How to Watch a Movie (4 page)

The story of the film takes George Bailey to the brink of suicide; his life seems to have been a failure, along with his building-and-loan association. Then the angel Clarence shows him what might have become of his family and his community if he had perished. These scenes are scary; they are film noir set down like a gravestone in the midst of romance. So George rallies and everything turns out all right. But in the decades since its first showing, it has grown easier for audiences to imagine a question mark in the title and to realize that the idyllic Bedford Falls of 1947 has turned into a Pottersville, the drab plan of heartless capitalism pursued by the town's tycoon (played by Lionel Barrymore). But George has his Mary at the end of the film—Jimmy Stewart with Donna Reed, the last hurrah of wartime spirit and one more tribute to home values. It's a wonderful life, as long as you believe it is. But just think of that story shifted to the era of 2008 and the anxieties of
middle-class existence. Once upon a time
It's a Wonderful Life
was a Christmas staple, but try showing the picture to a modern young audience without rueful irony crushing nostalgia.

Are there happy endings still in our movies? Have they survived as significant items of faith, or do they now seem bogus and foolish? Life hasn't worked out that way for Tony Soprano or Walter White, and we are likely more grown up on account of that. It's hard to think of a major American movie of this century that delivers a hard-earned happy ending. In
12 Years a Slave
, Solomon Northup regained his freedom, but we are left to ponder its extent or security in the context of 1853. Nor can one expect much contentment or ease in the work of our leading younger filmmakers: the Coen brothers, David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, among others. Yet Anderson's
Magnolia
, for all the disturbing details of life it uncovers, has a stoic air of constancy and persistence as embodied in its Aimee Mann songs.

It's unbecoming to take our seriousness too seriously, especially if you've pledged your life to the chance that some movies will be as good as anything you've encountered. There is a song of solitude we can sing together from the movies. Shane is one of its heroes, forever moving on, wounded yet immortal, like the wind, and as deeply opposed to domesticity. Michael Corleone is the master of his world and maybe the most effective leader in modern American film, yet he sits implacable and alone at the end of
The Godfather Part II
. In
The Third Man
, at the cemetery, Joseph Cotten and Alida Valli fail to make contact in the strangely triumphant final shot. They have been eliminated from romantic possibility. Travis Bickle, in
Taxi Driver
, yearns to make contact with others, but his alienation turns to violence and he is left enclosed in the front
of his cab, haunted by his own glance in the screen called a rearview mirror. In
Letter from an Unknown Woman
, the selfish pianist is left alone because the lover whose letter he was reading is dead. So he must face the duel he planned to evade; the endgame closes in.
In a Lonely Place
settles in as a title when the Gloria Grahame character cannot face life with the incipient murderousness in Humphrey Bogart (playing a Hollywood screenwriter).

But that edginess isn't just America in the pregnant 1950s. In Dreyer's
The Passion of Joan of Arc
, the maid is isolated by the film's ecstatic close-ups: she is transcendent, on fire before her burning, and half crazy. In Jean Renoir's
The Rules of the Game
, Octave (played by the director) is left with one friend less and without the chance of love in his life. We know now that his France is poised on the brink of war, occupation, and collaboration.
Citizen Kane
is the story of a man moving toward the loneliness of life in a deserted mansion. In
The Lives of Others
, the former Stasi functionary lives on in anonymity with just a coded book dedication to tell him he was noticed. In Mizoguchi's
Ugetsu Monogatari
, the potter is left alone without a wife or a ghost to comfort him. In
Point Blank
, the Lee Marvin character goes from being the ultimate avenger to a ghost who fades into nothingness when his victory is at hand. In
Vertigo
, the detective—that idealized model of confidence and problem-solving in many American fictions—faces his own disaster and the way he has permitted the death of his beloved not once, but twice.

