A. O. Scott and Manohla Dargis, the co-chief film critics of The New York Times, answer your questions in a monthly column that appears in print and online. Here they take on questions about reviewing and about character actresses, and pass on an answer from a mystery guest. You can write them at askthefilmcritics@nytimes.com.
Big Questions, Smart Women, Mann’s Movies
By A. O. SCOTT and MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: April 22, 2011
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ArtsBeat Blog: More 'Ask the Film Critics' (April 22, 2011)
Jojo Whilden/Paramount Pictures
Colm Hogan/IFC Films
Oscilloscope Laboratories
Merrick Morton/Paramount Pictures
Q. What turns me off most reviews are remarks such as one in which a reviewer gave a film a bad review because it was not the movie he had expected; and recently another, writing on “Uncle Boonmee,” complained it lacked “energy.” He seems to overlook the cultural differences of the Thai, and especially that Buddhism may have influenced it. How important is understanding the cultural differences when looking at a foreign movie?
Dean Cushman
Los Angeles
A. O. SCOTT One of the wonderful, paradoxical things about movies is that they can be both transparent and mysterious. Of course we’ll lose something in translation (at least in dialogue-heavy films), but the images are right there in front of us and, at least in theory, require no interpretation. Unlike literature and music, say, cinema is a modern, universal language, and the commonalities of vision to some degree override differences in language, tradition and belief.
But not quite, of course. In the relatively short history of movies, distinct styles have emerged, some related to literary and theatrical traditions of various countries, some arising in response to local conditions. An American movie fan raised on Hollywood genres (I’m speaking from personal experience here) is likely to be mystified by the color and chaos of a Bollywood spectacle or the slow pacing and aggressive lyricism of a Russian film. And yet we might also be fascinated by those movies, and eager to figure out how they work.
The analogy to food is imperfect, but somewhat apt. Our first taste of chimichurri or vindaloo or gefilte fish may be off-putting and strange, but that initial frisson of strangeness can also be a spur to further exploration. (Why Americans are, nowadays, more adventurous eaters than moviegoers is an interesting question. Fifty years ago the reverse was true.) The more we explore, the more we learn, even if we can’t always summarize what it is we know. I can’t claim that watching scores of Chinese movies over the years has made me an expert on China, a place I’ve never visited, but it has taught me something about life there, and also about how to appreciate Chinese movies.
MANOHLA DARGIS In 2001, while on the selection committee for the New York Film Festival, I watched “Secret Ballot,” an Iranian movie directed by Babak Payami shot on the island of Kish in the Persian Gulf. The story involves a young, veiled woman who, on Election Day, arrives on the island with a ballot box and insists that a soldier escort her as she gathers votes. At one point, she steps on (or off) a small boat and you see a flash of ankle, as does, if I remember right, the soldier. I thought nothing of it, but afterward the committee chairman, Richard Peña, explained that this glimpse of flesh was so forbidden the two performers were played by a married couple. That didn’t make me like the movie any more or less; it was just a reminder that some foreign movies can be more foreign to us than others.
Q. After Stephen Tobolowsky’s great tribute in The Times to Maury Chaykin and other recently deceased character actors, I got to wondering: why isn’t “character actress” a part of our vernacular?
LeAnne Laux-Bachand
Seattle
SCOTT With all respect to the excellent and protean Mr. Tobolowsky, there are a lot of great supporting roles for women in the literature he cites — mostly handmaidens, mothers and wives, perhaps, but those putatively marginal parts are catnip to skilled character actresses, who have always been around but perhaps not given as much respect as their male counterparts. There are also, perennially, more roles for men than for women when it comes to filling out a story with co-workers, cousins, crazy neighbors, beat cops and so on.
But here are a few names to conjure with from the Hollywood past: Mercedes McCambridge, Margaret Hamilton (a k a the Wicked Witch of the West) and the great and ubiquitous Thelma Ritter. Today, off the top of my head, I’d mention Patricia Clarkson, newly minted Oscar winner Melissa Leo, the always splendid Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton. Also Anne Heche (see “Cedar Rapids”). Kathy Baker. Grace Zabriskie. Actually, there might be a lot!
It’s a tricky category, of course. All of those performers are more than capable of carrying a movie as the lead (see: “Cairo Time,” for Ms. Clarkson, “Frozen River” for Ms. Leo and “Please Give” for Ms. Keener), but I guess what defines character actors is that they impress more by craft than charisma. And also that you always want to see more of them.
