An article by Jamie Stuart

-Collage by Jamie Stuart

Here we are, one year down and another in its infancy. 2002 wasn’t a bad year for movies, though I’m sure most critics are writing their annual rants about how bad everything was. We’ll get another dose of that come Oscar time.

I do feel that we’re now firmly in the 21st Century, so to speak. Although we’re still undergoing a transition, I think certain neophyte aspects of filmmaking have established firm roots. Let’s face it: CGI is here to stay. Sure, a lot of it looks like crap, especially whenever something is generated solely using computers, then mixed with live-action -- but its ease and elasticity of application have already begun seriously augmenting the shape and movement of the medium. For instance, Russian Ark, shot in 24p, became the first feature to ever consist of a single uninterrupted Stedicam shot.

We’re in an age of Super Blockbusters. I’m talking about special effects epics like Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Spider-Man and The Matrix. They’re so large that they need to be delivered in installments, and they gross $300 million per release. Up until recently, there had only been a few films in history to ever cross that mark. Now it’s assumed.

If the ‘90s D.I.Y. generation of filmmakers displayed an economic style and found depth in pop culture, then the next generation will be fluent in digital technology and concerned with ideas and observation.

We’re undergoing a changing of the guard. Most of the giants we admired growing up are in their twilight. Young filmmakers now respond to David Fincher or Paul Thomas Anderson the way they once emulated Martin Scorsese and Stanley Kubrick.

I’m starting this on the same weekend that Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York is opening. I think this film’s response is a perfect illustration of what’s wrong with film criticism today: all of the major film critics are raving, and they’re all entrenched in middle-age. They’ve been doing this for decades, and their sensibilities and loyalties are not only constipated, but outdated.

Gangs of New York, currently rating at 77% on Rotten Tomatoes, is, quite simply, a problematic movie. It’s as bad as Heaven’s Gate, 2 decades ago -- only Michael Cimino didn’t have 3 decades of acclaim behind him. That many major mass media critics have hailed it as a masterpiece -- Peter Travers, Todd McCarthy and Richard Roeper -- suggests one of several possibilities: either they saw a different film than I did, they were blind to its reality by their starry-eyed love of Scorsese, they want Scorsese to receive a sympathy Oscar, or they were bought off. (I’ll eliminate “general incompetence” out of professional courtesy.)

Shaun’s review was dead-on. Gangs of New York magnified all of Martin Scorsese’s faults as a filmmaker. He has a general inability -- with a few exceptions -- to fashion successful narratives; he’s more interested in stylizing violence. Any time he’s left to film human moments he seems out of his depth and uncomfortable. And every time he films anything, he’s unable to let the scene’s staging dictate the pacing, because he has to force it through unnecessary camera moves and rapid, often abrupt editing.

Martin Scorsese is irrelevant at this point. He has no box office power and he’s creatively bankrupt. All he has going for him is dedicated adulation. Gangs of New York neither defines this moment nor points toward the future of filmmaking. It’s nothing more than a vanity project.

Every review I’ve read so far, including the raves, has started out by mentioning how flawed it is -- some calling it a “flawed masterpiece.” There is no such thing! If it’s that flawed, it’s NOT a masterpiece! And Gangs of New York is inherently, detrimentally flawed. It doesn’t work on a single level that it attempts. The revenge plot is uninspired, Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz were miscast in underwritten roles, and Daniel Day-Lewis gives such a brilliant and over-sized performance that he throws the picture’s balance out of whack. He’s the only consistently interesting thing about it. Also, these characters are invincible super heroes getting shot, stabbed, stabbed, stabbed, beaten, stabbed and stabbed, but never dying. They wouldn’t be so lucky to survive even with today’s modern medicine, let alone back then.

The film also features some of the worst CGI I’ve ever seen. Awful backgrounds that make old time matte paintings looks authentic, as well as flaming windows at the end that were laughably fake, are signs of a director who’s had too much time to kill -- and one who’s out of touch with modern technology.

The coda, illustrating Manhattan’s rise, marking the film’s grand statement about immigration vs. nativism and the violence which created this country, is undeserved. Nothing in the film connects with this. I’m not sure whether it was this image that held up the film’s release for a year, or whether it was added after 9/11. Regardless, the timing now comes across as more opportunistic than anything else.

