Convictions and Celebrations

Anthony Lane begins his vast and welcome collection of movie and book reviews with these words: “You are holding a hunk of old journalism. The prospect is not immediately appealing. Who, like Oliver Twist, will have either the nerve or the appetite to ask for more?”

Good question. And Lane answers it with becoming modesty. Mostly, he suggests, the pleasure of revisiting old pieces--especially ones about the movies--is reserved to their author, affectionately shaking his head over his hasty considerations of objects no one in his right mind could possibly still care about and may even have already forgotten, just a few years after they appeared.

That, of course, is the curse of the movie reviewer, launching his opinions into the gales of hype that bluster about the typically overproduced, under-thought Hollywood “product.” Or, even worse, pushing them off into that Sargasso Sea of indifference that nowadays becalms the voyages of what we used to (rather touchingly) call art films. Let’s put the point bluntly: Reviewing movies is neither a literary activity nor a branch of moral philosophy, much as some of its stuffier practitioners would like to think. It is, I think, a form of performance art.

As Lane says in his introduction, “of all the duties required of the professional critic, perhaps the least important--certainly the least enduring--is the delivery of a verdict.” History, as he obviously knows, eventually delivers that verdict. The old movies we return to with anticipatory pleasure (and retrospective reward) very often turn out to be the ones that, at the time of their release, were treated with indifference, if not downright contempt, by reviewers and public alike. As Lane says, the best the reviewer can do, aside from giving his readers a sense of a film’s “texture,” is begin an argument that--if the film has any staying power at all--will continue to echo faintly down through the decades.

This being the case, what we want from a reviewer, writing in the heat of the moment, is wit, style, grace of expression--a dance to the music someone has decided to play at the moment Lane or anyone else is confronting his deadline that is in itself as amusing (or more so) than its ostensible subject. Here, of course, we confront the regularly appearing reviewer’s second curse. He has only a limited choice of subject matter. He can write only about what’s on offer. He cannot review the ideal movie that exists only in his wistful imagination. Or in the supposedly golden past. He has no choice--God help him--but to say something readable about, say, “Forrest Gump” or “Braveheart” or “Tom & Viv.”

This is what Lane does, in my opinion, better than anyone else right now. I skim a lot of movie reviews, but Lane’s are the only ones I read closely. And all the way to the end. This is not a habit, I gather, that is widely shared among our critical colleagues or that dwindling band of cinephiles who still (mis)understand reviewing to be a serious and consequential activity, worthy of their anxious attention. The book on Lane is that he is light-minded and perhaps not as well grounded in cinema history as he might be.

This is, of course, nonsense; it is, I suppose, the price he pays for writing extraordinarily well, for wearing his erudition so lightly, for refusing to see Hollywood as crassly determined to rot the world’s teeth for capital gain. And, of course, for being English and a cheeky kid besides (he is 40 this year and has had his New Yorker job since he was 31). But you have only to read his longer considerations of Buster Keaton, Alfred Hitchcock or Robert Bresson to see that he knows his subject as well as anyone (it has become in recent decades too vast for anyone to know all about its every aspect). And you have only to read the literary essays, with which this collection is generously stocked, to understand that he is capable of broad, yet nuanced, critical gestures: See, for example, his brilliant defense of the currently unfashionable T.S. Eliot. No movie bozo I know of could pull off this sort of writing without looking like either a pompous twit or a hopeless overreacher.

Lane’s most basic critical device is to introduce a note of observed, often quotidian, reality into his considerations of a supposedly fanciful medium. In a plot summary of “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” for instance, one finds this deliciously sly sentence: “At this point they overhear--as one so often does--a gang of uglies next door discussing a forthcoming drug heist.” Or, praising the reality of Roger Michell’s excellent adaptation of “Persuasion,” he makes this observation about the heroine’s helter-skelter hairdo: “For those reared on Merchant Ivory films, it could come as a shock to realize that styling mousse was not available over the counter in 1814.” It seems to me that these throwaway lines (and there are hundreds of them in this book) come close to capturing the mood in which most people approach the movies: eager to be transported yet painfully alert to those carelessnesses--of performance, art direction, costuming--that interrupt the purr of our romantic reveries and set us to wondering where we ought to have dinner.

Movies are, in and of themselves, only rarely complicated; they remain the most readily approachable and easily apprehended expressive form. What’s grown complicated about them is our responses to them. Lane understands that everyone--not just reviewers--has by now seen far too many movies, that they are the wallpaper of our minds and that once knowingness of them becomes instinctive, we are--those of us who are over 14 and still faithful in our devotions--tough sells. A good instance of what I’m talking about occurs in Lane’s review of “Saving Private Ryan.” He understands that the heart of its originality after all those decades of improbable wartime heroics lies in the antiheroic ferocity and clarity of its combat sequences. He is full of (entirely correct) praise for them. Yet he remains sweetly unwilling to abandon his childish affection for “Where Eagles Dare,” in which “Richard Burton took a rockbound Bavarian fortress with the calmness that comes only to those who have previously stormed Elizabeth Taylor.” See? There’s all this weird stuff in our heads when we go to the movies, and the reviewer had better be aware of it.

Lane likes clarity in movies, particularly the action variety. It is one of the few principles he keeps returning to. He understands that an exploding fireball--even one that threatens civilization as we know it--is not action. It is idle sensation, lacking the intricacy of preparation and mastery of technique that someone like the late John Frankenheimer brought to the brilliant car chases of “Ronin.” But mostly Lane avoids theory, both aesthetic and sociological. He deals strictly with what is in front of his eyes and doesn’t give a hoot for speculation about what unknowable forces shaped (or misshaped) the object in question. Who will ever be able to sort that out, given the hysterical communality and craven market calculations that condition most movie production?

This definitively sets him apart from his sainted New Yorker predecessor, Pauline Kael, to whom he is occasionally invidiously compared. She, too, was a terrific performer but one with a number of not-so-hidden agendas. Large among them was a belief that Hollywood was irretrievably corrupt. “Whorish” (and its many variants) was a word often on her lips, reform a possibility much on her mind. This was a feckless hope and one that, in some ways, made her a slightly risible figure, a lonely defender of a cultural purity that was surely not to be found in the collected works of her favorites like the inconsequential Irvin Kershner. Or in the blighted late career of San Peckinpah, whose alcoholic dysfunctions she often mistook for revolutionary acts.

I prefer a critic who takes things as they come: one at a time, alert to their accidental felicities, good-naturedly witty about their much more common failings, resistant to gaseous (and unprovable) generalizations. These qualities make Lane’s occasional angry outbursts (see him on “The Phantom Menace”) the more powerful. Lane is not a perfect critic; I cannot, for the life of me understand his affection for “Titanic” or his tolerance for “Apocalypse Now.” But “right” or “wrong,” he is a pure pleasure to read. And that is the critic’s first--and most often failed--obligation.