Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (72 page)

But all is not lost. Scorsese is not the only great director to come along since 1967. There are Altman and Coppola, Herzog and Fassbinder, Bertrand Tavernier and Oliver Stone, Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch. I went to Cannes last year and there was a twenty-three-year-old kid there named John Singleton who had made a movie, and he came out of thin air, but his talent was real. Things are opening up a little. In recent years we've started getting important films from blacks, Hispanics, women, and other groups that essentially made no films at all when I started reviewing.

When you go to the movies every day, it sometimes seems as if the movies are more mediocre than ever, more craven and cowardly, more skillfully manufactured to pander to the lowest tastes, instead of educating them. Then you see something absolutely miraculous. Something like Wings of Desire, or Do the Right Thing, or Drugstore Cowboy, or Gates of Heaven, or Beauty and the Beast, or Life Is Sweet, and on your way home through the White Hen Pantry you look distracted, as if you had just experienced some kind of a vision.

BY RICHARD CORLISS

(From Film Comment, March/April 199o)

ill anyone read this story? (It has too many words and not enough pictures.)

Does anyone read this magazine? Every article in it wants to be a meal, not a McNugget.)

Is anyone reading film criticism? (It lacks the punch, the clips, the thumbs.)

Can anyone still read? (These days, it's more fun and less work just to watch.)

My mother saves movie ads in which my name appears and magnetizes them to the door of her refrigerator. She judges my success as a Time film critic by the size and frequency of the blurbs publicists choose to promote their wares. Mom always taught me that if you can't say something nice about a picture, don't say anything at all. So if a month or two passes and I'm not quoted, she gets to fretting. "That Jeffrey Lyons," she purrs, scanning the ads, "he must be a very nice man. He seems to like everything." I have an image of Jeffrey Lyons's mother's refrigerator, festooned with rave quotes. It must be the size of a freezer at Hormel's main plant.

Jeffrey Lyons isn't a film critic, but he plays one on TV. The resident movie sage on PBS's Sneak Previews and superstation WPIX, Lyons has no thoughts, no wit, no perspective worth sharing with his audience. To anyone knowledgeable about pictures, he is a figure of sour mirth. But the other week he stumbled upon a truth about film reviewing at the end of this enervating decade. Appraising the movie Internal Affairs, Lyons said, "Sometimes, as an old showbiz adage goes, less can be more." No matter that the phrase was Robert Browning's (popularized by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe) and not Sam Goldwyn's. In today's movie criticism, less is more. Shorter is sweeter. Today's busy consumers want just the clips, ma'am. And an opinion that can be codified in numbers, letters, or thumbs.

The star system (* to ****) is as honored in popular reviewing as it is in Hollywood. It is a way of summing up the critic's response to a film. But in less-is-all TV, the reviewer hardly has time for the basics: synopsize the plot, introduce an excerpt, and then (if he hates the movie) make a joke or (if he likes it) invoke the five W's-warm, winning, wise, wacky, wonderful. Traditional considerations of directorial style, social import, and the film's place in film history are luxuries unobtainable in a no-frills review. Words are so much hot (or dead) air; only the number matters. So Gary Franklin, Lyons's West Coast counterpart, pegs movies on a i-to-io scale. But, inflation being rampant in the rhetoric market, Franklin must give his favorites a io+. On Siskel & Ebert & the Movies, the critics play Roman emperors and award a thumbs-down condemnation or a thumbs-up reprieve.

The new magazine Entertainment Weekly assigns a letter grade to each movie, television program, book, or classical record. EW's editor is Jeff Jarvis, a self-proclaimed "cultural spud." As the TV critic for People until last year, Jarvis panned Masterpiece Theatre adaptations of the great novels he was forced to skim in high school. He argued that the top-rated TV shows had more artistic value than the bestseller list. In a review of Nixon in China he wrote: "I hate people who talk slowly and people who repeat themselves-ergo, I hate opera." Now Jarvis is the culture czar at Time Inc. And EW is the reductio ad infinitum of a tendency-ignited by People, stoked by Entertainment Tonight, and inflamed by USA Today-to reduce history to gossip and criticism to a voxpop brain scan.

"Real" critics-my colleagues in print, for whom films and film reviewing are j ust a little more complex-may think that Lyons and Franklin have no more in common with serious writing than belly dancers do with the Ballet Russe. At their most generous, print critics will say, "We're writers, they're performers," who must create a stern or goofy TV personality and look natural while cribbing from a teleprompter. The print guys will quote with approval the observation of ABC-TV's film and theater enthusiast Joel Siegel, who told Theater Week magazine, "Frank Rich got hired because he can write. I got hired because I can read." They will surely scoff at Lyons's prickly pretensions when he accuses his print brethren of ` jeal ousy. They resent our money and exposure. They look down their noses at us. And that's the reason I make a point of being called a critic as opposed to a reviewer. It's my way of saying I'm doing exactly what they're doing."