Gangs of New York should have been more like Ragtime or Matewan. It should have been a multi-character/multi-plot exercise illustrating that period in time, not this silly medieval western. But Martin Scorsese lacks the dexterity, subtlety or depth to create such a work. All he’s interested in is blunt violence, and at this point he’s not even critical of it -- he seems to be glorifying it almost sexually. The ability to portray violence unflinchingly on-screen does not make somebody an artist. Nor does their personal attachment to the material. This is important, because much of Scorsese’s reputation was built upon the fact that his movies were “personal.” Who gives a shit? They’re not interesting and they’re not always well done. Just because something means a great deal to him doesn’t mean it’s going to be interesting or informative to me. Any filmmaker taking 1 or 2 years to make something is making a personal film. Marty’s personal obsessions aren’t any more important than anybody else’s.

The staleness of Gangs of New York was almost as entrenched as was the freshness of Alfonso Cuaron’s Y Tu Mama Tambien. With the exception of Minority Report, this was probably the most fun I had at the movies all year. It was so well-written and so consistently beguiling that I had a smile on my face during the entire first screening. Strangely, at the year’s end, I don’t feel the need to write a great deal about it, other than Cuaron took many of the basic tenets of the French New Wave, in particular Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, and perfected them. His next film will be the third Harry Potter installment. Any director who can effortlessly segue from a raunchy road film like this to a hugely successful kids franchise is somebody playing with a full deck.

I think that for any art to be successful and important it has to be culturally acute -- not just in terms of society, but in relation to the evolution of the medium. Being a filmmaker, I’m constantly aware of these things. I try to understand from my own experiences what writers or directors are attempting to achieve and why they succeed or often fall short. I’m also keen that creative progression and creative production are rarely in synch. I find that there’s generally at least a 5-year gap between the pinnacle of progressive thought and where movies actually are. Critics, however, don’t have a clue, so when Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman or PT Anderson experiment, they get praised for daring originality -- when in fact they’re simply the lucky ones who got in a position to make those types of films, not necessarily their best representatives. But, I suppose, since it is so difficult to get those types of film’s made, critics and audiences have to cheer them on.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s talent isn’t in question. One day he will make a great film. I don’t think he has yet. He needs to mature. He’s been making features with accolades since his early 20’s -- not nearly enough time for him to have matured as a person before attaining such responsibility. His films are formally and technically ambitious, but I don’t feel like they ever add up to a whole lot.

His recent release Punch-Drunk Love was probably his most enjoyable film to date. But it was ultimately plotless and carried about as much weight as a cloud sculpture. Experimenting for the sole sake of experimenting is not very interesting or productive. I’m afraid that unless he starts understanding his audience better, PTA will become intrinsically obscure. It appeared by casting Adam Sandler that he was attempting to create a more mainstream concoction, just as David Fincher followed up Fight Club with the commercial Panic Room. Instead, he chose a different path -- one which certainly garnered him respect, but one which did nothing to help his career otherwise. If he continues to pursue this direction, he’ll have to consider working with smaller budgets, because the studios won’t be as likely to give him creative control over large films that don’t earn anything, regardless of their prestige or originality. He’ll have to seek international financing and wind up possibly as another David Lynch, with a small devoted following and no commercial appeal. Then again, I’m not sure he wouldn’t mind that, since 2 of his idols are Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese.

Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman are filmmakers of a similar peerage to PTA. They’re both determined to present their audiences with films they’ve never seen before. In my opinion, Jonze and Kaufman’s Adaptation was probably the worst best-intentioned movie of the year. It was ugly to look at and the editing was inconsistent. Worst of all, I sat there completely bored. I didn’t care about a single character or their obsessive dilemmas. There wasn’t a single plot development that felt like it was part of a dramatic progression -- none of the events earned the right to come after what preceded them, making for a flat experience.

Jonze’s straightforward style is uninvolving. Whereas other surrealistic comedies, from Alex Cox’s Repo Man to the Coen Brothers’ Raising Arizona and Barton Fink to Luis Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, make a point of tuning the visual aesthetics to the content, Spike Jonze has made 2 films that are dark and muddy, and feature poor timing. I understand that he prefers a humble, naturalistic approach to counter his bizarre material, but natural doesn’t at all preclude interesting.

