the hotel’s precipitous “sky bar”-from which you can look out over the whole of Hollywood-a DJ starts the party at six and keeps on going till three in the morning. The music is gangsta rap, played for a mostly white crowd who see in the “pimp” the model of smart business practice. The rooms are white, as are all the fittings; every sheet and chair and table and pillowcase, every vase, every flower in each vase. Actors screw up their faces in displeasure at the mention of the Mondrian: “It’s a little bit too… much somehow.”
Hollywood has many tiers. Sitting by the pool are hot girls in bikinis and their jock guys, ordering twenty-dollar cocktails and lobster maki rolls, watching the dreamy water of the Hockney pool lap at the edges of the terra-cotta tile surround. Nobody swims. A young black couple, dressed in the Versace knockoffs they believe appropriate to this scene, pose in a lounger and get a waitress to photograph them, living the dream. This is repeated several times that afternoon, by Italians, English, Australians. Everybody speaks of the Oscars, loudly. It’s the only conversation in town. The hot girls check their watches and turn over. These girls create a Hollywood frisson by the pool, but they are quite different from actresses. Hot girls are perfect-actresses are not. Actresses are too short; their faces are lopsided, their noses askew. Actresses are charming. They are not tanned to a brown crisp; they do not wear sarongs with Gucci symbols on them. Their breasts are real, or else the work they have had done is of a tremendous subtlety. There is a depressing disconnect between these girls who wish to be actresses and what a successful Hollywood actress actually is. It is the strangest thing to sit by a fabulous L.A. pool in a fabulous hotel and understand that as far as Hollywood is concerned, these are the have-nots.
4
Friday night brings a private party in the hills. The house is in the prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright; wide, low and elegantly extended. At the end of a wide vista of lawn lies a dimly lit swimming pool, a long thin rectangle cut out of plain white stone. Steam rises off the water. The many connecting doors are wide open: you can stand outside the bathroom and see right through the building to the garden, two hundred feet away. Freshly cut purple poppies are in their simple stone vases. Saul Steinberg is on the walls. Everyone is cold-even for the desert, this is a chilly night. People gather under heat lamps and squeeze four to a bench, keeping close for warmth. It is an effort to be continually amazed; these are humans, after all, and in a celebrity party without any press, the celebrity aspect fades, having nothing to contrast with. After passing through the shock of their normal human scale and all that Photoshop obscures-smallness, wrinkles, slightly smeared mascara-you are left with something like a golden wedding anniversary party at which no one can identify the happy couple. The young actors goof off, tease their elders, threaten to play the piano. Elder statesmen greet one another with respectful formality, listing one another’s achievements, discussing future projects. The nominees are, by now, battle-scarred companions-they’ve been through half a dozen award shows since January. People drink little and eat less. Music plays and an infamous wild-child starlet tries to encourage dancing but gets no takers. The atmosphere is civilized to the point of suffocation. In two aspects it is reminiscent of a party in a university town. First, it is entirely self-referential. People talk about Hollywood in Hollywood as they speak of Harvard at Harvard. Second, there is a great fear of the ridiculous. People take care not to say anything that might make them look foolish. This fear manifests itself in a strange impulse to narrate events as they happen and thereby hold fast to a shared understanding of their meaning. Jokes are met not with laughter but with the statement “That’s hilarious. That is so funny.” Interesting or risqué anecdotes are neutralized by saying “That is darling. She’s completely darling.” People are friendly, polite, but never frivolous. Joan Didion, a West Coast believer but a Hollywood skeptic, has the last word on such events: “Flirtations between men and women, like drinks after dinner, remain largely the luxury of character actors out from New York, one-shot-writers… and others who do not understand the mise of the local scene.”
5
At about one in the morning, the young waiters, who have worked discreetly all night, now begin to approach: “I just wanted to say, I really dig your work. I think you’re totally amazing. Good luck on Sunday!” The actors, caught midway through conversations about their families, their dogs, a book they’ve read, a good restaurant in New York, now have to put their game face back on and become whoever it is the waiter thinks they are. They do this, for the most part, graciously. Confronted with such an embarrassment of riches, each waiter has chosen his virtual intimate to harass-that special actor who made him cry in the cinema, the singer whose tunes he plays when he clocks off work.
