How to Watch a Movie (17 page)

In the early 1970s, in the space of three years, he wrote and directed
The Godfather, The Conversation
, and
The Godfather Part II
. So it hardly matters what came later. To be a maestro or a godfather for just a few years is enough. If we confine ourselves simply to
The Godfather
, Francis took on a picture when many at the studio, Paramount, believed he was too inexperienced to handle that large a project. He endured the fabulous self-confidence of Robert Evans as his production executive. He lived through the rumors that he was about to be replaced by some pliant veteran. And all he did was deliver a picture that for a few years was the all-time box-office champion (between
The Sound of Music
and
Jaws
) and that won the Best Picture Oscar.

Coppola shared the Oscar for adapted screenplay with Mario Puzo, whose book was the origin of the film. But there were so many others who contributed, who served the director or did their own thing—you had to be there every minute to know exactly what happened, and even then who could be sure? Gordon Willis shot the film in so many browns and
blacks, against warnings that the film would not be visible. Dean Tavoularis designed all those Italian interiors. Anna Hill Johnstone did the costumes. Nino Rota wrote the music; the score is as famous as the one for
Gone With the Wind
. Walter Murch wrought the sound track in postproduction. Michael Chapman operated the camera, and Fred Roos did the casting.

How much that one word stands for, and how many different negotiations did Coppola have to beg Paramount to accept Marlon Brando as Vito? There was a similar struggle over Al Pacino as Michael. Then there are James Caan, Robert Duvall (in the role that defined his value), the exquisite John Cazale, Diane Keaton, Talia Shire, and of course I'm leaving people out. But every time I see the film I treasure John Marley (as the Hollywood producer, Jack Woltz, the man who loves horses), Abe Vigoda as the mournful Tessio, Richard Castellano cooking as Clemenza, Lenny Montana as Luca Brasi, Sterling Hayden as the crooked police chief, McCluskey, Al Lettieri as Sollozzo, Simonetta Stefanelli (as Apollonia, Michael's Sicilian bride and the one time in all the films where he finds pleasure in a woman), Alex Rocco as Moe Greene. Casting depends on hunch, availability, making a deal, and then directing the performance, though on big, busy films there is so little time for directing that casting may be most of the battle.

Did Francis make
The Godfather
? Well, yes. Would he say so? I'm not sure. He is a family man, for good and ill, and it's interesting to know that once upon a time, with a demanding father (the flute player in the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Toscanini), Francis was the weakling in the family, while his brother August was as flamboyant as Sonny and as brilliant as Michael. If Francis identified with anyone it was with Fredo. And that helps explain his movie a little.

Francis Coppola became regarded as an auteur in the early 1970s, and he did a lot to make it easier for some of his contemporaries to be viewed in the same way—Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Brian De Palma, William Friedkin, Peter Bogdanovich. It's interesting to note what has happened to those men: Friedkin, De Palma, and Bogdanovich have had periods of decline. Their recent work does not match their work from the seventies. Does that mean an auteur can lose his authority, or just his favored place in the business hierarchy? George Lucas has become very wealthy. He sold his enterprises to Disney for over $4 billion, no matter that he had been one of the original migrants to northern California who wanted to get away from the atmosphere of Hollywood. Few of his fans believe the later
Star Wars
pictures had the verve or originality of the first ones. Steven Spielberg has become exactly what Hollywood most treasures: a great and generous producer, nearly a studio in his own right. He has made half a dozen pictures that are hallowed in the history of the business and one film that seems to me close to greatness—I mean
Empire of the Sun
, adapted from the J. G. Ballard memoir. That's the picture in which he places a kid (the young Christian Bale) in a world that is insane but utterly real. All too often, Spielberg's kids exist in fantasy worlds where “Steven” is like a wizard.

And Marty? He is the chronic filmmaker, never weary or satisfied, a cornucopia of projects, a defender of film, an aid to so many others, our jittery patron saint, and he was at his best, I think, in the years from
Mean Streets
to
Raging Bull
. Since then, his mania to make films has fallen into self-repetition and diminished quality. Coppola is a long way from the man of the early seventies. But aren't auteurs allowed to wander and
drift? Orson Welles, long after
Kane
, made films that were far from his best work, though other directors would have given so much to have made them.