DARGIS The word actor is gender-neutral, yet while actress is part of the vernacular you’re right that “character actress” isn’t, perhaps because of some unease about women and eccentricity. I started investigating the origin of the term “character actress” and didn’t get far, but I did find a charming article on New York actors and actresses in the April 1879 issue of Scribner’s Monthly. Describing classes of characters in theater, J. Brander Matthews wrote that “in a very full company there would be a pair of ‘leading men,’ a ‘light comedian,’ an ‘old man,’ a couple of ‘low comedians,’ an actor of ‘character,’ or eccentric parts, a ‘heavy man,’ — the villain of the piece, — and a ‘walking gentleman.’ There would be a pair of ‘leading ladies,’ a ‘juvenile lead,’ an ‘ingénue,’ a ‘chamber-maid,’ an ‘old woman,’ — perhaps two.”
It may be that in 1879, shortly before the invention of cinema, it wasn’t seen as desirable (necessary or possible) for actresses to play eccentrics and deviate from the norm, especially since theater was regarded as a disreputable milieu, one for so-called loose women and prostitutes. According to the historian Tino Balio, by the 1930s there were four types of performers in Hollywood: supporting players who might work only a week; stock players, the largest group; featured players, who received credit; and stars, who received everything. By then, no matter what they were called, character actors and actresses like Andy Devine and Margaret Hamilton, with their distinctive voices, unforgettable faces and genius for stealing the show, were part of the system.
Q. I have spent years being enthralled by Michael Mann films, yet when I encounter fellow film lovers they express confusion or disdain over my fascination (they will give credit to “Heat,” but that’s usually it). Do you think his films warrant more discussion, or does his desire to work within established genres prevent this?
Gareth Moore
Washington
DARGIS There are viewers and, to judge from their reviews, critics, who (still!) think that the only movies worth taking seriously have subtitles or have subjects deemed Important by received wisdom. In this respect, it is worth noting that the one time Mr. Mann was nominated for best director was for “The Insider,” his 1999 movie about a tobacco industry whistleblower. (It may be that Mr. Mann’s early fame as the auteur of that pastel-hued TV 1980s confection “Miami Vice” didn’t help his cause with snobs.) Even so, around the time that “Collateral” hit in 2004 when I asked three other critics who was the American director in the commercial mainstream whose work they most looked forward to seeing and reviewing, three out of four of us named Michael Mann. The last (and only New Yorker) chose Martin Scorsese.
That said, I couldn’t make a strong argument for Mr. Mann’s last, “Public Enemy,” though I love the prison-break scene and the abstracted night images of Dillinger in a swirl of back-lighted fog after his arrest. It’s a striking-looking movie, but Mr. Mann works best with intense male actors, either great actors (Daniel Day Lewis) or major stars (Tom Cruise), who can ground this filmmaker’s beautiful moody work. In the end, what gives Mr. Mann his power aren’t their stories (which are what most people, including critics, focus on), but how he turns the ineffable — states of mind, feelings, atmospheres, loneliness, fear, exhilaration, despair — into cinema. In “The Insider,” you learn through the dialogue how the whistleblower becomes isolated, but you also hear it through the sound design and see it in the visuals.
SCOTT I think Mr. Mann’s critical reputation has grown steadily over the years as he’s shaken off the television stigma and dazzled viewers in the ways Manohla has just described. He has also clearly influenced younger filmmakers: you see traces of the kind of atmospheric expressiveness that characterizes “The Insider” in the work of David Fincher, for example, notably “Zodiac” and “The Social Network.”
For myself, much as I continue to be excited by Mr. Mann’s visual inventiveness, I also find myself tiring of the world-weary machismo that is his thematic and stylistic default setting. “Miami Vice” was so cool that the absence of story or ideas didn’t much matter, but for me “Public Enemies” was not much more than cool, and thus not quite cool enough.
Q. Why did the Coen brothers leave out the cat character, General Sterling Price, in “True Grit”? I thought this film was a faithful re-adaptation of the book with the usual Coen flourishes, but I missed the cat.
Kathie Moon
Sarasota, Fla.
DARGIS AND SCOTT We went right to the source:
We would have included the character of General Sterling Price, but our next movie is all about a cat. Seriously. — Joel Coen