A film critic in the Henry James mode

IT’S a slightly Jamesian title -- “Movies and the Moral Adventure of Life.” But why not? Henry James had the opportunity at least to see the earliest movies and to wonder if the medium was susceptible to what he wanted for his own characters: to be moral beings.

The “moral adventure of life” seems like one of those deceptively encouraging observations from James on how those characters might see themselves.

Yet our good news is that Alan A. Stone is here now and a discovery to rejoice at, a welcome addition to the sparse regiment of worthwhile film writers.

The disappointment must be that he cannot be much short of 80.

Stone is the Touroff-Glueck professor of law and psychiatry at Harvard. He has been president of the American Psychiatric Assn. But for more than a dozen years, he has also been a film writer for the quarterly Boston Review.

Straightaway, you anticipate the best thing about his work. It is not the breathless rave on this Friday’s release, but a culmination of the process by which a picture can be seen a few times, mulled over, seen again and then at last written about -- as if film writing might be as contemplative, gradual and enriched as any other scholarship.

As a newcomer, I read Stone’s collection in a gulp with great pleasure. But it’s a slender pocket book, and only 15 films are treated.

Moreover, I found myself eager to engage Stone in further argument.

One of the best pieces here is an essay on Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction.” I admire the care with which Stone picks apart that ravishing, streamlined film as a way of uncovering its essential humor. This is important to stress, in that “Pulp Fiction” is not simply violent, but is casual or lyrical in its bloodletting. Stone builds a very good case for it as a work of art.

“Tarantino,” he writes, “is irreverent, not didactic. He goes from Road Runner cartoon-violence humor in the Butch segment [the Bruce Willis part of the film] to whips and chain homosexual rape that silences the laughter. Tarantino will stop at nothing and yet never loses control. He dives into a nightmare and comes up with something funny, taking his audience up and down with him. Though Tarantino thinks his screenplay is funny, and would be disappointed if no one laughed, he doesn’t consider ‘Pulp Fiction’ a comedy. He is quite right; but if you don’t get the humor, you may not like this extraordinary movie.”

That is well said, and exactly on the pulse of that snaking film’s habit of making us laugh out loud at its most preposterous and lurid moments as it begins to feed on itself. It’s enough to sustain Stone’s thesis that Tarantino -- still so young, so raw, so uneducated, except at the level of video store clerk -- was separating the myth of violence from the sack-loads of blood and brain tissue that had to be cleaned out of the back of a car.

But that was 1994, and Tarantino’s lack of growth has marred the intervening years.

I still like Stone’s identification of a kind of moral humor that prompts the circular engine of “Pulp Fiction,” but I wonder what he would say about the gloating ear sequence in “Reservoir Dogs” or the dire stasis of Tarantino’s career after “Jackie Brown,” a seriously underrated film.

In other words, if a critic writes and thinks as well about film as Stone does, then he can’t leave “Pulp Fiction” stranded out there as a sensation in time when we have had to endure its drab aftermath, the inescapable realization that Tarantino jumped too far ahead of himself to know where he was. Thirteen years after “Pulp Fiction,” I’m bound to wonder how much that great film was a shot in the dark. That’s where the matter of directors’ careers becomes vital to any serious thinking about pictures -- with or without benefit of the “moral adventure of life.”

There are other occasions when Stone’s critical response is accurate and stimulating, yet leaves the reader begging for more.

He admires “Schindler’s List” and especially the rather aimless impresario energy in Liam Neeson’s portrayal of Schindler. But his review doesn’t begin to worry over the red-coat vulgarities in Steven Spielberg (those fatal underlinings), the emphases that so steadily betray his undeniable facility.

There’s a fine piece on what’s wrong with the remake of “Lolita” (though this comes down to a concession speech such as few professional film critics would allow themselves, that there really is no case to be made for attempting to film Nabokov’s great novel). Film’s crassness is far better suited for something like “American Beauty,” which is “Lolita” as done by a bright monkey in a cage.

The essay on “Thirteen Days” -- about the Cuban missile crisis -- is the most emotional, and the least persuasive.

I wanted more films, especially those strange mixtures of mainstream and independence that nag at our problematic relationship with the movies (“A History of Violence,” “Mulholland Drive,” “Magnolia”), and I wanted a more capacious and coherent overview in which a law professor and a psychiatrist might keep asking himself whether movies -- on the whole -- take us deeper into life or into fantasy. This may be a lot to ask, and it may not seem generous enough. Forgive me, professor, but you were such a nice surprise that you raised your own bar.

These days, if you whisper to film critics about “the moral adventure of life,” they are desperate to see souls bared. Among our best critics, there is already the underground anxiety that not enough movies really deserve reviewing, much less this Jamesian scrutiny.

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David Thomson is the author, most recently, of “The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood.” His new book, “Have You Seen: An Introduction to 1000 Films” will be published next year.