Vertigo
(which is now, according to the
Sight & Sound
critics' poll, the best film ever made) is a mark of Hitchcock's lifelong fascination with the process of movie. For the detective in that film is a metaphor for directors (and for Hitchcock
himself?) seeking to make a woman in his own image of desire.
Vertigo
was a commercial failure when it opened, and that frustrated Hitchcock, who was as fond of his rewards as he was of movie mechanics. But it is a landmark in his inclination to leave us stranded. For years he had gone along with conventional romantic harmony as a closer—it's there in his English films, and in
Rebecca, Spellbound, Notorious, Strangers on a Train
(albeit with two anemic lovers so much less interesting than Robert Walker's killer), and even in
Rear Window
. But in
Vertigo
we have the hero's failure at our feet, and in
Psycho
there are no likeable characters left at the end, so we are put in a holding cell with Norman Bates.

Sometimes a picture comes along that is not just engrossing and moving but an enactment of this thesis. Such solitude is hard to resist. Yet
Locke
(released in 2014) is a film that in outline description seems impossible, or even absurd. How can there be a movie with only a single character on screen who never gets out of his car? What sort of story or entertainment can that make? The only answer is how could there
not
be a picture in so ingeniously fashioned a situation, granted the variety of Tom Hardy as an actor and our own profound attachment to automobiles and telephones?

Ivan Locke is married, with children. He ought to be driving home in the Birmingham area to be with them and to watch a big soccer match on television with his boys. But he is not going to make that date. Nine months before, he met a woman and had a one-night stand with her. It's not that she was the new love of his life. Indeed, she seems needy to a point of desperation; on the phone she doesn't sound like his type. But she got pregnant and elected to have the baby, and Ivan has agreed to be in London for the delivery. It is a matter of honor
for him in a dishonorable situation, but now he has resolved to tell his wife about it. You see, he is a soft-spoken, rational, and conscientious man who has too much on his plate—if only he could get away to a pleasant movie and relax. As he drives the hundred miles to London, trying to speak to his wife on the car phone and talking to his nervous lover, he is also caught up in his job. Ivan is a top engineer in the concrete business (probably a first in movies). On the morrow an enormous concrete drop is to be made for the foundation of a new building. He should be there, but duty is not always a straightforward master. So now he has to talk to an assistant (less than worthy or able) to make sure nothing goes wrong. There are complications that show us how diligent and resourceful Locke can be.

He is driving south on the motorway at night—the film is 84 minutes of apparently continuous time. Occasionally
Locke
cuts away from the car interior to views of the road, of cars, and the slipstream of headlights. But this is like an interval in music. The film is rigorously concentrated on the interior as Ivan talks on his car phone to half a dozen different people. You can say that Hardy is up to the task (though I believe other actors could have done well in the role). He is inventive, brilliant, sympathetic without being ingratiating—a critic's words matter less than the creation of Ivan as a careful, dutiful Welshman, speaking softly to quell mounting stress. This is a film about reason and disorder that takes no side. You can approve or disapprove of Ivan, but only because the film keeps the neutrality of a camera, and the absorbing duplicity in which we know we are watching a living person
and
a known actor.

Locke
is written and directed by Steven Knight, and I give him great credit. Yet I'm not sure this is what is commonly meant by the film of a director, or auteur. Its authorship and
ownership owe so much to Hardy (it was the film that established him, beyond
Bronson
or
The Dark Knight Rises
, as a major figure), but it also springs from the technology of automobiles, recording instruments, and the subsequent solitude. No film I've seen in recent years is more eloquent on where we are now, and on how alone we feel. There is little left but to watch and listen.

A great change has occurred: once masses watched a movie together; but by now we have only our screens as company.

4

SEE IT ONCE, WATCH IT TWICE?

F
or most of the medium's history, movies were made to be seen once, or as many times as you could cram into a brief run. Then they were gone. But for at least thirty years now, the technology of video has turned movies into things that can be seen and seen again. They get closer to being paintings (or views through that other kind of screen, our windows), which we may live with so long they are still there after we've gone.

