Introducing Frank Bruni and Ross Douthat As the Moviegoers

By Frank Bruni And Ross Douthat
New York Times
August 8, 2014

http://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/07/introducing-frank-bruni-and-ross-douthat-as-the-moviegoers/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1&

Fox Searchlight , via Associated Press

Welcome to The Moviegoers, an occasional new series in which the Op-Ed columnists Frank Bruni and Ross Douthat banter about movies, pop culture, television and other real-world distractions. From 1993-95, Frank was a movie critic for The Detroit Free Press, and he has written frequently on culture for The New York Times Magazine and for the Arts & Leisure section. Ross is the film critic for National Review and frequently writes about film and TV on his Times blog.

Frank Bruni: Ross, maybe because you’d told me that you were going to roll with the crowds and buy a ticket for “Guardians of the Galaxy,” or maybe because I’d done “Godzilla” and the “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” and it was time to swerve in the opposite direction, I went and checked out “Calvary” the other night.

My summer moviegoing tends to cling to the poles. I hop aboard one of the loud, frenetic, big-budget blockbusters that supposedly define the season, then I sneak away to one of the quiet, independent movies that utterly defy it. I binge and I purge. And I’d like to circle back to the binges, but first: “Calvary.”

Have you seen it? I think you should. I think you will: You’re Catholic, and it’s a serious look at the tattered repute of the Roman Catholic Church today. I spent many years writing about the crisis of child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy and long ago published a book on the topic, and that crisis is the context and starting point of “Calvary,” whose hero (played by the Irish actor Brendan Gleeson) is a priest in the midst of a casually and sometimes caustically disobedient flock.

Most of the people in his seaside village in Ireland seem to feel no intimidation around him, no obligation even to feign rectitude. To several of them he’s a relic, a curiosity, a prompt for mockery, a magnet for anger. In one subtly devastating scene, a father finds his daughter walking and talking alone with the priest on an isolated country road and yanks the girl away, as if removing her from the clutches of a predator. It’s a reminder that the casualties of the crisis include many good priests who work under a cloud of suspicion, trying to recapture a trust that was once a given and is now a luxury.

Yikes. That’s an awfully wintry sentiment for a sunny month. Restore me to August, Ross. Fill me in on “Galaxy.” Comfort me with superheroes.

Ross Douthat: Talk about a bait-and-switch: I was sold on these conversations with the promise of a blessed escape from my usual duties as an analyst of all things grim and dark and papist, and here you are starting in already with priestcraft and scandal and the ravines on Brendan Gleeson’s Irish face … have no you mercy, man?

But yes: I need to see “Calvary,” not least because if it’s as good as you say, that will make two remarkable films about Catholic religious life this summer — the other being “Ida,” about an almost-nun in 1960s Poland, her discovery of her Jewish past and her hunt (with a worldly, disillusioned Communist-apparatchik aunt) for her murdered parents’ final resting place.

So far “Ida” has my vote for the movie of the year, though really it feels like the best movie of 1964 or so: Its black-and-white austerity seems like something preserved in a time capsule from that era, a lost masterpiece that only just now came to light.

Which I guess is a way of saying that like you, I’ve had a pretty good art-house summer, alongside the usual “pre-sold” gazillion-dollar let’s-remake-this-story-AGAIN experiences at the multiplex. Officially, we’re told, there is no summer movie season anymore, because studios feel comfortable releasing their spectacles and tentpole movies in the spring and fall as well. (The two highest-grossing films of the year to date, “The Lego Movie” and the latest “Captain America,” opened back in February and April.)

But that seems to mean that they’re also comfortable releasing not only somewhat obscure fare like “Calvary” and “Ida,” but also higher-profile anti-blockbusters like Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood” as summertime counterprogramming, without worrying that they’re stepping on Linklater’s (near-lock, I assume) Oscar nomination chances.

Which enables exactly the kind of filmgoer binging and — well, maybe let’s say fine dining instead of purging? — that you describe. (Though as our colleague A.O. Scott might note, there’s a solid, steak-and-potatoes kind of meal increasingly missing from the menu.)

