Words words words

The late Woody Allen, the one who wrote and directed Take the Money and Run, Annie Hall and Bullets over Broadway once had as fine an ear for idiomatic American comic dialogue as any of this contemporaries from Sid Caesar University such as Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, etc., etc. Sadly, this enjoyable filmmaker died and someone calling himself Woody Allen is making all-star tax-shelter movies in Europe without scripts, style or indeed any idea for a movie.

Last year this imposter turned out something called You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger (2010) which ostensibly poses the question: Can you predict the future? The answer is no. Any questions?

There is the usual Allen mix of scads of miscast stars (Antonio Banderas plays someone named Greg. Can you imagine Antonio being Greg? Or indeed any Spanish man named Greg?) an old man justifying his romance with an inappropriately younger woman, a failed artist or two, some pointless adulteries, a half-baked criminal act, the fear of discovery of which will drive much of the film, and as has been the case for the last 10 years, a foreign location to make his international investors happy, and because Manhattan is kind of sick of him tying up the streets for his snooze fests.

But his films are not bad for all the usual reasons that films are bad, such as there was no reason to make them or the filmmaker is inept. Neither is true here. Woody Allen has simply stopped writing scripts. He writes down ideas for scripts, with detailed notes of what the lines should be, but seems to have forgotten to write actual dialogue that could be spoken by actors who are trying to create the illusion of a character.

Starting about 10 years ago (that was the year of Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Allen's uncontested rock-bottom worst movie), instead of writing lines, his characters speak their unconscious intentions, what actors and directors call the subtext of a scene. "I have decided to leave you because you remind me of my lost youth and the impossibility of retrieving my lost youth." "Well, then, I have become an alcoholic due to your emotional abuse and neglect, and am sinking ever further into a morass of self-pity." "Don't blame your terrible decline on me; I am in search of that moving principle that once guided my entire existence." "I'll blame what I like you, because I am the embittered representative of a generation who was lost and lied to."

Mind you, this is not actual dialogue from an Allen film. There's no way I could remember such dreck, and nobody quotes this crap on line. You can't find a Woody Allen quote online any more recent than 1995, the year of Mighty Aphrodite, his last really good movie. But New York feels obligated to support Allen year after year, like making a contribution to the Planetarium. You don't go anymore, but you'd hate to see it gone.

It's not unusual for comedy writers to lose their touch, especially with dialogue. It happened to Billy Wilder and to Blake Edwards. My hypothesis is that once they become Hollywood celebrities, they don't encounter actual humans talking anymore. As William Goldman wrote, "In time they write plays about their agents." And in Woody Allen's case, he profoundly hates being around other human beings, which many might consider a disqualification for writing about them. It's not that he'll be mobbed as a celebrity -- if the portrait of him in Wild Man Blues is to be trusted*, this guy would rather lock himself in a closet with a TV so he can watch the Knicks than do anything, including write and direct movies.

And it shows. And believe, anyone who can still devote any brain cells to following the Knicks... he's done.

(Yes, I know he has a hit in the theaters currently, something about imagining he's in Paris with Hemingway. But from what I hear, it's as stilted as ever--he's just come up with a story that justifies the stiltedness.)
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* And why should it be? Allen seems to have agreed to participate in it just to reassure everyone that it's OK to marry your stepdaughter.

Life among the obnoxious

Let me say this straight out: the voice of a character is not the voice of the author. Otherwise intelligent people get this confused all the time. They rail against movies, plays or television shows with characters who are violent or homophobic or racist or serial litterbugs. But seriously, how can one write about social progress without addressing its opposite, and creating characters who embody that undesirable behavior? By this theory (which is NOT political correctness--that's something else), Dickens should not have created Ebenezer Scrooge, because he was endorsing stinginess and self-centeredness.

(Have you ever thought that the people who only knew Scrooge after his reformation, who must have far outnumbered the ones who knew him before, Scrooge's name must have been a byword for generosity and charity? In that world, people would say "It's Christmas -- be a Scrooge and give generously!" The Scrooge Foundation would have been known far and wide for building hospitals and orphanages.)

