Andrew Sarris’s perspectives on film have been an inspiration to many film enthusiasts who are more educated in the art and history of cinema than I am.
Nevertheless, when I heard that he was among the many staffers laid off by The New York Observer in June, I was dismayed enough that I knew I should write something about it. Sarris’s insightful articles have often helped me appreciate films more deeply. Even if I disagreed with him, he made me think about movies in ways that enriched the experience. His writing has humbled me and challenged me to do better.
And he wrote from a very personal place, without pretending that his pronouncement on a film was The Proper Opinion. I always understood that he was sharing his particular experience. That personable approach made his writing a pleasure to read.
I started to write a tribute.
Then, there were conflicting rumors, some saying that he would stay on at the Observer. So I put my tribute on hold.
Apparently, it was true after all: Sarris is no longer reviewing films there. So I’ll go ahead and offer this belated note of appreciation.
I never saw him jump on a bandwagon. His perspectives were his own, and he sometimes liked films that were unpopular, and sometimes disliked films when it seemed uncool to do so. (You can scan through Sarris’s top ten lists, dating all the way back to 1962, here.)
Here are a few excerpts from the archives of the Observer, reviews that I specifically recalled and went searching for. Yes, most of them are for films from the later part of his career, and yes the formatting is screwy on some of those pages. The Observer‘s online archives have some strange glitches. But the articles are still worth reading.
Mr. Arcand is scathing about the inefficiency and corruption he sees around him; he may be stepping on some sensitive, left-leaning toes over here by debunking the idealization of Canada’s health system by many Americans seeking cheaper drugs for seniors. (This is not to deny that the American health system is a shambles, for sale to the highest bidder at George Bush’s endless fund-raisers.)
Mr. Arcand’s tweaking of the left begins to draw blood when a virtual chorus line of disaffected academics begin to chant all the various political and cultural-isms, from Maoism to feminism, which they’d first embraced and then discarded over the past two decades. It’s a wicked number, and the point is made even sharper when Rémy recalls a visit to Beijing, where he attempted to woo a beautiful Chinese cultural employee by praising Mao’s Cultural Revolution-without realizing that the woman’s father, a professor himself, had been reduced to cleaning pig pens, and her mother had committed suicide. (Rémy later deduces that, in her mind, she couldn’t be sure whether he was a C.I.A. agent or a complete imbecile to be saying something so ridiculous.)
As for those on the right, Mr. Arcand certainly won’t win many friends there with his devastating attack on the punitive drug laws in effect in Canada and the United States, and on the sadistic puritanism of the medical profession in denying adequate relief from pain (the fear being that the terminally ill are in danger of becoming drug addicts). Indeed, I have never seen a movie as frank about the inherent corruption and hypocrisy of the anti-drug culture.
What is most unprecedented about the narrative, however, is its largely unsympathetic treatment of the yapping and yowling citizens of Gotham City, a gloomy echo of ourselves, at the gas pumps and grocery stores, still looking for easy answers from the highest bidders for our votes. In this respect, Ledger’s Joker brilliantly incarnates the devil in all our miserable souls as we contemplate a world seemingly without hope.
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… Mr. Nolan seems to have fallen into a darker mood between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, less than three years later. Has the world changed that much for the worse in the interim? One is hard-pressed to answer that question in the negative, though it may seem strange for many that so much weight is being given to a movie about a comic-book superhero. Actually, the moral despair in The Dark Knight has moved me so strongly because Mr. Nolan and his collaborators have not gone out of their way to zap the zeitgeist in primitively Bush-bashing fashion as have so many contemporary fiction and nonfiction filmmakers with a chip on their left shoulders. The political issues in The Dark Knight remain local and municipal, not really global despite the aforementioned excursion to Hong Kong.
Yet at a time when all social systems are veering toward moral bankruptcy, I was struck by the way Gotham City is presented for the first time in Batman movie history as a city with global connections, and not merely as a self-contained abstraction of a city with its own hermetically sealed morality and innocence.
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I previously have had my own auteurist doubts about Mr. Nolan’s work, even though he has been much honored for his stylistic innovations in Memento (2001) and The Prestige (2006). But after The Dark Knight, I may have to rethink my past reservations about Mr. Nolan’s place in the 21st-century cinema.
I must report that during the screening of the movie, I felt an excruciating sensation of helplessness and hopelessness, as if the Holocaust were still about to happen, and the poor wretches on the screen could not begin to anticipate the totality of the event…What makes The Pianist authentically Polanskian is the absurdist detachment of the artist who keeps practicing his art even when the world is crumbling around him…Mr. Polanski is in his element here: alone, abandoned, but still consoled by his art, which is more than he has ever revealed before about the source of his spiritual survival.
What I found most perplexing about the tragic turn of events was how a championship fight that ended in a quasi-criminal act fails to illicit any repercussions or protests, by Frankie or anyone else. I know John F. Kennedy said that life was unfair long before he was assassinated, and I know film critics have been conditioned to condemn happy endings, but does that warrant such excessive malignancy?
What’s amused and frustrated me somewhat is how critics have scrupulously avoided going into detail on the sudden pile-up of misfortunes that supposedly makes Mr. Eastwood’s film so moving. Of course, they don’t want to spoil the fun for the audience, who are left wincing over the sudden onset of terminal pain and sorrow. But I would suggest that to describe the final outcome as “tragedy,” as some critics have done, is a gross misstatement. Tragedies don’t depress me, because they are carefully constructed to avoid the vagaries of blind accident and random evil.
