jentleman film journal.

Fullness of Narrative in “Lawrence of Arabia”

Or, The AFI List Project, #7: Lawrence of Arabia

I don’t know that Lawrence of Arabia is the greatest movie ever made, because I’m not sure that, in questions of taste, it’s possible to affix such definitive and concrete labels. I am sure, however, that it belongs to that very select group of films that have to be a part of that conversation; it is one of the few movies in history that delivers both deep narrative complexity and substantial sensual entertainment. And, if we are to discuss film as a visual medium, there may be no higher example of the visual art of moviemaking than Lawrence, with its vast landscapes and vividly saturated photography. Seen in a movie theater, one becomes aware that it is something akin to a miracle of cinema.

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The Year Of Should-Have-Been; Or, The Year in Review, Part II: The Best Movies of 2012

It seems like, everywhere I look, pundits reviewing 2012 in cinema are nodding their heads in approval and talking about how it was a “great year” for the movies. In comparison to what was, by any metric, a dismal 2011, they’re justified in doing so: at least this year the Best Picture Oscar won’t go to a creampuff French silent film about a Hollywood that never existed. Still, as I survey the year, I can’t help but feel that those pundits are letting their relief that things were better in 2012 cloud their understanding of what the year really represents.

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Space Babies and Orbital Ballet: The Cinematic Non-Narrative of “2001”

Or, The AFI List Project #15: 2001: A Space Odyssey

For a movie so championed as a chilling parable of the final and necessary opposition between man and its mechanical creations, 2001: A Space Odyssey devotes remarkably little time to fleshing out the conflict between computer and the astronauts that it is trying to kill. “Open the pod bay doors, HAL,” has entered the lexicon as the most memorable line from cinema’s most celebrated piece of science fiction, but the movie is fixated on far more cosmic themes than Dr Bowman’s derring-do in dismantling his ship’s microchip brain. The origins of human behavior; the insignificance of man in the infinite scale of the heavens; birth, death, and resurrection – it is The Tree of Life, but better, in spaceships, and shot half a century earlier.

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Batman Ends: Taking in Christopher Nolan’s Bat-Saga

WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE DARK KNIGHT RISES.

Given the open ending and overwhelming critical and financial success of its predecessor, there may not be a movie in the history of cinema that was more certain to be made than The Dark Knight Rises. And, short, perhaps, of George Lucas’s second Star Wars trilogy, it may be that no previous movie has ever been the subject of such high expectations from its producers and its audience alike. On July 19^th, a day before the movie opened, the possibility for both a Best Picture nomination and the title of highest-grossing film of all time were legitimately in play. And why not? Batman Begins, released in 2005, was by itself one of the best superhero movies that we’d seen to that point. The Dark Knight, three years later, redefined the model of what a superhero movie could be, and even led directly to a change in the structure of the Academy Awards.  Meanwhile, director Christopher Nolan, in his breaks between movies, had directed a well-received Victorian magician drama in The Prestige and a Best Picture-nominated blockbuster in Inception. Reasons for optimism, in other words, were everywhere.

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Marx Madness: The Brother Act and Physical Comedy as Film Art

Or, The AFI List Project #60: Duck Soup

Comedy, especially satire, has never aged as well as drama, even from the ancient days. Aristophanes may be considered the first comedian, but it takes a thorough updating to make his satires watchable; the plays of his peers Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, meanwhile, can reliably be found, with few adjustments beyond translation, on stages across the world. It is no different in the movies: of the great comic acts of the first part of the century, it seems to me that only Charlie Chaplin’s films are still widely consumed, while the likes of Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers are remembered more as names and through their influence on later films than for their works themselves.