If you see a movie just once, that keeps faith with its being sensational, sudden, yet as drastic as a road accident. But if you go back to watch it a second time, or many more times, you're allowing that it may be art or ritual, less the same old accident than a portent and a dream. It begins to resemble things like Velázquez's painting
Las Meninas
or some of those water lilies by Monet. This is curious, because a real water lily, like those
in Monet's garden at Giverny (fifty miles northwest of Paris), comes and goes. You can enjoy the white flesh and the crimson core for now, the color and scent, but you know those blooms are not long for this world (like yourself, even if you have a few minutes longer). Be careful! Look too closely at Giverny and you may tumble into the pond. There ought to be an Agatha Christie novel,
The Drowning at Giverny
, with Hercule Poirot rhapsodizing on the fatal attraction of
nymphéas
.

There will be more water lilies next season, and they will be so close to this year's blooms that you will never tell them apart. But Monet or a professor of botany would assure you that every flower is just a little different. That's a basis for art, philosophy, and gambling: people are alike, but they are unique, too. Water-lilyness seems ready to go on forever. But these lilies, the ones you're reaching out to at Giverny, they are
now
. So seize the moment. You could rewrite those several sentences with “a woman” or “a man” or “a butterfly” substituting for water lilies. This is the enchanting mystery of nature, whereas a movie is always the same, always itself. If you want it to change, your best hope is to grow older. For older people do report that some movies seem to have shifted in their meaning or flavor as those viewers become less impressed by immediacy. In three days, a perfect bouquet may become the relic of a funeral.

Las Meninas
is always the same (if restoration is careful), but it presents a moment in time, as exciting and pregnant as a great movie still. You could imagine Poirot, stepping in front of the picture and saying, “It seems so calm and orderly, doesn't it—with the infanta, her maids of honor, two dwarves, and a dog, with the flamboyant D'Artagnan-like figure of Velázquez himself, carrying a brush instead of a sword, and the ghostly reflection of the king (Philip IV) and his queen in a mirror
watching the painting being made. But someone in that picture will be dead in ten minutes—most hideously dead,
mes amis
.”

Does that prediction hinge on the one figure Poirot missed: the elegant but slightly sinister courtier who stands sideways with each foot on a different step, looking over his shoulder at the room? He is apparently the court chamberlain. There is a readiness in everything about this man. The others seem to have posed to be painted, but he has another mission to complete. He is a suspect seen in the open doorway in the back of the room. That shaping light around him is as strong as the glow on the infanta's brow. That infanta lived on until the age of twenty-one when after having four children and several miscarriages she died. Philip lived until 1665, Velázquez the artist until 1660. But no one knows about the dog (it's a mastiff).

I'm taking a little time with
Las Meninas
and the water lilies because they embody quite distinct ways of seeing that are married in the movies. The lilies represent surveillance; they are there forever as a plant, and we can gaze upon them for as long as our forever lasts. The reverie of looking is timeless, pantheistic, and slightly inhuman. That mode is always there in the movies: whatever the rapid turns of story, we are always dwelling on, or in the existence of, Bette Davis's eyes or the curl of Bogart's lip. This is not stressing minutiae; it is identifying the crucial texture of watching movies and wanting to be that person. It is why some actors work on screen and some do not, and it speaks to some personality in existence that is more lasting than stories.

On the other hand, the much older
Las Meninas
seems more modern in an odd way because it has picked on a moment in
the life of the court of Spain. It says,
Look
, I think something is happening. It is the essence of movie melodrama, and more than three hundred years later its question is still gripping.

I am talking about looking and the momentariness that breaks into life at the movies. I cannot think of a painting before
Las Meninas
in which there is so strong a feeling of something about to happen. “Next” is so alluring. Compare it with Rembrandt's
The Night Watch
, done only a dozen years earlier. That's a masterpiece and a noble spectacle, but it is an assembly of notable people, arranged so that everyone can be seen. It is posed, not poised, and as still as a tableau. Socially it is fixed in the idea these men have of being grandees. Nothing is about to happen. But in
Las Meninas
some threatening future shivers at the door, and the odd mixture of people suggests a Spain ready for drastic insurgency.