Outside the party the paparazzi have arrived. They do not have to chase anybody-there is nowhere to run. We are on a dark hillside in the middle of night. “And what would happen,” asks a rueful young director, “If an actor just stood out there all night? Took a photo from every possible angle, naked, told them every last thing they wanted to know. Would that be it? Would they be finished then?” It’s a long process; the huddle under heat lamps, the wait for cars. The actors themselves are relaxed about both the wait and the photographers outside; it’s their drivers who are anxious and defensive, projecting desires onto their charges that don’t seem to be there: “Can I get this guy out of the way for you? Shall I move him out of your face?” An actor goes out into the scrum and then comes back a minute later. “They don’t recognize me-I got fat for a role and now they don’t recognize me. I’m fasting now. Eight days so far.” To which comes the reply, “Me too! I just did five. Isn’t it great!”
6
A few of the nominees adjourn to Canter’s, a sprawling Jewish diner where you can get good chicken soup at two in the morning. I order one such soup with a matzo ball the size of my fist swimming in the center. The nominees order a plate of pickles and corned beef sandwiches; they drink beer and joke with a gang of teenage girls behind them. They talk about an actor’s distant family correction to the poet Wordsworth, about Hollywood, the house prices in Brooklyn and who has the largest fry on their plate. How to explain the fact that the same kinds of kids who on Sunday will scream their lungs out on the bleachers outside the Kodak Theatre are, right now, at two in the morning in Canter’s, sitting perfectly calmly while several globally famous actors eat home fries in the booth right next to them?
7
On morning TV, some of the human beings from the night before are being described in Olympian terms by a pretty girl with a microphone. The detail is obsessive and alienating: what they might wear, eat and drink this coming Sunday is carefully itemized and salivated over; how they exercise, what they think about, whom they kiss, how they speak, where they go. The answers to these questions are all different, but one truth reigns: they are other. In relation to them, the only correct position is incomprehending awe. One cannot imagine their world, their ways.
I take my laptop out in an attempt to work by the water. A hot girl is loudly telling another hot girl that “Brokeback is so fucking awesome,” which is the consensus of the town, though little satisfaction can be drawn from this. That Brokeback, Capote and Crash are fucking awesome is neither here nor there for Hollywood: these films were all privately funded. This pool, like every pool in town, is now more frequently visited by excited young writers with laptops who have been cheered by the year’s “maverick” wave. This is the time for telling the world how Harpo Marx met Armand Hammer. Up in the hills the mood is less joyous. Strung up all over town are giant posters for Paramount’s new romantic comedy Failure To Launch, which is exactly the kind of underperforming, studio-made film that is causing the problem. These posters, with their airbrushed, smiling stars, flutter above the highway like the standards of a king who has been deposed, at least for this weekend.
8
Brunch with the nominated writers. Like everybody else, I have my Hollywood fantasy, and this it: a 1920s Spanish-style villa with original Mexican red and blue tiles in the fountain, with a living room Jimmy Stewart may have sat in once. It’s next to a golf course; every few years a ball breaks a window. The weather is darling: eggs and bacon and omelets are served in the courtyard. Being with writers instead of actors is like sitting in the pits instead of in the gods-one can speak freely, without fear. This is not their lives, but only an interlude. They make sure to tell you how they have kept their Manhattan apartments. Occasionally you meet a delusional Hollywood screenwriter who believes that without people like him there would be no movie business at all. Factually, of course, this is true-but it is delusional to draw any real conclusions from it. Scripts will be written, if need be, by fifteen people and the producer, or one million monkeys and a typewriter. Most screenwriters understand this and are wry about their Hollywood interludes. They are full of warnings and horror stories. “Do a first draft, but don’t touch it after that-unless you want your heart broken.” Or, alternatively, “Do the final polish, but that’s it. You’ll never write another novel if you get in too deep.” One writer nods and smiles encouragingly as some structural plans are outlined. “That’s very nice. But it doesn’t mean shit once an actor gets hold of it.” There is a campy relish for the Hollywood experience among the writers that is inaccessible to the “front-of-house” actors, who must live every day with the fantasies that are pressed upon them. “I weigh myself four times daily!” a man screeches, laughing as he says it. His companion wants to know if he has ever found that he weighs something different by the end of the day than he did at the start.
“Frequently!”
9
Oscar morning arrives and it is impossible not to succumb to the thrill of the thing. A man comes to do my makeup. Here is his assessment of my dress: “If you were collecting the all-time queen of Hollywood lifetime achievement award, you would be overdressed.” A cocktail dress is substituted. At four o’clock in the afternoon, I get in a car and pick up two writers who are writing a film that actually has a shot at getting made. We are going to the Vanity Fair dinner at Morton’s to watch the ceremony on video screens, eat some great tuna and then wait for everybody to leave the Kodak Theatre and join us. The Oscar ceremony most resembles Christmas in its sense of anticlimax. Everyone was so excited earlier; now they are subdued, and grow more subdued as prizes are won and the potential web of alternative futures gets smaller and smaller, until there are only the people who won and everyone else who didn’t. There is a chorus of “Well, that’s just hilarious” from every table as the Oscar host makes his jokes, although few people actually laugh, and everyone is made tense by occasional jibes against individuals, studios or Hollywood itself. When it is over people seem relieved. The consensus is that it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. One girl text messages through the entire event.
