It's been a good week for movies. After catching one of the last showings of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, I learned that the Belcourt Theatre was hosting a festival of the best films that didn't play in Nashville in 2004. So far I've seen Guy Maddin's Cowards Bend the Knee and Thom Andersen's documentary-essay Los Angeles Plays Itself. (Yes, that means I've seen two of J. W. Hastings's One Note Wonders in the last week, and more on that subject later.) I'm hoping to catch the re-release of Orson Welles's Confidential Report and F for Fake, and Overnight, a documentary about the rise and fall of the director of one of the most asinine movies I've ever seen, The Boondock Saints, entirely for schadenfreude.
But I've been thinking the most about Los Angeles Plays Itself. Thom Andersen's essay in cinematic form is a comprehensive study of the representation of Los Angeles, the most-photographed city in the world. He suffers no shortage of examples, of course, from contemporary blockbusters and longstanding critical darlings to bygone pieces with wonderful names like Putting Pants on Philip (1928) and What! No Beer? (1933). Andersen's project is to place the background of these films into the foreground, to look at all the defensive and cynical and clichéd and self-serving and occasionally insightful ways the movies have portrayed their capital city.
Andersen's study is most effective when it offers comprehensive surveys of multiple films or close readings of pivotal ones. In one early sequence, Andersen tallies the many incarnations of iconic locations like Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House or the Bradbury building, which plays out as a Hollywood melodrama of its own: the building starts as a late 19th-century attempt at utopian architecture and ends up in Blade Runner. But even there, Andersen finds a surprising ray of hope: for all that it's become synonymous with urban dystopia (the "official nightmare" of Los Angeles, Mike Davis says), Blade Runner does represent "a modern city planner's dream" with its bustling downtown life and high pedestrian traffic.
Andersen's tongue is lodged firmly in cheek during that little rehabilitaton, but it's indicative of his refreshing tendency to ignore the received wisdom and just watch the films; his fresh eyes reveal details that have been hiding in plain sight all along, buried underneath too much critical tradition. Nowhere is this stronger than his reading of Chinatown, in which he dismantles the myth that Roman Polanski's film presents a historically accurate exposé of that carefully buried original sin, Los Angeles's theft of water from the Owens Valley. Andersen does a great job of reminding us that most politicians tend to commit their crimes in plain sight, with the full approval of the public; I hope to show this section when my graduate class gets to Polanski.
My personal fascination with Los Angeles and southern California makes me pretty much the ideal target audience for this movie (as the Mike Davis and Joan Didion books over on the sidebar will attest; Andersen references both, and not always positively). However, it isn't perfect. The film is often formless, a serious problem at nearly three hours, and it ends at its most shrill point.
I think Andersen wants to go out on a note of solidarity, praising movies that represent the Los Angeles that most of its residents live in, but it rings false because he's just spent the last twenty to forty minutes - time dilates oddly in this film - denigrating a large proportion of them, including anybody who owns a car or thinks owning a car is important in Los Angeles. (And this after he does brilliant readings of cars in Chinatown, Double Indemnity, and Blade Runner.) In this final section Andersen only accords credibility to directors or critics who make movies or write books about African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, the poor - and even then they'd better shoot it in a neorealist style. It's an unfortunate example of the confusion of "diversity" for alienation and condemnation that too many people mistake for contemporary liberalism, and films like Andersen's only fan the flames. And then it ends.
Up until that point, though, Los Angeles Plays Itself is a rambling, entertaining, fascinating, almost endlessly insightful look at how the world capital of unreality (back off, Vegas) simulates itself.
As for those One Note Wonders: by now everyone has noted the limited range of Wes Anderson's movies and everyone seems to be waiting for him to break outside it. I think Anderson's challenge is that he's already made the perfect movie about an adolescent's conception of adulthood in Rushmore, and he hasn't gotten far enough away from it by making his subsequent movies about adults who live out the fantasies of childhood and adolescence. (The shot of a joyless Bill Murray carrying a child on his shoulders at the end of The Life Aquatic is the perfect condensation of Anderson's films. Great soundtrack, too.)
But to suggest that The Life Aquatic would play better as an action comedy directed by Ron Shelton (writer of Hollywood Homicide and Bad Boys II) is to celebrate mediocrity. One note perfectly played sounds better than a couple of merely competent ones - and I'm not sure that Bull Durham to Tin Cup reveals an expanded range so much as a more conventionally naturalistic, more acceptably middle-aged, but equally limited one. Wes Anderson makes movies from the worldview of the disaffected adolescent and the burned-out middle-ager; Shelton doesn't even cover both.
Next up: why Ghost Dog shouldn't be a fish-out-of-water buddy cop movie by Brett Ratner.
Marc,
I used Ron Shelton as an example because (except when he's working for a paycheck) he makes fairly intelligent and entertaining movies that are aimed at an adult audience (as opposed to many other American filmmakers). I think his movies are products along the lines of Elmore Leonard or Ed McBain novels. (I do think Bull Durham paints a more convincing and nuanced picture of "adults who live out the fantasies of childhood" than do Anderson's movies, but that's a separate point).