Not that these experiences are in any way predictable. For instance, the worst movie I’ve seen this summer is an art-house movie: “The Rover,” with Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson, which achieves the near-impossible feat of making a post-apocalyptic Australia seem horribly, terribly, depressingly boring. (That one I’d like to literally purge and get my two hours back.)

And then weirdly, the season’s best sci-fi blockbuster — one of the best such since “The Matrix,” for my money — ended up getting, essentially, an art-house release, because the director, Bong Joon-ho, feuded with Harvey Weinstein, and Harvey banished the movie to limited release and video-on-demand. I speak, of course, of “Snowpiercer,” a gripping work of right-wing propaganda in which global warming alarmism led hubristic scientists to accidentally deep-freeze the planet, and we learn the true horror of high-speed rail … and O.K., yeah, maybe there are some Marxist-class warfare themes in there as well, but don’t let that dissuade you.

Have you seen it? If not, tell me which of the blockbusters caught your fancy, and I’ll tell you why — as someone truly, deeply exhausted by superhero movies — “Guardians of the Galaxy” made me feel ever-so-slightly better about the genre’s possibilities.

Bruni: Ross, Ross, Ross. It’s summertime and we’re talking art-house fare. We must belong to one of two categories. We are big, pale nerds, or we are Op-Ed columnists for The New York Times.

I am so glad you brought up “Snowpiercer.” I have seen “Snowpiercer.” I have thought a lot about “Snowpiercer.” I am fascinated by the way it and “Elysium,” the 2013 Neill Bloomkamp film, are creating a whole new genre, not just of future dystopias but of future dystopias in which the salient dynamic is the income inequality — no, the cosmic inequality — between the self-indulgent rich and the wretched poor.

In this sense I do think moviemakers are tapping into the American psyche, but I also think they’re replicating a flaw of the American political debate. I’m not sure we’ll get very far by painting the rich as morally hopeless people who must be subverted, vanquished, overtaken.

I think we’re better served by arguing to the rich that we’re all in this together, and that everyone will suffer if the experiment gets so lopsided that it collapses. Ours is not a tale of two cities (my apologies, Mayor de Blasio) but a tale of one city with too deep and broad a fault line running through it.

“Snowpiercer” and its ilk don’t allow for that kind of cartography or nuance. But then why should we expect movies to show a sophistication that our elected officials can’t or don’t bother to?

“Snowpiercer” broke my heart, because it’s almost a great movie, it’s so close to a great movie, but it falls prey to the bloat and the bangs and the decibels that have become a third-act requirement of action flicks today.

I wish someone would hire a truly neutral party — I raise my pudgy hand — to take scissors to these movies and strategically cut 20 minutes from each. I could have done that with “Snowpiercer” and with “Apes,” which also has enormous merit and then devolves into a final 15 minutes of explosions and fire. I went deaf. I went numb.

But before we leave “Snowpiercer,” may I say that part of what I found so absorbing — and many critics, smartly and rightly, pointed this out — were its echoes of “The Poseidon Adventure”? It had a similar arc, a similar rhythm, a similar ragtag group of voyagers. Octavia Spencer was Shelley Winters and . . . O.K., I haven’t worked out the casting/character parallels any better than that. But they’re there, trust me. Somebody on that train was Red Buttons, and somebody else was Pamela Sue Martin.

I haven’t seen “Boyhood,” and I’m ashamed. I have seen “The Fault in Our Stars,” and I’m done with this habit of casting 30-year-olds as pubescents. O.K., I’m exaggerating, but as fine an actress as Shailene Woodley is, I did not for a second buy her as a girl still in high school. No more than I buy the splendid Jennifer Lawrence as a teenager in the “Hunger Games” movies. I think the Screen Actors Guild’s actual teenagers should file a class-action suit of some kind. Either that or Hollywood should just follow this falsehood to its logical conclusion and cast Meryl Streep in the Tatum O’Neal role in a remake of “Paper Moon.”

I have some thoughts on one trend of the summer movie season that pleased me mightily, but first, Ross, tell all of us why “Galaxy” so floated your catamaran. Did it have cameos by Marco Rubio and Rand Paul or something?