Against the vagaries of changing taste, of raising and keeping money, the sanctity of the auteur theory seems archaic. But it was introduced, principally by French writers, as a way of saying, Look, these American professionals, these studio men, these business successes, may be artists. That sacred list included Howard Hawks, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Nick Ray, Sam Fuller, Vincente Minnelli, Otto Preminger, Anthony Mann, King Vidor, and so many others. It was also a way of elevating the role of director for young critics (Truffaut, Godard, Bogdanovich) who longed to do the job themselves. Years later, it's evident that Hawks and Hitchcock were remarkable figures, albeit men torn between art and commerce. But the others on that list? Well, I suspect that “talented professionals” covers them adequately, though some, like Ray, put too much of their life and art into being melodramatic self-destructives in flight from obedient professionalism.

For a substantial moment in the history of film, directors took us away from the regular orthodoxy, the greatest mystery, which is not so much that actors make films as that films are about actors. The enormous library of auteur studies (hardly any of which existed in 1960) has not detracted from our habit of pursuing and enjoying actors and actresses, just because we like them, and would like to be them.

That does not mean the culture of movie stars continues unabated. The wisdom that we have fewer stars now, and that they last for shorter times, is common for good reason. The star system once depended not just on our love and desire, but on the seven-year contracts by which a star was the property
of a studio, provided with more or less suitable vehicles, and thoroughly promoted and cared for. Stars had an economic durability that is much tougher to hold on to now when they have to be independent and compelled to seek out their projects and their coworkers. No one said Gary Cooper needed to be a business genius, but George Clooney is a producer with a golden touch. Cooper meant more in the 1930s and 1940s than Clooney does now, but that is because a Clooney lives in an age when the new press is waiting for a star to make a fool of himself, or a mess, and when the public has wearied of its old adoration and likes to be fickle and spiteful. Cooper had a very untidy private life from which he was protected by public relations. And Cooper (born in 1901) had been raised on the faces in silent movies so that it seemed natural for him to be beautiful and noble. Ask Clooney to be such an icon and you can anticipate a wry grin and the curl of his lip.

If you want to watch films, you must never give up on the beauty of the people, or feel sheepish about it. In the compressed history of media and communication, the movies did one potent thing: they broadcast the sight and sound of beautiful people in situations of exceptional and unsettling intimacy. So we fell in love with strangers. Before movie and photography, that had not happened. But strangers, and strangeness, have become increasingly important in our experience.

All of which brings me to the last category of people who make the movies—ourselves. Anyone in the business will tell you that audiences decide what to like, often on a Friday, in ways that may defy every professional guess and every poll of human responses. So
The Lone Ranger
flopped and
Gravity
won a larger audience than anyone had anticipated. To a degree that meant that people were fond of Sandra Bullock and
just a little weary of Johnny Depp. But in hindsight it was clear that
Gravity
gave us the opportunity to see something we had never seen before, and to bounce around on the trampoline of space, while
The Lone Ranger
was the stale retread of a tired genre and a clichéd character, and a film that lacked the male confidence of old Westerns, the thing that had distinguished John Wayne.

But it is difficult to do good work while believing in the old virtues of American manliness. When Clint Eastwood made
Unforgiven
(in 1992) he surely was warned that Westerns were passé. But he had the confidence nonetheless to make that fine script, and to balance its elements of a new, doubting Western with the reassuring prowess of the old. So his William Munny was too old, too slow, with his nerve shot. It was an impressive and painful maturity, but then, just to be on the safe side, Clint allowed us to see the angel of death restored so that he could execute nearly everyone in the room. He had his cake and he ate it, a Hollywood habit. And we like Clint, no matter that his private life is checkered and his professional manners can get rough. So many times, he has made our day.

12

WHAT DOES A HERO DO?

