Maelstrom: "Almost Famous" and the Trouble with Extended Editions
31 July 2005
What can you say about a five-year-old movie that was reborn?
"Almost Famous" (2000) was Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical ode to the music upon which he grew up, started a career, and made his name. Successful and Oscar-winning (best original screenplay), the film came and went and came again, within the year, as a DVD titled, oddly enough, "Untitled: The Bootleg Cut." Its reincarnation was a director’s edition featuring 35 extra minutes of footage and a slew of special features. Included in the new edition – go figure – the original theatrical release.
This is a reflection of the age in which we live: the Age of Multiple Returns. DVDs have begun to be more lucrative than their films’ release to cinemas, and the result has been faster turnarounds between the date the film appears on screen and the date it is given to the public for individual consumption. What a water-cooler moment it must have been, then, when an executive somewhere first thought to burn any given movie not once, but twice, to DVD, the same year it was released or many years later, as director’s cuts, extended editions, platinum limited trademark copies, critical recreations, silver anniversary commemorations, and so on.
This year, this momentum has come under fire somewhat. Hollywood suffered through a dismal 19-week attendance drought, and their scapegoat has been how quickly movies are now released on DVD. Perhaps scapegoat is too strong a term since a recent AP-AOL poll suggested that 70 percent of pollees would rather watch movies at home – unsurprising given the improving quality of home-movie theaters – but rising ticket prices and, let’s face it, the low quality of the movies Hollywood released in that 19-weeks have also not done much to inspire the moviegoers to dance to Tinsel Town’s tune. It’s a quality driven industry, in the end, and any way the film industry and theater owners divide it, they depend on the films themselves.
Thus, we return to "Almost Famous," or more precisely, to "Untitled." They are both quality films by most measures: incredibly strong scripts, incredibly well acted, competently put together by a director who is a star in his own right (and frankly, more impressive, I feel, for having been a staff writer for Rolling Stone at the age of sixteen). I stress the word "both" here, because as much as Cameron Crowe would like to claim that the latter makes "you feel much more like you’re on tour with the band, and you have a chance to get to know the characters in much greater depth" -- I quote the director’s cut’s back cover -- they are two different films. Eisenstein theorized that a shot cannot be placed next to any two other shots without eliciting a different response from the viewer. How can a film extended by half an hour add anything but new responses – as Crowe says, "greater depth" – that did not originally apply. The Butterfly Effect -- not chaos theory, but the stock tattoo butterfly that’s on a thousand ankles worldwide, yet seems inevitably fresh and new and quirky? How can an extended edition be at all the same thing?
This is a conversation that can be had for the "Lord of the Rings" franchise as easily as it could for Crowe’s piece. The companies surrounding "Lord of the Rings" mastered the art of DVD promotion, releasing the theatrical versions after the films’ first runs, then waiting for Christmas the following year to release monster extended recreations on four disks each.
Crowe’s piece offers us an extended edition different from Peter Jackson’s Magnum Opuses: where Jackson was extending mostly, I feel, for fans of the books, Crowe was adding... what exactly? A lot of conversations in "Untitled" have been expanded from "Almost Famous." The overriding theme in added sections seems to be awkwardness: a shower scene, a strange bedroom visit from a sister’s ex-boyfriend, a failed goodbye while Lester Bangs waits for the bus, a brilliant sequence of a radio interview referred to in the original film, now seen, and thankfully so – Quince, a stoned disk jockey played by Tenacious D veteran Kyle Gass, passes out before the members of the film’s leading band, inciting a light-hearted feud, on-air. Crowe also added a pretty significant point of view break: we suddenly are party to a nicely-crafted conversation between two reluctant lovers in a hotel ice-room, a moment the film’s very central protagonist, William Miller, was not party to, and therefore, we should not be, no matter how well-crafted the conversation be.
