Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (62 page)

MAY 14, 2004

o many movies travel the same weary roads. So few imagine entirely original worlds. Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World exists in a time and place we have never seen before, although it claims to be set in Winnipeg in 1933. The city, we learn, has been chosen by the London Times, for the fourth year in a row, as "the world capital of sorrow." Here Lady Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini) has summoned entries for a contest which will award $25,000 "in depression-era dollars" to the performer of the saddest music.

This plot suggests no doubt some kind of camp musical, a subMonty Python comedy. What Maddin makes of it is a comedy, yes, but also an eerie fantasy that suggests a silent film like Metropolis crossed with a musical starring Nelson Eddy and Jeanette McDonald, and then left to marinate for long forgotten years in an enchanted vault. The Canadian filmmaker has devised a style that evokes old films from an alternate timeline; The Saddest Music is not silent and not entirely in black and white, but it looks like a long-lost classic from decades ago, grainy and sometimes faded; he shoots on 8 mm film and video and blows it up to look like a memory from cinema's distant past.

The effect is strange and delightful; somehow the style lends quasicredibility to a story that is entirely preposterous. Because we have to focus a little more intently, we're drawn into the film, surrounded by it. There is the sensation of a new world being created around us. The screenplay is by the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, who wrote the very different Remains of the Day. Here he creates, for Maddin's visual style, a fable that's Canadian Idol crossed with troubled dreams.

Lady Port-Huntley owns a brewery, and hopes the contest will promote sales of her beer. Played by Rossellini in a blonde wig that seems borrowed from a Viennese fairy tale, she is a woman who has lost her legs and propels herself on a little wheeled cart until being supplied with fine new glass legs, filled with her own beer.

To her contest come competitors like the American Chester Kent (Mark McKinney of Kids in the Hall), looking uncannily like a snake-oil salesman, and his lover Narcissa (Maria de Medeiros), who consults fortunetellers on the advice of a telepathic tapeworm in her bowels. If you remember de Medeiros and her lovable little accent from Pulp Fiction (she was the lover of Bruce Willis's boxer), you will be able to imagine how enchantingly she sings "The Song Is You."

Kent's brother Roderick (Ross McMillan) is the contestant from Serbia. Their father Fyodor (David Fox) enters for Canada, singing the dirge "Red Maple Leaves." One night while drunk he caused a car crash and attempted to save his lover by amputating her crushed leg-but, alas, cut off the wrong leg, and is finally seen surrounded by legs. And that lover, dear reader, was Lady Port-Huntley.

Competitors are matched off two by two. "Red Maple Leaves" goes up against a pygmy funeral dirge. Bagpipers from Scotland compete, as does a hockey team that tries to lift the gloom by singing "I Hear Music." The winner of each round gets to slide down a chute into a vat filled with beer. As Lady Port-Huntley chooses the winners, an unruly audience cheers. Suspense is heightened with the arrival of a cellist whose identity is concealed by a long black veil.

You have never seen a film like this before, unless you have seen other films by Guy Maddin, such as Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary (2002), or Archangel (1990). Although his Tales from the Gimli Hospital was made in 1988, his films lived on the fringes, and I first became aware of him only in 2000, when he was one of the filmmakers commissioned to make a short for the Toronto Film Festival. His Heart of the World, now available on DVD with Archangel and Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, was a triumph, selected by some critics as the best film in the festival. It, too, seemed to be preserved from some alternate universe of old films.

The more films you have seen, the more you may love The Saddest Music in the World. It plays like satirical nostalgia for a past that never existed. The actors bring that kind of earnestness to it that seems peculiar to supercharged melodrama. You can never catch them grinning, although great is the joy of Lady Port-Huntley when she poses with her sexy new beer-filled glass legs. Nor can you catch Maddin condescending to his characters; he takes them as seriously as he possibly can, considering that they occupy a mad, strange, gloomy, absurd comedy. To see this film, to enter the world of Guy Maddin, is to understand how a film can be created entirely by its style, and how its style can create a world that never existed before, and lure us, at first bemused and then astonished, into it.

