How to Watch a Movie (18 page)

This is not a matter for suspense. I think we all know Denzel is not going to be killed or significantly damaged. Still, he manages to off so many people I lost count. That's because the killing is hideous but complacent—I can see that one might get an appetite for it. As a worker in the hardware business, McCall believes in using the home gadgets at hand, so he knows how to drill a guy in the back of the head or use a corkscrew until a neck entry brings the spike up into the mouth. McCall does shoot people sometimes but he specializes in wounds where Russians drown in their own blood. His skill is dependent not just on special-effects blood, but the necessary way in which cutting allows a film to deliver extraordinary feats of violence. Sticking the knife in in a single take is still not really smiled on, not if you want an R rating (that's the one any child can sit through if they're with an adult).
The Equalizer
is not the worst violence you can see in a modern movie, but it's bad enough, and it goes on and on. In the end, McCall travels to Moscow to get the kingpin and wipe out the staff of his Putin-era mansion before he strolls away. I was surprised the Russian mafia didn't sue for defamation or hate speech. After all, we treat our own mafia so much more kindly.

It turns out that McCall was a CIA operative who wearied of the old trade and retired, but now he's back, still living on his own in Boston, still going to the corner café. As
The Equalizer
opened it was announced that
The Equalizer 2
was in the works. The picture had cost a mere $55 million and it grossed $45 million in its first week. Wait till the picture got to Russia! Denzel was a coproducer on the project, and the franchise can hardly proceed without him. No one else has the high-minded calm that can accommodate McCall's lethal instinct: though he kills, Robert doesn't drink or eat junk food. My guess is that the business and the public will take at least three, and that won't hurt the actor's net worth. By the time that's done he would be ready for
Expendables 6
or
7
.

I'm having fun with Denzel here, not that it's mere fun to ask whether some iconic figure has risked integrity in compromise. This is not too far from the problems of keeping faith with Barack Obama in the years after 2008, and as a matter of fact Washington has been a steadfast supporter of the president. It's not far-fetched to imagine that weary leader sinking down one night in the White House screening room, on his own, except for a couple of secret service men, watching
The Equalizer
, knowing in his cool, rational heart that it's garbage, and dangerous, too, but sighing with shameless rapture and dreaming he is offing his enemies and obstructors without laborious process, and feeling a little stronger before he goes to bed. You understand, I am imagining Barack Obama with the movie, and I suppose I'm doing that because, despite the danger and the shame in
The Equalizer
, there is a kick to it. The lone viewer and the lone hero exist in a rare, secret balance. After I had seen the movie, at about 6 p.m. in San Francisco, I repaired to the bathroom. Heroes of our time, at
seventy, need that regular relief. There was a man next to me at the urinals, and I realized that we had left the same theater at the multiplex.

“That was one action-packed movie,” he grunted.

And I responded, “I think there were three of us in there.”

“I know. Hell of a movie.”

This is a vein of film criticism that should not be overlooked or shuffled aside. Bathroom wisdom can begin to be that precious elixir, word-of-mouth. The theater we had sat in was built to hold five hundred, and I daresay by the evening screening there would have been two or three hundred for what was regarded as a successful opening. This was only six days after its kick-off Friday, and I had paid $11 for something not far from the splendor and solitude in which I had once seen
Citizen Kane. The Equalizer is
a hell of a movie, and that word is more than rhetoric. The world and the belief system it invokes seem to me ghastly and alarming, no matter the executionary skills of Antoine Fuqua or the aplomb of Denzel. And it's disturbing that while McCall wants to save people, he doesn't need them in his life. His being alone is a philosophy. It's striking that whereas in
The Pelican Brief
(1993), Denzel's character helped the Julia Roberts character, they never did the thing an “ordinary” movie would have had them do. That was racial caution, nothing less. But McCall is alone because maybe that's how heroes see themselves.

