How to Watch a Movie (16 page)

Television's surfeit of stories bred mockery and observations about there being only seven or nine story shapes in the entire history of fiction. Audiences caught these familiar rhythms and took story novelty less seriously. At the London National Film Theatre in the 1960s, there was a famous patron who sat on the end of a row and left a few minutes before the end of every film. She said she knew the way films worked well enough to feel closure coming and she resented the drab rites of explanation. The adroit Hitchcock was nearly defeated by the need to explain
Psycho
at the end, and that otherwise trembling film
has a soporific passage where a psychiatrist (Simon Oakland) lets us go home with a necessary and cleansing understanding of this bizarre psychotic behavior. But then
Psycho
rallies with the last glimpse (and sound) of Norman and his mother not just reunited but impacted. So it ends on a gotcha.

The old narrow-minded emphasis on story and narrative surprise has given way to the reenactment of ritual, or dream. There has been a mood in some modern films that says life is never simply one story. It is more likely a collection of overlapping stories: thus the interest in anthology films, like
Nashville
and
Short Cuts
(by Robert Altman),
Boogie Nights
and
Magnolia
(by Paul Thomas Anderson), and Paul Haggis's
Third Person
. Those films seem truer to what we see around us, and they heed the realization that everyone feels he or she must be the center of the universe, and thus a star, when we are all nothing more than supporting actors surrounded by others.

There are also notable pictures that treat story less as a compelling object of attention than a climate of many passing moods. In
Providence
, with a novelist (John Gielgud) as a central character, Alain Resnais shows us a variety of scenes, all of which are more projections than definite actuality. In
That Obscure Object of Desire
, on impulse, Luis Buñuel decided to replace one absent actress (Maria Schneider) with two women to share the one part (Angela Molina and Carole Bouquet). But the man who lusts after this woman (Fernando Rey) cannot tell one actress from the other, so he is hopelessly confused when they veer off in bifurcated seductive modes. There's another level of reference in that film, for Rey's suave womanizer is plainly related to the Frenchman, Alain Charnier, in
The French Connection
(1971). Buñuel and Rey borrow the look of that character. But that wit is only one step in the
realization that all along in movies many actors had been themselves and variants on their own archetype. So Christina Crawford's book on her adoptive mother, Joan Crawford—
Mommie Dearest
—and the film that came from it, are, consciously or not, anthologies of Crawford's career and the ever more hysterical emotional tyrants she played.

In
Céline and Julie Go Boating
, two young women become intrigued by what is happening in an elegant but rather mysterious house in Paris. When they gain entrance they see that an obscure melodrama is playing there in continuous performance: a story in which a child is menaced by three very mannered adults. Céline and Julie then realize that they may be able to intervene in that story and save the little girl. This is couched in terms of gentle comedy, with the events inside the house looking more and more movielike, but the attitude could as easily furnish a sinister story in which the oppressive weather of movie is going to drive people crazy. Examples of that darker tendency could include Andrei Tarkovsky's
Stalker
(1979), where men travel through a wasteland to the mythic Zone where desires are made into life, or
Pierrot le Fou
, where the female character (Anna Karina, until lately the wife of the film's director, Jean-Luc Godard) talks to the camera and the force behind it, and the fusion of betrayal in life and fiction is exhilarating but tragic.

In story, we were attached to the moral being of characters. This is the crux of the nineteenth-century novel in so many languages, and it carried over into movie for at least a hundred years. So we care about what will happen to Scarlett O'Hara, to Montgomery Clift in
A Place in the Sun
, to Marshall Will Kane in
High Noon
, to Bette Davis and Anne Baxter in
All About Eve
. It looks like an orthodoxy in which characters
fought the good fight to overcome obstacles, to be themselves, and to find true love. But there were wild places in that uniform landscape. In
To Have and Have Not
(1944) and
The Big Sleep
(1946), a sardonic, blithe travesty is made of the wartime action genre and the detective story, and the films become just about anything Bogart and Bacall care to do. They may not have known it. Director Howard Hawks may not have been certain. But they are making a new kind of film, a satire on set conventions. This approach would hardly be dared again until Jean-Luc Godard's films of the early 1960s, which are casual, fond, but derisive remakes of Hollywood schemes.

