I finally got around to seeing The Savages this weekend, which has been an on-demand offering seemingly for forever. One factor, having little to do with my anticipation of its actual flaws, that militated against my watching the film, both when it appeared in the theaters and since then, was the abundance of typically nauseating reviews gushing over Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance.
I’m digressing, but I think it’s a reasonable digression. I want to make clear, first of all, that I admire Hoffman as an actor. I think he’s versatile, convincing, and, most admirably, unafraid of being disliked. On the other hand, I’m made uneasy by the facile criteria employed to draw the conclusion that he is, as the New York Times put it recently, “the greatest character actor of our time.”
Character actors, first of all, no longer exist. Their last great heyday was in the 1970s, when a cadre of actors (Jack Warden, Ned Beatty, and Ed Lauter come immediately to mind, although there are dozens more) played supporting roles calling for the specific qualities offered by their individual screen presences. The necessity of character actors seems to have diminished around that time, which roughly coincides with the rise, in Hollywood, of the everyman star as personified by the likes of Walter Matthau, Gene Hackman, and Jack Nicholson, each of whom, not so coincidentally, first gained attention for their work in supporting roles. It strikes me, in fact, as a complete inversion of the definition of “character actor” to describe an actor as flexible as Hoffman as one. The viewer knew what to expect when, say, Jack Carson came onscreen. The function of the character actor was to ground a given film in a set of familiar conventions. Jack Carson (or Thelma Ritter, or William Demarest, or George Sanders) was a specific idiom in him- or herself, not the all-but-irrelevant embodiment of a cliche. This is very different from the function of today’s supporting actors, who are called upon to enact the simple traits of the clip-art caricatures posed against the background of a film. It doesn’t even rise to the level of impersonation. I have often felt that one factor in Hollywood film’s self-impoverishment as a popular art is the current formula that seemingly obtains (in all but deliberately conceived “ensemble” films), where two or three name actors are supported by dozens of interchangeable nobodies -- a budget exigency, no doubt, but also a tacit acknowledgment of the fundamentally schematic function of most supporting characters.
This apparently all-too-successful scheme -- supporting roles as cartoon foils, leading roles as the sum of whatever contingency motivates them -- leaves a lot of space for movie reviewers to operate in. Commercial Hollywood cinema is mostly review-proof, now, and while movie reviewing is perhaps guiltier than any other genre of popular criticism of the self-indulgent sin of taking potshots at poshlost, indie cinema is granted a lot more space in the papers than, say, small press books or other "independent" artistic productions. Quirky flicks and actors like Hoffman are given ample room to wow us, and so they do. I am, however, deeply suspicious of the blinder-driven superlative. He’s the greatest? Recently, of course, our greatest actor also has been identified as, in addition to Hoffman, Liev Schrieber, Sean Penn, Robert Downey, Jr., Stanley Tucci, Johnny Depp, to name a few, all of whom share some of the same interesting traits: (1) Enormous talent, (2) unusual looks (even the beautiful Johnny Depp is hardly a conventional leading man), and (3) a career marked by frequent appearances in quirky “little” films, hereinafter referred to (correctly or incorrectly) as “indie.”
This leads me back to The Savages. One thing that has become grating, to me, about indie film is the way that it privileges cliche. Hollywood at least surreptitiously suggests that its embrace of cliche is the acknowledgment of necessary impedimenta -- our rogue-cop hero cannot wreak havoc without first overcoming the obstacle of the weary, hostile-but-friendly, lieutenant, who has long since abandoned the dangers of the street for bureaucratic etc. Indie, meanwhile, mounts its cliches in a setting of putatively profound truth, and then gilds them. And so it is with The Savages. Laura Linney’s character doesn’t merely have an unfulfilling job, she has a hellishly deadening job as an office temp, surrounded by drones too benightedly foolish to know that they are soulless slaves. From her cubicle she stages her self-deluded (we think!) sorties against the impregnable and insensitive Guggenheim Foundation. Despite this self-delusion, we are given to understand that she is superior in her self-awareness of her unbelonging in this fluorescent purgatory (NB: in the course of supporting myself for over two years as a temp, I never once met another temp who found the work to be rewarding). She doesn’t merely have an unhappy love life, she has a dismally unsatisfying affair with an older married (bald, schlubby -- can we be cued any more blatantly as to what a disastrous interlude this is?) man who seems, if anything, more pathetically desperate than she is. Again, Linney’s longing for something better, her heroic if so-far-ineffective resistance to the limitations inherent in her affair with the married nebbish, ennobles her. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Professor of Dramatic Literature lives in a ramshackle house badly in need of paint and refurnishing. His books and papers -- in the time-honored manner of “intellectuals” -- are scattered haphazardly throughout the house. "There's a system," he protests, when Laura moves some of his stuff. Ah, the life of the mind! An aesthete, he is deeply engaged by the emotional and political implications of the theater (one of his courses is entitled “Oedipal Rage in Beckett”; the book whose composition frustrates him is a study of Brecht), while completely blind (we think!) to the richness and potential of the Real Life that surrounds him.
What is unsatisfying about all this is that, ironically, it’s one’s schooling in the vocabulary of the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster that leads one to expect more of the ostensibly more adventurous “indie” film. The blockbuster teaches us that the kernel of the film -- once we’ve gotten past the barrier of the cliches that serve as our grounding in the normative state that the film establishes and then explodes, often literally -- is the venturing beyond. The world freezes. The world is populated by vampires. The police training officer is a bigger criminal than anyone on the street. The world does not exist at all, it is a digital simulation. Aliens arrive to destroy the planet. The conspiracy extends from the highest levels of authority all the way down to that trusted individual one has let into one’s heart...
This isn’t to say that these variations aren’t deadening in themselves. I’m not actually making the argument that these films are any better than indie. I’m making the argument that they’re no worse. At least in invoking catastrophe and chaos as the incentive for its heroes to venture beyond the normal, commercial cinema is hardly demanding our complicity in making of stuporous lack of affect a heroic virtue. And indie film, or at least a certain species of indie film, posits that the zone of no-conflict is in fact the biggest conflict of all. It is the pressure of the stupid old world itself that exerts itself on the “special” heroes and heroines of these movies. How stupid is it? As stupid as the dumb insurance job Jack Nicholson is given to retire from in About Schmidt, as stupid as Thora Birch’s uncomprehending peers in Ghost World, as stupid as the absurd suburban family, led by its dying matriarch, that is forced to accept the alternative life choices of Katie Holmes in Pieces of April. As existential drama goes, it’s a winner, because -- unlike in the genuine Beckett, as opposed to the Oedipally enraged Beckett of the imaginings of Tamara Jenkins’ fish-in-a-barrel academic -- rather than there simply being life, there is always the promise of life-plus. We are conscripted into the position of ratifying the self-conception of righteous exceptionalism that the lead characters maintain. So it is that Laura Linney succeeds at last in writing her play, and staging it in New York. Life-plus is attained, and every mindless office suite retreats into the cabinet cold storing the record of every true artist’s travails.
No comments:
Post a Comment