As with their previous film Being John Malkovich, I felt that Adaptation was more of a conceptual stunt than anything else. I like the ideas, since they’re similar enough to my own, I just don’t like what they do with them. (Perhaps my reaction is out of envy.) I can’t stand their postmodern self-awareness and blatant references. It makes their films lifeless. Nothing is authentic, emotionally or dramatically. It’s all college-level thinking, and what makes matters worse is that all of the characters are cartoons, not even caricatures the way the Coens create sometimes. With the exception of their nebbish main characters everybody else seems undeveloped and existing as decoration to move the plot forward. Adaptation was masturbation.

At the other end of the spectrum is Alexander Payne, who scored with About Schmidt, and proved himself to be the best young writer-director in the game at this time. There’s nothing flashy or self-conscious about his work. He’s a genuine storyteller who’s not afraid to include the most uncomfortable details -- details that at once make us squirm while we cheer their audacity (think Matthew Broderick’s crotch-washing in Election). Payne and writing partner Jim Taylor have a genuine understanding of great satire, from the politics of Election to the brilliant abortion humor of Citizen Ruth. They’re unafraid to show humanity’s cheeky flaws.

Alexander Payne also doesn’t seem to seek much publicity or have any interest in creating a media image for himself. When I met him at The New York Film Festival, in September, he actually lent a moment to talk to me. I had just expected to grab a quick photo of him amidst the after-screening frenzy, but he genuinely took time to consider my thoughts before his publicist whisked him away. That made a real impression on me.

About Schmidt may very well become an American classic. It’s certainly a worthy follow-up to Jack Nicholson’s Five Easy Pieces. What it lacks, in relation to other young filmmakers and enthusiasts, is flash and youth. About Schmidt plays to a different audience than Punch-Drunk Love. It’s a testament to Payne’s ability that he could so accurately portray a senior citizen’s flickering existence -- and he deserves credit for even being intrigued by its possibilities.

Speaking of maturity, we were lucky enough to receive Pedro Almodovar’s Talk To Her. If Almodovar ever makes a more graceful, delicate, fully realized film it would be surprising. That’s not a slight on him, but a compliment to the success of this masterwork.

Talk To Her was a film that looked and breathed dedication. Everybody involved was totally committed to its life. I was pleased to see Geraldine Chaplin so adored. Almodovar, in Leonor Watling, has found another beauty as pure and disarming as Penelope Cruz in All About My Mother. Let’s hope Leonor doesn’t choose to come Stateside so quickly and play herself out in the media to the point of exhaustion.

The picture’s vagina sequence was a classic. It came from nowhere and left me laughing and awed at its daring. Talk To Her was a genuine work of art -- a personal film that Martin Scorsese could learn a lot from.

Whereas Martin Scorsese made a film about New York’s past, Spike Lee took on the present -- and made his best film in 13 years. 25th Hour captured the anxiety and sense of suspended animation New York felt in the months after 9/11. For me, personally, I was glad that somebody got on screen what I had tried to capture in my screenplay The All-Nighter -- a genuine street-level feel for the city that never sleeps.

Visually, it didn’t resemble any of Lee’s previous films. He shot 25th Hour in widescreen with restraint. Only in some of the dream sequences is there the feel of his patented wide-angle compositions.

The movie had its share of problems -- the ending was drawn out, and I never really bought Philip Seymour Hoffman as a Jewish trust-fund brat -- but it was an overall success. The characters were precisely drawn in all of their ethnic and economic disparities, and Spike Lee deserves credit for nailing on celluloid complaints about Enron, the Bush Administration, and terrorism. At the press screening I attended, Edward Norton’s mirror monologue woke everybody up. I saw pens come alive jotting down notes.

Most critics didn’t care. They dismissed it as merely another Spike Lee Joint. Such a declaration can be seen as a sign of middle-class disconnect.