INTRODUCTION

In the newspaper business we call these Thinkers, or Thumb-Suckers. The critic becomes a pundit and profoundly addresses the issues of the day. The article about The Color Purple was written on the airplane to Chicago, the day after the Academy Awards. The article on the A rating is one of many I've written over the years. I have also debated Jack Valenti on the subject, to no avail. My personal thought is that the movie industry and the theater owners have no desire to establish a workable rating that would actually prevent them from selling tickets. The directors' loss of freedom to make adult films is one the industry can live with.

MARCH 30, 1986

LOS ANGELES-They caught up with Quincy Jones just as he was entering Swifty Lazar's big post-Oscar bash at Spago, the chic pizza joint up above the Sunset Strip. They asked him why he thought The Color Purple had been so completely shut out at this year's Academy Awards, why it didn't even get one single lousy Oscar for anything, not even in one of those obscure technical categories. And Jones, who composed the music for the movie and was its coproducer, said:

"That's the way it is."

He paused. "And." He paused again, then said, "And that's the way it is. Someday we're going to have to change that." Then he went inside, where Swifty and several hundred pals were attending Hollywood's version of prom night.

That's the way it is.

A flat statement, concealing a multitude of possibilities. I cannot read Quincy Jones's mind, and so cannot tell you for sure what he meant. But I imagine he was making a quiet, almost dispassionate statement about a black film in a white society.

Nobody would say, or probably even believe, that the academy voters were being racist in their across-the-board rejection of The Color Purple. After all, these were the same voters who gave the movie eleven nominations. A movie has to stand or fall on its perceived merits, and not on the race of its cast or the subject of its screenplay. Perhaps, all the same, there was a small irony in the fact that the academy passed over a movie about blacks in a white land to give seven Oscars to Out of Africa, a film about whites in a black land.

Perhaps there was another irony in the fact that many influential black writers and leaders denounced The Color Purple for what they saw as a negative portrayal of black men, but none of them denounced Out of Africa, with its vague portraits of tribal blacks who were trotted onscreen for a touch of authenticity.

In a Hollywood world where blacks are hardly ever made the center of major films, why attack the film that tried to say something that gave attention and love to its unforgettable characters? Was it a certain provincialism on the part of those black critics, who saw the movie in terms of how it would present blacks to white audiences, instead of seeing it as a movie about certain black characters, some of them good people, some of them bad?

This much seems true: the controversy over The Color Purple, which extended even to pickets outside Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Oscar night, did nothing to help the film. The typical academy voter is hard to characterize, but there are two generalizations we can make. He or she is not young, and not black.

This typical voter possibly enjoyed out of Africa because it was a reminder of an earlier, simpler time in Hollywood, when stately epics were cast with major stars and cloaked in literacy and respectability. Here was a film directed by Sydney Pollack, Hollywood's idea of a true professional (and mine, too-I am not attacking Out of Africa, only wondering why The Color Purple was snubbed). The film starred Meryl Streep, the reigning queen of great Hollywood actresses (she deserves to be), and Robert Redford, a modern leading man of mythic proportions, and Klaus Maria Bran- dauer, the sort of distinguished European actor Hollywood has always liked to import for a new face in a tricky role.

And then you have a film starring names that most of the academy voters had never heard before: Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, Margaret Avery and Danny Glover. It was directed, however, by a name they could quickly recognize, Steven Spielberg. And as we consider Spielberg more carefully, perhaps we can begin to understand some of the subtle reasons the academy turned away from The Color Purple.

There has never been a Hollywood director more successful than Steven Spielberg. Not Cecil B. DeMille, not John Ford, not Frank Capra or Alfred Hitchcock or George Lucas or Francis Ford Coppola or any combination of two of those names. Steven Spielberg is the man, more than any other, who in the last decade has understood the sort of films that most people want to see, and has made them, and made them well. His credits in- cludeJaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and E. T., which was the largest-grossing film in history. As a producer, he has made Gremlins, Poltergeist, Back to the Future, and many other films, virtually every one of them successful. If a major Hollywood studio executive were to simply sign Spielberg to an exclusive contract, he would have done such a good thing for his shareholders that he could then justifiably retire on full salary.