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The Best Lack All Conviction: “The Avengers,” “Snow White and the Huntsman,” and Crafting the Cinematic Villain

Blockbuster season is the time in the cinematic calendar when studios and directors are given the freest license to paint with broad, unsubtle strokes, and 2012, so far, has been no different: if we leave aside the refreshing ambivalence of The Hunger Games, this summer’s fare has offered up plenty of stark, dualistic storylines pitting the forces of good against those of evil. None of them, however, have quite managed to hit. The Avengers, despite its record-shattering march into the rarified air of box office history, relies far more on pageantry and witty squabbling to entertain than on any genuine sense of peril. Snow White and the Huntsman, meanwhile, tries to complicate its fairy tale villain by giving Charlize Theron lots of space to monologue about how men mistreat women, even as the movie sticks to a conventional fairy tale structure of good overcoming evil. Prometheus, out this past weekend, doesn’t even have a recognizable antagonist, unless one wants to shoehorn the huge pale aliens that apparently created its creepy-crawlies into that box.

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A Jentleman’s Defense of “Drive”

Now that the dust has settled a little bit from the Oscars and 2011 is firmly in the cinematic rearview mirror, I’d like to take the time to offer up a more complete treatment of Drive, last year’s second-most critically polarizing movie and also my favorite movie of the year. (For those keeping score, The Tree of Life is, by my unscientific analysis, the only movie that more divided audiences and critics – The Help’s stirring of controversy being more social and political than aesthetic.) Admittedly, I’ve already written about Drive twice, once in my review in once in my ‘best of 2011’ column. However, as with The Artist, the backlash against and defenses of this movie have taken on a particularly hard, unintelligent character (“I loved it! It was so cool!” “Ugh, are you kidding? It was so boring!”), with the result that, somehow, no one who likes it has been able to try to articulate why Drive moves them.

As with The Artist, part of the issue is the movie’s highly stylized aesthetic. Just as The Artist is a directing achievement for revisiting the silent era and revitalizing its theatrical, glossy aesthetic as a modern-day crowd-pleaser, Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn reappropriates elements of ‘80s kitsch (the satin jacket, the gorgeously saturated photography, the dreamy synthpop soundtrack) and layers them onto a deceptively simple story. It’s all style and no substance, argue detractors: just as The Artist would have caused barely a ripple if not for being a throwback to a different era of filmmaking, the foundations of Drive don’t amount to anything meaningful.

Unlike The Artist, though, Drive’s aesthetic draws on a period both of less nostalgia and less artistic brilliance. Or, to put it another way: the silent era produced Metropolis, Nosferatu, The General, City Lights, and Intolerance, among many other masterpieces. The ‘80s, as defined by the aesthetic that Drive draws on, gave us Blade Runner, Scarface, and… uh… well, that’s about it, really. That, combined with its atonal violence, means that the audience that Drive ends up appealing to is a far more specific one: basically, young males with a particular affinity for a Eurocentric style of directing. In other words, me. Having that sort of narrow but vocal support, I think, can end up working against a movie, and logically so: when a bunch of people from a certain group are trumpeting a particular thing, be it a movie or a style of music or an article of clothing, it takes on a certain totemic status, making it hard for those outside the group to take it for itself.

I am, clearly, a member of that same demographic that so fervently admires Drive. I think, though, that Drive’s appeal to this group and the fundamental truth of its story are intimately intertwined. There is, in other words, something beyond the exciting style and cool soundtrack that is particularly appealing to my demographic, and it’s at the heart of what makes Drive a great film.

Both Ryan Gosling and Nicolas Winding Refn have been much quoted on the idea that Drive is a fairy tale; as Refn put it, “you have the driver who’s like a knight, the innocent maiden, the evil king and the dragon.” But, with apologies to director and star, they’re wrong, because in fairy tales, the main characters always live happily ever after; Drive isn’t nearly so optimistic, or so frozen in time, and if the Driver and Irene lived happily ever after, it would defeat the point of the movie, anyway. Drive isn’t a fairy tale so much as a medieval romance, a sort of modern day chanson de geste complete with a chaste love, a coat of arms (a golden scorpion on a white field), and – yes, here at least they were right – a knight in shining satin armor.

