Borrowing a page from the UK’s Campaign for Real Ale, Roger Ebert blogs from Cannes on the need for a Campaign For Real Movies.
The implicit complaint is the same: In a marketplace glutted with mass-produced product that’s all fizz and no substance, it’s hard to find a hand-crafted product of distinction and local flavor, the kind of product that surprises and challenges you, that engenders real enthusiasm and loyalty. Real Ale is not carbonated or carefully crafted to taste just like every other mass-market brew. Ebert writes:
[Real Movies] also would not be carbonated by CGI or 3D. They would be carefully created by artists, from original recipes, i.e., screenplays. Each movie would be different. There would be no effort to force them into conformity with commercial formulas.
These notions took shape while I was viewing some well-made Real Movies I’ve seen this year at Cannes … These aren’t all masterpieces, although some are, but they’re all Real Movies. None follows a familiar story arc. All involve intense involvement with their characters. All do something that is perhaps the most important thing a movie can do: They take us outside our personal box of time and space, and invite us to empathize with those of other times, places, races, creeds, classes and prospects. I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization.
That paean to empathy might sound like an overstatement, but St. Edith Stein arguably goes further in her dissertation On the Problem of Empathy and subsequent treatises, arguing that empathy is foundational to personhood and community, to knowledge of others and even knowledge of the self. It is through empathy that the experiences of others become available to us while remaining theirs and not ours. Through empathy I transcend the limits of my own subjectivity and become aware of the subjectivity of another—and understand that my own subjectivity can likewise be the object of another’s empathy. Not only do I gain insight into others from how they perceive themselves, I can also learn from how others see me things about myself I would never otherwise know.
What does this have to do with movies, and with Ebert’s lament for Real Movies? Mainstream Hollywood entertainment, like mass-marketed brews, offer us essentially nothing we haven’t already assimilated long ago. Such movies show us only what we have seen before, tell us only what we already know. Instead of a window into another soul or another world, they offer only a mirror of our existing tastes or (worse) comfort levels. The sequel phenomenon is symptomatic of this. Not that a sequel can’t be surprising and revelatory, but that’s not why sequels get green-lit. They get green-lit because most people are readier to pay for what they already know.
That’s true in spades of mass-market entertainment like this weekend’s Shrek Forever After. But it’s also true of not a few pious movies favored by many in Catholic and Evangelical circles. Many of us are only interested in movies that tell us only what we already know and want to hear: moral messages we already agree with, diagnoses and solutions we already accept for problems we already know about.
Nothing necessarily wrong with that, as far as it goes. Obviously we don’t want to be lining up for movies with moral messages we disagree with! But it’s more complicated than that. I think of a story my mother tells about my father’s early days as a Protestant pastor (he’s a Catholic today) at a church where leading congregants wanted to hear sermons about sin—but only the sins of the younger generation (this was the 1960s). Not sins like gossip, for instance.
A homilist who tells me only what I already know and want to hear does me little good. It’s what I don’t know, and what I don’t know I don’t know, that I most need to hear. For that matter, a movie reviewer that only affirms my existing comfort levels for the kinds of things I like or don’t like in movies does me little good.
A movie is not a homily. What is it? Among other things, a real movie should be an opportunity to see through other eyes. Not first of all the eyes of fictional characters, if it’s a fictional film, but the eyes of the filmmakers. If (and this is a big if) the filmmakers have brought empathy to their movie, if they have looked through the eyes of others and creatively expressed that insight in their characterizations of fictional characters (or their handling of real events), then the film offers an opportunity to share in that empathic experience.
If the filmmakers haven’t brought empathy to their movie, very likely it isn’t worth watching. Nothing is more likely to secure my distrust of a serious adult drama than a clear lack of empathy for a major character, or for a class of characters.
Empathy doesn’t mean excusing bad behavior because the person meant well, or had a bad childhood, or whatever. It does mean understanding that the lowest scoundrel is not a demon or a monster, but a man like ourselves—and perhaps, by understanding the nature of his transgressions, gaining insight into our own capacity for selfishness.
Ebert gave examples from Cannes of the kind of Real Movies he was talking about. I recently saw a Real Movie opening this weekend in New York and LA: Solitary Man, directed by Brian Koppelman and David Levien from Koppelman’s screenplay. Not a movie about another culture or time, it is nevertheless about a world far removed from most of us.
Solitary Man stars Michael Douglas as a man so venal, egocentric and dissolute that to empathize with him might seem almost a temptation to be resisted rather than an occasion of insight and compassion. A disgraced former car dealership mogul whose rapacious behavior has torpedoed his career and his marriage, Ben Kalmen is a compulsive salesman whose first and only product line is himself, and everything is always about making the pitch and closing the deal, especially in the presence of attractive women half or even a third of his age.