The question is, who cares? There is no Middle Earth here, there are no fans ready to chant like orcs and demand Crowe’s head on a Scots sword (imagine what they would have done to Jackson had he made "Rings" into only one film like the Weinsteins suggested). In "Almost Famous," we have only Crowe, his story, his life, and how he intended to put it on screen. Why bother with two editions? "Because the director’s cut is the pure vision of the script," you say, "cutting for time, for substance, to put it on screen in theater – i.e. the cutting done by executives – is a corruption of the film art." And to you insufferable lot, I say, "tough."
The "cutting done by executives" is the film process. Why? They have the money, and without the money the movies do not get made. The same is true of theatre, of music, of fine arts. So be it for film.
The editing that gets done after the director is part of the process, after all, like the second editor to journalists, the second draft of the published text. True, some executives would seek -- or have sought -- to cut out all but the most cliche in films, to remove the very thing that gives a film the identity to be worth seeing. In those cases, let filmmakers strive to have their own voice. Let filmmakers fight. But when the cutting is done for less obscene reasons, why argue?
"Almost Famous" is a good example. Academy Award winning in its original contexts, the extended verison is long and less focused; I remind you of the point of view break. Its "greater depth" is also uninteresting character development – certainly nothing that did not exist in first movie. The same $3.5 million soundtrack (a tremendous soundtrack) is there without alteration, the same acting. So, apart from the radio interview and the timing of the line "You’re still young enough to be honest," said to Miller after he lies about his age, little makes the new version worthwhile. Little, except the temptation to buy it because its extended, which is, after all, the point.
In the interest of full disclosure, I must break with my critical facade for a moment to add that I am a big fan of the original film. I might not immediately agree with Joel Siegel that "Almost Famous" is "the best rock and roll movie ever" – I would turn Mr. Siegel’s attention to "Don’t Look Back," "This is Spinal Tap," "Stop Making Sense," and "Tommy," just for starters – but I do reserve a certain central place for it in my filmic mind. I think, because it’s a road movie, as much as it is a rock movie. An "Easy Rider" with a kid, whom I identified with when I first saw it (whom I identify with now, since I’m struggling for interviews just as he is).
That perspective notwithstanding, a greater issue is at work. That of sales. What is the permanence of film, anymore, if DVDs are being released with extended versions, fuller versions, deleted scenes, scenes just recently unearthed in a vault somewhere? Aren’t deleted scenes just an indication that the filmmaker didn’t do his job to begin, making sure that what he shot would fit into story and time frames? Weren’t Lucas’ new editions of "Star Wars" worse than the originals because they were technically updated?
No, give me the genuine article. The original cut. The studio version. I want the film that has all the sweat and tears and fights behind it. Give me the studio recreations for good and bad, because, where there is bad, we can learn, and where there is good, there is bound to be a good filmmaker who refused to let his voice be overthrown.
If the filmgoing audience lets itself get sucked into this frenzy of director’s special versions – an easy thing to do since it seems so much more the right thing to do – than what’s to stop a film from having seven or eight or eighteen DVD versions? What’s to keep studios from making money off test edits and pre-prints, packaging them as rough drafts, two for $20, if they were so generous as to set the price so low? Where would the rebirths end?
The "Untitled" package offers an intesesting concession: both the director’s cut and the original theatrical release, together between two disks. An interesting concept, though I wonder if it could be done in one blow, an option to watch the film with or without deleted scenes. A thought for the rushing tide of DVD salesmanship that may not have the gravity to be reversed.
It’s a question of integrity, in the final analysis. Film as permanent article. Film cannot be an accountable or documentable form if it can be re-released over and over again. Film would have no real texts, no substance: the directors would know they could always go back and try again. There would be only additions.
Can’t the silence be at times more compelling than the sound?
In the days before video brought movies into the home, the audience had no way to know what was or was not the original film. It had no options: there was only the movie as it played when it played. Perhaps we should go back to that. It would solve the theater owners’ problems. They, I am sure, would have little to say.