C
lint Eastwood is only one of the heroic figures in this book. Or maybe they are better understood as attempted heroes. But that archetype is worth examining, because he (or she) has a lot to do with whether we're having decent fun.

Other heroes so far would include Burt Lancaster in
The Flame and the Arrow
, effortlessly bringing peace and freedom to old Lombardy; there's Tom Hardy in
Locke
, doing the right things, even if in some ways they are wrong and damaging things; there's Gary Cooper in
Meet John Doe
, struggling with the toxic celebrity of being an American hero while wanting to remain a vagrant nomad; there is John Wayne in
The Searchers
, so lethal a force of rescue that you might hope to escape him; there's Robert Redford at sea in
All Is Lost
, resolved to go on trying his best until the storm becomes too much; there is
Orson Welles in Kane's no-trespassing privacy, wondering if he was a great man or could have been, and thinking what he might say as a last word for a headline in our urge to solve his mystery; there is even Derek Jeter in that commercial, being defiantly ordinary, no matter that the set-up for the ad is as rigged as Arnold Schwarzenegger in
Terminator 2
, the film where he crossed over and became a good guy.

Arnold is a disconcerting movie hero. He went from being a handsome, articulate bodybuilder in
Pumping Iron
and
Stay Hungry
to governor of Kalifornia (I have to do something to get his way of talking). He did well as a governor because he had so few principles above and beyond effectiveness and looking good. If he had managed to be born in Duluth or Fresno, instead of near Graz in Austria, there would have been a move to draft him for president. He might have made a good or unworried executive, or at least cheerful on screen. People still revere that package in Ronald Reagan, who was not as smart or as big a star as Schwarzenegger, and who became forgetful near the end. Arnold had too much on his plate, too: he contrived to betray a person from another movie, Maria Shriver, who had that Kennedy flourish. One might as well, in considering how to watch a movie, recognize the extent to which public life in America has itself become an untidy, unrated motion picture that has a captive but disenchanted audience.

So Arnold joined
The Expendables
, a rest home franchise for male superheroes who have seen better days and may need a new gig. The organizer for this creaky gang is Sylvester Stallone, but others include Jason Statham, Mel Gibson, Wesley Snipes, Dolph Lundgren, Antonio Banderas, Mickey Rourke, and even Harrison Ford, who used to be the most profitable screen hero of all time until he woke up one day as a crotchety
geezer. I realize, just five years ago, I could have been laughed off the page for concocting a scheme for these ridiculous and painful movies. It would have been said that the public was too smart or cynical, and simply too young to be interested in these social security recipients with AK47s. Well, don't rely on the public: on an investment of about $90 million a hit, the three films so far have grossed $786 million worldwide—that was our money, and by my calculation it would have been enough to purchase seventeen F-117A night stealth fighter planes. There is also a video game from the
Expendables
franchise, as well there might be, because surely the prospect of these arthritic heroes shooting down enemies is in league with the industry of martial video games and their kill counts. (
Call of Duty: Black Ops
earned $650 million in its first five days on sale, more than any movie I can think of.) Further, the Air Force sometimes uses such games for training night stealth pilots. It's a small world.

I don't take the
Expendables
franchise seriously (the way I did
Amour
and
Hiroshima Mon Amour
). But they remind us of the larger culture in which we're watching movies, and because heroic violence seems so important to our weather scheme. When it comes to violence, or what is optimistically called action, the medium has turned to an exotic personal destruction that depends on our saying, well it's not really happening; it's safely removed from us on a screen; it's only a movie. The trouble is that as citizens, or as people who love movie entertainment and want to believe in its power, “only a movie” is a dismal and depressing concession that betrays hopes for a relationship between movies and reality.