The people of Nancy Holofcener's Please Give (2010) are not stingy, but they are self-centered, which stymies any attempt they make to find meaning and purpose in life. But their myopia is as funny as Mister Magoo's. And rather than take real steps toward finding meaning, Kate (played by Catherine Keener) seeks charitable work, then dissolves in tears over the mere thought of other people having needs. (This is clearly a novel thought to her.)

There is not much too much to Holofcener's cinematic technique here, which seems to be limited to designing some echt-New York apartments and setting Keener, Oliver Platt, Rebecca Hall and Ann Morgan-Guilbert loose in them. Morgan-Guilbert, Millie from The Dick Van Dyke Show is insanely funny as a bitter, difficult old woman for whom everyone, including her grand-daughters and the people who have already bought her apartment, is waiting to die. But if the characters are all horrible -- not monsters, but small and lacking perspective -- you can enjoy them the way you can enjoy George Costanza, as an unholy fool.

There's not much to enjoy about Michael Douglas's Ben Kalmen in Solitary Man (2010). His portrayal of a dying and failing auto salesman doesn't differ much from the jerks he's played in Wall Street, Beyond A Reasonable Doubt or countless other "love me, I'm an arrogant jerk" movies. The discovery that Douglas might himself be dying, made after the release of this film, doesn't improve it. In fact, it increases one's desire to remember Douglas playing a decent guy trying to improve things, as in Traffic and The American President.

Moreover, although the film takes the form of the "lost weekend" it rambles and meanders through a series of disjointed encounters, mostly with college students who seem to be impressed with this jackass. Jesse Eisenberg is out of his element playing someone easily fooled, he exudes too much intelligence. And the college women the 60-something Douglas pursues make him look like a pedophile. (There is a charming encounter with real-life Douglas friend Danny DeVito, but that doesn't appear to have anything to do with the rest of the movie.)

Still, as I said, portraying a jerk doesn't make the author a jerk. But writer co-director Brian Koppelman has nothing to say about this man that we haven't already thought. If you make bad choices, use people and throw them away, you will have no friends or loved ones and you will be unhappy. There's no twist, no irony, no redeeming perversity. It's a classic case of "why are you telling me this?"

Which could also apply to Color Me Kubrick based on some true anecdotes, in which John Malkovich plays a man who, though he looked nothing like him and had no discernible talent or taste, told strangers he was filmmaker Stanley Kubrick and cadged meals and drinks off them. I have now recited not only the premise, but the entire plot of the film. A con movie should have the ability to deceive the audience, have some concealed twists and turns and a build-up to a grand deception. Instead, over and over, people think this man called Alan Conway is Kubrick, find out he's not and dump him. Sometimes it's not even that. Martin Freeman starts chatting Conway up, listing his favorite Kubrick films and throwing in a film by Stanely Kramer, which Conway cheerfully takes credit for. Freeman points out the mistake and suggests Conway study his subject harder.

I did enjoy the story of the real-life former theater critic of the New York Times, Frank Rich being taken in, as Rich is a fatuous blowhard who could use some knocking down, but the makers of Color Me Kubrick should have had the courage to stray farther from the facts. Couldn't their character have raised the money to get a small film started, then arrived on the stage and tried to direct without the knowledge or the talent? That would have been amusing. Because ultimately this is a film about a person who wants praise and adoration without having earned it. It could have been a general critique on celebrity culture, but given that most of Conway's victims are buffoons themselves, there is no room for satire to have grown and developed. An idiot tricks other idiots. Is that a story?

Separate Lies (2005), on the other hand is all story and no characters. Written and directed by Julian Fellows, screenwriter of Gosford Park it shares that English weekend-country-place feeling, right down to the rather genteel killing that starts the film. Like City Island, all the characters are lying to each other, but lies that seem to be covering up a crime are only actually covering up an affair. The only complication is that, being English, the truth about sexual fidelity must be kept a far deeper darker secret than that of homicide. Embarrassment is far worse than incarceration.