Arthur Ryel-Lindsey » Comments:
Strangers on a Train: Film According to the Hollywood Stock Exchange
25 July 2005
Fella said, We must never forget that we are Human. And, as humans, we must dream. And when we dream . . . we dream of money . . .
David Mamet
"The Spanish Prisoner"
-~-
I would like to call my participation in the Hollywood Stock Exchange a hobby or a past time. Rather, I would like to call it a talent, but I fear that claiming my minutes looking at HSX a talent is on a par with my talent at standing on "The El" in Chicago’s Loop. Both give me the sense that I have progressed. Depending on how far I look into the distance, both give me the illusion that I am moving faster or slower. But eventually, on both, I end up where I started.
The Hollywood Stock Exchange (www.hsx.com) is easiest described as a stock market simulation. Instead of stocks, HSXs’ patrons use fictitious money to buy, sell, and trade movies and box office stars.
In fact, HSX, established in April 1996, is "the longest continuously operating prediction market," according to its website.
"Fake stock," I call it, "go see X movie, I have ‘fake stock’ in it."
A big name film like "Harry Potter" or "Star Wars" garners a high IPO and more or less increases to Intel-like stature over time. Other films, like Mamet’s forthcoming "Diary of a Young London Physician" – released on the stock market in October 2000, supposedly starring Jude Law and based on "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and still, according to HSX, in "concept" mode – fall to rock bottom and do not move much at all.
All told, it is a familiar, if not brilliant, recreation of the economic steam engines that power the country.
For a "movie buff," it is a lot of fun, too. The stock prices rise and fall as the curiosity in films and, eventually, their box office takes fluctuate. A surprise film heavily invested in can bring riches beyond one’s wildest fancies. A film that fails can knock you down to or below the $2 million you start the game with.
As far as stars go, they act as bonds on the stock exchange of Katzenberg’s dreaming. Buying Johnny Depp three years ago returns a nice net gain today, but be wary of symbol JDEPP if the man himself does not have any major roles looming on the horizon. Directors, I have noticed, come at a considerably lower price.
HSX has other advantages than indirect industry tracking. An active HSX trader can follow movies from concept to contempt with remarkable ease. Many HSX stocks are for films that are still only a glint in a given director’s eye – again, Mamet’s "Diary" – if they have not already been scrapped. All HSX needs is an official announcement. Also, it has a venue for investing in "funds," large accounts you pay into handled by more expert HSXers than yourself, and "options," quick accounts based on the films being released the next weekend or other industry happenings like predicting Academy Award winners.
All this has reeled in a weekly trader volume of about 21,000, the website says, with over a quarter million trades per week. The website comes with a fully-integrated research companion to help subscribers chart the rise and fall of specific films – I mean, stocks. One can ask advice, read recent reviews and articles, enter a discussion group and add his or her voice to whatever matter is at hand. And while I am pleased so many people take such a unified interest in the film market – and I stress the word, "market" – I cannot help but lean back from time to time to breathe a protracted sigh and say, "Wow."
For underneath its glittery surface, HSX is exhibiting the precise and unstoppable problem with the film industry, rather than its solution. Namely, big money.
Granted, I assume many of the people trading on HSX are movie fans; how else did they find the site? I would go a step further and assume movie fans might be more interested in film quality than film business, but maybe that is a step too far. On HSX, films have become tradeable commodities, "fake stock." Perhaps, to the Selznicks and Mayers and Weinsteins of the world, they have always been, but to humble movie attendees, even to myself, an active HSX trader, I wonder if this interest in the ups and downs of an art industry become financial market is the best perspective to take. Could this just be making films less user-friendly?
Moreover, HSX itself is flawed. It short steps one of the foundations of the stock exchange model: uncertainty. Since its main source of market fluctuation is box office numbers, HSX can be easily "mastered" by buying into big name films shortly before they are released, if the buyer expects the film to financially succeed. When the film does succeed, the price skyrockets, as does the buyer’s revenues.