Violence in movies has been agonized over at least since the coming of sound. The original
Scarface
(1932) got itself in a
tangle on whether it deplored violence or wanted to market it like bootleg liquor. But it was typical of an age in movie history that made the screen's “realism” problematic.
Scarface
is about as realistic as a comic book, but it came with the fresh sounds of screams, automobiles, explosions, and gunfire, that fearsome but inspiring new poetic. The picture sometimes had a subtitle, “Shame of the Nation,” and it viewed the authorities with contempt for letting gangsters run riot in society. But the cinema has not yet tired of that riot and the genre includes some of our finer films: the two parts of
The Godfather
, of course, but lesser, bloody gems like the remake of
Scarface
(1983),
Taxi Driver, Heat, Miller's Crossing, Zodiac
, and many others. It's notable in those films how little faith or interest the genre has in law and order: in the Miami
Scarface
the only cops in sight are crooked; in
Heat
, there is the movie trope that you can't tell the good guys from the bad; in
Miller's Crossing
, the police seem to have gone fishing; while in
Zodiac
there is an honest if weary cop (Mark Ruffalo), but he's not the one who comes close to solving the crime. As for
The Godfather
, there is one antique cop (Sterling Hayden) and he is shot dead halfway through the first film. Plus he deserves it. We're pulling on Michael's nervous trigger.

It was Francis Coppola, after making the
Godfather
films, who remarked on how the set was always crowded for the shoot-out scenes. That was a harbinger of the theater audiences to come. So, one may be alarmed by movie violence, but the admission has to be made, and the admissions count: we like it. Once upon a time, the disapproving regard for cinema said the whole enterprise was all sex and violence. The pressure leading to the end of conventional censorship in the 1960s was more aware of sexual liberties that were being denied us and those
actresses anxious to remove their clothes (the men got a pass). But then sexual behavior was a topic taken up by pornography, and its astonishing advances in becoming theoretically more acceptable in “respectable” households. So it's common nowadays to hear the argument that pornography may not be what you and I do, but it's useful for those unlucky souls who do not simply walk into sexual situations every day of their lives, with invincible talent and no anxiety. Who are those edgier people? Well, let's say the lonely, the shy, the homely, the awkward, and those who feel on the edge of stability. They are bystanders who do not much resemble the leading characters in movies: they are not photogenic, able to say what they think with snap and wit, or “sympathetic.” In all likelihood, they are poor, too. It's no more than 90 percent of us.

So pornography is often deemed an enlightened palliative or release for such backward people—while you and I have wholesome and rewarding sex the way Masters and Johnson advocated or as Jeanne Moreau discovers in that groundbreaking film
Les Amants
(1958), in which the female orgasm seemed as refined and tasteful as Emily Dickinson's inscape. (That said,
Les Amants
has dated so much that it is a lesson on our earlier innocence.) The real and everyday situation is more complicated, just as fantasy has become as recognized an element in sex lives as alcohol in social exchanges. Once upon a time as our antecedents dreamed of Garbo and Valentino, so now some people get impetus and teaching notes from five-minute movies in which some “naughty teen” … you get the message. But grant this condition, then what can we say about the influence of movie violence, which has gained fresh reach and wonders as filmmaking has acquired computer-generated imagery of things that could not be in dull real life, or which
even the semi–slave state of show business could hardly ask actors to engage in.

Times change, more than film critics care to admit. Over fifty years ago,
Les Amants
was candid and touching; it owed a good deal to the courage of the actress, and to the affection and trust between her and her director, Louis Malle. Today, I fear, in black-and-white, that film could look quaint and genteel, just because the cinema was then striving against the barricade of restrictive censorship. A more intriguing example—just because it cooks sex and violence together—is the ending to
Bonnie and Clyde
.

You know what happens there; that film is an item in our culture still. Bonnie and Clyde (Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway) are partners in a rapturous criminal spree directed against the heartless banks and humorless police. The years 1932 and 1967 merge as gorgeous kids make a romantic wave beating against authority. But these kindred outlaws have not quite got it on, despite their erotic promise and our yearning. Warren Beatty is not totally credible as someone too shy to do it. But the film is cannily written, Arthur Penn directed with an appealing ardor, and Faye Dunaway embodied the horny sensual frustration in Bonnie. (Frustration is as vital to romance as discontent in commercials.)