As they will, lies engender more lies and the complications heap up until there is no way to turn back, no way of going back to the way things used to be. Which is sort of the point, I guess. The problem is that rather than creating characters for whom this journey would be of interest, Fellows has cast Tom Wilkinson, Emily Watson and Rupert Everett, capital actors all, providing of course that they have something to act. So, for example, once Wilkinson establishes that he is all polish over ruthlessness and acquisitiveness, he is more or less done, reduced to quiet wimpering once all is lost. Emily Watson is interesting, but never believable as Wilkinson's long-time wife. And it is never explained why the bland and amoral Everett would be preferable to Wilkinson. All rather a bad lot, and get lesser punishments than they deserve. Only the low-key lighting of Tony Pierce-Roberts seems completely admirable.

And, since I brought up Scrooge before, let's dispose of last year's Robert Zemeckis motion-capture atrocity, Disney's Christmas Carol (2009). Something has to be done about these films, perhaps federal legislation. So far we've had The Polar Express, Beowulf and now this. I think there is comprehensive proof that this is not a valuable or expressive form that adds anything valuable to the vocabulary of film. They're not unwatchable films (except maybe Polar Express, which is kind of ghastly), but there's nothing indispensable about the motion-capture format. Taking Christmas Carol to be the technological highpoint so far, the characters are still unable to focus their eyes, and their heads still look as though they were either carved from foam or slightly over-inflated balloons. Look at this illustration. Who are the characters looking at? Clearly not each other. Nor is the motion produced much more graceful or expressive than that of any stop-motion animated film. Put this film next to the work of Pixar, and you will see what real animation by real animators can accomplish. (It is appalling to have this stuff released under the Disney banner.) And then someone decided that since this was animation that the film had to be aimed at children, and that there's nothing kids like than aimless, pointless cruel and illogical slapstick added to a tale of Victorian moral reclamation. Does anyone have any idea why Scrooge had to be shrunk and slung around the icy landscape in a wacky chase sequence? What story did that tell? If you make bad choices, you will shrink and slide on ice?

There are good things. Carrey's voice work as Scrooge is first rate, especially since it sounds nothing like Jim Carrey. (His work for the first two ghosts is not so strong, with weak Irish and Scots accents respectively, and diluting the strength of his work as Scrooge.) The face of the Scrooge character is rendered with a detail and expressivity lacking in most of the other characters. (Nephew Fred fits Colin Firth's voicework probably because they decided to make Fred resemble Firth, the only character that bears such a correspondence to the voice actor.) Gary Oldman's work is rather good, and the screenplay is among the most faithful to Dickens, even eschewing some of the favorite later additions to the Scrooge saga (especially those of screenwriter Noel Langley for the beloved Alistair Sim version).

But here's an example of things gone wrong. This is a little-noted incident during the Ghost of Christmas Present chapter, just before we enter the Cratchit household, when Scrooge and the Ghost observe that people like the Cratchits, who do not own an oven, use nearby bakers' ovens to heat their food, but that given England's blue laws, they could not do so on Sunday when all the shops are required to be closed. Scrooge remarks that this has been done in the name of the spirit, or his family. In Dickens, the Spirit replies, "There are some upon this earth of yours who lay claim to know us and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred , envy, bigotry and selfishness in our name." And here Zemeckis inserts: "These men of the cloth." Thus he creates an equivalency between bigotry and oppression and the clergy which Dickens did not write, and we have no reason to believe he felt. After all, you don't have to be a professional to use the Bible as a cudgel to hurt other people. So while I was delighted to see this arcane and interesting bit restored to a dramatization of Dickens, I deplore that it was felt necessary to distort it to engage in an attack on the clergy.

But finally the sum is less than its parts. This Christmas Carol has lots and lots of parts, and incorporates as much beloved Dickens dialogue as might be possible in a film of reasonable length. And yet for all the ghosts, it is without spirit. Everything feels like a dutiful recitation, without real despair or real exhilaration. Dickens can survive all sorts of misguided tributes and adaptations, but he can't survive sterility.

