The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (421 page)

Truffaut made only a few films that are not flawed, several that have serious weaknesses in conception and realization, one or two content to treat the surface of a subject, but none without a youthful enthusiasm for movies. He treated material speculatively, in the way of an idealized Hollywood director in the days of constant production, priding himself on an ability to make any assignment beautiful and entertaining. Even in 1973, his own appearance as the director in
Day for Night
showed the unabashed attempt to think himself into Warner Brothers,
circa
1943. One cannot deny the infectious charm of that attempt. But Truffaut was self-consciously enthusiastic, and that has dangers as well as virtues. Of course, he was very alert to the moods of young people, and especially of children; but his work is curiously short of people over the age of forty. Overall, I think his continued leaning on American cinema misled him or kept him from a more interesting personality.

Youthfulness made all his films like debuts. Truffaut might have adopted the policy of making some films as throwaways. That frank diary on the making of
Fahrenheit 451
so eagerly hunts through his own feelings about cinema that it could easily have included some such rationalization of the disaster on which he was engaged. Like Charlie in
Shoot the Piano Player
, and the Jean-Pierre Léaud character, Truffaut talked to himself as he lived, daring himself to take action, gambling on the consequences.

He was a key figure in the New Wave: for his vigorous articles in
Arts
and
Cahiers du Cinéma;
for
The 400 Blows
, an autobiographical movie that securely tied the new films to Renoir, Vigo, and the French tradition of location shooting, flowing camera, and offhand lyricism; but also because of his role as instigator of new projects. Truffaut was the source of the idea for
Breathless
(59, Jean-Luc Godard); the coproducer of
Paris Nous Appartient
(60, Jacques Rivette); and writer and producer of the remake of Renoir’s
Tire au Flanc
(62, Claude de Givray). That spearhead activity was accentuated by
The 400 Blows
’s prize at Cannes and by the popular success of
Jules et Jim
.

But that should not disguise the theme of privacy in his films. Truffaut had an instinct for timidity and shyness, especially in characters who harbor overwhelming feelings. His most fruitful way of making films was to show the tragi-comic consequences of restrained, smothered, or diverted impulses; and his most serious insight—coming in
Deux Anglaises
and
Jules et Jim
—is that emotion is expressed more openly in art than in life. Time and again, he dealt with people unable to express themselves: the reticence of Charlie in
Shoot the Piano Player;
the delinquent isolation of the boy in
The 400 Blows
(Truffaut was himself only kept from an institution by the good offices of André Bazin); the unexpected charm of Cyril Cusack’s reserved captain in
Fahrenheit 451;
the way in
La Sirène
that Belmondo conceals his knowledge so as not to disturb his fatal relationship with Deneuve; the intractability of the boy in
L’Enfant Sauvage;
the way that
La Mariée
is undermined by our being drawn to see the depths within the ostensibly odious Michel Bouquet character; the somber aloofness and gusts of silent tenderness in Muriel in
Deux Anglaises;
Catherine in
Jules et Jim
taking Jim away into a world she commands, that of death.

In his first three films, Truffaut showed a vital ability to disclose offhand intimacy, to mingle laughter and tears, and to make the shape of his films flexible.
Shoot the Piano Player
was the sort of film Laurence Sterne might have made, and generally Truffaut neglected his skill at stretching the form of a movie—though structural surprise is wonderfully employed in
Les Deux Anglaises
. The speed of farce chasing pathos was very influential, not least on the writers of
Bonnie and Clyde
. In
Jules et Jim
, Truffaut formed his most fruitful collaboration, with the novelist Henri-Pierre Roché, author of
Les Deux Anglaises
and of a situation dear to Truffaut—the passionate triangle in which three people are trapped, all in love with all, all reluctant to hurt the others.

With such an inheritance from Renoir, Truffaut dragged himself toward Hitchcock. It was a sign of his intellectual earnestness that he worked so hard to admire a man far from his own feelings.
Le Cinéma Selon Alfred Hitchcock
is not a successful book simply because the two men so seldom occupy common ground. The interviewer’s attempts to make Hitch confess to his greatness and Hitch’s whimsical reluctance are very funny and the sort of scene Truffaut might have invented. There is the same self-exposure in the diary on
Fahrenheit 451
, a film that splits apart on the director’s inadequate English, on his bewilderment at the way in which former companion Oskar Werner turned into a self-interested actor, but chiefly because the abstraction of science fiction was alien to Truffaut’s commitment to behavior. That is his worst film. But
Soft Skin
is as muddled and not helped by clumsy resort to melodrama.
La Mariée était en Noir
is another misguided effort at revealing Hitchcock, a film based on a concept of vengeance that Truffaut is too kind to share.

There was therefore a serious and prolonged lapse in his work.
Baisers Volés
and
Domicile Conjugale
are minor films, reprising the boy from
400 Blows
but without firsthand reflections from Truffaut’s own life. They are vehicles for Léaud, and the worse for that. But with Delphine Seyrig in the first he at least rediscovered his contact with actresses, an ability he has always cherished and that sustains a film like
Une Belle Fille Comme Moi
.

But Truffaut also made three films that considerably enlarged his talent.
Mississippi Mermaid
actually masters Hitchcockian themes and turns into a rhapsody on a fatal obsession, largely because of the way it defines solitariness in the Belmondo character;
L’Enfant Sauvage
is a limpid account of wildness being schooled, based on fact and with Truffaut himself playing the teacher. Best of all, however, is
Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent
, a story of “Proust and the Brontë Sisters,” sure of period and place, so beautifully acted by Kika Markham and Stacey Tendeter that Léaud’s coldness is not a handicap. Because its central character is a writer, Truffaut was able to use interior monologue and to measure the gulf between art and reality. In
La Mariée Était en Noir
, someone speaks of “happy fools and unhappy fools,” being the generality of human beings. That wistfulness is the real Truffaut, and
Les Deux Anglaises
goes a step further—to present the intelligent fool and the passionate fool. Death comes very often in Truffaut as the only resolution to misunderstanding. It always leaves one character looking back, indelibly marked by the loss, the recollection of missed chances and the perspective that shows people passing in the dark. By implication, or in fact, that character is an artist.

It may seem churlish to carp at so enjoyable a film as
Day for Night
. But it was the work of a man in his forties, and it did precede an announced, short retirement from films. No question of the facility of
Day for Night
, the pleasure with all cinema’s tricks and the way that it makes them clear to a lay audience. But it is best on first viewing. The characters in the film lie very near the surface. The mood seems playful after
Contempt
.

It seemed likely, and necessary, that the confessional summary of
Day for Night
, (like a young conjurer revealing his apparatus), and his self-imposed two-year withdrawal from movies, would mark a change and a maturing in Truffaut. In the event, one can see loss of fluency and verve and a withering onset of doubt and melancholy. To grow old is inescapable; yet perhaps Truffaut’s artistic sensibility was a matter of deliberate youthful enthusiasm—something appreciated by Steven Spielberg when he cast him as the wide-eyed master of ceremonies in the great light show of
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
(77).

Truffaut’s own films became less compelling.
Adèle H
. is a begging subject about demented and unwarranted obsession; Isabelle Adjani possesses the bursting emotional energy for it. But Truffaut’s earlier studies in obsession had been from the stance of a shy, rational observer who admired the overthrow of common sense but could not partake of it.
Adèle H
. needed complicity from its director. Without it, the girl’s
amour fou
seemed merely silly, a folly disapproved of by the chilly, tense style. It needed the compassionate severity of Bresson or the adoration of a Borzage; it needed mad humor and self-sufficient lyricism; the girl should become a demon, whereas Truffaut couldn’t quite justify her as a victim. He fumbled dialogue, the contrasting locations, and even one of his earlier strengths: the lonely writing to the dark outside world.