When the couple meet their end, they are shot to pieces in an orgy of firepower all the greater for the slow-motion filming and the tender, surgical precision of Dede Allen's editing. We had never seen bodies shattered like this or so lovingly illumined with their own gaudy blood, and never felt such a brilliant, trashy expression of orgasm. That ending still works, but in 1967 it was a beautiful outrage, and an audacious gesture of self-destructive heroism.

Just two years later, at the end of
The Wild Bunch
, Sam Peckinpah staged a terminal shoot-out in which the outlaws gave up their lives and took a vast number of Mexicans with them. There was an implicit racial carelessness to this violence: the Mexicans were not as photo-friendly or worthy as the bunch. And the shooting was another tour de force of edited action, more slow-motion and the mechanics of blood spurts and flesh explosions to convey damage. These honorable brutes were also emblems of a kind of lost knighthood who made violence valiant. This was Peckinpah's boozy dream, but it was part of movie technology and a horror in America at the televised slaughter in Vietnam. A similar feeling was conveyed in the ending of
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
(also 1969) where our movie stars (having dispatched many Bolivians) are saved from obliteration by a freeze frame as idealizing as the writhing in harmony of
Bonnie and Clyde
.

Just as sound had made
Scarface
more insinuating, so the new technologies of film lifted
Bonnie and Clyde
and made it an authentic love story. Butch and Sundance have their girl—or Sundance has her and employs his authority over her in a strange mock rape. But the woman abandons the boys at last, as she told them she would. As for the wild bunch, they assume that every woman is a whore and treacherous. Feminism was thriving in America in those years, but not always on screen.

There's an underground message in
The Equalizer
(2014) that insists on male isolation, and an actual defiance of equality. We are in grubby old Boston to meet a strange fellow, so curious in his lifestyle that he might be suspicious without the all-purpose reliability of a movie star. His name is Robert McCall. He's about sixty and in good shape. He works in
a large home hardware store where he is friendly and helpful to others, and he lives alone in a tidy apartment on what is plainly a modest salary. The oddness starts there, for he is also Denzel Washington, one of the most tested and beloved movie stars we have. “Denzel” is sixtyish, too. He seems securely married, with four children and a net worth of $140 million. He has done exceptional work playing Malcolm X and Hurricane Carter. He has had a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for
Glory
, and a Best Actor Oscar for
Training Day
, which was directed by Antoine Fuqua, the director of
The Equalizer
. Washington has played bad guys (
Training Day
and
American Gangster
), but his stock-in-trade is that of a good man who will get difficult things done (
Unstoppable
) and defend order (
The Taking of Pelham 123
). Has anyone ever heard a bad word about him?

So why is Robert McCall alone, and showing every sign of being a neatness freak? It's the way he always goes out to a corner café in the middle of the night with his own tea bag to drop in the hot water that is kept ready for him. That's where he meets a woeful teenage Russian prostitute (Chloë Grace Moretz) and sees her roughed up by a pimp. And that's when Robert decides to do something about the bad, bad world. Like kill a lot of people.

Now, even in Boston, I suspect, there has been a bad world since Robert was a child. Yet all he's been doing, apparently, is selling plumbing tools, reading improving books, and doing his tea-bag routine. But then he's pushed over the edge and he decides to equalize. The script is written by Richard Wenk, who did
Expendables 2
, but it's derived from a TV series of the 1980s in which Edward Woodward played a retired intelligence agent who decided to help wronged and threatened people. In the movie version, Robert McCall goes after the
Russian mafia, who are pimping that teenage hooker. Sure, his mission will involve a few crooked cops, but mostly the swine are Russians, which provides an opportunity for accent-heavy character actors prepared to be horrid, sleazy, stupid, cruel, and heavily tattooed Russian thugs. If black Americans were the enemy subjected to the same character analysis, or Norwegians or Moslems, the film would never have got made. But at this moment it's open season against Russians—so much for the Cold War. It's clear now that once those guys freed themselves from Communism there was no stopping them.