Gilligan's Dilemma, or why all the clam diggers?

In the post just below this, I mentioned Westerns that take place in confined spaces. Confined spaces are things characters want to get out of. In a thriller, it's in order to save their life. In a comedy, it's in order to save their sanity.

A couple of contemporary films investigate the comfort, security and smothering quality of living one's life in anchored to one spot. (Both also involve clam digging communities in the greater New York area.) City Island (2009) is so tightly limited, it would easily fit on an off-Broadway stage. (No, it's not that it's stuck in one room, but that the passions of the characters would be right at home in the theater.) As in many a farce, every character has a secret, a secret that puts them in conflict with the small-town ethos of City Island, New York. Dreams of being an actor, of smoking, stripping and considering infidelity are all deeply suppressed until they explode in a theatrical-style all-out confrontation, illustrated above.

The film has proven an audience hit, and deservedly so, especially for a strangely charming scene in which prison guard Andy Garcia auditions for a Martin Scorsese film by improvising a scene he might have witnessed at work. Maybe it's because we would love to think films succeed by the intrusion of little shards of reality. (A doubtful prospect.) The odd thing is that the film starts off by setting out a great deal of detail about the uniqueness of the setting and the proceeds to ignore those specific unique qualities in favor of treating it as any isolated small-town-type community. The people seem more quirky than the setting, what there is of it. What I'm trying to say is it's hard to say whether this family is meant to be eccentrics or typical of City Island, since all we know about it is that they fish and that some are born City Islanders and others have City Islander-ness thrust upon them.

So it's odd that this film is far more effective than the similarly-themed Diggers (2007), even though the latter film has embedded the characteristics of its setting into the character's DNA. Insularity, "us against them" mentality, "this is the way it's always been" thinking--these are built into the story and situations in Diggers, whereas City Island's characters seem to have had their quirks appliqued onto them after the fact. Nonetheless, or perhaps, because of that, City Island moves along in a purposeful manner, whereas there are dozens of scenes in which seem to lack any point or purpose in the film. They don't provide new information on characters, move the story forward or develop what little theme there is. Diggers seems to have been designed as an acting fest for the pals of writer-actor Ken Marino (late of The State), including Paul Rudd, Maura Tierney, Marino, Sarah Paulson (uncharacteristically as a put-upon mom), Ken Marino and Lauren Ambrose.

As if aping the lives of the characters, the movie ambles around in various brackish backwaters, not headed anywhere and therefore not arriving anywhere. I do have to say they have meticulously recreated the wardrobes of the mid-70s, my college days, which were probably the low point in style for the entire 20th century. It was as if Watergate had so demoralized all of us that we figured, "what the hell, we'll just wear cheap ugly crap until we cheer up."

I suspect both films were made not because of a burning desire to tell these stories, but from a burning desire to get a feature film made and develop a calling card for a feature career. There's no reason for us civilians to linger over them. Next.

Anti-social network

Most of the conversation swirling around The Social Network (2010) concerns the question as to whether it is "true." This is absurd to begin with, as the "truth" of human interactions is ultimately undiscoverable. There is no unbiased data. There is no science here, to be tested in double blind procedures. All we have is "he said", "he said." True, there are bits of what we laughingly call objective reality which are omitted, combined, reordered and, at times, invented in order to tell "lies like truth." Which leads us to the only answerable question: "Is it a good story well told?"

Yes, if you like Aaron Sorkin's brand of fast funny patter, often doubling back on itself, leaping forward and occasionally slamming characters with juvenile but effective sarcasm. The first scene is as effective an announcement of style as I've ever seen. It says, "wake up and keep up. This is going to go quickly and we're not going to repeat it." Movie theater snack bars should be pushing caffeine drinks to get audiences up to speed.