But times keep changing. Anyone wondering how to watch a movie is nowadays often engaged in following what we call long-form television, serial versions of certain situations and characters that may run for several series. These shows are made on budgets and schedules that hark back to the factory system of Hollywood. They depend on good writing and fine character acting, and they tend to fix on groups of people who face dramatic crises but never quite settle them. That could end the series. I am thinking of shows like
The Sopranos, The Wire, Homeland, Big Love, The Hour, The Fall, Rubicon, Luck, Masters of Sex, Ray Donovan, Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad
, and
Peaky Blinders
. Some succeed better than others, or last much longer. But that success presents creative problems.

In the nature of dramatic writing, one creates a character to see what will happen to him or her—the matter of moral resolution has not vanished, even if it has receded. So from the outset Tony Soprano was a conventional New Jersey boss in organized crime beset with doubts. He needed a shrink. He had family problems and difficult children. He was in middle age. Walter White, from
Breaking Bad
, is a hardworking,
luckless, high-school chemistry teacher with domestic problems, but still trying to get along with life—like 99 percent of his audience. Then he finds he has lung cancer and he is outraged that dedication and playing by the rules have failed him. So he will take life and the law into his own hands. He diverts his knowledge of chemistry to making drugs. And what will become of him?

The dramatist, or the creator of such a show, wants closure. He dreams of a finale full of corpses or a hero who has been redeemed. But the same person is also riding the monster of television success. It isn't just the immediate audience they get, or the sale of boxed sets. With enough seasons, these shows go into syndication—and
I Love Lucy
is still making money on that mechanism. So the dramatist wants it both ways: he wants tragic resolution (sometimes it's comic) but he wants the show to go on as long as life. Those feelings are shared by the actors whose salaries go up with a long run—so long as they are not killed off. It does not diminish the power or value of these series to be honest about the commercial pressures. But good shows can develop their own hysteria.

Homeland
began in 2011, created by Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon (and derived from an Israeli show). The show depended on the character of Carrie Mathison, a brilliant CIA agent who was also bipolar, in need of constant medication, and frequently on the edge of breakdown. In the first season she became involved with Brody (Damian Lewis), a prisoner returned from Iraq and possibly a terrorist agent. Carrie had to investigate him; but she also fell in love with him. Immediately, this stretched credibility. We like to think that the CIA is shy of employing bipolar victims who fall for their targets. Equally, it was far-fetched that under so much suspicion Brody
would rise to elected office and the chance of a vice-presidential nomination. Still, the first season climaxed in espionage suspense and a tortured love situation with Carrie in hospital and shock therapy. Claire Danes gave a performance that had no superior on film and television in its time. She was so good she overcame fears of implausibility. She won awards and made many of us feel that we had never seen the bipolar condition so well handled. Which is not the same as watching a bipolar patient in anguish.

Then there was a second season, in which more or less the same things happened again, but suspending disbelief was that much greater a test.

And a third season, in which … Well, the people behind the show (and Danes was by then a producer) seemed to realize that a far-fetched situation was on the brink of nonsense. So Saul (Mandy Patinkin), the acting head of the CIA, dished Carrie at a congressional hearing. He admitted that she was unstable and unreliable. She was taken off duty and sent back to hospital. In one episode her hard life in recovery was paralleled with Brody's being held captive in a South American country by terrorists. And then
Homeland
came clean: Carrie now was
pretending
to be bipolar and at the end of her tether. This was part of a plot hatched by her and Saul to make Carrie available for overtures from Iranian intelligence and to lure them out into the open. So the actress was playing an actress.

What had happened with
Homeland
was story being sacrificed to commercial appetite (like the start time of a ball-game being moved to satisfy television schedules). The twists of plot invention had bigger pitfalls ahead. In season 3, Brody was executed, and Carrie discovered she was pregnant. What next? Season 4 wanted to press on with foreign intrigue and
suspense, so it reckoned to send Carrie to a posting in Istanbul or Pakistan. But could her baby go with her? Well, scenarists must have felt a babe would get in the way (they had dropped Brody's family already), so the kid was left at home with Carrie's sister.