Douthat: Frank, regarding your failure to see “Boyhood,” you should be ashamed. Truly, deeply, Bill Clinton-with-the-lip-quiver ashamed. Haven’t you glanced at the Metacritic ratings, where Linklater’s film has the same perfect score as “The Godfather,” “The Sweet Smell of Success” and “Lawrence of Arabia”? In 50 years, the kids will be asking you where and when you first saw “Boyhood,” and you’ll have to mutter something about watching it on-demand late on a Tuesday night when you were snowed in and didn’t have anything else to do, and they’ll laugh at you. Oh, how they’ll laugh.

Seriously, it’s a good movie, but not actually quite as good as all that, and some of the wild critical reaction feels like admiration for the scheme — the same kid! the same actors! over 12 years! — as much as the execution. (It didn’t make the Metacritic database, apparently, but Eve Tushnet’s contrarian take for The American Conservative captured some of its third-act problems pretty well.) “Boyhood” is, though, at least as relevant as “Snowpiercer” to current debates about class, culture and stratification, because among other things it’s a pretty painful portrait of how family breakdown — divorce, remarriage, failed attempts at blended families, live-in stepparents — shadows Middle American childhood, and even though the story has a happy-ish ending it still leaves you with a strong sense of just how perilous a youth spent amid failing social institutions can be.

As for “Snowpiercer” itself, the great train spectacular, I agree that it had some third-act problems as well, and perhaps a savvy edit could have helped … but a non-savvy edit would have cut out the wonderful weirdness of the movie, the gonzo detail of the train, of which if anything I wanted more — more strange cars, more weird vignettes, more bizarre inhabitants, etc. And joking about its anti-environmentalist message aside, I’ll actually speak in defense of the movie’s politics: Yes, it has some of the eat-the-rich crudeness you describe, but by the end it’s complicated that initial message and made it clear that revolutions can be futile, that the system is more complicated than the rebels thought, that the existing links between rich and poor can be severed only at great cost. In that sense, it’s worlds better than “Elysium,” which was just disappointing agitprop with an implausible shiny-happy ending in which the bad guys lose at no real cost (except, yes, to Matt Damon’s great white martyr) at all.

As for “Guardians,” I’m pretty sure I’m stealing this line from someone on Twitter, but it’s basically the best “Star Wars” movie since “The Empire Strikes Back,” with the soul of a great space opera injected into the body of a superhero origin story. As someone suffering (for years now) from superhero fatigue, the parts I liked least were the parts that felt like they belonged — and will doubtless appear — in “Thor 3” or “Iron Man 4” or “The Avengers 5.” (The villains … snore; the stones-of-power MacGuffin … zzzz.) But most of the movie was the kind of “ragtag outlaws save the galaxy” story that George Lucas forgot how to tell somewhere between the ’70s and “The Phantom Menace,” with a script that should be studied in film school as an example of how to balance humor and humanity in perfect equipoise, while also blowing all the things up that summer-movie conventions require to be blown up.

Back to you: Tell me about the trend that made you happy, and (speaking of political allegories) whether you like “Apes” as much as everyone else.

Bruni: Did I read you right? “Perfect equipoise”? That sounds like the goal in yoga, not the gift of a superhero movie. But I’ll channel your semantics and answer you about “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” like this: It is in imperfect dis-equipoise. But for at least three quarters of its excessive length, it’s riveting nonetheless. I think its own Metacritic score is about right or maybe two to three points too high. But I also think we have to stop plugging Metacritic. That, or buy stock in it.

Many aspects of “Apes” confused me, starting with the title. It’s the sequel to “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” but doesn’t the “Dawn” sound as if it would come before the “Rise”? Or are we in Scandinavia in the dead of winter, when the sun makes its coy appearance around 11 a.m.? I also didn’t understand the shrill pitch of Gary Oldman’s performance, which Andrew O’Hehir made accurate fun of in his pan of the movie in Salon.

There was something poignant about watching “Apes” against the backdrop of the mess in the Middle East and of the war in Israel and Gaza, because it’s a disturbingly good allegory of reciprocal mistrust, asking the right questions about how peace ever reigns when combatants can’t bring themselves to forgive error, to take the first step, to turn from the past and focus on the future, to start afresh. It’s a disturbingly good allegory about corrupt leaders, too: how they whip up fervor in the service of their own ambition; how we rise and fall based on the clarity and wisdom with which we choose them. If only “Apes” had steered clear of a few of the cliches it crashed into, and if only it hadn’t resorted to all that generic noise and fire in the end.