Consider "Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith," stock symbol STAR3. Certainly, no one doubted that George Lucas’ much-anticipated film would be a financial success. According to the HSX Market Lab, STAR3's daily closes fluctuated around $290 in the days before the film’s May 19, 2005, release. After the 19th but before the 23rd, the price rocket launched to nearly $357. Meanwhile, the shares held in STAR3 peaked at approximately 413 million the weekend of the release while the shares daily traded went from about 20 million to 70 million.
How about a film that did well financially but poor critically? "Fantastic Four" – FFOUR – released July 8, 2005, sank from nearly $140 a share late June to $113 the weekend of its release, I assume in the wake of its bad press. After the weekend and its surprisingly high monetary yield: $154 per share. It is all about the money, after all – shall we celebrate this disappointment?
HSX devotees will argue that the game is not so easy, and indeed it is not, since, as I have mentioned, I often find my HSX account creeping downward. That is because I cannot help but invest a lot of my $2 million in the smaller films, the "Andrew Henry’s Meadows" of the film world, on the hope that Zach Braff’s next film – still in development – will become the next "Garden State," a huge earner for the few HSXers who bought into it from the start. Few "Garden State"s are out there, but I feel that, since its so hard to convince people to see the smaller flicks, I owe them enough to pay for them – kinda.
Still unsatisfied, the devotees will also mention that this Star Wars liftoff phenomenon is balanced by the marquee films that surprisingly fail. But aren’t those stink bombs pretty easy to spot as well, or at least, as an investor, easy to refrain from? Maybe not, but it hardly matters when a "Harry Potter" or "Spiderman" or movie version of "The Simpsons" remains on the slate. Sometimes you lose. Most times you win.
This is getting off my point somewhat, but it is related to the kind of simplification HSX has created for the film business. Its model seems too easy: quantity, rather than that other thing we scarce dare mention. HSX moves you forward: your $2 million becomes $2.5, $4, $7 million. Yet, since that money, like the movies it promotes, is not real, has it really gotten us anywhere? Are we, instead, listless riders, staring off into the distance for illusion's sake? Are we, as that certain fella said, strangers on a train?
Arthur Ryel-Lindsey » Comments:
Tour de Force: In the Wake of Lance’s Final Ride
24 July 2005
I think it is dangerous to say what Lance Armstrong did Sunday in capturing his seventh Tour de France crown makes him the greatest athlete of all time. An ongoing ESPN.com poll suggests that Michael Jordan retains the "best athlete" ever among ESPN’s readership, for example, Lance second. And what of Wayne Gretzky, Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, Arthur Ashe, Babe Ruth, Muhammad Ali, Jim Thorpe, Babe Didrickson, etc., etc. The list of contenders for the crown is endless. And just as Lance himself acknowledged Woods, Gretzky, and others in a post-race interview on OLN Sunday, there is always potential for discussion, even among the greats themselves.
What can be safely said about Lance, whatever allegiances one has to other athletes, is that he has won hearts and minds in his efforts, in his well-documented comeback, in his charity, in his poise and Texan’s tenacity, in his joie de vivre. Cycling has never had such a following in America as it has now. The mobs that lined the Champs Elysees Sunday seemed to be more swollen than they were five or six years ago. Lance Armstrong is a household name, and four Americans finished Sunday in the top 20 of the sport’s greatest event. Certainly, this gives the Americans who have flocked to the sport something to look forward to next year, after Lance has left the game. Levi Leipheimer and Bobby Julich resurged, Chris Horner appeared out of domestique-dom, George Hincapie won one ride, and Floyd Landis, always a nipper at Lance’s heels, remained a nipper.
The concern, now, is will the audience stay? Today, Lance Armstrong might be the second best athlete ever. What will he be a year from now, when Tour 2006 is over with someone else in the yellow jersey – Ivan Basso, Jan Ullrich (my money’s on Alexandre Vinokourov, fresh with a new team)? Will he still be as revered? Can most Americans name the other American to win the Tour de France?
