Perhaps this is why many people did not appreciate my film reviews.
However, the one thing I did like discussing was the “idea” of a given film, assuming it actually had one. This is also why I prefer reading film reviews of movies I’ve already seen; I’m always more interested in seeing if what I philosophically absorbed from a motion picture was conventional or atypical, and that can usually be deduced from what details the critic focuses on in his or her piece. This was particularly true on the morning of my cataclysmic tummy ache, when I stumbled across EW’s January 4, 2002, review of Vanilla Sky.
I am keenly aware that I am the only person in America who thought Vanilla Sky was a decent movie. This was made utterly lucid just forty-five seconds after it ended: As I walked out of the theater during the closing credits, other members of the audience actually seemed angry at what they had just experienced (in the parking lot outside the theater, I overheard one guy tell his girlfriend he was going to beat her for making him watch this picture!). Over the next few days, everything I heard about Vanilla Sky was about how it was nothing but a vanity project for Tom Cruise and that the story didn’t make any sense; the overwhelming consensus was that this was an overlong, underthought abomination. This being the case, I was not surprised to see EW’s Owen Gleiberman give Vanilla Sky a grade of D+. His take seemed in-step with most of North America. However, I found myself perturbed with one specific phrase in O.G.’s review:
The way that the film has been edited, none of the fake-outs and reversals have any weight; the more that they pile up, the less we hold on to any of them. We’re left with a cracked hall of mirrors taped together by a What is reality? cryogenics plot and scored to [director] Cameron Crowe’s record collection.
The phrase I take issue with is the prototypically snarky “What is reality?” remark, which strikes me as a profoundly misguided criticism. That particular question is precisely why I think Vanilla Sky was one of the more worthwhile movies I’ve seen in the past ten years, along with Memento, Mulholland Drive, Waking Life, Fight Club, Being John Malkovich, The Matrix, Donnie Darko, eXistenZ, and a scant handful of other films, all of which tangentially ask the only relevant question available for contemporary filmmakers: “What is reality?” It’s insane of Gleiberman to suggest that posing this query could somehow be a justification for hating Vanilla Sky. It might be the only valid reason for loving it.
By now, almost everyone seems to agree that the number of transcendent mass-consumer films shrinks almost every year, almost to the point of their nonexistence. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve heard anyone suggest otherwise. Granted, there remains a preponderance of low-budget, deeply interesting movies that never play outside of major U.S. cities; Todd Solondz’s twisted troika of Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness, and Storytelling is an obvious example, as are mildly subversive minor films like Pi and Ghost World. P. T. Anderson and Wes Anderson make great films that get press and flirt with commerce. However, the idea of making a sophisticated movie that could be brilliant and commercially massive is almost unthinkable, and that schism is relatively new. In the early seventies, The Godfather films made tons of money, won bushels of Academy Awards, and—most notably—were anecdotally regarded as damn-near perfect by every non-Italian tier of society, both intellectually and emotionally. They succeed in every dimension. That could never happen today; interesting movies rarely earn money, and Oscar-winning movies are rarely better than good. Titanic was the highest-grossing film of all time and the 1998 winner for Best Picture, so you’d think that might be an exception—but I’ve never met an intelligent person who honestly loved it. Titanic might have been the least watchable movie of the 1990s, because it was so obviously designed for audiences who don’t really like movies (in fact, that was the key to its success). At this point, winning an Oscar is almost like winning a Grammy.
I realize citing the first two Godfather films is something of a cheap argument, since those two pictures are the pinnacle of the cinematic art form. But even if we discount Francis Ford Coppola’s entire body of work, it’s impossible to deny that the chances of seeing an über-fantastic film in a conventional movie house are growing maddeningly rare, which wasn’t always the case. It wasn’t long ago that movies like Cool Hand Luke or The Last Picture Show or Nashville would show up everywhere, and everyone would see them collectively, and everybody would have their consciousness shaken at the same time and in the same way. That never happens anymore (Pulp Fiction was arguably the last instance). This is mostly due to the structure of the Hollywood system; especially in the early 1970s, everybody was consumed with the auteur concept, which gave directors the ability to completely (and autonomously) construct a movie’s vision; for roughly a decade, film was a director’s medium. Today, film is a producer’s medium (the only director with complete control over his product is George Lucas, and he elects to make kids’ movies). Producers want to develop movies they can refer to as “high concept,” which—somewhat ironically—is industry slang for “no concept”: It describes a movie where the human element is secondary to an episodic collection of action sequences. It’s “conceptual” because there is no emphasis on details. Capitalistically, those projects work very well; they can be constructed as “vehicles” for particular celebrities, which is the only thing most audiences care about, anyway. In a weird way, film studios are almost requiring movies to be bad, because they tend to be more efficient.
However, there’s also a second reason we see fewer important adult films in the twenty-first century, and this one is nobody’s fault. Culturally, there’s an important cinematic difference between 1973 and 2003—and it has to do with the purpose movies serve. In the past, film validated social evolution. Look at Jack Nicholson: From 1969 to 1975, Nicholson portrayed an amazing array of characters—this was the stretch where he made Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Carnal Knowledge, The Last Detail, The King of Marvin Gardens, Chinatown, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It might be the strongest half decade any actor ever had (or at least the strongest five-year jag since the fall of the studio system). And what’s most compelling is that all the people he played during that run were vaguely unified by a singular quality. For a long time, I could never put my finger on what that was. I finally figured it out when I came across a late-eighties profile on Nicholson in The New York Times Magazine: “I like to play people who haven’t existed yet,” Jack said. “A future something.”
Nicholson was particularly adroit at embodying those future somethings, but he was not alone. This was what good movies did during that period—they were visions of a present tense that was just around the corner. When people talk about the seventies as a Golden Era, they tend to talk about cinematic techniques and artistic risks. What they should be discussing is sociology. The filmmaking process is slow and expensive, so movies are always the last idiom to respond to social evolution; the finest films from the seventies were really just the manifestation of how art and life had changed in the sixties. After a generation of being entertained by an illusion of simplicity and the clarity of good vs. evil, a film like Five Easy Pieces offered the kind of psychological complexity people were suddenly relating to in a very personal way. What people like Nicholson were doing was introducing audiences to the new American reality: counterculture as the dominant culture.