What separates the romance – and Drive – from fairy tale is that, where fairy tales of the sort that Refn thinks his movie is are about the rescue of the kingdom and the union of the prince and princess, romances are concerned with more complex and monolithic questions of duty, chivalry, and above all love, both as an ideal in itself and as an ideal limited by the real. The highest ideal of the medieval romance is the knight who not only loves a lady, but who loves her purely, and fights for her honor with no hope of reward but for the sake of bringing her that honor. Better still, thus, if she is already married and occupies a position high above his own, a situation which imposes certain social strictures to maintain the purity of the knight’s love. Our medieval forebears, of course, had few illusions about human nature, and recognized as easily as we do that iterated out over an extended period such a romance can only result in misfortune. That is why the most famous medieval lovers to come down to us today are not Roswall and Lillian but Lancelot and Guinevere, who give into temptation and in so doing destroy not only themselves but the Round Table and King Arthur’s entire idealized kingdom.

It should be clear that Drive works on the same principle, with the Driver as the heroic knight-errant and Irene as the lady love that he dedicates himself to, just as she herself is already dedicated to her far-off prince. (Though it’s admittedly a stretch to imagine Oscar Isaac as a prince of any sort.) In the romance, lust gets in the way and the romance loses its purity, or else the knight fails to live up to his ideal, but either way, it necessarily ends in tragedy. The Driver’s love for Irene is never consummated, but the situation implodes nonetheless, on account of him and his idealized chivalry as surely as Guinevere is undone by Lancelot’s love. The narrative innovation of Drive is that it recognizes that, in taking place in a world without chivalry and where violence is not an accepted way of life (as of course it is for the knight-errant), it is Driver’s very commitment to Irene – and the extreme behavior that becomes necessary to protect her – that prevents him from ever being able to be with her. His love may be pure, but once he has had to literally stomp someone’s face in for it, he can never be, as surely as he’ll never wash the bloodstains out of that white jacket.

I don’t mean to say that Drive is good because it can be read as a medieval romance; I’m sure that plenty of medieval romances are bad, just as I know that many movies are. I do think, though, that reading it in this way allows us to understand more clearly where the movie finds something true to supply its dramatic weight, which is that the Driver knows and accepts from the start that there is no future to his love for Irene. The power, and the tragedy, of Drive come in the fact that his character is so fully understandable. Critics of the film are fond of pointing out that we know very little about him, but for once that lack of a backstory is essential to his character. We know that he came to Los Angeles some time ago, alone; we know that the only person he has any sort of human connection to, prior to Irene, is his boss Shannon; we know that he moonlights as a getaway driver, but it’s a pursuit that seems to have little importance to or impact on him, a thrill or a pastime more than a career. He is isolated, both physically and emotionally; even his dreams, of racing a stockcar, are not his own but projected onto him by Shannon.

Then, into all this isolation, suddenly and without intention, there bursts Irene, this small, lovely, seemingly spotless woman and her child. Crucially, she is married and therefore unattainable, and that unattainability makes her, for him, less a person than a symbol, something that can be perfect and idealized because it can never really be known. It is this symbol, not any real person, that the Driver falls in love with and sacrifices everything to protect. (And, on a sidenote, the casting of Carey Mulligan, whose essence as an actress is of wide-eyed, lovable innocence, is part of what makes this work.)

The natural objection on narrative grounds is that there’s no reason that we should care if the main character’s motivation is essentially a fantasy, but what matters isn’t whether or not it’s real but that it’s real to him – and that, regardless of any of that, the consequences for his actions are necessarily and irrevocably real. That is, I suspect, why Drive appeals so strongly to the particular demographic that it does, partly because it celebrates a heroic, idealized love that appeals to the sort of kid who grew up reading legends about King Arthur, and partly because, like the best of those medieval romances, it sees that such loves are necessarily impossible and can never end well.