After all, ESPN’s poll was lacking in people I would be willing to rank high in the best athlete category: Walter Payton, Babe Didrickson (yes, I used her twice), Kareem Abdul Jabbar. In a sport such as cycling, which is not guaranteed the press, how long can Lance stand?
This is something the cycling and sporting worlds will have to wait for. My personal hope is that he stands forever. I ranked him above Jordan despite my growing up in Chicago in the Bulls dynasty era, but again, this is a dangerous thing to say. Everyone has their personal favorites. Mine, for seven years, has been Lance Armstrong.
In the end, let us stick to the facts. Lance came back to do the unthinkable, in a sport that is more physically demanding, more gut-wrenching, more manic than most. He did it seven times, he did it seven different ways, and he has established his legacy. He is second all-time for most yellow jerseys won. He has more overall wins than anyone. He has retired, like Gretzky and Jordan, at the top.
Well done, Mr. Armstrong, and thank you for the ride.
Arthur Ryel-Lindsey » Comments:
Punch Drunk: The Culture of Classic Sports in Current Cinema with "Cinderella Man" Riding Shotgun
Primo Carnera. Max Baer. Jim Braddock. Joe Louis. A footnote in history, James J. Braddock, the answer to the trivia question, who was the heavyweight champion before Joe Louis? Yet, in Ron Howard’s film Cinderella Man (Universal/Miramax, 2005), Louis is himself the footnote to Braddock’s title triumph. Howard and leading-man Russell Crowe bring Braddock back to center stage, just as the real Braddock reclaimed his birth into boxing greatness.
For Cinderella Man is a fine film, honestly well conceived and certainly well-executed. It has everything we have come to expect from Howard – a strong if unsophisticated visual tableau, dominant central (male) character and a perhaps too subservient female lead (remember Apollo 13?), astoundingly good supporting performances (Ed Harris from Apollo 13 gives way to Paul Bettany in A Beautiful Mind giving way, now, to the surprise powerhouse Paul Giamatti) and interesting transitions, really the only thing in Howard’s visuals that make you go, nice (Ronny has always been good with the transitions). Surprisingly, perhaps, given his previous work, Howard gives little ground to fluff and sentimentality; oh, it’s there, no doubt, but it doesn’t override, muttle, or drown out the heart of the story, and damn it if at times the film isn’t downright touching. That has been something Howard has always been good at: touch.
After all, Cinderella Man has a wonderful sense of touch. It takes on the Depression, the Braddock-Baer title fight, Braddock’s career, and America’s sense of itself in a time of desolation, but it takes them all on in moderation, giving each its due and reasonable time. In fact, the title fight tolls for a good half-hour at the end of film – not a quick, anti-climactic flash at the end of a supposed boxing movie or a dead, oversized weight dragging the facile wreck down (I am thinking of Rocky IV here). In Howard’s picture, the fight is a really good, serious piece of drama. It stands on its own terms, as much as it stands as the fitting finish to a worthy story.
But let me not overstate myself. Cinderella Man, as a whole, is good, standing on an plain with a film like Seabiscuit – indeed those two recent reminders of Depression era sport biopics are almost too similar to separate. As far as the boxing genre goes, Cinderella Man is another nice example of what is really unique about the best boxing movies, why we keep coming back to them, and what they tell us about ourselves: it is about a boxer, not boxing. Like in Raging Bull and Rocky, the incidence of boxing directs our lead character but it does not limit him to a one-act show. This is not boxing for the sake of sport, for the sake of the political or social statement boxing might allow us to make, like in later Rocky’s, like in Million Dollar Baby. Rather, it is a character study, a who and why, an engagement with a man on his basest levels, that makes us wonder what we would do in like circumstance, what we would do at our barest essentials. And for that it is interesting.
