Their Reputation Precedes Them, Alas

A prominent movie director once asked me what I thought of a colleague’s work, and I replied that I thought his output was uneven. “Everyone’s output is uneven,” the director shot back without missing a beat. That simple statement has always struck me as one of the few essential truths about the movie business.

Yet the axiom eludes many movie critics, who remain fiercely loyal to their favorite directors. Anyone who actually works in the movie business understands why it is virtually impossible for a filmmaker to have an unblemished track record.

In a collaborative medium, even the most strong-willed director depends on the unpredictable contributions of a whole army of artisans and technicians. Interference from studios, producers, stars and their entourages also plagues every director’s career. And then there’s the danger that even the most gifted director can be blindsided by egotism.

Director Steven Soderbergh, who’s tasted both success (“sex, lies and videotape” and “Out of Sight”) and failure (“Kafka”) said recently, “For a young filmmaker, the enemy isn’t the studio or the critics, it’s self-importance.” A director who becomes too convinced that he’s “king of the world” can lose the self-critical eye that every artist needs.

In spite of all these impediments to consistent career achievement, critics construct contorted defenses for even the most appalling blunders of a beloved filmmaker. The auteur theory that launched the cult of the director was a highly controversial credo when first promulgated by French critics and their American acolytes back in the ‘60s. Yet this dubious doctrine has gone from heresy to gospel during the last 40 years.

One tenet of the auteur theory, which defines the director as the author of a film, is clearly more valid today than when it was applied to movies made in an earlier era. The director does have greater power than ever before, and with it comes a greater ability to shape a career that sustains a coherent point of view.

But the second corollary of the auteur theory, the notion that every creation of an anointed director deserves veneration, is pure insanity. Of course, some directors are more talented and exciting to follow than others. But even the greatest has an “Ishtar” in his oeuvre, and even the most pedestrian can sometimes, through a lucky series of accidents, stumble into a bonanza. For example, Robert Z. Leonard, an MGM contract director who would probably not make it into anyone’s pantheon, was at the helm of the superb 1940 film “Pride and Prejudice.”

Then why do critics turn into tireless flacks for their favorite auteurs? First of all, when critics go out on a limb and champion a director’s breakthrough movie, they feel a personal, almost proprietary stake in that director that they refuse to relinquish. New Yorker critic Pauline Kael had committed herself to Sam Peckinpah early on, and she closed her eyes to the gaping flaws of his later debacles “The Killer Elite” and “Convoy.”

It’s much easier to evaluate a movie based on the pedigree of the director than it is to perform the arduous but imperative task of analyzing each movie on its own terms. What we’re getting today is brand-name criticism, which is lazy, deluded and of no possible value to readers who want an honest appraisal of new releases.

Nowadays most critics review a movie as if it were part of an ongoing opus made by a revered auteur instead of taking a hard, objective look at the individual work and trying to separate its flaws from its achievements. And that’s certainly the case with two new overpraised films from critical favorites Paul Thomas Anderson (“Magnolia”) and Mike Leigh (“Topsy-Turvy”).

The rave reviews lavished on these recent movies expose the bankruptcy of this new wave of unbridled auteurism. Anderson was hailed as a budding genius when he made “Boogie Nights” a few years ago, and now many of the same critics who championed him then have embraced his new movie, “Magnolia,” despite its glaring flaws.

Some of us felt “Boogie Nights” was also overrated, but it did have a fresh subject, a measure of wit, some fine acting and a couple of passages of bravura filmmaking. It definitely showed talent, along with a penchant for grandiosity (Anderson had to be forced by New Line into cutting the movie to a still-overblown two hours and 30 minutes) and a weakness for numbingly simplistic ideas.

Dreadful as it is, the three-hour “Magnolia” still shows a few flashes of talent, but the worst tendencies of his previous movie are excruciatingly magnified. The critics who claim to adore it aren’t responding to what’s on screen; they’re genuflecting before a director they’ve already enshrined as a god.

Anderson clearly feels their worship is warranted. He presents “Magnolia” as if it were biblical revelation, with a climax borrowed from the book of Exodus. “Magnolia’s” other source of inspiration is Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts.” Both movies intercut half a dozen Los Angeles stories that culminate in an unexpected cataclysm. The most obvious difference between the two movies is that “Short Cuts” was derived from the fiction of Raymond Carver, and he provided the vivid characters and inspired story lines that “Magnolia” lacks.