You won't see or feel such things unless you look for some time. A movie can spring from an image eager to bloom as much as from a storyline. Graham Greene said
The Third Man
started with a line he wrote on an envelope about the surprise of seeing a man on the street who had been buried just a week earlier. But I wonder if Carol Reed's film didn't believe in that night scene where noise brings a light in an upstairs window and it falls on the smile of Harry Lime (or Orson Welles), who also seemed to have been buried some time ago.

One viewing is enough, if one is all you get. In the 1980s I spoke to someone who had seen the long version of von Stroheim's
Greed
, in 1924—she couldn't remember it well (she had been seventeen), but she had thought it was amazing. (Stroheim's eight-hour version was eventually cut by the studio to
just over two hours.) Think what a photograph of that screening would mean.

There is a speech in
Citizen Kane
by Bernstein. He is talking about the past and memory and he says he saw a girl once, in 1896, a woman in white with a white parasol, on the ferry over to Jersey. He never spoke to her or saw her again, but “I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since, that I haven't thought of that girl.” It's a bittersweet moment, and Welles does not cut away to a glimpse of that woman (a Monet-like bloom) just to show you what Bernstein means. Not that
Citizen Kane
doesn't cut back and forth in time; but it's a movie in which there are only a few “nows,” and all of them are ghosts from the past.

By 1955, I had been told about
Citizen Kane;
I had read of it in the few film books that existed then. But you couldn't see it: old films seldom came back. For all we knew they were lost. Then a local theater, the Classic in Tooting, announced it. I hurried there for the first screening, confident that there would be lines. I was the only member of the audience. This bewildered me so that I did not appreciate at first how providential that circumstance was.

Orson Welles was half-forgotten then. He had gone to Europe in a mood of disgrace or escape.
Kane
had had a working title of “American,” but Welles was dismayed by his own country and what he saw as its abandonment of the FDR spirit. He may have had tax problems, and fears over investigation of his radical ties. He may have preferred Europe. But in the summer of 1955 he came to London for a flurry of activity: he married his third wife, Paola Mori, at Caxton Hall; and he appeared at the Duke of York's Theatre in a play he had made up out of Herman Melville,
Moby Dick Rehearsed
. It attracted attention and maybe someone said, “Well, suppose we showed
Citizen Kane
again?” And suppose they found a magnificent print—for that is what I remember, a print direct from the negative, as if struck the day before.

I did not understand
Kane
when I saw it the first time, but I felt the shock of a film that was “difficult.” The plot itself was beyond my grasp, I was not sure where to look and what to listen for in its dense texture. Most films, then and now, are sign-posted visually and aurally; everything is meant to be grasped on one viewing.
Kane
may have been the first American picture that required more than one viewing. I realized that the sled thrown into the furnace at the end was the source of “Rosebud” (at least, I think I did), but I was unsure how to feel the emotion or the irony in that resolution. One difficulty in keeping up with the film was the rapid shifts backward and forward in time, leaving so little “now” story. How can there be, when the hero, or whatever he is, dies in the first scene? Another difficulty was that this picture gave no help in knowing which people I should like, or not. This was especially relevant with Kane himself. He was charming, boyish, devil-may-care—but was he a devil, too? (A similar puzzle attends Harry Lime.) That matter of identification is still a problem in filmgoing: I have heard people say, Well, yes, Michael Haneke's
Amour
(2012) is all very fine, but truly that old man and woman are past our sympathy. They have given up being likeable, so they cannot stop life and death washing over them like a tide. Others say, But that's what elderly people are like and why
Amour
is so special.

I wanted to see
Kane
again, just as on your first visit to Madrid you wonder when you will get back to the Prado. You buy a postcard or a poster of
Las Meninas;
you keep looking. It is the same with a person—until you stop looking. If Bernstein
had married that girl in white, he might not have remembered her so sharply.