Cinderella Man is not, however, as it is being advertised, "one of the best movies ever." For one, Howard doesn’t give his audience enough credit, using handhelds as if we wouldn’t get that the depression was a shaky and unstable time (and could we finally dispense with the seemingly requisite training montage for boxers, please?). Cinderella Man comes far too close to A Beautiful Mind for Ron Howard’s good: the score is similar, the visuals, the lead actor, the focus on the central male character. You also hear in it the echoes of On the Waterfront, which ultimately hurts Cinderella Man for one reason: unlike Waterfront, Cinderella Man doesn’t challenge, AT ALL. It is a good story, well told, but why? Simply to honor a man long past, long since a footnote? Is that enough? Could we have done better? The story is told, cinematically speaking, very straight-forward, very standard. Could we have done better? Whereas, in On the Waterfront, we were witnessing the creation of an acting revolution – the development of the Method before our eyes – what is happening in Cinderella Man but, really, the same old thang?
I’ll give you an answer, for the "could we have done better?" Why not show us Jimmy Braddock? Could we have not seen the real man, the real fight? Certainly not in the same way: we wouldn’t know the background, the life-story, the rise from the gutters, the hurt and humiliation caused to Jimmy Braddock at the docks... Seeing just the fight wouldn’t have been the same.
But imagine if Braddock were fighting today – assuming boxing still had the luster it had in the thirties. We would know that back story: we would know everything about him, just as we can’t help but know every little mishap that befalls Olympic athletes, every little sob story of the college basketball star risen from the ghetto. The media now makes it a business to sell the athlete-as-character-in-a-movie, which may be why it has become a marketable thing for Hollywood to sell old and obscure sports triumphs with the veneer of the classic-era biopic: Seabiscuit, Miracle, Stroke of Genius, Game of Their Lives, Cinderella Man, the soon-to-arrive The Greatest Game Ever Played, perhaps the worst title in the history of sports film. Sport, after all, is inherently marketable as entertainment: it is, in essence, entertainment itself, so it leads well to having movies made about it, and you wonder, sometimes, watching something like Cinderella Man, if it isn’t all a farce, watching a movie about watching a sport.
More importantly, this tendency toward giving character to sports’ past greats in film may just lead us to forgetting about the sport itself, because (a) soon we’ll run out of great sports moments to recount, not because they don’t happen anymore, but because we’ll soon catch up to that point in time when we over reported our sports heroes and know everything about them already (see Ali) and (b) because how many times has our knowledge of an athletes’ personal life overshadowed his accomplishments on the field? It is just a game, after all. Who can watch and O. J. Simpson Rose Bowl performance in this day and age without seeing him as just a guy who was on trial once? Who looks at Lebron James without thinking of him as a college-no-show?
Perhaps this is a little grand, a little too far fetched. Cinderella Man is just a boxing movie. Perhaps James Braddock is just a footnote getting another moment in the sun: a true cinderella story, in the end. Howard’s movie is good, and if you just want to be entertained and have a laugh, it is far better than anything else that is in theatres right now (believe me, I know). Certainly, it is the only film yet released in 2005 that has a prayer of being remembered for anything other than George Lucas finally hammering that final(?) nail home; boy, did he hammer us with it. Maybe that’s all you need to expect from Cinderella Man, from any movie: not a great cultural phenomenon, just a good time. Go see Cinderella Man, and let a good time from good film-making be enough...
Then go see On the Waterfront and sit in awe of something Cinderella Man echoed but could not hope to achieve (ok, ok, too much, forget this last sentence).
Arthur Ryel-Lindsey » Comments:
Through the Aquarium Glass: A Digression into Theatricality out of Mike Nichols’ "Closer"
If appearances make the movie, Mike Nichols’ Closer can be slingshot to the front of the line of current films: it is hard to pick a more cinematically gorgeous cast than Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman, Clive Owen, and the recently crowned "Sexiest Man Alive," Jude Law. For the less virile tastes, Closer is also a beautifully constructed film, with expert handling of a dialogue-heavy narrative that harkens back to the films director Nichols cut his teeth on: The Graduate (1967) and Carnal Knowledge (1971) (Who can see Closer’s aquariums without seeing Ben Braddock through the Nicholsian glass?). Moreover, it provides another example of what Nichols is best at: the extroverted discussion of sex.