Anderson’s most damaging delusion is his belief that he’s a visionary writer. Placed under close scrutiny, the script for this new opus turns out to be one thick wad of cliches--with a single exception. Tom Cruise’s character, a TV guru of a reactionary men’s movement called Seduce and Destroy, is a sharply drawn satiric figure. His raunchy rhetoric is vibrant, and Cruise has fun playing the bellicose character.

Unfortunately, every other subplot is trite and predictable. Most of them revolve around the anguish of dysfunctional families; Anderson even trots out that most overused secret of child molestation to resolve one of the plot lines. Domineering fathers and damaged children, a lonely tycoon and a bimbo with a heart of gold are just a few of the stereotypical characters.

In great ensemble movies like “Short Cuts” or “Nashville,” as the director interweaves a tasty array of stories and characters, you eagerly look forward to the next piece of the mosaic. In “Magnolia,” when Cruise isn’t on screen, you dread the earnest banalities that await you in all the other leaden playlets. Even Cruise ends up in a tremulous father-son encounter that weighs down the last section of the movie.

In his two previous movies, “Hard Eight” and “Boogie Nights,” Anderson seemed to be a first-rate director of actors, but that gift deserts him here. He allows excellent performers like Julianne Moore to confuse hysterical ranting with cogent acting. To my eye and ear “Magnolia” looks like a legendary disaster, and I suspect that plenty of savvy moviegoers will come to share that sour view.

Unlike the upstart Anderson, British director Leigh has compiled a substantial body of work in theater, television and film. But the reviews for Leigh’s “Topsy-Turvy,” which has won a number of awards--including honors from the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle--for best film and best director, provide another illustration of auteurism run amok.

This isn’t an aggressively awful movie like “Magnolia,” though it’s almost as long. It’s interesting to see Leigh apply his ragged, cinema verite style to a historical pageant, the tale of Gilbert & Sullivan as they created “The Mikado.” But this movie takes some crucial missteps that will be painfully transparent to everyone outside the Leigh fan club.

For one thing, a 160-minute movie needs a stronger narrative engine than Leigh provides. The central story of the creation of “The Mikado” doesn’t emerge until halfway through this elephantine movie. Up to that point, it makes a few halfhearted stabs at establishing themes that are never coherently developed. At the start, for example, the film highlights Arthur Sullivan’s growing dissatisfaction with the light comic operas that have brought him fame and fortune. After the disappointing reaction to “Princess Ida,” Sullivan resolves to devote himself to the more serious music of which he believes himself capable.

That motif is emphasized repeatedly during the movie’s first half, but when Gilbert finally proposes to him the idea for “The Mikado,” which is every bit as frivolous as the stories he previously rejected, we never do understand why Sullivan abandons his qualms and signs on for another collaboration. The crucial scene that would have dramatized his change of heart is missing.

After that, Sullivan vanishes for long stretches of the movie; Leigh strikes off in a whole new direction and focuses on the backstage bickering among the company of actors and designers staging “The Mikado.” There’s something arbitrary about all the storytelling decisions in “Topsy-Turvy”; it flits from one subject to another and rushes through the most intriguing parts of the history it surveys.

Along the way Leigh offers no insight into the chemistry that made the collaboration of Gilbert & Sullivan such a successful one; there are only a couple of scenes when the two men are even shown in the same room together. They seem to regard each other with suspicion and distaste; then how did the partnership survive for decades? The film provides no clue.

Leigh might argue that he wanted to avoid the simplistic explanations so often deployed in this kind of biographical film. But he fails to come up with any penetrating revelations to take the place of the usual Hollywood cliches. Although he scrutinizes a medley of fascinating characters, Leigh stays on the surface, offering a few tantalizing glimpses of their quirks but no sustained exploration of the passions that drove them.

This turns out to be a movie full of asides--on the business pressures at the D’Oyly Carte company, on Gilbert’s relations with his aged parents, on the insecurities of actors. Some of these random bits are charming. But you know something is fundamentally askew when the best scenes--like a heated argument about corsets between a costume designer and several of the actresses in “The Mikado”--feature a slew of minor characters who never reappear.

*

Leigh’s earlier movies, such as “Life Is Sweet” and “Secrets & Lies,” benefited from spontaneity and naturalistic understatement, but that loose, improvisatory approach is of little value to “Topsy-Turvy.” This kind of historical epic requires a discipline and command of dramatic structure that may simply fall outside Leigh’s range of talents. “Topsy-Turvy” has many incidental pleasures, but it’s a disjointed, misshapen mess of a movie that squanders a promising subject. Clearly it’s Leigh’s name that sends critics into rapture; they ignore the lumpy pudding that’s actually on screen.

Brand-name endorsements so prevalent today make a mockery of criticism and betray both the artist and the audience.