How to Watch a Movie (15 page)

There is no sure recipe for talk, beyond having writers and actors and listeners who can do it. That means people who believe in it, who appreciate tone of voice, hesitation, and the great collection of sounds that go with talk—the sighs, the grunts, the gasps, the giggles, the groans. Do you still hear the orchestra of nonverbal sounds uttered by Timothy Spall's
Mr. Turner
? All of which can come down to something as simple and infinite as
The Lady Eve
and Stanwyck murmuring thank you to Henry Fonda when he draws down the hem of her dress after it has risen unaccountably in the warmth of their kissing.

Have you ever listened properly to a kiss?

10

WHAT IS A STORY, AND DOES IT MATTER?

T
ell me a story,” we beg as children, while wanting so many other things. Story will put off sleep (or extinction), and the child's organism hardly trusts the habit of waking yet. It means relationship with a storyteller: being read to is the template of every intimacy in life. Moreover, it was in rising to the challenge of story that movie went from being a craze to a universal entertainment, and an art form. Still, film is curious: the storyteller may fall asleep before the child, but movie is story or a continuity that carries on without us. It is time itself, and time does not have to be organized, until we insist on it.

A film show runs mechanically; that is part of its charm, but the thrill is faintly sinister, too. (It
would
carry on without us.) If an actress onstage halts in the middle of a speech from
Electra
, say, because she can't continue, then that performance
and its play stop. All of which leaves story in an intriguing but uncertain position in a medium that has its own momentum and continuity. We are there to watch and we are likely to watch wherever that imperative takes us. So sometimes we end up watching things we might never have chosen. Yet still we cling to this idea—tell me a story, because a story can avert or deny the most frightening thing of all, the abyss, the great hole of insignificance, and the dread that we have no story.

Consider
All Is Lost
(2013), where Robert Redford is alone in a small boat in the Pacific. This is easily presented as a story: it has an abrupt start and that almost demands a settling answer. A man in his mid-seventies wakes up alone on his yacht one morning, 1,700 miles from Sumatra. He has felt a great bump, and now there is seawater slapping around in his cabin. While he slept his yacht has been struck by a container that must have slipped off some cargo ship. The container is brick red in color and maybe sixty feet long. It is a bizarre new monster of the deep, and it is leaking running shoes into the Pacific from the point of impact. The damage to the yacht is greater. There is a gash in its side so large that as and when the seas turn rough the boat will take on too much water to stay afloat. The same impact has destroyed the yachtsman's means of communication. (That might happen, though experienced yachtsmen think it fanciful; but this story
requires
his isolation—that's what keeps us there.)

Anyone seeing the film calls the man “Redford”—he is the only actor in the picture and he is there all the time. He never acquires a fictional name; when the credits roll at the end of the film he is referred to as “Our Man.” That's touching and suggestive. It's not quite “our hero,” but it assumes some allegiance on our part, and some exemplary status on his. As if
All Is Lost
is a fable, “Our Man” means he represents us. Still, we know nothing about him. Is he taking part in a round-the-world, single-handed race such as was popular in the sixties and seventies? There is no sign of it. Is he a dying man who has taken on a last challenge? Is he seeking to escape an impossible domestic situation? Has his wife died, or did he leave her for a younger woman who then dropped him? Has a child died or disowned Our Man? We are given no clue for exploring these possibilities, though at the outset we hear his voice compose a message saying he tried his best—to survive, and to live, too. It's not clear whether this message—he will put it in a bottle and send it off—is for his own dear ones, or for the world. Our Man has only a vague sense of us and who we might be, except that if he is a story then we are the ones to whom it is being told. We're looking at him, and we're the only ones close to “there.”

He tries unsuccessfully to raise a radio operator on his broken equipment and later he will cry out at the fates. As written and directed by J. C. Chandor, the film does not succumb to an interior monologue, to panic, or to a crack-up. Our man wants to survive; he does everything he can think of, but there is something stoic and resigned in his silence. As his yacht founders, he goes to the emergency raft. He tries to attract attention. There is a moment when a fully loaded container ship passes him in broad daylight, but it has no lookouts and no one to hear his cries. The ship is from a ghost fleet, an ominous reminder of that other container vessel that lost the red rogue that struck him. It is also a metaphor for the blind corporate momentum that cannot notice the individual in need of help.