Lyons is almost right. He's doing exactly what we may soon have to do. To editors at major newspapers and magazines, the brisk opinionmongering of TV critics-the minute-manager approach to an art form about which there is so much to say-provides the maximum daily requirements to be consumed by a readership glutted with information. Isn't everyone in a hurry? TV certainly is, and TV sets the pace we live and think by. The nightly newscasts are offering more but briefer stories: not news in depth-news in shallow. Tabloid topics, sexy footage, lotsa graphics, hold the analysis: television news plays like the International Enquirer staged by MTV. In this cramped universe, the traditional film critic might as well be writing in Latin. The long view of cinema aesthetics is irrelevant to a moviegoer for whom history began with Star Wars. A well-turned phrase is so much throat-clearing to a reader who wants the critic to cut to the chase: what movie is worth my two hours and six bucks this weekend? Movie criticism of the elevated sort, as practiced over the past half century by James Agee and Manny Farber, Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, J. Hoberman and Dave Kehr-in the mainstream press and in magazines like Film Comment-is an endangered species. Once it flourished; soon it may perish, to be replaced by a consumer service that is no brains and all thumbs.

[John] Huston's pictures are not acts of seduction or benign enslavement but of liberation, and they require, of anyone who enjoys them, the responsibilities of liberty. They continually open the eye and require it to work vigorously; and through the eye they awaken curiosity and intelligence. That, by any virile standard, is the essential to good entertainment. It is unquestionably essential to good art.

-James Agee on John Huston, 195o

hen Pauline Kael moved from San Francisco to New York in the mid-sixties, she called her archrival Andrew Sarris and suggested they meet. After the visit, Sarris told his friend Eugene Archer, "She wasn't exactly Katharine Hepburn." And Archer added, "Well, you're not exactly Spencer Tracy."

But they were, in a way. They raised the musty trade of film criticism to a volcanic, love-hate art. Their wrangles over the auteur theory had the excitement of politics and sport. The intensity of their debate lured people to see new films, and to see old (especially old Hollywood) movies in a new way. They opened eyes, awakened curiosity, aroused intelligence. They made film criticism sexy. Pictures were things that mattered; ideas were worth fighting over. Forget Tracy-Hepburn, Sarris and Kael were more like Ali-Frazier. Film criticism was the main event, and these two were the champs.

The important thing was not that they converted readers to their positions-after all, they ended up converting each other. Sarris came around to cherishing certain directors, like Huston and Akira Kurosawa, whom Kael had once chided him for attacking. And Kael became a more rigorous and predictable champion of a few younger filmmakers (Peckinpah, Kershner, Kaufman, De Palma) than Sarris had ever been of Hitchcock and Hawks.

Their true and lasting value was in the voices they devised for film criticism. Sarris's prose was dense, balanced, aphoristic, alliterative; he had taken more from the French than just the politique des auteurs. Kael's was loping, derisive, intimate, gag-packed, as American as Lenny Bruce. I can recall reading one of Kael's early pieces in Film Quarterly (1961, maybe) and being shocked-shocked!-to see she'd used a contraction. In those prim days, when most serious film criticism read like term papers in sociology and most popular reviews read like wire copy, Kael's writing was the battle cry of a vital and dangerous new era, the equivalent of Little Richard's primal "A wop bop a loo bop, a wop bam boom!" that announced the birth of rock 'n' roll.

is not as if no American had ever written about film in the vernacular, or with passion or intelligence. There had always been a freedom in reviewing a medium so pervasive and so declasse. The critic needn't bring reverence to the job. He could speak in his own voice, at his own desired decibel level. In the late thirties and forties, Otis Ferguson and Manny Far ber, writing for the New Republic, and Agee in the Nation, created a body of reviews that still make edifying reading. Another critic, Cecelia Ager, who appeared in the New York tabloid P.M., established the bright, brittle tone that Kael would later make her own. Ager on Citizen Kane: "It's as though you'd never seen a movie before." Ager on the Bette Davis weepie Deception: "It's like grand opera, only the people are thinner." (Contractions! Wow!) Agee, Ferguson, and Farber finally had their film pieces collected in book form. Nobody's publishing film books anymore, but it would be lovely to see the work of this neglected critic between hard covers.