Unfortunately for those of the less virile tastes, their tastes might have had them heading for the doors before the glory of Nichols’ filmmaking really kicked in. At least, that’s what happened to a friend of mine who, prior to my viewing, said she hated the film and had to keep herself from walking out.
Closer is vulgar. Let’s not mince words, it is downright disgusting. But it is digusting in the way that truly disgusting blood-and-guts films wish they could be, i.e. there is a reality to Clive Owen’s sexual forwardness that is first real and second enviable. His degradation isn’t simply blood and guts, or vulgar sex, or pain and torture – the kind of degradation that comes ten a penny in Hollywood films these days. It is a chance meeting on the street with a man you never wished you wouldn’t meet. It is exciting, and, as Owen repeatedly reminds us in the film, it is honest, and that is something we rarely see.
Such is the reason Closer is daring – or perhaps more accurately, the reason Patrick Marber’s play upon which the film is based was daring enough to be filmed. The dialogue of Closer is a striking audible reality the way David Thewlis’ unending London night in Mike Leigh’s Naked was a striking visual plague: a grotesque image of honesty and singularity that we the audience are seldom forced confront but can’t stand to ignore. And such honesty is hard to write. After all, A. O. Scott’s review of the film in the New York Times suggests Marber’s dialogues are unlikely and his characters improbable at best. But at least Mr. Marber is trying something uncommon. Not "new," uncommon.
Meanwhile, the review of Closer on IMDB.com at 6:25 pm EST, 19 December, 2004, written by one "noralee" of Queens, NY, summarizes the film as "Hollywood stars using lacerating words as sexual weapons." In my experience, the reviews that show up on IMDB and any other public online source are 90% of the time negative because (a) everyone’s a critic and (b) only the people with strong feelings against a particular work feel the need to sit down for hours to warn people against that thing. If you like a piece of artwork, you generally pat someone on the back and say, "Hey, what a nice piece of artwork, let’s get a beer" or you whisper similar sentiments in the car ride home, but unless you’re getting paid, you don’t sit down to write in praise of something. Unless you’re me. I digress. I’m just saying praise is not as much fun as ridicule and the point of that is, I rarely give the IMDB reviews a second thought. I only mention this one to highlight two things: (1) It shows the total dissolution of the writer to the current film audience that this review faults the actors, rather than the author, for word choice, and (2), more importantly, the word "Hollywood." I mention "Hollywood" – that disgusting, vile word loosely defined as a factory for making sequels – because, despite the use of Hollywood big wigs like the current man-in-every-film Jude Law, Julia Roberts, and Natalie Portman (yes, the use of "wig" there was an intentional pun, but not very well constructed one), Nichols’ film is anything but Hollywood.
Simply, no tradition of dialogue exists in Hollywood cinema. One might be able to cite Linklater – Slacker (1991), Before Sunrise (1995) and its sequel Before Sunset (2004) – or My Dinner with Andre (1981, directed by Frenchman Louis Malle) for conversational American filmmaking, but four is hardly a tradition and the unremarkable public response to each suggests a less than sustainable legacy.
I mentioned Mike Leigh earlier purposefully: Closer is a dialogue driven film in a more European tradition, a tone more referential to Goddard and Renoir and Stanislavsky than to anything America has put into celluloid. Nichols molds that same tone, which was borrowed by Leigh and Cassavetes (an American) and which has yet to appeal to an American audience (Cassavetes proved that, where has his American cinema verite gone?).