A time came when I started seeing
Kane
regularly. I read the script and several books about Welles. This was going back to church and renewing one's vows, but I was getting more out of the picture all the time. It was in 1962, for the first time, that the film topped the
Sight & Sound
critics' poll. Yet it had not placed in the top ten in 1952, because many people had not seen it then. Where would you see it? How would you counter the notion that Welles was a burnt-out case? But by 1962, it was appreciated that Welles was still alive, still making films.
Touch of Evil
had opened in 1958, and it was not so much a comeback as a sardonic reappraisal of American film in the late fifties. In its deft, insolent way, it was about Mexican-American sexual threat, drugs, police corruption, and the rancid border. The burnt-out case was aflame, and still ahead of his time. In 1962, his film of Kafka's
The Trial
—with Anthony Perkins as Joseph K (or was it Norman K?), shot in the abandoned Gare d'Orsay—was unexpected, perversely inventive, and utterly European. Orson was giving immense interviews, and interview was his métier. He talked like a great traveler who had read everything and known every dancer. He was still younger than fifty. He made
Chimes at Midnight
, playing Falstaff. He was as far from burned-out as a ticking bomb.

Against the grain of the film's mounting eminence, Pauline Kael published her long essay, “Raising Kane,” which sought to bring the picture down to size. She claimed it was a shallow masterpiece at a time when other writers were finding new depth in it. But Kael's point of view was contested by her own avowed habits. She was the leading American critic of that moment, and a very good writer. But she claimed she only
ever saw a film once. The rationale for that was worth listening to. She said that movies were and ought to be sensational, immediate, and so compelling that one had to rely on the first viewing. If it didn't work straightaway, then it wasn't working. I sat next to her at a screening and she had a fierce intensity, hunched over her notebook, looking up at the screen and then at her notes in rapid succession—and the notes seemed to be fluent sentences, not just jottings for memory.

It was a disarming encounter, for plainly Kael was not always looking at the screen. If she really believed in nothing but the first time, how was she getting it all? Or was her mind being made up as she watched the film and by the process of writing? As I say, she was a picture of concentration, and an exciting writer whether or not one agreed with her. She coincided with a rich moment in the movies, and she made the medium seem important for her America. But was she to be trusted? Did she only ever see a film once? Was her regard for the shallowness of
Kane
valid if she had only paddled at its edges? Had she written her essay on just a single viewing?

Immediacy is vital, and for a long time the movies organized that adrenaline as suspense. So in
Intolerance
(1916), D. W. Griffith staged a race-against-time in its modern episode in which audiences were desperate to see whether a condemned man could be saved from execution. Years later, in
High Noon
, we were on tenterhooks to find out whether the lone figure of Gary Cooper's marshal could defeat the four murderous avengers who have come to his town to get him. Suspense of that kind was novel in 1916, and perhaps audiences were in true doubt over the outcome. But by 1952, movie had established its own system, so that we knew Coop was going to be all right. He might be wounded. He might need that new daughter-like
wife (Grace Kelly) to come to his aid. But virtue would be rewarded—though it was striking and novel in 1952 when the heroic sheriff told his wretched town to look after itself, and he threw his star in the dust. (In
Touch of Evil
, the corrupt sheriff also turned in his badge.)

High Noon
and
Intolerance
are made with great skill, and the people on view are appealing. Still, the more a film relies on pure suspense the less likely it is to hold an audience for long. A few years later, Cooper was the lead in another Western,
Man of the West
, in which he is a reformed outlaw caught up in the deadly moods of his own past. In 1957, you could assume that Coop would survive that test, but
Man of the West
is more complicated than survival can handle. Suspense has yielded to a tragic understanding of the West. By 1971 it was far less clear that McCabe would survive in
McCabe & Mrs Miller
. Could he kill off the bad guys the way Coop did? I won't answer that question, in case you haven't seen the film. But it is waiting for you, and it leads the picture into a mood of fatalism, not triumph. You'll have to see it again, as soon as you've seen it once, just to try to hear what is said and see everything that happens. Its director, Robert Altman, was a pioneer in not making things clear—and clarity is death if you like to see films again and again. But the idea of unclarity in movie was a heresy, or even the end of cinema as fun. John Wayne, that rock of the Western genre, disapproved of these anti-heroic films and thought they signaled a decline in American manliness.