I like Washington still. He does movies that have a streamlined silliness so that I seldom resist them when they come up again on television: I have seen
Déjà Vu, The Bone Collector
, and
The Book of Eli
more times than they deserve. (Actually,
Déjà Vu
, directed by Tony Scott, plays exhilarating games with time—the more you see it, the better it gets.) But why are
so many routine films with Denzel so enjoyable? I think it's because the kid who exulted in
The Flame and the Arrow
and the unstoppable zest and virtue of Burt Lancaster's Dardo has joined hands in the dark with a modern president who may admit to himself, God help me, these problems are too many and too intractable and I'm too powerless and the whole thing is going to hell in a handbasket. So, if only for three people at a time,
The Equalizer
is a source of ridiculous comfort that we enjoy even as we hold much more mixed and daunting feelings over it.

You understand, I am anxious to have you see more good films and get more out of them, but when we're watching movies it is misguided to ignore the overall panorama of moviegoing, which includes a merciful appeal to our weakness, our failure, and our passing sense of futility. That context is a matter of fact:
The Equalizer
was released by Columbia, a part of Sony, which is the parent company of Sony Classics, the distributor in the U.S. of such films as
Amour, A Separation, Whiplash
, and
Mr. Turner
. You can't have one without the other.

There is a casual cruelty in
The Equalizer
that is uneasily allied to the spirit of the altruistic vigilante, setting right the wicked wrongs in the world. A similar energy obtains in video games, where anonymous, faceless operatives obliterate enemy forces thanks to
our
finger on the trigger mechanism.

Those video games are for fun—all their ads stress that. But that's where heroes may betray the nature of real war and our status as observers. War is very hard to film. Get too close and the bullets may find you. Most of the best documentaries from World War II, like John Huston's
San Pietro
, were simulated—but at least they were re-created by people who had been there
in the fought-for places, felt the real confusion, and been honest with it. Those who have been there know the rueful admission from
War and Peace
that hardly anyone understands what is happening on a battlefield.

So the most heroic and misleading thing about war films is their sense of strategic command. Steven Spielberg's
Saving Private Ryan
(1998) was a landmark in combat films because of Spielberg's rare managerial talent for the advances in special effects that let such scenes be created. So the D-day sequence is horrific in part because of severed limbs and temporary deafness, but also because we feel that human agency and virtue are helpless. The final battle in that film is tactically astonishing: we can follow what is happening, and that permits the feeling of achievement, which is amply mixed in with understandable fear and failure. But the action in that town is too controlled, and that goes with the fatal tidiness in Spielberg's mind in which the fruit of the good war is something the survivors must earn. That sentimental equation is presidential but ruinous to art. It exposes the gap between management and insight.

Graver, more beautiful, and more mysterious as combat is Ridley Scott's
Black Hawk Down
(2001). It may seem disconcerting that unrelenting combat, with many deaths, can be beautiful, but the gun-metal sheen of the film and its removed calm deserve the word. Nor is there any talk of a specious bargain with history. The episode in Mogadishu suggests simply that the American forces should not have been there. The story is made from the American point of view and it is held together by esprit de corps. But it never thinks to say that our guys were right or supermen. The wonder of the film is that some Somalis wave to the troops with friendly smiles. Others try to kill
them. Then as the Americans withdraw there is a breathtaking moment—it is the height of mystery—when a man walks across the road of retreat carrying a dead child. This is not referred to in dialogue; there is no crude homily about collateral damage. The spectacle is simply there, like the glorious light in Somalia as the helicopters come in to attack. It is such a pretty place, and such a trap for bravery. There is no scope for heroes, least of all where we are watching. Courage in the dark is too easy. So some of our best movies are made about protagonists who have been turned by life—the guys in
The Deer Hunter
, the people in
Magnolia
, Tony Soprano, and Walter White. But can our culture live with such disturbing heroes?

13

CAN YOU SEE THE MONEY?

I
t is one of money's deftest tricks to arrange the world so that we don't see it. So it's an accomplished maneuver of the movies to convey a feeling of desirable wealth without provoking fury or revolution in that 90 percent who are neither pretty nor rich enough to be up there on the screen. For decades, it could be claimed that movies were telling us stories, offering us harmless dreams, bringing delight and consolation—doing all those things that the director in
Sullivan's Travels
comes to see as precious and useful. But in asking you to watch movies, I have to suggest levels of geological content and discontent beneath those friendly messages. The screen breathes money, and it's more than a nickel, or however much you paid the last time you went.