Closer fits into another genre, that of the play filmed. It is an arena that has brought success – Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley, 1992) – and failure – The Big Kahuna (John Swanbeck, 1999) and a few of Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespearean remakes. That friend who nearly walked out called Closer’s dialogue wooden, theatrical, like she was listening to a play. Would have she liked it better had she seen the play staged, I wonder? Would she have nearly walked out then? My impression of our dinner conversation a la Closer is that yes, she would have, which suggest to me not a problem of "wooden" dialogue but again of taste. Toward the vulgarity, yes. But also toward a theatrical interchange that is somewhat unbeknownst to modern filmmaking, except for Glengarry Glen Ross and The Big Kahuna and Love’s Labour’s Lost (Branagh, 2000).
Of course, my friend is not alone. A. O. Smith found Closer’s scenes flawed, the intensity "misplaced." "Larry, Dan, Alice and Anna seem to find themselves in a constant state of emotional extremity, in part because the quiet, everyday moments of their lives have been pruned away, but for precisely that reason their tears and rants seem arbitrary and a little absurd." Further, "They exist only from moment to moment and only in relation to one another." I might ask Mr. Smith to suggest a film in which the quiet everyday moments mattered to the climax of the story. Are not memories based upon emotional extremity? Again, here is taste. Here is theatricality. To Smith, Closer seems made up, i.e. theatrical.
And really, theatricality in dialogue is a hard thing to get rid of when adapting a stage play directly for the screen. It is a painful process that relies on the strength of the original word combining with the strength of the new found artistic palette of the motion picture. And where Marber’s words falter or fail – the cliched child-like stripper, perhaps – Nichols and his cast does admirably to succeed.
Yet, I’d like to suggest something more, in relation to Closer and the play on which it is based. I did not get distracted by the words, I did not question the actors or their probable-ness. In fact, I found them engaging, admittedly hard to like toward the end, but hardly misplaced or zealous. It suggests to me a virtue of playwriting, first proving that story is the bedrock of good filmmaking, but also that those films that refuse to get rid of the theatricality, the structure, and dare I say the "wooden"ness of staged dialogue deserve to be remembered for exactly that: their theatre, their underrated mesh of performative arts, cinema and stage. After all, films based on successful, dialogue driven plays – not musicals – have some common features: comparatively minuscule casts, few sets, and scenes that drag on for ages. The moment in the strip club, for example, where Clive Owen accosts Natalie Portman: whether for the vulgarity of the dialogue or the oddity of the situation, it was mammoth, and, as if to seal that scene shut, Nichols ends the interchange with that remarkable zoom into Owen’s eye.
This is not to say that filmed plays can’t have moments entirely cinematic or entirely novel compared to the original play – Closer includes a medium of dialogue virtually impossible to perform on stage, the chat room, while Glengarry Glen Ross adds more information to the motivations of a previously ambiguous Shelly "The Machine" Levene, the illness of his daughter – but there will always be an element of theatrical performance.
Maybe this refers to the roots of film, to Melies and Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, performers who were first theatrical artists and then cinematic pioneers. Maybe this style is the sister to those films that were at first films and then somewhat theatrical: Mike Leigh and John Cassavetes (I’ll not touch upon the improvisational style of those to film makers as a factor in their works’ theatricality right now, but please note it).
In any case, if it is not the vulgarity that has people missing out on what is an undeniably fine film, then it is a sense of theatricality that apparently isn’t reaching people. This is a shame. The theatricality in Closer is very well handled: apparent and clearly theatre-based, yet experimental and not at all reserved in approaching this version of Closer as its own filmic document. Too many filmmakers have problems distinguishing their filmic text from its written counterpart (the first two Harry Potters (Chris Columbus) for example). Closer does well. Having a director who has converted a play brilliantly into cinema before helps (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff?, 1966).
I don’t want to suggest that Closer is flawless: the soundtrack may be over done, overly dramatic, especially in the chat room scene, and the leaps in time are at first constantly forward, then progressively forward and backward, a narrative shift that is not signaled, not constant, and not fair to the audience. But the acting is exquisite, which helps the already well-developed script, and in the end, this is a film worthy of continual attention, if not publically, than critically. I only fear that it will have an unsustainable legacy.
Arthur Ryel-Lindsey » Comments:
