And Now for a Few Pointed Words

Whatever gives people the idea that Anthony Lane is a senior citizen? The dashing movie critic for the New Yorker magazine turns 40 in December. But his reputation as a brainy expert with a writing style as graceful as Fred Astaire’s dance steps has piled the years onto his image. He was lining up for tickets to the popcorn movie “Rollercoaster” during an age when “Chinatown” was making film history. But people still expect him to be a silver-haired literary lion.

“Maybe it’s because they think you shouldn’t make pronouncements unless you’ve lived a full and useful life,” he says about the misconception. Just to prove them wrong, 10 years’ worth of pronouncements pepper his new anthology, “Nobody’s Perfect, Writings From the New Yorker” (Knopf).

The book brings together several hundred of Lane’s essays and reviews on books and movies, literary figures, pop culture icons and film stars. (The Los Angeles Times praised Lane “for writing extraordinarily well and for wearing his erudition so lightly,” the New York Times compared his movie reviews to “a tray of delicious candies.”)

He turns his sharp intuition and comic wit toward everything from home cooking with Martha Stewart and Julia Child to the literary lives of T.S. Eliot and A.E. Housman. Not to mention the fame of Julia Roberts, as well as Buster Keaton. “I like to traffic back and forth between the movies’ ability to represent the world and other ways there are to represent the world,” he says. “It keeps me on my toes.”

Born in England, educated at Cambridge University, Lane lives in London with his wife, newspaper columnist Allison Pearson, and their two children. He says he is a hopeless square who never hangs out with movie stars or spends more than a few hours at a time in Hollywood. “Taking a new route to my children’s school in the morning makes it a wild and crazy day,” he says.

In Los Angeles on his book tour, he began his first day by filing a movie review that was due to his editor before breakfast. That and jet lag could explain his pale complexion, but he blames it on his years spent in dark screening rooms.

Surprisingly crisp for a journalist, Lane’s polished loafers and pressed navy jacket suggest that he may never fit the rumpled image of a writer. But, as he often points out in reviews, things are not usually as they appear.

He started his career as deputy literary editor for the London Independent and he reviewed books as well as movies there for several years before he joined the New Yorker in 1993. He still screens films in London at least as often as in New York. “Do you think most people know I live in London?” he wonders a bit uncomfortably. His British-ness does raise a question about whether a critic who lives on a separate continent can get a grip on American culture--the stuff U.S. movies are made of.

“I don’t go into a movie review thinking of American culture,” he says. “How do you even define such a thing? Hopefully, a review will suggest fresh ideas of what that culture might be.”

Bumping into Harrison Ford, who was working on a movie across from Lane’s Beverly Hills hotel, made him think not of Hollywood, but of France. “It’s like waking up in Paris to see a man on a bicycle carrying croissants,” he says. “It’s just what you’d expect.”

His reviews twist and turn in the same unpredictable way. When he wrote about a revival of “The Sound of Music” two years ago, he began his review outside the movie theater where ticket holders dressed as nuns were smoking cigarettes and others were outfitted as “brown paper packages tied up with string,” inspired by the musical’s lyrics.

In a graceful glide, he steered the piece into a serious essay about the unsettling effects of the movie by comparing “The Sound of Music,” which was set during the World War II, with “Meet Me in St. Louis,” which was made during that war. “Why does ‘Meet Me in St. Louis’ maintain the status of a nimble masterpiece while ‘The Sound of Music’ limps along behind?” he wrote. “Then again, how come Vincente Minnelli’s [‘St. Louis’] of 1944 was reckoned merely a success, while Robert Wise’s [‘Sound of Music’], made 20 years later, is a gold-plated phenomenon? The answer to both questions is the same: because Minnelli showed happiness to be the most fragile of possessions, whereas Wise backed it as a sure thing.” Today and forever, he concluded of Wise’s choice, “that is what moviegoers want to hear.”

Like any critic worth reading, Lane always inserts himself into his writing, sometimes physically. When he reviewed a batch of cookbooks in a pre-Christmas roundup of 1995, he added a sketch of himself at home in the kitchen. There he was, making dinner for friends, “holding onto the sink, finishing off the Cote du Rhone that was supposed to go in the stew.” Had he been following Martha Stewart’s menu correctly, he confessed, he would have been handing around phyllo triangles with lobster filling by this point, not getting sloshed in the kitchen.

That review taught him that cookbooks, not movies, are the way to win the most admirers. “I had more response from that article than anything else I’d written,” he says. “Cooking is something that everybody does, for better or worse. Food is like sex. Both things that most of us try and aren’t very good at.”

Reading Stewart’s cookbooks reminds him of Margaret Thatcher, who was Prime Minister of England when Lane was growing up. “I recognized the type,” he says. “Martha runs the kitchen the way Lady Thatcher ran the kingdom. It seemed quite clear the level of control going on in Martha’s world.”

Connections like this make perfect sense coming from Lane. At the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills, where he was interviewed recently by New York magazine film critic Peter Rainer as part of the “Writers Bloc” literary series, Lane talked about movies, of course, but also about authors and actors and obituary columns. In his mind, they all relate.

What does he remember about his favorite actors? The way some of them walk. “There is the Cary Grant walk, the Gary Cooper walk. And Fred Astaire running up a flight of stairs in the movie ‘Funny Face.’ Who runs up stairs like that?”

Can a bigot make great art? Rainer asks. Lane dived into the debate in an essay about the British poet T.S. Eliot in a review of “Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917,” a 1997 anthology edited by Christopher Ricks. In that review he traced Eliot’s rise to genius stature, but also pointed out the poet’s severe limits.

“The anti-Semitism of Eliot can’t be excused,” Lane told his Writers Bloc audience. “We can’t excuse him by saying he was a man of his time.” But, he also argued that imperfect men and women do make great art. Separate the art from the artist or you will miss the most brilliant works of history.

Flaws and contradictions fascinate Lane. He gets more interested in actors if their movie image doesn’t fit their private life. Winona Ryder, accused of shoplifting this summer, plays a pinnacle of virtue in Martin Scorsese’s “The Age of Innocence.” “She may be a troubled soul in some ways,” Lane says. “I’m interested in people’s feeble nature if it feeds into their image on screen.”

The late Claude Rains intrigues him for the same reason. Cool and gallant in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Notorious,” he was married at least six times in real life. “After wife No. 3 or so, you have to think Rains must have had something to do with it,” Lane says.

It is these quirks of human nature, of human lives not quite adding up that might explain his obsession with obituaries. He reads them faithfully and wonders if the subject of the article would agree with what was written. “The truth is, in the end we’re not likely to say, ‘Wasn’t I smart to trade in my stock options at just that moment and make a fortune,’ ” Lane suggests. “We’re more likely to say, ‘God, I wish I’d kissed her.’ ”

One of his more surprising essays for the New Yorker is a review of several collections of obituaries from the New York Times and the London Daily Telegraph. “The art of the obituary is a minor one, but an art,” he says. “The pro will hunt down lives that might not at first seem interesting and find ways to bring out comedy without being insulting. Novelists would see it as second nature. They are always looking at the life of the guy who cleans the rafters.” James Joyce, for example, in “Ulysses,” Lane suggests. “Leopold Bloom making breakfast is far more interesting than a man running a country.”

He imagines himself at his funeral, correcting the eulogizers from somewhere out of sight. “No, I wasn’t that way,” he warns them in a stage whisper. “I wasn’t kind, not really. And I didn’t like animals at all.”