None of this is to say that you have to like Drive; it remains a specialty movie, and plenty of people have been perplexed or bored by stylized Scandinavian directing in the past. It is to say, though, that the movie is drawing on a set of real human emotions and situations, and that it allows those situations to play out honestly. That’s more than you can say about most movies that ever get made, and it’s rare that the ones that do also manage to establish themselves as the vanguard of the cinematic cool as well. You don’t have to enjoy or even admire Drive — but you do have to acknowledge that it’s more than a style-heavy frame for Ryan Gosling to bash heads.

Bad Movies that Masquerade as Good Movies: A Case Study

Hollywood presents us with about 400 movies to choose from over the course of a given year. Of this number it’s safe to bet that there will be a few that will be pretty good, a somewhat larger number that will be atrocious, and a vast majority that will range from pretty bad to mostly competent.

Usually, it’s not hard to tell which of those categories a movie falls into: you and I might disagree about the relative merits of, say, True Grit and Black Swan, but for the most part we’ll agree that they were both halfway decent. Similarly, not many people are going to walk out of Bucky Larson: Born to be a Star talking about how they’ve had a profound artistic experience, and if they do it’s a safe bet that they’re joking or should never be allowed to watch another movie ever again.

Invariably, however, there’s at least one movie that claims to be good and is not: a bad movie that masquerades as a good movie, or, as we’ll call it for the purposes of this essay, a ‘Faker.’ These films for some reason strike a chord with audiences – and sometimes critics – despite being terrible. It’s not about being overrated, in the sense that people will talk about a movie, director, or actor being overrated: for something to be rated too highly, it usually has to start out with some kind of merit. Nor is it about being popcorn – people may enjoy watching Transformers, but no one is under any illusions that it’s a cinematic masterpiece. It’s about movies with little or no narrative merit being viewed as genuine triumphs – movies that seduce their audience into judging them wrongly. Crash, 300, Avatar, and (it pains me to say) Requiem for a Dream are all good examples; I’m worried that Drive (which I loved) might be one, too.

To me, the Faker par excellence – or at least the one, having been recently re-watched, most immediately on my mind – is 2006’s Matrix-lite V for Vendetta, which mixes facile political pronuncionados with stylized special effects to create a particularly noxious concoction. Vendetta, along with movies like Children of Men and dystopian literary adaptations of 1984 and Brave New World, fits into a peculiar dramatic subgenre of British apocalypticism, where the rest of the world has somehow fallen to pieces while Britain trudges forward as a lone bastion of (debased) civilization. America, we soon learn, has been engulfed in some sort of civil war, while a plague in Britain has led to the rise of a fascist government that rules through fear. A mysterious masked man known only as V (Hugo Weaving) wants to start a revolution. A young woman named Evey (Natalie Portman) is, by chance, dragged into his campaign at the beginning. The movie is both about her personal journey and about V’s campaign to bring about the death of the film’s shuttered antagonist, the villainous Chancellor Adam Sutler.

Not exactly a mega-hit on release, V for Vendetta still resonated with audiences, earning over $130 million against a $54 million budget. It also managed to attract for itself the type of enthusiastic following that have turned Donnie Darko and, most notably, The Rocky Horror Picture Show into cult classics. Generally, audiences have embraced its strange brand of anarchism wholeheartedly: the movie currently carries an 8.2/10 approval rating on IMDb, putting it among the site’s top 500 rated films.

Yet there is almost nothing to like about Vendetta. Leaving aside the film’s troubled, troubling politics – we will get to that in a moment – it is a movie characterized by ludicrous plotting, unbelievable characters, and clumsy exposition. Unlike Children of Men, which was released in the same year and which wisely transmits as little backstory as it can afford, Vendetta is saddled with a high concept and too much plot to get through. The only way it can find to explain why things are happening the way they are is to present a series of overdramatized montages, each more groan-inducing than the last. Worst of all, we are forced to support the masked V by default, because the totalitarian government offered by the movie is so plainly horrible, yet there is no clear reason why our protagonist is any better than the people he seeks to bring down. Indeed, this is the greatest sin in a litany of unforgivable ones: V for Vendetta wants to replace personal sympathy with political ideology as a reason to care about its characters.