Surely a man like this should be censured, not understood? Surely a movie that invites us to see the human side of this contemptible creature is a contemptible film? Or, if not contemptible, at least gratuitously unpleasant, rubbing our noses in depravity to no redemptive end? Or is it, on the other hand, a morality play? An “aging-Lothario-gets-his-comeuppance number,” as David Edelstein put it?
The potential pitfalls are real, and Solitary Man is frank enough about Ben Kalmen’s sleazy inner world to be off-putting to some. But there’s more to it than that. There is empathy not only for Ben but also for those whom he variously uses, wrongs or lets down; we see Ben through the eyes of others as well as through his own, and from this multifaceted perspective emerge larger truths. I’m particularly struck by Ben’s grown daughter struggling to be a daughter to a man who is rotten at being a father (and grandfather) while also protecting her son and being loyal to her husband and to her mother. Then there’s Danny DeVito, embodying decency as an old friend of Ben’s, an unassuming diner owner whose shoe Ben isn’t worthy to untie.
Solitary Man takes some unexpected turns before coming to a crucial fork in the road, a moment of clarity that comes when someone barreling down a one-way road is abruptly faced with a clear choice: to continue or to change direction. In a typical Hollywood confection, the ending would be all what happens as a result of the choice Ben makes for him and everyone else. In Solitary Man, it’s the clarity that matters. We see the truth about who Ben is and why, and what it means for him and those around him. We see the stakes, and so does he.
Shrek Forever After also involves a protagonist who lets down those closest to him for reasons not unlike Ben’s. It’s not a bad movie, in a flattish Coke sort of way. It’s inoffensive and mildly amusing, and in the end you’re the same person you were 93 minutes earlier, with not much to talk about coming out of the theater.
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Bit of shame Ebert looks down on CGI; though I will admit that without Pixar I would probably be of a similar opinion, only recently has non-Pixar Hollywood begun making CGI ‘toons that approach Pixar-ness (and surpass some of their lesser films; How to Train Your Dragon > Cars).
“A homilist who tells me only what I already know and want to hear does me little good. It’s what I don’t know, and what I don’t know I don’t know, that I most need to hear. For that matter, a movie reviewer that only affirms my existing comfort levels for the kinds of things I like or don’t like in movies does me little good. “
This reminds me of Chesterton’s observation that “We don’t really want a religion that is right where we are right, we want a religion that is right where we are wrong.”
Beowulf, I don’t think Ebert is thinking of computer-animated films like Pixar so much as CGI effects in live-action spectacles, i.e., Avatar and all its predecessors and would-be successors.
Some of these are even good. Ebert and I both praised Avatar. But we also both dread a marketplace in which every theater at the multiplex is playing … well, let’s just run down last weekend’s top 10: Iron Man 2, Robin Hood, Letters to Juliet, Just Wright, How to Train Your Dragon, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Date Night, The Back-Up Plan, Furry Vengeance, Clash of the Titans. A marketplace in which movies like, say, Babies (or Crazy Heart, or Bright Star, or Summer Hours, or The Informant) tend to get lost in the shuffle.
Tim Jones: Spot on. Thanks.
Because before thirty years ago no films were escapist entertainment? Because every A-list feature from the ‘40s and earlier was a true original?
I have only to think of the sequel to Casablanca or the franchises of The Pink Panther or The Thin Man to realize that this Campaign for Real Movies is predicated on the false assumption that bad movies that rehash cash-cow tropes are a modern phenomenon.
To pine for the days of those memorable features from the Golden Age of Hollywood we must force ourselves to forget all the unmemorable flicks cashing in on the latest craze.
“this Campaign for Real Movies is predicated on the false assumption that bad movies that rehash cash-cow tropes are a modern phenomenon.”
Not at all. Rather, it’s predicated on a realistic acknowledgment that Hollywood’s center of gravity is always changing, and not always for the better. Effects-driven roller-coaster movies have become an ever-bigger part of the Hollywood equation, and serious adult dramas have become comparatively less prominent. Right now, everyone wants to make Avatar. That wasn’t true 40 years ago.
“Because before thirty years ago no films were escapist entertainment? Because every A-list feature from the ‘40s and earlier was a true original? … To pine for the days of those memorable features from the Golden Age of Hollywood we must force ourselves to forget all the unmemorable flicks cashing in on the latest craze.”
Who’s pining for Golden Age films? A return to studio-system Hollywood would be the opposite of what Ebert is talking about.
Ebert’s examples are all contemporary non-Hollywood films, mostly foreign language, except for one by British director Mike Leigh. You can still find films of the same ilk made in the US, but the big studios aren’t as interested in them as they once were.
Why is Crazy Heart a Fox Searchlight picture? Because movies like this are produced by companies with names like Informant Media and Butchers Run Films, that’s why.
Last night, I saw the Michael Caine ALFIE for the first time in a theater ever and for the first time since seeing the Jude Law version (and also since seeing the Romanian illegal-abortion movie 4 MONTHS). It’s a textbook case of what you say about the Michael Douglas movie—a film about a very bad man that is very good because you don’t hate him.
