The Ensemble Movie Is Back--and With Good Reason

Amid a somewhat disheartening movie year, there is at least one hopeful sign: Ensemble movies, long shunned by major actors and directors, are making a comeback.

By the end of this month, four impressive ensemble movies will be playing in theaters: “What’s Cooking?” looks at four Los Angeles families struggling through a Thanksgiving dinner; “Chocolat,” the latest film from director Lasse Hallstrom, celebrates the sexual and culinary liberation of the denizens of a sheltered French village; “State and Main” from director David Mamet surveys the chaos that ensues when a Hollywood film crew invades a bucolic small town in Vermont; and “Traffic” interweaves three stories dealing with today’s international drug trade.

These films epitomize one of the most appealing trends of recent years, though they also demonstrate that it requires exceptional skill to balance the large casts of characters and multiple story lines ensemble movies deploy. Multi-character pictures hark back to all-star productions of the 1930s such as “Grand Hotel” and “Dinner at Eight,” but in a sense, almost every movie made under the old Hollywood studio system was an ensemble effort.

In that era, legions of character actors--in addition to top stars--were under contract, and the studio bosses wanted to maximize their investment by keeping all their players working. Writers were encouraged to create colorful, richly detailed roles for the supporting actors as well as the stars. This gave a wonderful texture to movies of the ‘30s and ‘40s, and we remember not just the glamour boys and girls, but also a whole slew of second bananas--Ethel and Lionel Barrymore, Edna May Oliver, Edmund Gwenn, Sam Jaffe, Thelma Ritter, Hattie McDaniel, Elisha Cook Jr. and Joan Blondell, to name a few.

With the exception of a few chamber dramas that draw their intensity from psychological concentration on one or two characters, first-rate movies are almost always richly populated. (Pick a favorite movie--”Citizen Kane” or “Gone With the Wind” or “Lawrence of Arabia” or “Rules of the Game” or “The Godfather”--and chances are that it has a healthy number of vivid characters.)

When the studio contract system collapsed, stars seized power, and they didn’t like sharing the limelight with huge casts of supporting players who might steal some of their thunder. Studios that had to pay huge salaries to these mega-stars wanted to make sure they got their money’s worth by keeping the leads front and center. So we began to see more bloated star vehicles, in which secondary roles were slashed to smithereens.

Many movies of the last two or three decades suffer from this imbalance. Consider one of the better examples of these swollen star vehicles, “The Way We Were.” It benefited from great chemistry between Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford. But the movie’s excellent supporting cast--Bradford Dillman, Viveca Lindfors, Patrick O’Neal, Murray Hamilton, Herb Edelman, James Woods--was wasted in teensy roles that barely registered. This was a major failing, because in addition to its central love story, the movie aimed to paint a portrait of Hollywood in the blacklist era that turned out to be disappointingly superficial.

Even after the demise of the studio contract system, a few iconoclastic filmmakers tried to keep the ensemble tradition alive. Chief among them was Robert Altman, who relished the huge canvases of “Nashville,” “A Wedding” and, more recently, “Short Cuts.” The directors of today’s ensemble movies often cite Altman as an inspiration. “What’s Cooking?” director Gurinder Chadha testifies to her fondness for “Nashville” and “A Wedding,” and “Traffic” director Steven Soderbergh recalls the impression that “MASH” made on him.

“All those little parts--Bud Cort, Robert Duvall, Rene Auberjonois--were so interesting, distinctive and funny,” Soderbergh says. “I think the whole idea of the modern ensemble film is crystallized in ‘MASH.’ ”

Philip Kaufman is another director who savored the challenge of guiding large ensembles. His first Hollywood movie, “The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid,” was ostensibly about Cole Younger and Jesse James, but it also etched a dozen members of their outlaw gang as well as a bunch of more respectable citizens with witty panache. Later, in “The Wanderers” and “The Right Stuff,” Kaufman continued to parade a vast array of characters.

“On a personal level I like the sense of camaraderie you get in ensemble movies,” Kaufman says. “It creates a much richer garden--more colors, more beauty, more opportunities for humor.”