So, if V for Vendetta and other Fakers are so terrible, why do audiences like them so much? Looking at Vendetta and its relation to other such movies, I think there are two essential components: high production values – in particular with reference to striking production design – and an illusion of intelligence. For all its dramatic atrocities, V for Vendetta is, technically speaking, a well-made movie, with strong editing, a definite ‘look,’ and production design that creates a believably off-kilter, fascist Britain. Its action scenes are charged, spectacular, and satisfyingly brutal, and it’s hard to deny that V is, if nothing else, a total badass. It’s the total opposite of a Capra film: where It Happened One Night is a good movie despite a total lack of technical polish, Vendetta and other Fakers have to get by on their looks.

That’s not enough, though. To go back to the example I used at the beginning of this essay, Transformers – and, really, every other Michael Bay movie – has great production design and very high production values. (Where else do you think that $150 million budget went? Paying actors?) Lots of people will pay to go see Transformers; very few of them will ever say that it’s a good movie. Entertaining? Sure – but only entertaining. Why? Because it’s so obviously silly. It’s meant to be good summer fun and nothing more, and it succeeds totally. (At least, I assume. Somehow I’ve never actually watched the movie.)

V for Vendetta and other Fakers, though, make a claim to be far more profound – to have something worthwhile to say. In the case of Vendetta, that comes in the form of the muddled political message that it espouses, a sort of populist anarchism that we are supposed to believe originates from a deep compassion for other people. The political angle of Vendetta is both troubled, in the sense that it’s incoherent, and troubling, in that it essentially amounts to an uncomplicated endorsement of terrorism. A good film would have striven to bring out the moral ambiguity of its protagonist, creating a sort of dystopian sci-fi Battle of Algiers in the process. Vendetta, though, is content to paint V as a superhuman folk hero, fighting against a regime that must be dismantled at all costs. It is, in other words, narratively lazy; its revelations are deliberately unsubtle, fit for sound bites but having no interest in anything that is actually true. Lines like “People shouldn’t be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people” are seductive when spoken so seriously, and backed up with such spectacular pyrotechnics, but they don’t seem to have any meaning beyond being an excuse for a masked Hugo Weaving to blow shit up.

Other Fakers are equally facile. Requiem for a Dream is a virtuosically-directed, fantastically depressing movie, but its final conclusion – which is, basically, that drugs are bad for you – offers nothing of substance about any of its characters or, really, about what the real consequences of drug use are; Trainspotting is a far more effective film on the same topic. Avatar, as previously discussed at some length, makes no effort to truly explore what it means to leave everything that you are behind. It’s gorgeous, but hollow. Crash wants us to believe that it has something weighty to say about race, but in the end all it manages to come up with is, more or less, that we’re all racist. That’s probably true, but we didn’t need Ryan Phillippe and Matt Dillon to make a point we’ve all consumed in fourth grade Social Studies classes.

It’s a commonplace that the simplest explanation is almost always the truest one. Such is the main thrust of the Faker: it offers a simple solution to a complex problem. Sadly, that commonplace is rarely true. Even when an apparently simple solution proves to be correct, it frequently needs a lot of sophisticated analysis to understand why, or even what that ostensibly simple solution means. That’s why we always need to be wary of the Faker. It plays to our desire that movies be able to tell us something real, without actually having anything new to say.

On Aesthetic Taste

Or, The AFI List Project, #24 – E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial

This is long overdue and will, unfortunately, be extremely short, because frankly I don’t have a whole lot to say about E.T. It’s one of the movies on the list that I had already watched, but so long ago that I had almost no memories of it.

