Differing Opinions

So we have: Annie Proulx vs. Roger Ebert on Crash, Brokeback Mountain, and sour grapes. Proulx is mad because her film didn't win - I can understand that, and she is hardly alone in her contempt for Crash. Ebert, on the other hand, won, and is whining, it seems, because of that contempt for Crash, which he mistakes for, um - anti-homophobia. Or something. Ebert plays politics with it - "The nature of the attacks on "Crash" by the supporters of "Brokeback Mountain" seem to proceed from the other position: "Brokeback" is better not only because of its artistry but because of its subject matter, and those who disagree hate homosexuals." I suppose that's a comfort, but in fact, the attacks on Crash are usually based on the fact that it was a simplistic and badly written film. The words of David Edelstein in Slate carry the day: "It might even have been a landmark film about race relations had its aura of blunt realism not been dispelled by a toxic cloud of dramaturgical pixie dust." Some variation on that opinion was shared by many.

Meanwhile, on a more elevated (maybe) plane, there has been something of a to do about Terence Malick's Pocahontas movie lately. Take a look at Dave Kehr's blog, where his citation of J. Hoberman's comments on the cult of Malick drew said cult (mainly the very able advocate, Matt Zoller Seitz) to refute... Kehr answered - much prose followed, and then some name calling, and now, Moderation in the Comment Thread. For all that, it's an interesting conversation - raising interesting questions about the film, about film styles, about the role of critics, and so on.

The New World is gone from the local theaters, so it's going to be awhile before I see it again. I don't think it's all that good a film - it's gorgeous to look at, it's interesting to look at and think about, but it seems a bit empty to me. I know I have to recheck the thing itself to say that definitively - I don't know if it the longer cuts of it work better - we'll see, someday. For the moment though, I have some thoughts.... One of the commentators on Kehr's site (Kehr himself, in cold fact) compared it to 2001 and 2046 - "striving to induce a kind of hypnotic trance in the viewer, through endless repetition and a heavy reliance on music." Kehr resists - "I want to interact with it as an adult, not as a passive, blissed-out child", quothe he. [I recall that I have promised a review of 2046 one of these years - sad... though I think it appeals at a rather more adult level. The repetition has a direct relationship with the character of Chow - his attempts to keep reliving the past; his misreading of his affairs as being repetitive, when in fact, the situations (the women) are very different, reacting to him very differently - and so on... Someday, I swear it...]

Right now - thinking about The New World, especially in relationship to 2046 - the film that comes to my mind is Ashes of Time. There's a lot of talk about how new and unusual Malick's style here is - but it doesn't seem all that different from Wong Kar-wei's. With any comparison going to Wong, hands down. Not just style, but apparently method - shooting lots of stuff, on the fly, putting the film together later. Wong Kar-wei. These films compare on other levels as well - they are set in the deep past, a kind of mythic past (though Malick makes certain gestures toward the real past.) They are also both dealing with rather adolescent genres - flying swordsmen (who don’t do much flying) in the Wong; Pocahontas and John Smith (and the whole run away and join the Noble Red Man plot) in the Malick - but Wong takes a more critical and ironic approach to the tale. Malick’s film looks loose and unstructured, but in fact is quite conventional - it tells its story coherently enough, without any particular disruption of the narrative, concentrating for the most part on the main characters in the story, their actions and perceptions and so on. What it does, which is admirable, is tell all of this obliquely at times - to fill the actual moments of the film with a kind of flow of images that move the story forward, but rather the way a river moves a boat forward. There's nothing strange about the boat.... It is told in an interesting way, but since the story is so conventional, the impact is lost - the style starts to seem decorative. Certainly compared to Ashes of Time, which is as disruptive at the level of plot and character as it is in style. Malick does shift characters around a bit, starting with Smith and switching to Pocahontas in the middle, but that's not that unusual - compare to the doubles and parallels and transformations of characters in Ashes of Time, let alone the loops and repetitions and so on of the plot itself. For me, Ashes of Time actually earns the kind of consideration Malick's fans are giving The New World - maybe it isn't a world changing film, but it is an endlessly fascinating one. I don't get that from The New World. Maybe I will on subsequent viewing, but the odds have to be against it.