I reached my limit. (It left me more aware of the teasing delicacy with which David Chase had ended
The Sopranos
on a kind of pregnant vacancy.) I could go along with a bipolar woman given special trust by the CIA. I bought her love affair with a man who may be a terrorist: detectives screw up. And I liked the raw humanity Claire Danes brought to the role. But when the baby got dumped, I gave up on the show.

11

WHO MAKES THESE MOVIES?

I
wanted to hug Lassie, to be in the same room as Gary Cooper, and to meet a projectionist. The miracle of the movies has always made us ask, Who did this? So in talking to you about how to watch a movie, the question of the who is important, at the level of authorship, and ownership. And remember that it's a truism in the business that
we
own the movies. You can hear producers and studios say that with touching piety, and mercenary stupidity. But their self-pity does lament the vagaries of the process: they put three years and $150 million into the works, and then on a Friday they face the truth. The public thinks it's junk. They walk away and never tell a friend to try it.

In the nicest way in the world, I have rubbed shoulders with vivid men and women doing fine work in picture production
to whom one would not readily speak of “moral being” or “ontological validity.” It's not that they didn't have access to those things, like a tuxedo for red carpet occasions. But philosophical self-advertising has been looked at askance in show business. It gets in the way of necessary egotism and the attitude (derived from the young Alexander Korda) that to make it in Hollywood you need to follow these blunt but enticing guidelines: move into the best hotels; frequent the most expensive restaurants; be seen with the most beautiful people in the most noble cars; charge everything; and tip lavishly. Then wait for offers. Hollywood has the best gallows humor about itself, if only to get in ahead of the scolds.

Don't tell the people there that Hollywood hardly exists now. That atmosphere lingers, not so much in the movies as in the contracts (as long as most scripts, and more carefully studied) and in the riot of Internet gossip. A lot of picture people are living in the past, their safest place. Moreover, there is another sound principle in the abandoned city: don't describe movies in language that would be incomprehensible to the people who made the pictures. But that can be hard. In the late 1950s, as the young writers on
Cahiers du Cinéma
and
Positif
hailed and reclaimed American directors who had felt lucky if they found work, they sometimes launched themselves on immense, flowery, and academic descriptions of films like
Detour, They Live by Night, Angel Face
, and
Run of the Arrow
. The makers of those excellent films might be flabbergasted and breathless at the questions. So sometimes they said “I guess so” to assertive and very flattering statements that had run on for a paragraph. The pattern became comic and touching in the celebratory interviews run in those magazines.

The first time I met Nicholas Ray was at Dartmouth
College. He was a day out of Sloan-Kettering, where he had had operations for cancer. He was sixty-six but in his gauntness he seemed older. He was in very bad shape, not helped by having to make the small-plane flight from New York to the West Lebanon airport, the gateway to Dartmouth. The next morning I tried to get him to eat a small plate of scrambled eggs. This was encouraged by the presence of Susan, his fourth wife, a great believer in Nick, but someone who had learned dark truths along the way.

Nick Ray had made this trip for the modest fee that Dartmouth would pay him for appearing before the students. I suppose that might have been a warning: Ray was old before his time, frail, unsteady, not always coherent, ragged but handsome, with a black patch on one eye. The parents of those students could have surmised that Ray was the worst possible example, but it is my experience that film students—experts in the visual—see what they want to see.

I was in the same predicament and not much older than my students. I had admired Nicholas Ray since my youth: his
Rebel Without a Cause, In a Lonely Place, They Live by Night, Bitter Victory
—the titles themselves spoke to his desperate but romantic existentialism. So I talked to Nick in earnestness, and even love. I told him what he had meant to some of us. I reveled in the beauty of his pictures. I believed (I still do) that I was in the presence of a flawed genius and a wrecked man. Susan must have noticed this. I'm sure she had seen similar meetings in the time she had been with him. So, quietly, she came up to me, thanked me for being good for Nick, but cautioned me. “On no account,” she said, “give him any money. He'll throw it away on drugs and gambling before morning.” This was said with bleak kindness, like Gloria Grahame
talking in
In a Lonely Place
about the difficulty of trust and love in Hollywood, and that great romanticization of self-destruction.

That meeting at Dartmouth was in 1978, I think, and
In a Lonely Place
was made in 1950. But Nick Ray was a battered icon, the visionary director who had stayed true to his unruly self and suffered for it. He had a persistent following who revered his independence as an artist and a film director and who looked upon his fallen status, his dire health, his history of family wreckage, his professional isolation, and his need for money as the signs of ontological validity. The truth was more complicated. John Houseman, the producer who had nursed Nick through his debut,
They Live by Night
, saw a man in turmoil, a spreader of human damage, a womanizer who was possibly a closet homosexual, and someone who never lost the passionate but incoherent hope that movies might be made by Baudelaire, Van Gogh, and Mahler—so long as they had a John Houseman to run interference. (Once upon a time, Houseman had served the same function for Orson Welles, and you can argue that Welles was never as organized after he threw Houseman out.)

So, the question arises, and it is one that every person who wants to know how to watch a movie asks—who makes these movies? J. C. Chandor has said that
All Is Lost
could not have been made without Robert Redford. Who else at that age could be so athletic, act without words, and help bank its modest budget? In his turn, Redford insisted that it was J.C.'s film as an idea, a story, and a work of cinema. I think I would say that Agata Trzebuchowska and Agata Kulesza were even more crucial to
Ida
. The way Pawel Pawlikowski made that film is driven by their two faces. Yet he grasped the drive, and I'm sure that other actresses—Polish or whatever—could have
done very well in the roles. Better? Why bother to ask when we have such achievement?

So if you want to know who made a film, you can read the credits. But that's a wearying task now. That National Film Theatre escapee I mentioned could be home and making tea with you still in the dark processing the crawling roll of credits, in which we learn who trained the dogs, who negotiated the completion bond (though the exact and delicate circumstances of that evening are still in the dark), who drove whom to the set every morning. You can be put into a comatose state by this amount of information so that you might not recall there
were no dogs in the film
—but still trainers were credited. “Oh sure,” you learn later, “they cut the dogs. In fact, I believe they sold the dog footage to another picture.”

The credits on motion pictures have never been known for reliability. They are assertions in a business crowded out with self-promotion. They are gestures of ownership, profit participation, or guaranteed legal rights thanks to the negotiated stances of guilds and unions. There are even people who have been at pains to keep their names
off
films. Irving Thalberg's name appears on a film very seldom, yet we know he was a decisive executive who touched most Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films between 1924 and 1936, for good and ill. By contrast, Jack Warner was happy to have his name on pictures, even those he'd barely heard of. One can mock that as self-importance, but most people who worked at Warners believed that Jack's power and say-so were crucial—also for good and ill. So many of our most beloved movies, waving the flag of great star presences, were the dream of moguls who owned the company. And America is very big on ownership—it can come close to art itself in a society where increasingly art comes with massive
price tags. In 2013, Francis Bacon's
Three Views of Lucian Freud
sold at auction for $142.4 million. You could have had three-quarters of
Iron Man 3
for that.

Today, not too many filmgoers have heard of Cedric Gibbons. He was born in Dublin in 1893 and he died in Los Angeles in 1960. In his time he was married to two movie actresses, Dolores del Rio and Hazel Brooks. He had had a brief training at the Art Students League of New York, and he was working in pictures by 1919 as a “designer.” From 1924 to 1956, he was in charge of the production design department at M-G-M, and thus he had his name (by contract) on about 1,500 pictures. He won the Oscar for what was called art direction eleven times (his victories included
Gaslight, An American in Paris
, and
Julius Caesar
).
An American in Paris
(1951) was a very ambitiously designed picture, with a seventeen-minute ballet sequence with Gershwin music in which the styles of several French painters were copied. Gibbons was on the picture because it was a major studio production. But so was E. Preston Ames (who shared the art direction credit), Edwin Willis (who did the set decoration), and Orry-Kelly (who did the costumes, along with Walter Plunkett and Irene Sharaff). Then there was the director, Vincente Minnelli, who had begun in the theater as a designer of costumes and sets. Arthur Freed produced the picture, and although Freed was a former songwriter, he was in charge of the M-G-M musicals unit—and this was a prestige production, budgeted at $2.7 million, and eventual winner of the Oscar for Best Picture. Even then, the chain of authorship is incomplete, for the creative forces on the picture (Minnelli and Gene Kelly) were inspired and provoked by the glorious
achievement and the American popularity of
The Red Shoes
, made in England just a few years earlier by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, a pioneering film in believing that the fine arts and ballet could be made material for a hit movie.