My favorite screening experience came during Roman Polanski’s The Pianist. In 2001, I drew a series of Holiday cards for Jami Bernard to give to her friends. One of them, based on her script, featured a comic strip that repeatedly displayed the back of her Daily News colleague Jack Mathew’s head. I had never actually seen the back of his head, but she described it for me. Well, at The Pianist he sat in the front row -- and let me tell you, the square back of his head looked exactly like the cartoon!

That was probably the only funny thing about The Pianist, Polanski’s strongest effort in years. Unlike the young and experimental Polanski of Repulsion or Chinatown, his approach was very straight forward. The camera never really called attention to itself, yet was as tightly choreographed as anything he’s done.

Adrien Brody’s performance as Wladyslaw Szpilman wasn’t a performance. He inhabited the role. Strangely, even though we followed his character through virtually every scene, we never really knew who he was. He never had the luxury of relaxing and expressing his mind, because he was too busy trying to survive. Everything was reacting, not acting. The only real expression he ever offered was when he played piano.

The final third of The Pianist played similarly to what the Coens had planned for To The White Sea, in that there’s virtually no dialogue, just the struggle to survive. It’s so subtly done here that you almost don’t even realize there’s no dialogue. Each death cheat became more absurd to the point where I almost laughed out of nervousness when the Russian troops shot at him during his rescue.

Focus Features, which released The Pianist, also released the most respected film of the year, Far From Heaven. Focus Features is the conglomerated result of mergers, including proud indie labels Gramercy, USA and Good Machine. They’ve consistently ranked at the top of year-end honors for the last few years, with titles like Traffic, The Man Who Wasn’t There, and Gosford Park.

I still don’t know how I feel about Far From Heaven. Throughout its meticulous calculating and technical precision, I kept wondering, Why did this movie NEED to be made? What was so urgent about it, other than Todd Haynes’ fetish, and its formal challenges?

Far From Heaven is an art film for the sake of being an art film. It’s not necessarily saying anything new, other than in its context -- namely, Douglas Sirk’s work. Besides that, I’ve seen too many attempts at using idealized archetypes to promote subversion (Blue Velvet, The Truman Show, parts of Happiness). It’s too obvious a conceit, though certainly one I’ve taken part in with my work -- I just wouldn’t use it as the foundation for an entire picture. Beyond that, I also found the melodrama lacking in drama, heading too easily toward inevitability. This unfortunately magnified the conceptual stunt that the film is, regardless of the abundant symbolism throughout.

It does work, however, as a mirror for us to hold our current social standards to. It’s a liberal liberal’s movie, concerned not just with racial equality, but also sexual freedom. The use of both issues seemed heavy-handed, but in perspective with modern attitudes it illustrated how far things have come, and how far we are from the expressed idyll.

Picking up where Far From Heaven left off, Paul Schrader’s Auto Focus was a delightful surprise. Both features dealt with the social hypocrisy of that period, only Auto Focus followed it to its death.

For the first time since Mishima, Paul Schrader successfully integrated all aspects of filmmaking into a fully functioning whole. The picture’s cinematography and art direction remained in synch with Bob Crane’s deteriorating existence, subtly exposing the rot. I had no qualms with this film. Its nihilistic conclusion felt appropriate.

Auto Focus had balls for a dramatic film, and Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine had a pair for a documentary. Although it wasn’t really as much of a documentary as it was agitpop, Columbine brought up issues that everybody else was too scared to -- with the possible exception of Spike Lee in 25th Hour.

It was exhilarating to watch Charlton Heston prove himself to be a racist on film. The abstracted clip of George W. Bush’s “evildoers” rhetoric alone was worth the price of admission. For all its faults, I was jumping with enthusiasm for Columbine.

As I’m now nearing the end of this article, I’ll bookend it by informing the reader that this is the weekend Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can is opening. The film serves as an allegory of the Baby Boom generation, spanning from 1963, the year of JFK’s assassination, to 1974, the year of Richard Nixon’s resignation. It portrays naive innocence being shattered, leading to a rebellious attempt at redefinition, only for it to eventually be co-opted by the system. Only it isn’t innocence that’s been co-opted, but the criminal experience that corrupted it -- just like in A Clockwork Orange.