What I was trying to get at is that I think there is a compelling story to be told about an undersea filmmaker going off on a half-baked revenge mission, but that Wes Anderson isn't interested in telling that story as much as he is interested in achieving and maintaining a certain style. A style which, incidentally, seems to have an arbitrary connection to the story. While a Ron Shelton directed Steve Zissou vs. the Shark wouldn't have been an artistic masterpiece, it probably would have held my interested for over 5 minutes, simply because I thought that the story had the potential to be pretty interesting in its own right and not just as fodder for Anderson's one-trick filmmaking.
And I think your take that Anderson has yet to break out of a limited thematic range is right, but (and this is the heart of my original point) he's also yet to break out of his limited stylistic and technical range. I do think it's a problem when a filmmaker tells the same story over-and-over again, but I think it's a much bigger problem when from frame to frame, scene to scene, a filmmaker does exactly the same thing. I wouldn't really care that both Tenenbaums and Zissou are both about the same thing in a general thematic sense, but I do care that each and every scene in those movies is made exactly the same way.
I get a similar sensation watching one of those univentive "MTV"-style action movies like The Rock, where every single action scene is handled by turning up the volume and cutting really quickly. Anderson isn't a hack like Michael Bay, but they both seem to have one solution to every problem they come across as filmmakers. Of course, what Anderson does is a hell of a lot more beautiful, interesting, and idiosyncratic, but it's all he ever does and he shows no sign of even wanting to try to do something else.
It's not just that he can't--it's because if he does--if he learned a new trick--he'd be in danger of losing his audience which has come to expect that a "Wes Anderson" movie is simply one that's made up of a lot of "Wes Anderson" shots. And Wes Anderson is loved by film buffs primarily because they can instantly recognize these shots as being his. I think that it's the recognizability of his visual style (and its related tone of semi-mockery) that has earned him a following more than anything else. Anderson does have a distinctive "worldview", but I think it's a fair criticism to point out that so far that's all he's shown that he has going for him.
What I find interesting, is that there's at least a small group of filmmakers whose careers are based on presenting their idiosyncratic worldviews over and over again. These filmmakers build an audience that is looking for something different from the mainstream by giving them the same kind of "different" over and over again. This seems to be the same kind of "branding" that goes on in the contemporary art world or the indie music scene.
all the best,
J.W.
Posted by: J.W. Hastings | February 04, 2005 at 12:15 PM
are there really so many carefully composed, twee movies with oldies soundtracks and deadpan humor in the world that a director is only allowed to make THREE before people complain? how is the three the limit of people's patience?
"these filmmakers build an audience that is looking for something different from the mainstream by giving them the same kind of "different" over and over again."
if i just wanted something different over and over again, i'd run a fractal on my computer and stare at that. i think a better question to "is this different from prior works" is a simpler "does this work or doesn't it?" the moment of bill murray excusing himself from the party set to bowie's Life on Mars, for me, works as a moment, regardless of whether it echoes margo tennenbaum coming out of the bus to Nico. not everything in the movie does.
but i think its flaws are its own, and there's plenty to talk about re: that ("angelica houston looked bored and her character was underwritten" say) than this bizarre idea that an artist is only worthwhile when they're doing what the critic wants them to do instead of pursuing their own vision.
also: Play it to the Bone was neither intelligent nor entertaining.
Posted by: abhay | February 04, 2005 at 02:13 PM
abhay,
I'm not trying to set it up so that a filmmaker can either do "what I want" or "pursue their own vision". I am, however, trying to suggest that in the case of Wes Anderson (among other filmmakers), the pursuit of his own vision has led him straight into a rut. If this is your thing--if you like to groove on Anderson's wavelength and appreciate his "worldview"--than that's just fine and you're not alone.
Now, I realize the whole project of prescriptive critism is pretty dubious, and I know that no one really cares about what I think Wes Anderson should or should not do. But I just can't help comparing him to someone like David O. Russell. Russell's movies don't have the same natural visual style as Andersons (in fact, his movies have no discernible, distinctive style of their own) and, in fact, I think that Spanking the Monkey and Huckabees are worse than all of Anderson's movies. But Russell at least seems willing to take risks, not only from movie to movie, but within his movies. There's no such thing as a stereotypical Russell shot, while just about every single frame from an Anderson movie fits the same pattern.
I'm really not trying to say "Anderson should be more like this director I like", although it may sound like that. But I do think that Anderson plays it safe and that he gets away with it because his movies have a distinctive brand of quirkiness. For me, the flaws of Zissou and Tenenbaums all come out of Anderson's pursuit of that quirkiness at the expense of his characters and his story. And, again, if you're going to make a 90 minute movie, you better bring more to the table than a "worldview" that the audience gets after about 5 minutes.
I'm not sure what's "bizarre" about my ideas. If anything, I think it's fairly straightforward (not to mention square) to expect a filmmaker to try to keep an audience interested in the story he's trying to tell rather than trying to get his quirky "worldview" across.
all the best,
J.W.