Kaufman and Altman have long been champions of ensemble movies, but they were a lonely minority until 1994’s “Pulp Fiction” changed the landscape and made such movies chic. After that movie’s enormous success, even huge stars such as Bruce Willis and John Travolta recognized the career boost they could get by blending into a large cast, and hip filmmakers clamored to make these multi-character cornucopias. Unfortunately, most of them have not worked as well as “Pulp Fiction.” For every arresting experiment like “Go,” there have been many more duds like “200 Cigarettes” and “Playing by Heart.”

Many Small Plots,

One Big Picture

What makes a great ensemble movie? First of all, there has to be a larger story than could be told in any of the individual vignettes. The 1998 film “Playing by Heart,” which intercut several routine soap operas of romantic and family turmoil, didn’t gain much resonance from the multiple story strands.

In the just-released “Chocolat,” by contrast, the ensemble approach is absolutely integral, because the film aims to examine an entire community transformed by the arrival of a hedonistic stranger (Juliette Binoche) with a stack of recipes for obscenely delicious chocolate treats. This story requires a large canvas to work its magic, and all of the townspeople--who include Alfred Molina, Judi Dench, Lena Olin, Carrie-Ann Moss, Leslie Caron and John Wood--blend into the tapestry.

Mamet’s “State and Main,” which opens today, captures the lunacy of contemporary movie-making by interweaving a series of subplots involving deranged actors, a nervous writer and a tyrannical director, as well as the townspeople whose lives they touch. Mamet, who also directed a film based on his two-character play “Oleanna,” says, “I like to try something new, and I’ve always adored gang comedies like those that [Frank] Capra and [Preston] Sturges made. I thought this film was like the Mark Twain story ‘The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg.’ It’s about a whole town getting corrupted by ambition and greed.”

Similarly, the three-pronged “Traffic,” which opens Wednesday, gives us a broader perspective on the subject of drug trafficking than any single story could. The movie delves into the intrigue within a Mexican cartel, the travails of American narcotics agents and the disease of addiction that keeps the traffic thriving. “If you’re going to be fair and get into all the relevant issues, an ensemble movie is the only structure that works,” Soderbergh says.

He will continue in the ensemble vein in his next movie, “Ocean’s Eleven,” but he has created substantial supporting parts even in more straightforward star vehicles such as “Out of Sight” and “Erin Brockovich.”

“When movies don’t give attention to all the characters, whoever is in control is not being very egalitarian about people,” he suggests. “The person who has only two lines lives in a parallel universe where they’re the central character, and you somehow have to give a sense of that. You know that joke about ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’? Someone asked one of the actors what the play was about and he said, ‘It’s about this guy who takes a woman to the booby hatch.’ ”

The genius of “Pulp Fiction” lies in the way the three stories gradually overlap and bleed into one another. To a lesser extent, this is what makes “What’s Cooking?” such a winning ensemble movie. It has a subject larger than any of its individual stories; it means to create an impression of our modern, multiethnic metropolis.

“Essentially all four families are the same family,” Chadha says. “They’re all Angelenos, and they’re all Americans, and they’re all going through the same kinds of conflicts and crises. An ensemble movie has to be like one river flowing. There are tributaries and some tiny little streams, but they all have to hit the delta and flow into the sea.”

In addition, the movie renders a remarkable number of characters--more than two dozen--with satisfying specificity. While some are inevitably more stock than others, most are pleasingly unpredictable. For example, there’s surprising interplay in the African American family headed by Alfre Woodard, a compulsive control freak who has to contend with a workaholic husband and an overbearing mother-in-law. Even characters who have only a few minutes on screen manage to emerge as individuals rather than types, and this is a tribute to the script as well as to the beautifully calibrated performances; Chadha does an expert job of intercutting the stories.

But what makes the movie satisfying is that the four families finally do come together in one brief, dramatically potent moment at the end that enriches the movie’s theme of the crucial necessity of urban coexistence. “What’s Cooking?” reminds us why ensemble movies are enjoying a welcome resurgence. They capture something of the turbulence and vitality of a complicated world that we simplify only at our peril.