Small Change
was horribly cute, and seemed like an attempt to revive boxoffice memories of his former success with kids. It is a facile collage about the vitality and preciousness of childhood, but spoiled by its creeping sense of adult nostalgia and sentimentality. Still, nothing prepared one for the sheer nastiness of
The Man Who Loved
Women
. Unaccountably in Truffaut, the movie disdained women and refrained from crushing the reptilian self-regard of its hero, a heartless womanizer on his way to writing a book.

He died young, of a brain tumor, after the great boxoffice success of
The Last Mètro
, and two last, minor films that starred Fanny Ardant, with whom he had a child in the last year of his life. Since his death, a collection of his letters has been published to remind us of his intelligence as writer. Whether or how well his films will last remains to be seen. Whatever the answer to that question, for many people who love film Truffaut will always seem like the most accessible and engaging crest to the New Wave.

Stanley Tucci
, b. Katonah, New York, 1960
1996:
Big Night
(codirected with Campbell Scott). 1998:
The Impostors
. 2000:
Joe Gould’s Secret
. 2007:
Blind Date
.

Joe Gould’s Secret
did no business, and that may bring down the shutters on Tucci’s career as a director—no matter that it was a far more intriguing picture than the feel-good, eat-good
Big Night
. If the bonhomie of the first film seemed superficial, the chill in the third was authentic and disturbing. Indeed, it was one of the better films about writing as a way of life, a good glancing portrait of the smug club called
The New Yorker
, as well as a fond yet fearful picture of the incipient madness in Gould. There was a tenderness and respect, akin to one actor’s awe for the remarkable performance from Ian Holm as Gould. One should add that
The Impostors
was a well-handled farce, enough to suggest that the modest Tucci possesses a skill that might seem dazzling today—if he chose to work in any of the brutal genres so popular with the young.

Of course, Tucci is an actor, too, deft enough a lot of the time to let us forget he is Italian (in an age when all Italians get their Equity card at birth, it seems). He has been seen, to increasing effect, in
Prizzi’s Honor
(85, John Huston);
Monkey Shines
(88, George Romero);
Billy Bathgate
(91, Robert Benton);
Men of Respect
(91, William Reilly);
Beethoven
(92, Brian Levant);
In the Soup
(92, Alexander Rockwell);
Prelude to a Kiss
(92, Norman René);
The Public Eye
(92, Howard Franklin);
The Pelican Brief
(93, Alan J. Pakula); very funny in
Undercover Blues
(93, Herbert Ross);
It Could Happen to You
(94, Andrew Bergman);
Somebody to Love
(95, Rockwell);
The Daytrippers
(96, Greg Mottola);
Deconstructing Harry
(97, Woody Allen);
A Life Less Ordinary
(97, Danny Boyle);
The Alarmist
(98, Evan Dunsky); as the lead for TV in
Winchell
(98, Paul Mazursky); as Eichmann for TV in
Conspiracy
(01, Frank Pierson);
America’s Sweethearts
(01, Joe Roth); Frank Nitti in
Road to Perdition
(02, Sam Mendes);
Maid in Manhattan
(03, Wayne Wang);
The Core
(03, Jon Amiel);
Spin
(04, James Redford);
Shall We Dance?
(04, Peter Chelsom); and Stanley Kubrick in
The Life and Death of Peter Sellers
(04, Stephen Hopkins).

Then something happened. As an actor, Tucci quietly took charge of films—he ran them, as a meta-director, or like Octave in
La Règle du Jeu
. He was the airport manager in
The Terminal
(04, Steven Spielberg);
Lucky Number Slevin
(06, Paul McGuigan); immaculate as the man about the house in
The Devil Wears Prada
(06, David Frankel); a publisher we all know in
The Hoax
(06, Lasse Hallstrom);
What Just Happened
(08, Barry Levinson). But nothing was as sublime or central as his Paul Child in
Julie & Julia
(09, Nora Ephron). In addition, he directed another fine film,
Blind Date
(07)—himself and Patricia Clarkson—that was scarcely released.

He was nominated for his killer in
The Lovely Bones
(09, Peter Jackson)—but he was not himself.