Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (57 page)

At the end of the film, after Heidi has been found guilty and is going to prison, and she has every reason to hate Nagy, there is a remarkable scene. Nagy calls her on the phone, and lets us eavesdrop as he sweet-talks her. You can tell she still falls for him. Nagy smiles to the camera, helplessly: "There you go," he says. Charming.

JANUARY 10, 1997

here are so many different insect species that there's a famous scientific quip: Essentially all species are insects. Their biomass-the combined weight of the creepy-crawly things-is many times greater than the combined weight of everything else that swims, flies, walks, and makes movies. Insects are the great success story on planet Earth; they were here before we arrived and will remain long after we've gone, inhabiting their worlds of mindless and intricate beauty.

Children, being built nearer to the ground and having more time on their hands, are close observers of ants and spiders, caterpillars and butterflies. Adults tune them out; bugs are things you slap, swat, step on, or spray. Microcosmos is an amazing film that allows us to peer deeply into the insect world and marvel at creatures we casually condemn to squishing. The makers of this film took three years to design their close-up cameras and magnifying lenses, and to photograph insects in such brilliant detail that if they were cars, we could read their city stickers.

The movie is a work of art and whimsy as much as one of science. It uses only a handful of words, but is generous with music and amplified sound effects, dramatizing the unremitting struggle of survival that goes on in a meadow in France. If a camera could somehow be transported to another planet, in order to photograph alien life forms, would the result be any more astonishing than these invasions into the private lives of snails and bees, mantises and beetles, spiders and flies?

Where did these forms come from? These legs-two, four, six, a thousand? Eyes like bombardier's turrets? Giant pincers? Honeyed secretions? Metamorphoses from a wormy crawling thing into a glorious flying thing? Grasshoppers that look like plants, and beetles that look like ants? Every one of these amazing creatures represents a successful Darwinian solution to the problem of how to reproduce and make a living. And so are we.

One beautiful creature after another takes the screen. There is a parade of caterpillars. A dung beetle, tirelessly moving his treasure. Two snails engaging in a long and very loving wet kiss. Spiders methodically capturing and immobilizing their prey (what a horrible fate; does the victim understand what has happened to it?). Ants construct lives of meticulous order and then a hungry pheasant comes along and gobbles up thousands of them. More ants construct more anthills, flawless in design and function, and then the hills are bombed by raindrops that look to them as big as beach balls.

There is a fight to the death between two beetles, and their struggle looks as gargantuan as the battling dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. There are tiny insects who live in, on, and for the nectar supplied by plants that are perfectly designed for them. Ladybugs seem so ill-designed to fly that every takeoff seems like a clumsy miracle; do they get sweaty palms? Overhead there is a towering canopy of jungle foliage, consisting of the grasses and flowers of the meadow.

See whatever other movies you want to this year. Microcosmos is in a category of its own. There is no other film like it. If the movies allow us to see places we have not visited and people we do not know, then Microcosmos dramatically extends the range of our vision, allowing us to see the world of the creatures who most completely and enduringly inhabit the Earth.

Sometimes the close-up cameras are almost embarrassingly intimate; should we blush, to see these beings engaged in their crucial daily acts of dining, loving, fighting, being born, and dying? You may leave this movie feeling a little like a god. Or like a big, inelegant, and energy-inefficient hunk of clunky design. Of course, we're smart and they're not. We know the insects exist, and they don't know we exist. Or need to.

INTRODUCTION

Every critic has films about which he is right and the world is wrong. Here are some of mine. A few, like Trouble in Mind, have been so thoroughly overlooked that its director, Alan Rudolph, told me he fears a print no longer exists. Others, like El Norte, are Oscar-nominated classics, but have not found the wide audiences they deserve.

In 1999 I started Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We look at twelve or fourteen films over a five-day period in the magnificent old Virginia Theater. We look at overlooked formats (70 mm, Todd AO, silents), overlooked genres (musicals, documentaries, even Bollywood, which is certainly overlooked in America), and films that for one reason or another never received the recognition they deserved. What amazes me is how well they play, how the audience shares my mystification that other audi ences did not embrace them. I have never heard more laughter than at the Overlooked screening of an Australian comedy named The Castle, which Harvey Weinstein told me they shelved at Miramax because "it didn't test well."

1974

ike so much of his work, Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us has to be approached with a certain amount of imagination. Some movies are content to offer us escapist experiences and hope we'll be satisfied. But you can't sink back and simply absorb an Altman film; he's as concerned with style as subject, and his preoccupation isn't with story or character, but with how he's showing us his tale. That's the case with Thieves Like Us, which no doubt has all sorts of weaknesses in character and plot, but which manages a visual strategy so perfectly controlled that we get an uncanny feel for this time and this place. The movie is about a gang of fairly dumb bank robbers, and about how the youngest of them falls in love with a girl, and about how they stick up some banks and listen to the radio and drink Coke and eventually get shot at.

The outline suggests Bonnie and Clyde, but Thieves Like Us resembles it only in the most general terms of period and setting. The characters are totally different; Bonnie and Clyde were antiheroes, but this gang of Altman's has no heroism at all. Just a kind of plodding simplicity, punctuated by some of the characters with violence, and by the boy with a kind of wondering love. They play out their sad little destinies against two backdrops: one is the pastoral feeling of the southern countryside, and the other is an exactly observed series of interior scenes that recapture just what it was like to drowse through a slow, hot summer Sunday afternoon, with the radio in the background and the kids playing at pretending to do Daddy's job. If Daddy is a bank robber, so what?

The radio is constantly on in the background of Thieves Like Us, but it's not used as a source of music as it was in American Graffiti or Mean Streets. The old shows we hear are not supposed to be heard by Altman's characters; they're like theme music, to be repeated in the film when the same situations occur. Gangbusters plays when they rob a bank, for ex ample, even though the bank would have been closed before Gangbusters came on. That's okay, because the radio isn't supposed to be realistic; it's Altman's wry, elegiac comment on the distance between radio fantasy and this dusty, slow-witted reality.

At the heart of the movie is a lovely relationship between the young couple, played by Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall. They've both been in Altman movies before (just about everybody in view here is in his stock company), and it's easy to see why he likes them so. They don't look like movie stars. They share a kind of rangy grace, an ability to project shyness and uncertainty. There's a scene in bed that captures this; it's a two-shot with Keith in the foreground and Shelley, on her back, eyes to the ceiling, slowly exhaling little plumes of smoke. Nothing is said. The radio plays. Somehow we know just how this quiet, warm moment feels.

The movie's fault is that Altman, having found the perfect means for realizing his story visually, did not spend enough thought, perhaps, on the story itself. Thieves Like Us is not another Bonnie and Clyde, and yet it does end in a similar way, with a shoot-out. And by this time, we've seen too many movies that have borrowed that structure, that have counted on the bloody conclusion to lend significance to what went before. In Thieves Like Us, there just wasn't that much significance, and I don't think there's meant to be. These are small people in a weary time, robbing banks because that's their occupation, getting shot because that's the law's occupation.