Which is not to say Gibbons didn't deserve his Oscar, but his name is like a trademark, and truth to tell,
An American in Paris
no longer seems that good a film. I should add that Gibbons has another claim on the Oscar, for he is supposed to have designed or drawn the original statuette. He was a member of the inside club and one of the thirty-six founders of the Academy in 1927.

Shift sideways, two years ahead, to another Metro musical,
The Band Wagon
. Yet again, Freed produced and Minnelli directed; one virtue of the studio system was familiarity and a kind of teamwork, even if Freed and Minnelli were never best friends. The art direction group on the film was most of the people from
An American in Paris
. There was one crucial departure:
The Band Wagon
was a Fred Astaire film. Now, in many respects Gene Kelly matched Astaire in his artistic ambitions, and Kelly was a credited codirector on films like
Singin' in the Rain
. He had even directed nonmusical films, not that they are remembered. Astaire never had a credit as director. But he insisted on the way his dance numbers were shot. He would not dance on film unless the full figures of the dancers were visible in the frame, and he preferred the camera to move laterally with the dance, to maintain the shot, as opposed to cutting. It was his credo that this thing he did (with whichever female partner fate selected) was as difficult as it was beautiful. Therefore it had to be shown intact.

So there is a style, a fluidity, a camera identity, and what we call a mise-en-scène in Astaire's dance numbers. The rehearsal
was relentless and exhausting; the shooting was meticulous and hardly cheap. Some of his partners wept because their feet were bleeding. But still they had to appear to be in the arms of a god. In
The Band Wagon
, the great number is “Dancing in the Dark” in Central Park (all done on a Culver City set designed by the team). Fred's partner here is Cyd Charisse. They are both dressed in white and the narrative function of the dance is to have two rather chilly people warm up to each other. Neither Astaire nor Charisse were what we could call “actors,” but this is one of the great love scenes on film, and proof of how far movie is poetic, dreamlike, and musical, despite its apparent allegiance to plausibility. Astaire was not just the director of the scene, not just its auteur, but its reason for being.

For decades, ever since he started doing movies in the early 1930s, after his first partner, his sister, Adele, had married into the English aristocracy, audiences knew they were going to see a Fred Astaire film, or “Fred and Ginger.” The great Astaire-Rogers partnership flourished at RKO and no one disputes Rogers's value: she was an extraordinary dancer (though not as soulful or balletic as Charisse); she was tart, earthy, and a touch rowdy; the famous judgment was that Fred gave her class while she brought him sexiness. Those pictures, from
Flying Down to Rio
to
Carefree
, had yet another contributing author: black-and-white cinematography. I like
The Band Wagon
in color, but Astaire's natural leading away from realism is fostered by black-and-white, and the décor of those RKO films is full of polished floors and deco arenas. Those films were designed too, and Van Nest Polglase has most of the credits—as the studio's resident chief designer he would also get that credit on
Citizen Kane
. There's another name to mention, Hermes Pan, who was Fred's choreographic partner
from 1933 till the end—which was
Finian's Rainbow
, where a new director named Francis Ford Coppola outraged Fred and ruined the picture by chopping up legs and heads.

Not that Francis only deserves blame. Just a few years after
Finian's Rainbow
(hardly ever shown today) he made
The Godfather
(which people see all the time, as if they enjoy being a part of its sinister family). Francis Coppola has been called an auteur, a genius, a boss, a spokesman for a generation, a lord of San Francisco. That's a lot of things to be in a package that has involved him as husband, father, vintner, patron, magazine publisher, opera director, entrepreneur for the vacation industry in Belize, chef, and sometimes depressive.