My career as a movie critic began almost 40 years ago in the pages of the American Spectator with a review of The Warriors, the story of a New York City teen gang from Coney Island forced to fight its way home from the Bronx through one very dark night. The Warriors was considered a dangerous and provocative film that caused life-threatening fights to break out near the theaters showing it. I saw it again last year, about 39 years later, and couldn’t quite believe my eyes. Far from frightening, the cast of The Warriors looked not so much like young thugs as they seemed like overeager kids from theater camp hoping to get cast in a revival of Hair.
If there is one painful truth I have learned in four decades of film reviewing, it is just how few movies stand the test of time—and often how unexpected the movies are that do endure and flourish in the collective memory.
As it happens, I had had much the same experience around the time The Warriors was released, when I saw the universally celebrated 1961 film version of West Side Story (a direct inspiration for The Warriors) on the big screen for the first time and found it hilariously dated and silly even though it had been released only 18 years earlier. (West Side Story still works gangbusters on stage, maybe because its theatricality is what sinks it as a movie—and on stage, there are no close-ups of Tony’s flaring nostrils.)
If there is one painful truth I have learned in four decades of film reviewing, it is just how few movies stand the test of time—and often how unexpected the movies are that do endure and flourish in the collective memory. Consider the year 1980. The most celebrated film that year was Ordinary People, the family melodrama about a fragile teenager coping with the suicide of his brother and the cruel coldness of his mother. It won an Oscar for Best Picture and its director, Robert Redford, won his only Academy Award for directing it.
I loathed Ordinary People, but at the time I was all but alone in that sentiment. I think it fair to say this is a movie no one remembers all that fondly or has any interest in watching now—and I think you can say the same for such later 1980s Oscar fare as Rain Man, Gandhi, Amadeus, Platoon, The Last Emperor, and Driving Miss Daisy. But weekly, it seems, a throwaway comedy from the same year called Airplane! is shown on cable, which means it still has the capacity to amuse and involve viewers in a way Ordinary People simply cannot.
Indeed, it seems to me that the movies people still want to watch from the 1980s are far more in the Airplane! mode. Ghostbusters. Diner. Tootsie. Stripes. Trading Places. When Harry Met Sally. The Princess Bride. Who Framed Roger Rabbit. These are the movies that parents remember fondly from their own childhoods and have been eager to introduce their kids to in the decades since, with great success.
Sydney Pollack directed both Tootsie and Out of Africa. If they aired at the same time on different Showtime channels today, would anyone choose to watch the latter rather than the former? I doubt it. And here’s the thing: Out of Africa is a good movie. But Tootsie is, it turns out, a classic. (Out of Africa would have benefited from a Pollack cameo as a Jew lost in Africa, just as Tootsie is memorable in part due to Pollack’s amazing supporting performance as Dustin Hoffman’s agent.)
Out of Africa was perhaps the ur-version of The Beautifully Constructed Big-Budget Middlebrow Picture Made by a Major Studio That Takes on Serious Topics. It is an adaptation of a memoir by Isak Dinesen and therefore a work of High Purpose just for that reason alone. Such films have all but vanished from the scene in the decades since. One of the most important purposes such pictures served was to make people feel as though they were elevating themselves somehow by going to a movie theater. But that is no longer part of the list of demands American culture makes on its engaged citizenry. Now you are culturally ennobled by watching Samantha Bee shout about Trump, not by listening to Meryl Streep doing a pitch-perfect Danish accent.
Meanwhile, if you asked most professional movie critics about the 1981 Oscars, they would say the outrage was that Ordinary People bested Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, which continues to be ranked in polls of critics among the top five movies ever made. In truth, though, it’s among the most unpleasant films ever made and deliberately so—Raging Bull is a character study of a jealous psychopath and it puts you in the positions both of voyeur (as he torments his victims) and of victim (as you are forced to witness his horrible behavior). People who watch movies for a living can develop a bad habit of confusing intensity with quality. We see so much that is mediocre and pointless that we can be falsely impressed by something that jolts us. But touching a live wire isn’t the same thing as having a valuable or rewarding cultural experience.
This is another lesson I’ve learned. I remember writing in these pages that Slumdog Millionaire, the 2008 worldwide box-office triumph and Oscar winner, was one of the best movies I’d ever seen—but the only thing I remember from it now, a decade later, is the horrendous scene of a man purposefully blinding children as they slept to turn them into sightless beggars who would work for him in the streets of Bombay. If indeed Slumdog Millionaire is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen I should surely want to watch it again, but the very thought of it makes me somewhat queasy. Perhaps I felt so strongly about it because I managed to watch that scene without bolting in horror from the theater and came away unconsciously proud of my false bravery.