There is a fearsome storm, and we believe in Our Man being
tossed about in the shaking yacht. But the storm is not entirely elemental. A camera keeps filming it and we understand that if Redford the actor had had to beg for rest it would have been granted. The night storm scenes are done in a tank where the waves can be manipulated. The illusion of ordeal survives, yet we know this is a contrivance. And because Our Man is so alone, that peril is all the more nominal. This has many resemblances to a desperate, tense story, yet it is as naked and theoretical as a diagram in the proving of a theorem. So many films have “desperate” situations, but several hundred people and a completion bond are keeping it under control. Yet
All Is Lost
makes us believe (while leaving us in doubt).

That's where the title becomes important. It is an assertion that seems to say that the end is known before we begin, so that conventional suspense should be abandoned. It's a title that applies to Our Man and his yacht, yet it is more resonant—could this even refer to the twenty-first-century fear that, in more ways than we can begin to deal with, our civilization is edging toward demise? As we watch the film, and participate in its ordeal, the title seems foreboding. The inquisitive part of us wonders, How are “they” going to end this film? After all, they started it, and who embarks on a story without some thought of an ending? Did Redford come on board to die? Must this film be a downer, or will it be clever enough to find offsetting sources of romance and sentiment such as turned
Titanic
into a popular success? Can Our Man conjure up a Girl Friday?
All Is Lost
does not feel extravagant, but it does have a movie star in a big situation. It is said to have cost only $10 million, which means that Redford took little money up front. Still, it was a mainstream film, an old-fashioned adventure picture, with a chance at Oscars. So the question of how to end the picture is
there from the start. It can't go on forever; yet it can't simply stop. We need a signal to go home.

I suspect there were several endings in J. C. Chandor's head. (Someday, we will want films that show the alternate endings, and that lay out script directions not taken.) There could be a breathtaking, last-minute rescue. The life raft might be cast upon a desert island where Girl Friday is making tea and sympathy. God could intervene. The film could acquire the fierce assistance of a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Or Our Man may drown or go crazy from lack of water, roasting in the sun—the way people do perish in extremis. He might give up the ghost and slip into the water, like Captain Oates leaving Scott's camp for “a walk” on the way back from the South Pole in 1912.

I think this is what happens. Night falls. Our Man sees a light in the distance that must be another vessel. He begins to burn whatever he has to attract attention. The light comes toward him. Will it arrive in time? Will it be another ship? Is it a mirage? At the moment of crisis, in one swift shot an arm reaches out to grasp Our Man as he founders. Black out. End of film. Has he been saved, or has he died? Whose arm was that? And does one end exclude the other? Imagine
All Is Lost
as a film by Robert Bresson, and the ambiguity of the ending could be a moment of spiritual exultation. In fact, music builds towards the end of
All Is Lost
, and I fear that is the greatest weakness in the film. But it takes wisdom in a director to know when to use Mozart, Louis Armstrong, or silence.

J. C. Chandor is a young American filmmaker. He delivered the sickening emptiness at the end of his first film,
Margin Call
. He delivered the very subtle and absorbing
A Most Violent Year
. He knew he was making a Robert Redford picture here
and he was likely at ease with the unspoken assumption that Redford comes out of his films well, though not always in victory. He is about to be shot to pieces in
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
. He was compromised in
The Way We Were
. He is murdered in
The Chase
. But he has never been crushed or broken. He has never seemed rotten or dishonest. He has been able to think well of himself—and like other actors he may need that bonus. Chandor found a way of ending his picture with honor, or its mirror image, while leaving an intriguing openness.

So how do we follow a story without becoming story theorists, or would-be screenwriters? As Hilary Mantel said recently, “History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.” Story is an ancient cultural form remade by the movies, as profound and misleading as the cult of happiness, everything working out for the best, and order standing firm. These motifs spring directly from an old picture business adage: If we don't send an audience away feeling good they may not come back. For decades, until well into the 1960s, movie storytelling was usually positive and always tidy. Without those faithful elements the show risked our dismay.
Citizen Kane
was a box-office failure (despite good reviews) because it did not pay off in the customary way. The search for the meaning of “Rosebud” nearly slipped into oblivion. It only worked if you were attentive enough to track the sled through the movie and share Kane's feeling of loss. Even then, you had no reason to feel Kane had ended well, or happily. He had died in exile from his own world, shut in his own head, and the movie had not made audiences care for him in any conventional way. Indeed, the picture felt as ambivalent toward him as most of his colleagues felt about Orson Welles. In going so deeply into the mind of a little boy tycoon, the film ended irresolute. It made us uncomfortable.