The two ALFIEs are a near-perfect example of why nobody with a functioning brain should pay any attention to any form of criticism that consists of counting up bad deeds or words. One of the two ALFIEs features an abortion; one does not. That the one that does is by far the more-moral of the two (and that is as close to a statement of fact as an aesthetic-moral judgment can be).
I usually don’t agree with Ebert’s (liberal) assessment of the movies, but a few years ago we agreed completely, though for different reasons, on what I thought was a great film for many of the reasons stated in this piece. I’m curious to know Mr. Greydanus’s take on Pan’s Labyrinth. Despite its not-so-subtle anti-Catholic bias and its sympathetic account of communist rebels (fully acknowledged by the writer/director), I found the film wonderfully creative and, in the end, pro-Catholic or at least very life-affirming. I’ve also read most of the fascinating things that Chesterton has said about fairy tales, and I’m still wondering if PL fits into GKC’s definition of a good or worthy fairy tale (though not one for children). It certainly does for me, and I think Chesterton just might equate this one to something from the Brothers Grimm. Any thoughts?
Mark, good question. In passing, let me say it’s gratifying to see how you approach a film like Pan’s Labyrinth, acknowledging your various objections and problems with the film but still giving credit where you feel it’s due to the artistic achievement.
As I (cautiously) see it, the strengths of Pan’s Labyrinth are more in terms of the mythic power of its imagery than in its fairy tale overtones and structure, which I don’t think are as successful. As fairy tale, I find the film frustrating and unsuccessful.
For instance: Why does the heroine dawdle and break the rules in the lair of the Pale Man? She’s not some fairy-tale illiterate like Eustace Clarence Scrubb. She’s been immersed in fairy tales since before she could read. She knows darn well that the first flippin’ rule of Fairy-land is “Follow the flippin’ rules of Fairy-land, starting with this one.”
For this and other reasons, I have a hard time responding to the film as fairy tale. However, this takes away nothing from the mythic force of Del Toro’s imagery. The Pale Man, the Faun, the Toad ... these are visions of haunting imaginative power and dark beauty. I really like the creepy fairies, so much more interesting than cutesy Disneyfied fairies. (Even in Disney, Tinker Bell and the mermaids originally wanted to kill Wendy, something the modern Disney machine would like to forget!)
Where that leaves me overall on the film is … conflicted. I’d have to see it again before I could comment further.
I agree with the sentiment expressed above but can we please call them something other than “Real Movies” (which sounds “Real Pretentious” at best—and “Real Dana Carvey Grumpy Old Man” at worst)?
Since Ebert himself made the analogy to hand-crafted ales, perhaps we could call them Micromoves and the studios that make them Micromoveries?
I don’t know why this page refreshed in the middle of the comment, but I’ll imagine it was to remind me about brevity and leave it at that.
I have no problem enjoying noisy escapism now and then, personally, and it’s worth remembering that without Twentieth Century Fox, there would be no Fox Searchlight.
Thanks, Steven. The two things I was concerned about in Pan’s Labyrinth were, first, my liking it perhaps a little too much given the anti-Catholic elements, and second, whether my favorite author would approve of it as a worthy fairy tale! I saw it completely unaware of what I was in for, and when the credits rolled I was asking ‘what did I just see’ for the first time in my limited movie-going life. I think we could discuss some of your objections to the parts of the film that don’t work in Elfland, but this is probably not the place for that.
I’m glad I finally got to run this by a Catholic reviewer after talking to friends about it for 3 years, most of whom didn’t share my enthusiasm for the film. BTW, the film loses quite a lot of its visual appeal on DVD in comparison to the big screen. I’ll look forward to your future reviews.
Benjamin: As regards noisy escapism, you’re talking to an ardent defender not only of Spider-Man 2 but also Spider-Man 3. I enjoy popcorn as much as anyone. I just don’t like seeing it crowd everything else off the marquee and the production slate.
As regards Fox Searchlight, why shouldn’t Big Fox be producing films like Crazy Heart? Your earlier comment harked back to 30 years ago. Thirty years ago was 1980. The best-picture Oscar winner for that year was Ordinary People, a popular and critical success produced by Paramount Pictures and the year’s 11th-highest grossing film. The top 10 that year included The Coal Miner’s Daughter and The Blues Brothers as well as more obviously commercial fare like 9 to 5 and Airplane! The #1 film that year was The Empire Strikes Back.
I see lots of major releases today that could roughly be compared to the likes of The Empire Strikes Back, Airplane! and 9 to 5. I see few if any major releases that could be meaningfully compared to the likes of Ordinary People, The Coal Miner’s Daughter or The Blues Brothers. You couldn’t make a movie like Ordinary People today at Paramount Pictures, or any other major studio. It would be an indie, and hopefully would get distribution under the boutique label of some big studio.
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