Posted by: J.W. Hastings | February 04, 2005 at 04:04 PM
I think as a Wes Anderson fan and having a bunch of friends who are fans, none of us were that impressed by Life Aquatic.
The reason I enjoy Anderson is not just his visual style, but rather the characters in his tales. RUSHMORE is probably one of my favorite 5 films of all time. Tenebaums overall was a good follow up, but Life Aquatic was dull in most respects.
Life Aquatic was also the first film he didn't 'write' with Owen Wilson. Consider that a risk for Anderson.
Truthfully, I think Life Aquatic was "Lets get a bunch of cash from a studio and go have some fun in Europe for a few months." I mentioned this thought to Owen's assistant a while ago and he laughed, but also pretty much agreed.
Posted by: Kan Mattoo | February 04, 2005 at 04:16 PM
"the pursuit of his own vision has led him straight into a rut"
do you think its interesting that the movie everyone's saying he's in a rut on is a movie about a guy IN a rut? i think one of the things people don't like about it is the movie's about failure-- most movies aren't, and i kinda was wondering while i was watching it if that wasn't what people were responding to. even sideways, which is supposed to be-- its about the failure character meeting a nice girl (and i liked sideways).
while i like three kings an awful lot, and flirting with disaster almost equally for different reasons... i just don't find russel preferable in that as you point out, his wild streak can explode in his face (which, mark wahlberg aside, i think happened with much of huckabees). he seems too far in the opposite direction. (and i think anderson took a lot of risks in Life Aquatic-- Zissou's a NASTY character, thoroughly unlikable, same as Schwartzman was unlikable in Huckabees-- just i think Anderson pulled it off more)(but, yes, in a flawed movie, sure)...
but, like: when woody allen dies, are we all going to complain that all his movies were too much alike? or are we going to celebrate how just purely good annie hall is? or sleeper or purple rose or whatever. i think woody allen has made several really terrific entertaining movies even if he never pushed himself to be scorcese, say. his mileu is smaller than scorcese's but i'm lost how that affect its value.
though honestly, i've just never really quite understood the quirky complaint. its never gotten in the way of the characters for me. but with life aquatic, i think my problems with that movie, its just the characters and what they were going through just lacked the clarity of his earlier movies. his earlier movies are just simpler plotwise-- aquatic's plot was just too busy for me... but not with quirkiness so much as "serious stuff"-- cate blanchett's issues with the dad of her kid or whatever that was...
Posted by: abhay | February 04, 2005 at 08:20 PM
The Royal Tennanbaums is possibly my favortie movie of all times (A rather trivial choice, I know, and obviously not the greatest movie of all times, but still my favorite), and I must say that to me, there is nothing whatsoever "quirky", about the film or any of the characters. It all makes sense in that perfect, Aristotelian-Stasis-Inducing way that can't be properly articulated, Like the best Harold Pinter plays.
I realize that's not much of an argument, but the point is that if your wavelength is synchronized with The Royal Tennenbaums, there is not a single pixel in the entire film which doesn't seem absolutely necessary.
But I do want to point out that while Rushmore is about smeone in his very shaky way up, Tennenbaums is about what happens after the whole "Rise and Fall part", when you already hit a ground and are living your own post-mortem. While the characters are of an adolscent mind, for all of them it's an adolscent mind dealing with the position of an old man.
(Reading your post again, you did hint at this with the comment about the "burned out middle-ager", but I still felt a need to say it more explicitly).
Peli
Posted by: Peli Grietzer | February 05, 2005 at 01:14 AM
Bah. I now find out I misread a passage when you say exactly that. Oh well.
Posted by: Peli Grietzer | February 05, 2005 at 01:16 AM
J. W.,
I take your point about the stylistic uniformity of Anderson's films, but I'm not certain that the Ron Sheltons of Hollywood display that much more of a stylistic or technical range. Isn't playing comfortably within the confines of cinematic naturalism just as consistent as Anderson's reliance on theatrical self-awareness? Or to put it another way: how different are all those Elmore Leonard and Ed McBain novels from one another?
I think the problem is that we're taught to expect consistency of style from popular entertainment but we want individualism and autonomy from the "artistic" works we set above them. (Except that when we get it, we usually want the same kind of individuality over and over again, as you note - many indie comics work just as well as your examples.) This is especially true when those works maintain a consistent style of realism or naturalism, the style that passes itself off as no style at all.
I don't think we need to hold popular entertainment and art to two different standards of stylistic consistency (and, per all your examples, I'm not certain that we actually do). It doesn't make any sense to criticize Wes Anderson for his stylistic consistency and then hold him up unfavorably to people who are just as consistent, in what I think are far less interesting ways.
Essentially, your critique boils down to noticing that Wes Anderson, maker of "art films," does something that's supposed to be reserved for the crowd-pleasers. I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that - in fact, maybe it's one of the reasons I enjoy his movies.
Also, I'm not sure why you keep putting "worldview" in what appear to be sneer quotes, given that I took it from your essay.
Finally, the blogosphere would be a much more boring place indeed without prescriptive criticism - I know I would have far less to say. So keep it coming!
Posted by: Marc | February 05, 2005 at 02:09 PM