A few shots had stayed in my head: somehow not the iconic scenes, of bicycles flying and flowers reviving, but the shots in the dark at the beginning and end, with the alien spaceship. And, of course, the first sight of the alien’s heart beating again through the glass (if that is indeed what it was).

Watching it again, I have to admit that I was unmoved – and it may be precisely because I was watching it for academic reasons more than anything else that that was the case. It may also be the case that I just didn’t love the movie.

Is it okay to not be in love with a work of art that for whatever unknown reason is dear to the hearts of many others? The individualist in me wants to say yes, and I’ve been musing on reasons why. A central question of aesthetic philosophy has long been what constitutes taste, and if a person is somehow lacking if they are unmoved by a work of art that others love. The argument has a certain logic to it: if I like something, and you do not, then it would seem that you lack some undefined capacity to appreciate that work of art (and probably other works as well). Or, to put the question more broadly: if something is beautiful, shouldn’t it be unambiguously and universally beautiful? How can an aesthete accept a suggestion of aesthetic relativism?

It’s a question I’ve struggled with for some time, but my nearest answer right now is this. We know that the brain is much like any other muscle: you use some areas of it more than others, and so those areas become more developed. For instance, as you practice a foreign language more, the area of the brain responsible for language learning and retention becomes more developed and speaking the language comes increasingly naturally.

Shouldn’t aesthetic taste be exactly the same? That is, you live your life and have experiences that are entirely unique to you. It seems to me that that should mean that you develop different areas of your brain differently from others; you become more aware of some things than others, and so you are able to appreciate certain things more than other people can (just as they are more able to appreciate other things). The result, it seems, should be widely differing tastes.

This is the briefest sketch, and I need to think more about it because I can see where there might be some obvious rejoinders from aesthetic absolutists. Nonetheless, I’m going to offer it up as something to consider when you’re perplexed by a movie that your best friend loves – or when you love something that someone else thinks is drivel.

Midnight in Paris, Midnight in Manhattan: Thoughts on Woody Allen

Last night, I went to watch Woody Allen’s latest directorial offering, the Owen Wilson comedy Midnight in Paris. It’s a sweetly conceived movie that adds a time-traveling twist to the ‘imagined results of lots of famous people being in the same place at once’ genre (other examples: Travesties – Stoppard, Tom, and Picasso at the Lapin Agile – Martin, Steve). Wilson plays struggling Francophile writer Gil Pender, on a trip to his beloved Paris with his fiancé and her parents. And he is, indeed, struggling: struggling with his novel about a man who runs a nostalgia shop, struggling with the realities of life with his shrewish wife-to-be Inez, struggling with his need to become a serious writer and escape the perceived shallowness of writing for Hollywood. In the course of all this struggle, as he wanders around Paris one evening, he is transported back to an idealized Paris of the 1920s, where he meets such figures as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, and more, and returns there every night to rub shoulders with his dead heroes – and fall in love with the ever-enchanting Marion Cotillard as well, here disguised as a French flapper named Adrianna.

As long as it’s nighttime – midnight being the time that Gil is transported away to cavort with the Lost Generation – the movie is quite charming, alternating between delightful characterizations of dead artists and the developing love story between Gil and Adrianna. Allen’s affection for all the figures concerned is clear, and his lampooning of them is charming and amusing. It is when we return to reality that the movie loses its way, because with the exception of Wilson’s Gil (really just a toned-down stand-in for the character that Allen himself would have played back in the seventies, and probably also in the nineties) it’s clear that Allen has nothing but contempt for any of his other characters. Inez, Inez’s parents, Inez’s friends Paul and Carol: they are, collectively, a group of joyless upper-middle-class pseudo-intellectuals who have lost the capacity to dream. They are also a springboard for the expository demon that is the most noxious characteristic of Allen’s movies, as he can’t resist sprinkling his dialogue with a few political jabs.