And then they come. We are told to vacate our tables and walk forward, where we will find Morton’s magically extended by the addition of a huge tarpaulin tent. At the mouth of the tent, the same TV girl with the microphone interviews the stars as they appear. Her MO is extreme naïveté: “What goes on in there?” she keeps asking, although she is as famous as many of the people inside and will soon join the party. “Can you just give us some idea of what kind of thing happens at a party like this?” Most of the invitees are at a loss to answer this question. An action star thinks about it and then indulges her: “It’s like Vegas: what goes on in there stays in there.” But “in there” there is only a charming, if tame, cocktail party, with a good deal of free booze and stilted conversation and a Porta-Potty. Everywhere people are trying to get introduced to other people, and feel glad when they are. These are melancholy victories, though. At a normal party we befriend people with the hope of seeing them again, of having a friendship, even a love affair. A “celebrity” encounter is more like a badge to be collected and then shown to other people. A whole night of collecting such badges grows demoralizing. You begin to understand the angry people you meet in Hollywood, who by choice or necessity regularly submit themselves to these one-way charm offensives, speaking with other human beings whom the world believes to be more than that. Yet there are people who seem to enjoy it; who work the room collecting all the badges and have no time to waste. At this party, a very short man who had been talking to a star and then, through a subtle shift in the circle, got stuck with me, actually asked to be released from his bondage. “Is it okay if I talk to someone else over there?”
This party is fun, all are beautiful, except for the old men who are powerful. People are drinking, finally, and the room is full of indiscreet conversation, much of it about where people will go next. Are you following the rappers with the thirty-thousand-dollar grills on their teeth and their newest accessory-a gold statuette in the palm? Or are you following the Frenchmen holding plush toy penguins above their heads? Committed badge collectors follow the whisper of the hope of an invitation up into the Hollywood Hills, in someone else’s car, with no clear idea of how they will get home.
Outside Morton’s, waiting for my car back to the hotel, I meet an old actor, a favorite of the late John Cassavetes, smoking a cigar and explaining how things are with him. “He chose me, you see?” he says of Cassevetes. “Me. It was a thing to be chosen by him, I can tell you that.” He is full of soul, and his eyes are rheumy and beautiful. “This town’s treated me well. I was never a star, no one knows my name, but I always worked, and now it’s given me a retirement plan. I’m the old dude in any movie you care to mention. Make nine or ten a year.” He smiled joyfully. We stood together on the forecourt with a lot of other people less joyful: losing nominees, yesterday’s news, TV stars, hungry models and people so famous they couldn’t get to their car without causing a riot. Of all the fantasies and dreams people have of a life in Hollywood, it seemed odd that no one had thought to dream a career like the one just described.
10
The next day I woke at eight. In the name of research I watched an hour of fantasy television about the Oscars that in no way described the evening I had just had. I went back to sleep and woke at eleven. I checked out and dragged my hangover and my laptop down to the pool. It was empty. I ordered a quesadilla, but the speedy service that had been in place only yesterday had vanished. It took half an hour to get some Tabasco sauce. And then it began to rain, softly at first and then dramatically. I moved in under the glass roof and thought of nearby San Fernando Valley, where the American porn industry-a fantasy industry even larger and more remunerative than Hollywood-is located. The pool boys packed up the loungers around me. The rain drummed the surface of the pool and forced water over its edge, soaking the feet of the waitresses as they cleared the tables.
I packed up myself and went outside to wait for a cab. Three New York hipster kids ran into the hotel with their coats above their heads, one of them complaining: “It’s not supposed to rain!” The dream persists, even as reality asserts itself. I looked to my right and for the first time that weekend spotted someone I actually knew: Bret Easton Ellis. He asked what I was doing in L.A. and I told him. I asked what he was doing, and he looked at me with a kind of beatific insanity, as if he didn’t quite believe what he was about to say: “I’m moving back to L.A.!” I wanted to a share a novelist’s joke with him: what if you got assigned to write about the Oscars and you didn’t mention a single actor? You know, as a kind of demystifying strategy? How about that? But he had to get in his car. Anyway, Bret’s been there, done that: his own Glamorama tried another demystifying strategy, with fifty celebrities name-dropped in the first five pages. But the fantasies of fame cannot be dislodged by anyone’s pen. It’ll have to be a collective effort; we’ll have to wake from this dream together. It’ll be darling.
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