To the best of our knowledge, Cleopatra VII Philopator
(69
B.C
.–30
B.C
.) was either a very beautiful woman, or not. This says a lot about the way we negotiate such subjects as knowledge and women. In
Antony and Cleopatra
, the actress playing the role can do her best. She has to be present onstage, clothed or not, but she cannot escape the rapture with which Enobarbus has described her:

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale

Her infinite variety: other women cloy

The appetites they feed; but she makes hungry

Where most she satisfies.

That celebration of reputation, or legend, comes after one of Shakespeare's most revered speeches, an eyewitness description that saves every production from having to mount all the expensive things described:

The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,

Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold;

Purple the sails, and so perfumed that

The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver.

It has not always been exactly so onstage. Judi Dench had a great success in the role in 1987, when she was fifty-three (Cleopatra embraced her asp at thirty-nine) after she had warned the director that he had cast “a menopausal dwarf.” Other notable players who have taken the part include Frances de la Tour, Janet Suzman, Peggy Ashcroft, and even Mark Rylance. Those are considerable actors, but not always cast for their iconic feminine beauty. If the general public had to list their Cleopatras, and if they were old enough, they might
think of Theda Bara (in a 1917 version), Claudette Colbert (on a sumptuous barge designed by Hans Dreier and dressed by Travis Banton, all for the emperor Cecil B. DeMille), Vivien Leigh (with Claude Rains as her Caesar), and of course Elizabeth Taylor, who seemed to embody the helpless idiocy and extravagance of the movie business in 1963 and who survived the indulgence of that film, even if
Cleopatra
initiated a fragility in the old Twentieth Century Fox only cured by a modern Caesar, Rupert Murdoch.

Not that I am blaming Elizabeth Taylor. She was caught up in the public clamor of being victim and survivor. As only a movie star of that era could manage, she was beauty and sex playing for happiness, and so much better a businesswoman than her hapless contemporary, Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn was always sighing about what she wanted to do that “they” wouldn't let her do. Liz simply stormed her kingdom and ran it. Marilyn at her demise was getting about $100,000 a picture, while Liz took the $1 million for
Cleopatra
as her right. With overtime and reshooting, she ended up taking away far more than $1 million. In the early days of that
Cleopatra
she had been close to death, or at least “close to death” at the London Clinic, and she had just lost her most recent great true love, Mike Todd, in a plane crash. But she proceeded to digest the $1 million, the riot of publicity, and such weak men as Eddie Fisher and Richard Burton. And loved them all. She also helped define the modern press attitude to celebrity with a nerve and courage that would be the envy of half a century, from Marilyn to Lindsay Lohan. And she was younger than Cleopatra, unashamedly gorgeous, and smart enough to talk to. She was also the image of money, supreme and insolent at the same time.

That disastrous
Cleopatra
began with the usual bright intentions. Twentieth Century Fox initiated the film in 1960. Rouben Mamoulian was to direct. He wanted Dorothy Dandridge as Cleopatra. The picture would be shot at Pinewood in Britain on a budget of just $2 million. This was transformed when Fox settled on Elizabeth Taylor, when the British weather proved less than Egypt deserved, and when Taylor fell seriously ill. The picture was delayed. Joseph L. Mankiewicz was hired to redo the script and direct. The project was moved to Rome and its rolling budget would end up at $44 million. As such, the project was jeopardizing the future of the whole studio, and it brought the old boss Darryl Zanuck back as a controlling figure. You have probably heard that when Taylor and Richard Burton met in Rome, the chemistry of the picture as well as its nuclear explosion were assured. The studio and Mankiewicz clung to this rampaging sensation as best they could. Somewhere around the $4–$5 million mark, the venture went out of control. Fox had to go all the way, piling on investment to justify the first splurge, and no doubt a few talents took some advantage of that. If you write a novel, and decide after a hundred pages that your inspiration was mistaken, you can burn those pages and move on. But if you get to $4 million on a picture with terrible forebodings, there is no escape. As with many wars, the true subject may become the mounting toll of money,