The question I’ve been asked the most across the decades—besides “What’s your favorite movie?” to which the only correct answer is The Godfather, and that goes for you too and everyone else alive, because if you answer it differently you’re wrong, and no, The Godfather Part II isn’t better, shame on you—is “Why are movies so liberal and how can you stand it?”
The answer to “how can you stand it?” is that I stand it just fine so long as it’s not rubbed in my face. Oddly enough, that’s pretty much the same answer Hollywood gets at the box office; its most nakedly political offerings have done pretty badly in the decades I’ve been writing. The most left-wing movie ever to win an Oscar for Best Picture is probably Platoon, which is supposedly a serious examination of an American crime against humanity during the Vietnam war but is actually an extended Oliver Stone psychotic fantasy about murdering his platoon’s lieutenant. Most other efforts at direct conservative-bashing end up on the trash heap of cinematic history. Scooter Libby has good reason to dance on the grave of Fair Game, the film that sought to lionize Valerie Plame and earned a whopping $9 million at the domestic box office. I hope Dick Cheney gets a similar chance with Vice this Christmas.
One comic element of having been one of the nation’s few right-leaning movie critics over these many years is the occasional use to which I have been put by liberals hoping to create a controversy where none, alas, existed. I wrote what I think was literally the only unfavorable review of Platoon at the time, which gave Time magazine’s Marc Cooper leeway to say Stone had been “barraged” from “his right flank.” There was no right flank. Just me.
The same thing happened with James Cameron’s Avatar, which I made fun of in these pages. A fanboy slavering over the movie in the Los Angeles Times used my piece and two others (one by Ross Douthat and one at Andrew Breitbart’s website) to offer this hilarious observation: “To say that the film has evoked a storm of ire on the right would be an understatement.” First of all, I had no ire. Second of all, please.
Now, of course, movies generate political controversies even when they don’t mean to; witness First Man, the Neil Armstrong biopic that’s lousy but not because (as the Twitter rage had it) it doesn’t show the American flag enough. It’s likely the flag kerfuffle was one of the elements that led to First Man drastically underperforming at the box office.
The truth is there’s no way to know what message an audience is going to take away from a movie it sees. Vladimir Lenin once said that “of all the arts the most important for us is the cinema.” He was thinking about the way the movies could be used to spread his awful gospel, to advance an ideological agenda. And of course, Hitler thought so too, which is why he empowered Leni Riefenstahl to make Triumph of the Will, her diabolical hagiography of the Nuremberg rallies of 1934.
What they did not understand, and what we still struggle to understand, is that while audiences can be told to think things and directed to look at things, they often do not do what they’re told and do not follow the directions they are given. There’s a story about Soviet audiences seeing The Grapes of Wrath, the 1940 American movie allowed into the Soviet Union because it showed Americans suffering extreme privation during the Great Depression. Stalin is said to have banned it after Soviet audiences were wowed by the fact that even the poorest Americans owned their own trucks. (It was directed, by the way, by John Ford, who later became the most prominent conservative in Hollywood and a rabid supporter of Richard Nixon.)
I’ve expressed a great many opinions in this magazine over the past 23 years, and looking back on them, I’m reminded of the fact that if you judge a movie critic by the accuracy of his opinions, you’re never going to like any movie critic ever. There are views I can’t even believe I once held. For example, I wrote that 1996’s Mr. Holland’s Opus was the only movie we’d remember from that year, and while almost nothing from 1996 was memorable, neither was Mr. Holland’s Opus. The reason I said it, though, was that I was trying to make a point about what it is that makes movies stick in our collective unconscious, and I thought the movie’s unadorned sentimentality would give it a timelessness it does not possess.
This is an occupational hazard for all critics of all art forms—trying to use the works we review to make grander cultural points when they simply cannot carry that kind of portentous weight. Mostly, I think, I have avoided such pitfalls by the simple expedient of not taking anything I reviewed too seriously. The one movie I did take very seriously was the topic of the only review I ever wrote that made the cover of The Weekly Standard.
That was The Lives of Others, the 2006 thriller about an East German intelligence officer who begins spying on the boyfriend of the actress with whom he and his boss are both obsessed. I’m not going to describe it here. I’m only going to say that it’s the best movie I wrote about in the course of my 40-year career as a film critic, and for that reason alone, you should go watch it and thank me—and in this case, as in the case of The Godfather, if you don’t agree, you’re wrong. And shame on you!
Just kidding.
Not really.
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