I’ve complained about Allen’s movies in the past, often to friends who regard him as a genius and can only stare at me incredulously. Admittedly, I haven’t seen many of them – six total, and one of those (Play It Again, Sam)was his writing but not his direction. Regardless: for a long time I attributed my general discomfort with Allen’s movies to his personal lack of charisma. Both Annie Hall and Manhattan I thought were good in spite of Allen, his archetypal neurotic, self-conscious, over-intellectual Jew a character that I always found annoying and not particularly funny. That also explained why I could have enjoyed Match Point as much as I did – there’s not a whiff of Allen anywhere.

After Midnight in Paris, I’m not so sure about that anymore. By which I mean, yes, I do find that Allen character, and Allen as an actor, insufferably annoying. The problem is more fundamental, though, and it’s embodied perfectly in what I found so discomfiting in Midnight in Paris: Woody Allen doesn’t really like people. A case in point: late in Annie Hall, in one of the film’s most famous scenes, a lamenting Alvy walks down a street in New York soliciting opinions about what went wrong in his relationship with Annie. He approaches one attractive couple and asks how they account for being happy. The woman responds, “I’m very shallow and empty, I don’t have any ideas, and I have nothing interesting to say”; her companion quickly adds, “And I’m exactly the same way.” The scene is clearly meant to be funny, and, indeed, it is (immediately before approaching the couple, an older man tells Alvy that he and his wife use ‘a large, vibrating egg’ to stimulate their sex lives). Beneath the play for laughs, though, is a breathtaking cynicism about how people live their lives and love their partners.

Even this doesn’t fully capture the problem, though; many great artists have had little compassion for humanity, and artists that do have such compassion are often guilty of the even greater crime of sentimental schlock. The problem is that, in so clearly expressing his disdain, as he does in Midnight in Paris, Allen denies people interiority and, thereby, he denies them any existence as individuals. They become a class of others who are of their nature opposed to him, their opinions laughable, their habits ridiculous, their concerns mind-bogglingly banal. This in turn powers what is so infuriating about what I would call the ‘priestliness’ of Allen’s films, which is that they are intellectually bankrupt. Allen or his stand-in makes a comment about politics, or art, or religion, and speaking in response is some meat-head troglodyte or narrow-minded shrew. The intellectual content of a Woody Allen film is an exercise in assembling straw men. It also suggests a reason that people enjoy his movies, which is that people who agree with Allen on the issues he likes to sermonize about get to have a laugh at the expense of people they don’t agree with.

All this throws focus on why it’s so hard to recognize Allen’s fingerprints in Match Point, and, indeed, why I appreciate it so much more than his other movies. It isn’t that Allen has suddenly developed compassion for the group represented in the film: Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s Chris  aspires to the same sort of upper-middle-class lifestyle that Inez’s family embodies, and that aspiration is at the root of the ugliness that the film portrays. The difference is that, for the first time, Allen commits himself to inhabiting the body of the sort of person that in his other films would be relegated to cutout status. To be sure, Chris is loathsome – but he’s loathsome in the same way that Michael Corleone is, loathsome but also full, complex, human. It is the other characters (all of them, really) that are the victims, rather than the protagonist, which is an utter inversion of Allen’s usual construction, and one that allows the audience to take their complexities and interiorities seriously. And, because it’s not a comedy, there’s no basis for Allen to throw in his usual didactic pedantry, which is so much the better.

Maybe what that means is that the comedy genre simply isn’t where Allen should be trying to make movies, because comedy allows greater license for the sort of approach to humanity that Allen takes too far. Some months ago, I wrote of Annie Hall that it was that rare sort of comedy that ‘didn’t need to be funny to be good,’ that it allowed itself to be about something and thereby, against all odds, succeeded. Rearrange and rephrase that and you get why I find Allen’s films hard to stomach: he doesn’t allow his characters to be about anything. That would be (more) fine if he were making summer blockbusters, where conflict is painted in the broad strokes of good and evil. As he long as he claims to make movies that are about people, though, it can’t be anything but a fatal flaw.