Here’s how and why the summer sang to me, Ross: Women fared reasonably well. Not in terms of quality, mind you. The critics mauled “Tammy” and scratched up “Lucy” some, too. But lost amid all the understandable lamentations about Melissa McCarthy’s squandered talents was the fact that “Tammy” didn’t bomb commercially. Not at all. Last I looked, it had grossed more than $80 million domestically, outpacing such male-dominated 2014 releases as “The Monuments Men” and “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.” And “Lucy,” with Scarlett Johansson putting herself forward as an action heroine, looks poised to haul in more than “Edge of Tomorrow,” starring Tom Cruise, or “Non-Stop,” starring Liam Neeson, did. I saw “Non-Stop,” by the way, so don’t talk to me of shame. I have none. I kissed it goodbye long ago, around the time I bought a ticket to the Sandra Bullock apocalypse “All About Steve” and stayed through the entire first hour.

“Maleficent” is the fourth-highest-grossing movie domestically of the year, and that’s a testament in part to the commercial power of Angelina Jolie. “Divergent,” with Shailene Woodley in the lead, took in more than $150 million in the United States. We still have a long way to go before female actors stand at the helm of as many big-budget extravaganzas and as many franchises as male actors do. I’m still waiting for “Wonder Woman,” as I wrote in a column late last year. But the summer gave me hope, along with that hauntingly beautiful shot of the paratroopers falling from the sky in “Godzilla.” I’ll take both, gratefully.

Douthat: We began with priests; we’ll end with women. I do think there’s a case to be made (you can read John Podhoretz making it explicitly this week that female movie stars are having a better run right now, in larger numbers, than at any time in decades. Some of it is clearly franchise driven (ScarJo with “The Avengers,” J-Law with “Hunger Games,” Woodley in “Divergent”), but even allowing for that element the female stars seem to be having an easier time establishing nonfranchise bankability than their male counterparts. (Henry Cavill, our current Superman, doesn’t have an equivalent of “Silver Linings Playbook” on his resume, and a lot more people went to see Woodley’s “Stars” than saw, say, “Rush,” Chris Hemsworth’s attempt at a non-Thor star turn.) Neither “Tammy” nor “Lucy” was a presold property, and while “Maleficent” has the Disney pedigree, we all know that it would have grossed half as much with anyone other than La Jolie headlining. Likewise Bullock and Meryl Streep: We didn’t see either of them this summer, but if you didn’t know anything about a movie except that they were starring, wouldn’t you be inclined to bet on it outgrossing whatever the once-bulletproof Johnny Depp does next?

I only wish some of the movies (especially this summer) were better: There is a great Melissa McCarthy vehicle out there, but since “Bridesmaids” it’s been a steady downhill slide; “Lucy” sounds just terrible (and I’ve admired ScarJo’s recent explorations, in “Her” and “Under the Skin,” more than I’ve actually enjoyed them); and Jolie has managed to become an icon without making a single movie I’d call legitimately great. Lawrence has made the best choices by far; I just don’t want to see her undone by the kind of overexposure plus idiotic backlash that seems to have sidetracked Anne Hathaway.

And as for “Wonder Woman” … no, Frank, no! I suspect female leads are doing particularly well right now in part because every promising male lead gets vacuumed up by the superhero-industrial complex, and in part because there’s a large, insufficiently tapped public appetite for movies in which (with apologies to the Bechdel test) two people can talk to each other about something other than the immense threat posed by a supervillain. So all the excitement about how Marvel is going to finally give us a superheroine just feels like a step in the wrong direction, for womankind and audiences alike. Give me better scripts for Jolie or McCarthy or Bullock; give me more great roles for Lawrence; give me Mila Kunis or Emma Stone in movies that make the most of them; give me ScarJo in a role that will make Anthony Lane finally sell his soul to the devil for a night with her. Just don’t ask me to cheer at the prospect of Hollywood’s fairer half vanishing into masks and tights as well. Until next time …

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