Story is often closely linked to comfort. “I'll tell you a story” is a parental promise, and the teller of the tale will look after us even if the story is frightening in parts. This is also the way the silly confusion of the romantic plots in Fred Astaire films are wiped aside in a final dance routine and a shower of applause. It is the way lovers are brought together, their last embrace rippling on the closing curtains. It is the way adventure heroes—from Tom Mix to James Bond, from Mickey Mouse to E.T.—overcome all enemies and leave the world in an orderly shape. More than just the clicking together of narrative elements in movies, this is the way for more than three decades a dozen stories a day on television ended with a cursory but doubt-free air of settlement and well-being, as emphatic as the assurances in the commercials that paid for the programs. Grant that his cop was shabby, vulgar, homely, and one-eyed, still Columbo—like Perry Mason or Jessica Fletcher in
Murder, She Wrote
—solved every case and outwitted every wrongdoer. These defenders of right were as trustworthy as Woodward and Bernstein in
All the President's Men
. That was Robert Redford again, saving America from corruption and wanting to believe that newspapers would protect the Constitution.

All the President's Men
worked very cunningly: it had stars, noir suspense, a portrait of iniquity, and the thought that things were going to be OK, not the beginning of the end for newspapers. This optimism can be an American blindness after which exhaustive, critical inspection seems preferable, if less likely. Consider a contrasting movie, that of
Ida
(2013). We are in Poland in 1962. A young woman, Anna, is about to take her vows to become a nun. She had thought she was an orphan, cared for by the Church. But her Mother Superior tells her she has an aunt, and she must visit her before the decisive step of taking the vows.

The aunt, Wanda, has lost any faith in vows. She was a fierce Communist once. As a prosecutor she sent some people to their deaths. But she has lost that conviction. She is alone and growing older. She smokes and drinks and has a lot of careless, hopeless sex. She is a skeptic to her own chance of story. But she has narrative news for Anna—they are both Jewish, and Anna's parents were murdered in the war by Polish Catholics. So Wanda is like a grave test now: understand your past and your nature, she tells Anna—and see if you can still take your vows. After all, your true name is Ida.

The film of
Ida
is only eighty minutes. I won't spoil the ending for you, and saying that does admit that endings can be precious. But what promises to be a great test for Ida becomes as much of a rite of passage for Wanda. Enormous crimes are uncovered in the process, along with the downcast admission that the criminals were as human as the victims.

I spoke of indefatigable detectives on screen, and in story the viewers are detectives, too, at the foot of the screen. That's one reason why
Vertigo
is so instructive. James Stewart plays a police detective retired on account of his vertigo. A few years earlier Stewart had been the single-minded investigator who worked out the truth in
Rear Window
. In
Vertigo
, he makes a hash of the case; he brings about the death of the woman he has fallen in love with; and he lets the murderer escape. Was it that degree of failure that made
Vertigo
a flop, or was it because Hitchcock could find no way of telling the story without revealing its ending too early? Perhaps it was just a matter of time; in 1958 audiences wanted suspense that played fair. But by 2012, the analysis of tragedy in
Vertigo
was not just recognizable; it seemed necessary.

Into the 1960s, such conclusions became more common or
more respected. Michelangelo Antonioni's
L'Avventura
looks like the case of a missing woman who has vanished on a trip to an offshore island. But then interest in her disappearance fades away in what proves to be less a mystery story than a film about emotional forgetting and disloyalty. We never discover what happened to her. Antonioni loved such endings:
L'Eclisse, Blow-Up
, and even
The Passenger
end in a kind of hiatus.
Magnolia
ends like a flower: so many petals, some dying, some in bloom. It enjoys the wildness in life, hence its frogs.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
has a heroic resolution in which the inept McCabe disposes of the three bad guys sent to kill him, but no one in the township has seen what he has done. He will be misunderstood again. In Scorsese's
Taxi Driver
, the fundamentally unfit Travis Bickle is still a cabbie in the city, no matter the slaughter he has caused or our doubts about his sanity. In
Chinatown
, one of the more unpleasant villains in American pictures, Noah Cross (John Huston), remains in charge of Los Angeles and guardian to the granddaughter who is actually his daughter. The detective, Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), is led away, on the point of breakdown, with the advice, “Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown”—the system is too intricate and corrupt for him.