The age of epics was ending in the early sixties, but only after a glory that is hard to credit now.
Ben-Hur
, with Charlton Heston, had cost $15 million and earned ten times that amount. Under the studious care of director William Wyler it managed to seem like a serious film in 1959, respectful of its religious content without forcing it on anyone. It won eleven
Oscars. One of its screenwriters, Gore Vidal, knew it was fatuously archaic at the time, and history has proved him correct. By the time of
Cleopatra
, the film world had enjoyed so many corrections to its old traditions: the French New Wave, John Cassavetes, the realism of British pictures, the discovery of a kind of novelistic cinema in Antonioni, Fellini, Bergman, and Satyajit Ray. There was even a growing sensibility that if anyone had $44 million to spare, donating it to the fragile economy of Egypt might be more valuable than establishing the trade of paparazzi and producing a picture that was more a container tanker than a golden barge.

In Britain, there were sets and costumes left in the wake of the move to Rome, like the abandoned spoils of war. With ingenuity and wit these were adapted for
Carry on Cleo
(1964), one of a very successful series of naughty British comedies and a sign of how ready the public were for pictures or TV shows that lampooned old Hollywood attitudes.
Carry on Cleo
cost about £150,000. It had Amanda Barrie as Cleo and the inimitable Kenneth Williams as Caesar. It had a profit ratio to fill Twentieth Century Fox with envy. A feeling arose that the extravagance of the movie business was no longer appealing or glamorous, but out of order and grotesque. This spirit had flourished after the war with Italian neorealism, with the cultivation of modest but fruitful national film industries (like Britain—with Carol Reed, David Lean, Powell and Press-burger, and Robert Hamer).
The Red Shoes
had cost just half a million pounds; the teeming spectacle and over three hours of Kurosawa's
Seven Samurai
had been made for $500,000; Ingmar Bergman's
The Seventh Seal
needed $150,000; Godard's
Breathless
was made for 400,000 francs. Such lessons were taken to heart in that exciting age that envisaged brave new
films on difficult subjects made very modestly. The dream lingers at every film school, along with the accurate estimate that a technically acceptable, beautiful, and powerful film can be made for $100,000.

Then the lessons found a pinch of salt. People still do movies for the loot.

And that's as much because of us as it is the fault of “them.” For there was a time, beginning in the late seventies, that the conglomerates buying film companies recognized a young audience who might treat going to the movies as an adjunct to shopping.

There was debate and competition over the part of Vivien in
Pretty Woman
(1990). Meg Ryan, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Michelle Pfeiffer (at least) had turned it down because they found the material tasteless or sexist. Instead, it went to a young Julia Roberts, who had made just a couple of films before, and she earned a large sum for her—$300,000. The film was made for $14 million, and it has taken in over $400 million at the box office.
Pretty Woman
is a very American picture because it is a movie about happiness, true love, and shopping, and because its charm can sweep aside every intelligent reason for despising it. Bad taste is vital in this form we love.

Pretty Woman
is the fable of a beguiling Los Angeles prostitute ($3,000 a week, plus use of the man's plastic) who will end up cleansed, redeemed, properly dressed, primed for education, and married to a successful businessman. Just as
The Godfather
managed to enlist us on the side of Michael Corleone, a murderer and a lord of criminal behavior, so
Pretty Woman
sold the idea of a good-natured whore whose Cinderella rite of passage needed not a pumpkin made into a coach but an opportunity for shopping on Rodeo Drive.

That's because it transcends or obliterates criticism. Its contact with the fantasies of an audience are so direct they cannot wait for any mediation. Moreover, this is a film that caters to all genders: Julia's Vivien is lovable, fuckable, and a dreamy mix of experienced and innocent. Men adore her, and some women want to be her. It's plausible that she could command $3,000, but she has a yearning still to go to college and be decent. A queasy liberation prompts her. And when Vivien strikes gold and finds a man who appreciates her mind as much as her blow jobs, he is ready to give her the wardrobe of a movie star. That's where
Pretty Woman
arm-wrestles any principled audience: the shopping scene is one of the headiest wish-fulfillment passages in cinema.

