Auteur, Auteur

Stephen Farber’s article on the recently “overpraised” films of Paul Thomas Anderson and Mike Leigh illustrated an unmentioned corollary of movie criticism (“Their Reputation Precedes Them, Alas,” Jan. 30). If self-importance is the enemy of the young filmmaker, as Steven Soderbergh rightly states, what else but the same would be the enemy of the blowhard critic?

In other words, who died and appointed Farber as the see-all king of the critics’ hill? It strikes me as self-indulgence to assume that his opinion somehow ranks higher on the tote board than the many other reviewers who liked the films.

And besides, isn’t it all just opinion anyway? If a film touches you, it touches you. Obviously these two films touched many.

TIM CARPENTER

*

Sherman Oaks

Thanks to Farber for articulating publicly what we privately believe. “Magnolia” is one of the worst films ever to sport an “A”-list cast. As we exited the theater, exhausted, we overheard a foursome displaying the laughter of agony. One woman turned to her companions and said, “I was sitting there wondering if anything could possibly make this movie worse than it already is--then I found out,” referring, of course, to the “biblical intervention” climax.

In that one scene alone, Anderson displayed complete contempt for his audience, as he turned the entire film into an absurdist fantasy, the exact opposite of the path he had led us down for three hours, as we struggled mightily to find someone to care about in this mess.

JOE and MYRALINE WHITAKER

La Jolla

*

With the usual hubris of critics who presume to speak for their readers, Stephen Farber writes that “plenty of savvy moviegoers” will share his opinion that Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia” is a “disaster.” Well, not exactly. For me and for many of my friends, “Magnolia” is a bold and ambitious exploration of ordinary men and women confronting extraordinary circumstances in their public and private lives. Farber dismisses the plot as “trite and predictable,” but since when are themes like “domineering fathers and damaged children” hackneyed and irrelevant?

In limiting his diatribe against “Magnolia” to an analysis of the script, Farber forgets that film is a visual medium. As a result, he ignores what is most remarkable about this amazing movie, which is the soaring, aching lyricism of its camera moves accompanied by the poetic insight of Aimee Mann’s songs and the haunting ostinato of Jon Brion’s score.

In the movie “Providence,” John Gielgud says that “style is substance in its most elegant and economic expression.” Such is the pleasure of watching “Magnolia.” Unfortunately, the only truth Farber reveals in his vicious editorial is that he has the visual equivalent of a tin ear.

BEN VANAMAN

Los Angeles

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For more on “Magnolia’s” score, see Pop Eye, Page 68.

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“Self-importance” isn’t the only cause of a disaster like “Magnolia.” What about the studio heads who handed this young director 40 or so million bucks, then let him do whatever he wanted? Didn’t they read the script? For the record, it runs almost 200 pages and, despite a wonderful prologue, is as repetitive, banal, boring and sophomoric as the movie itself.

ALAN ORMSBY

Sherman Oaks

*

I think it would be hard to find a serious auteurist critic even in the past--not to mention today--willing to subscribe to what Farber justifiably characterizes as “pure insanity,” namely “the notion that every creation of an anointed director deserves veneration.” Moreover, the criterion for deciding whether a director deserves being called an auteur is not some ineffable conception of the artist as an “anointed” genius but stylistic continuity, as Andrew Sarris has always emphasized--and that continuity has to be detectable on the screen, not just in the mind of the critic.

Farber is wrongly using auteurism as a whipping boy for a quite different phenomenon: the verbal inflation that has become pervasive in movie reviewing in recent years. Every Friday when I flip through Calendar, I see movie ads sporting words like “masterpiece,” most often lavished upon junk that will disappear from view in a few months.

DAVE CLAYTON

San Diego

*

Thank you, Mr. Farber, for pulling the veil off of the increasing number of director-struck critics. I begged a friend to see “Magnolia,” citing (foolishly) “the reviews are outstanding.” Two hours into the film, however, it took absolutely no begging to persuade my friend to join me in leaving. Watching wasted characters spout vacuous drivel was a torture for which no ending, however unexpected, could have compensated.

PATRICK L. KERWIN

San Diego

*

I probably wouldn’t know the narrative engine Farber complains “Topsy-Turvy” lacks if it ran over me, but it did strike me that Mike Leigh’s major interest here is not really Gilbert’s relationship with Sullivan but the complex way assorted bits and pieces of people’s lives--actors, composers, writers, impresarios, their wives, families, mistresses--weave themselves together in any creative process.

And I wonder what Farber means when he says there is no sustained exploration of the passions that drove Gilbert and Sullivan? The film seems to me to be exactly about the fact that their driving passion--and just about everyone else’s in the particular world these people inhabit--is the stifling of passion, which is allowed breathing room only in brief outbursts of madness, license or drink. Gilbert, the discomfited witness both of his dotty old father’s surreal lapse into furious incoherence and of his wife’s ramble into an operatic mad scene lamenting her childlessness, cannot even acknowledge what he has just heard, let alone respond to it. Sullivan, recovering from near-fatal illness, exalts his newfound feeling of mortality by speaking vaguely about serious music but ultimately drowns it in a few French romps.

Leigh’s account of the process by which this muffled and distorted anguish might have been translated to the exquisite lightness of “The Mikado” seems to me a wonderfully poignant demonstration of the transforming power of art.

EDITH MILTON

Santa Monica

*

What a pleasure to read one’s very reservations so powerfully and precisely articulated. What a relief to know that I am not the only one who sat there (and sat there, and sat there) wondering, “Why am I still sitting here?” Thank you, Mr. Farber, for your courageous and affirming words.

ELYCE WAKERMAN

Sherman Oaks

*

I am not a critic; however, I do consider myself one of those “savvy moviegoers” that Farber made reference to (unless of course he is referring to those folks who flocked in droves to see “End of Days,” “Big Daddy” and “Double Jeopardy”). The last thing I find “Magnolia” to be is “dreadful” or a “disaster.” In my opinion, Paul Thomas Anderson’s most recent piece of cinema is a masterpiece and is worthy to be on a list of the best films of the 1990s. I certainly do not know of a more profound 1999 release.

SHENANDOAH LYND

Rancho Santa Margarita

*

By praising Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts” the way he does, Farber is guilty of the auteur worship he’s so busy accusing other critics of. Altman’s adaptation was an oversimplification of characters Raymond Carver truly cared about; the director’s only apparent goal was to tie all the separate stories together, not to get deeper into the characters as Carver--and in my opinion, Anderson--does.

The difference between “Short Cuts” and “Magnolia” is the fact that Anderson genuinely cares about his characters--not so much the plots that tie them together--and this is what makes “Magnolia” moving, despite its predictability at times.

RAY HEDGPETH

Long Beach

*

In his excellent article, Farber failed to single out another director for excoriation: Kevin Smith, whose sophomoric, boring take on Catholicism, “Dogma,” also brought a brace of cheers from out-of-touch movie critics.

The film was a particular disappointment coming from the man who helmed the excellent “Clerks” and “Chasing Amy,” though you wouldn’t know this from the film critics. They praised it to the skies, not realizing that the film was a turkey on the order of Smith’s previous disaster, “Mallrats.”

STEVE FINKELSTEIN

Los Angeles

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I totally agree with Farber’s comments. I wish he regularly reviewed for The Times.

JOHN BATJIAKA

Westminster

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Feiffer

This week’s cartoon appears on Page 86.