In the end, Frankie accedes to Maggie’s pleas and facilitates her suicide – after which, according to Scrap’s narration, Frankie disappears from view, never to be seen again.
The thorny issue of mercy killing becomes something of an anticlimax next to the oppressive conjunction of an evil fighter and a monster mother – I would argue that nothing in the narrative prepares us for such a disastrous dénouement, though some critics claim to have discerned an ominous darkening of the texture of the film as it seemed to be rollicking along on its Rocky-like inspirational way. I beg to differ as I rest my case against Million Dollar Baby. This is not to say that I wish to demean the work of Mr. Eastwood, Mr. Freeman and Ms. Swank: They are all excellent in what is, in my perhaps ultra-Aristotelian view, a losing cause.
Mr. Depp has been hailed by critics for his hitherto infallible instincts for avoiding any project that has threatened to become a blockbuster, and for infusing potentially flamboyant roles with an arrestingly underplayed gentleness, calmness and almost mystical sincerity. He was completely overshadowed by Leonardo DiCaprio in Lasse Hallström’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), but the more perceptive critics noted that it was Mr. Depp who kept this fragile fractured-family story from flying apart. Mr. DiCaprio, as we all know, made the mistake of going on to become a titanic star with nowhere to go but down as he got older.
Yet now that Mr. Depp is turning 40, some of his erstwhile admirers have suggested that it’s time for him to look after his old age with a franchise series of his own. I am a notoriously unreliable prophet in these matters, but I doubt that Jack Sparrow has that kind of staying power, either commercially or mythologically, especially since Mr. Depp plays him as too much of a peacock of indeterminate sexuality. Indeed, it’s Mr. Depp who seems to be giving the flashy DiCaprio performance here, and Mr. Rush who provides the funnier and more subtle performance usually associated with Mr. Depp.
And amid all the feverish Depp-worship, the indispensable contribution of Orlando Bloom as Will Turner, the romantic blacksmith-swordsman who wins Elizabeth’s heart after saving her skin, has been much underrated. Yet is it not the guy who gets the girl, or loves her à la folie , who lies at the heart of any popular film franchise? Now that Sparrow has regained his ship at the final fadeout, what will he do for an encore? Rape and pillage and plunder with a jaunty step? Or decide that the drunken pass he made at Elizabeth on a deserted island was the real thing after all? I can’t imagine.
The most original stroke in the Pirates story is provided by Jack Davenport’s Commander Norrington, who, after losing Elizabeth to Will Turner and watching Jack Sparrow elude his grasp, reacts with surprising grace and gallantry. Up to that point, Norrington has been presented as a stiff, pompous figure of authority, completely lacking in imagination. But in the end, he exhibits both generosity and humor in resigning himself to his fate. He turns out to be the one real mensch in the film.
Before I try to explain why I liked Lars von Trier’s Dogville more than I ever thought I would, I should provide a context as to why this film has become such a bone of contention-among critics and audiences alike-ever since it was unveiled at last spring’s Cannes Film Festival. Many Americans on the scene professed to despise it as stupidly anti-American. Europeans reportedly liked it more, but what do we expect from jealous old Europe? Still, I didn’t really follow the controversy with any degree of professional curiosity. Nor did I lose any sleep awaiting the arrival in America of Mr. von Trier’s latest alleged outrage. And when I learned that Dogville was three hours long, I considered delaying sitting through it until it came out on VHS or DVD. But curiosity got the better of me, and I sneaked off to Dan Talbot’s Lincoln Plaza Cinema for a peek, promising myself that I’d walk out if it proved excessively boring or offensive. After all, I’m still convalescing from Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ .
Anyway, Dogville turned out to be neither boring nor offensive. I found it a huge improvement over Mr. von Trier’s previous vicarious visit to Franz Kafka’s Amerika in the deplorable Björk disaster, Dancer in the Dark (2000). Though only marginally mainstream, Mr. von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (1996)-his most favorably received S&M exercise to date-doesn’t prepare the viewer for the shockingly abstract and literally board-game-like cinematic strategy of Dogville . You just have to see it to believe it. Frankly, I have never seen anything like it, which is not to say that it’s good or bad, but it is different and even original.
There are several points to be made here about what exactly Mr. Tarantino represents in the current cinema. For one thing, he is the most casually color-blind Caucasian filmmaker around; not merely in terms of a liberal “tolerance” for African-Americans and Asians, but with a deep and passionate embrace of all their cultural nuances.
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What redeems Mr. Tarantino’s violence from mere exploitation is his genuine affection for the genres he celebrated, particularly his unironic appreciation, in Kill Bill, of the various moral codes by which his heroines conduct their lives and establish limits to their warrior behavior.
But what makes him especially unusual is a fondness and respect for women that never lapses into lust or lechery. Even Truffaut, for all his professed love for women, often disguised his womanizing onscreen with the affected expression of a blushing little boy with his hand caught in the cookie jar.
As it happens, Ms. Thurman’s Amazonian prowess as the Bride in Kill Bill has been compared to that of Sigourney Weaver as Murphy in Ridley Scott’s scary Alien (1979). The big difference in that Ms. Weaver’s character is just trying to save her skin from the danger posed by an insidiously malignant extraterrestrial. Ms. Weaver’s Murphy isn’t looking for trouble; it simply keeps coming at her. By contrast, Ms. Thurman’s Bride ventures across oceans and continents to find her enemies and vanquish them in single combat with their weapons of choice. She wishes to redress a wrong, and she devotes herself entirely to this mission.