Mr. Spielberg has proven himself to be the best working director there is. Not the best auteur, but the best director. He’s never fashioned himself an auteur, and since the Auteur Theory was the only significant school of thought ever promoted within the critical establishment, he’s never been considered a filmmaker of “high art.” That was something reserved for Martin Scorsese. I’ll say this though: Steven Spielberg is a better director than Martin Scorsese is an auteur.

When I watch Scorsese’s films, I see struggle. I see films that have been worked over, reassembled and often remain incomplete. The critics misinterpret this as the mark of greatness. I consider it the mark of a great effort, not necessarily a great finished film.

When I watch Spielberg’s films I see joy in every frame. I don’t feel the filmmaker’s angst, I feel his unstoppable enthusiasm -- even in it’s darkest, most violent moments. For me, that’s more inspiring than watching films with high mountains and very low valleys. His films feel more complete and even-tempered.

The difference in their sensibilities is obvious, and within 5 days in December the public was shown an example of both. The barometer was Leonardo DiCaprio. The question was: Which filmmaker would use him to better advantage?

Considering that Catch Me If You Can earned $9 million on its opening day -- the entirety of Gangs of New York’s opening weekend -- the public has spoken. The critics too. Not that each individual review has been better for Catch Me, per se, but its overall positive response, signified by a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, compared with Gangs’ 77%, is unavoidable proof.

My feeling was always that if Steven Spielberg could ever match uncompromising intellect with his mastery of craft, any filmmaker anywhere would have a hard time comparing. He’s done that with both A.I.: Artificial Intelligence and this year’s Minority Report.

Minority Report might have been the first fully integrated masterpiece of this century. It drew upon everything that’s vital about the medium and our culture and presented us with a coherent whole. Fusing the aesthetic tones, technical advances and nihilistic skepticism initiated by The Matrix and Fight Club, with the genre hopping of Generation X and the experience of a filmmaking master, Minority Report kicked the bar up a couple of notches.

It was the first film in a while that I watched and honestly felt was ahead of what I could concept, both dramatically and aesthetically. Is it perfect? No, nothing is. Everything needs to be judged in relation to whatever else is around. And this year nothing came close to Minority Report.

Where is Spielberg supposed to go from here? He’s had as great a career as any director ever, with 3 Oscars, a prize from Cannes, and a majority of the most popular films ever made. He’s at the pinnacle right now. There aren’t even anymore lifetime achievement awards for him to win; in his mid-50s, he’s already won them all! Will his influence start to die down finally, or will he forge ahead to scale even greater heights?

Steven Spielberg’s progressive arc is astounding. From TV shows like Columbo, to the TV movie Duel, to the groundbreaking Jaws, to the roller coaster of the Indiana Jones series, to the intimate sci-fi of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, to the surreal juxtapositions of Empire of the Sun, to the epic realism of Saving Private Ryan, to the bleak future worlds of A.I. and Minority Report, and now the chase picture Catch Me If You Can, he’s shown more versatility -- successful versatility -- than any other working filmmaker. Period.

I don’t see any younger filmmakers who’ve established themselves as his heir. The closest thing is M. Night Shayamalan, who seems content to keep repeating the same formula over and over (supernatural thrillers set around Philadelphia, in which the main character discovers a hidden power, and the audience is thrown a third act surprise). Peter Jackson is too idiosyncratic, I think, to take the mantle. For all the scope of his The Lord of the Rings series, he’d be just as content making small zombie films. Brett Ratner would like to be a successful mainstream director, and he is. I just don’t see him maturing into films like Schindler’s List. And Michael Bay...I won’t even go there.

He’s been faulted for being a mainstream director. Well, popcorn movies are always going to rule the industry -- and it is an industry. Aren’t we better having Steven Spielberg as our cultural icon than say, Jerry Bruckheimer or Ron Howard? We should be glad to have somebody with such a feel for narrative and visuals -- and somebody who honestly means well.

I know I’m not the next Spielberg. Not that I don’t believe myself to have the ability, but because my vision is a little more offbeat. I’m too stubborn. Too subversive. More an auteur than a director.

Truth is, I never saw much of a point in comparing newer artists to older artists, suggesting that one is filling the role of the other. People come to prominence based on what their times call for. Speaking of time, here’s to 2003!

-Copyright 2002 by Jamie Stuart


 

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