I am not suggesting that intelligent men and women have not watched this film with disbelief or contempt. But they have watched. The secret to the stardom of the young Julia Roberts was to be like an Audrey Hepburn with orgasms and a dirty laugh. She is no more to blame personally than Liz Taylor was with
Cleopatra
, but even our most serious actors exist somewhere between the steady diet of television commercials and the shopping channel. Often enough, we agree that movies are about desire. In which case we cannot forget that desire includes money, the subtext on the American screen.

It's not that money and its pursuit are urged directly in movies. It's not that moviegoing has ever been an expensive recreation—though, relatively speaking, it is pricier now than it has ever been. Far more, it is that the stress on fantasy strives for a perfection that exists first of all in the glow of the light. Produce stores put extra light on apples and broccoli to make them appealing, and there has never been anything dowdy or dull in the look of a picture. Even the poor are perfectly
poor. In John Ford's
The Grapes of Wrath
, the Steinbeckian attempt at realism is offset by the way Henry Fonda is Tom Joad. Tom has had a hard life. He has been in prison for murder and he has grown up in the Depression without health care, social security, or much education. But he has Fonda's perfect teeth; he is as handsome as that actor always was; and he has a speaking voice that has been trained for clarity and eloquence. Such things are not shrugged off or lost in makeup and regular meals. Fonda had been a romantic lead in
The Mad Miss Manton
and
Jezebel
. He had played the president-to-be in
Young Mr. Lincoln
. He was a remarkable, heartfelt actor with an instinct for hard-luck guys (
You Only Live Once, The Wrong Man
). But if you have ever seen a filmed interview with a real Okie, or looked at the faces in the James Agee–Walker Evans book,
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
(1941), you know the reality of tough, beaten people who cannot speak decently. They suffer from awkward mouths and a hollow lack of pretence. Fonda's Joad is lean and close to gaunt, but he has a face that has eaten often at the Brown Derby, and in every shot he is lit to best advantage. Often enough in life we stand in bad light and do not know what to say.

It is observed that
The Grapes of Wrath
looks “beautiful,” and it was photographed by Gregg Toland, who was about to shoot
Citizen Kane
. Sometimes it has a pictorial elegance that seems at odds with the hardships of the characters. Many of the attributes of poverty are there in the film: shabby clothes, beat-up cars, hovels to live in. Jane Darwell's Ma is a decidedly homely woman, but she is supporting-actress homely and plumper than Ma Joads could expect to be. She received the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in the film, and she certainly delivers a performance. But Jane Darwell was the daughter of
a railroad president and she had been making pictures steadily since 1914. If you put a photograph of her Ma next to some of the women in Dorothea Lange's photographs, it is a lesson in the unshakable comfort or well-being of movie people, and that is hard to get out of the eyes, especially if you have a nice, small spotlight on your eyes in the big scene.

Actors may be angry at reading this. They reckon that their craft and their identification can carry them through to the real being of a character. So Marlon Brando was a punch-drunk fighter in
On the Waterfront
? Or a brilliant actor working on that act? On that film, Brando was working for Elia Kazan, the director most associated with the Method and most dedicated to psychological realism. He handled Dean in
East of Eden
, Brando in
Viva Zapata
, Rod Steiger and Lee J. Cobb in
On the Waterfront
. Critics sometimes remark on the authenticity of those performances. I enjoy them, but I think they are only authentic as performances. It goes against the grain of suspended disbelief, but I wonder if a great pleasure at the movies doesn't have to do with observing the levels of deceit or imitation—one of which is that we know we're watching actors, not people. You may know from life that watching real people runs great risks. It can be confusing, boring, and dangerous. Twice in Kazan's famous work I feel I am seeing a real person, and it is Jo Van Fleet both times—the mother in
East of Eden
and the old woman in
Wild River
. In both cases, I can't guess what she's going to do and it makes me a little afraid. But that's a rare ability: to seem to be someone born without good lighting or an agent.