Oddly, the scene may or may not state the theme of the film. In it, protagonist Zuckerberg is obsessing about admission to Harvard final clubs, a near-impossible feat for a Jew, even in 2004 (according to this film--again, I am not going to go into what is or is not true about Harvard. Being an Amherst grad, I will naturally assume the worst.) So the film seems to announce itself to be about class and or ethnicity systems.

But soon the film shifts ground from race/class rivalries to those of technological expertise. (Let me point out that the expertise here is of the engineering variety. There are no genuine scientific breakthroughs involved in this story--merely the intersection between marketing and code writing.) Then the rivalry shifts to the question of monetization, capitalization and overall business acumen (and the male aggression encoded therein). Only over time is the true theme of the movie revealed--the ever-evolving methods of measuring relative status. It moves from social status, to mental skill to money skill, but finally all are surrogates for macho. (At one point, Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster asks the waitress for the check, and I turned to my wife and said, "and a tape measure, please, as long as we've taken them out.")

The screenplay also reflects the subjective nature of the facts, framed as it is by the depositions pursuant to two lawsuits. (Applause for the filmmakers who recognize that most lawsuits are determined in their discovery phase, eschewing the dramatic trial scenes which never happened.) This seems appropriate, for while the actual framework is not taken the book on which the film is based is, it is in a sense a product of one of the lawsuits, being told solely from the viewpoint of one plaintiff who claimed to have been squeezed out of Facebook. (It the lack of access to Zuckerberg is a source of contention around the film, as Zuckerberg comes off as a jerk, but not quite as big a jerk as everyone else.)

What is truly surprising about the film is that it is directly so self-effacingly by David Fincher, the super-stylist of Aliens, 7even, and Fight Club, the film that may have defined a generation as thoroughly as Catcher In The Rye defined its generation. Aaron Sorkin is one of the few brand-name writers to the public, thanks primarily to Sports Night and The West Wing. His only predecessors may be writers Paddy Chayefsky and Rod Serling (all three created by television), who could receive more attention in press and marketing materials than the directors of their films (and even possessory credits at times). Paddy Chayefsky was usually served by theater-oriented directors such as Arthur Hiller and Sidney Lumet, who were unafraid of smart people making fast smart talk for long periods of time. But Chayefsky came a cropper when Ken Russell was engaged to direct Altered States. It's hard to understand how this happened. Russell had never shown much respect for texts, and Altered States was no exception. The script was so mangled in Chayefsky's opinion that he had his name removed from the film.

Fincher is a great visual stylist, but he does not seem to have declared war on writers, and indeed, he lets Sorkin have at least the first half of the film to himself, restricting his signature to dark, backlit scenes and some very crisp cutting. Interestingly, when the first sunlit scene arrives, one of a crew match on the Thames, Sorkin and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth take the bit in their teeth and turn this somewhat pastoral sport into a grinding, eye-gouging affair. Soon thereafter the film dissolves into alternating scenes of decadence and law offices, and we are back to all talk all the time. One must assume that Fincher took his brief as maintaining the pace and the dark atmosphere and dialing down the self-pity that seems to flow around so many of the real-life characters. All praise to Fincher as the main who knows when his special talents are required and to what degree.

Presumably Mr. Fincher also hired Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) and Atticus Ross for the extremely original and appropriately twitchy movie score. It would be interesting to know who came up with the nervous scratchy sounds that accompany Zuckerberg's trip across campus at the beginning of the second sequence of the film; in any case it is exciting to hear, more than 80 years into the history of sound-synchronized film, people moving past the lush orchestras and pop pap in order to find new ways to use sound to enhance story-telling.

Clearly we now have two contenders for best screenplay in next year's Oscar ceremony, Inception and The Social Network. Both are sources for huge amounts of internet buzz, even more than is usual for new films. Maybe they should just count up who has the most "Like"s on Facebook.

UPDATE: Three great posts by Jim Emerson on The Social Network here, here and here. I especially like the third, where he looks at the visual code of Social Network. You should be reading his blog, Scanners, regularly anyway.