Cineastes vs. Multiplexers
            

            Dear Sarah,

            When I read a sentence about Tom Hanks like "Wherever he goes, a treacly,
white-guy triumphalism seems to follow," I wonder what impulse causes you to
add the words "white guy" to the sentence. That's the one part he can't help.
Would you write this sentence substituting "Jewish" or "black" or "Native
American"? Tom Hanks embodies all he embodies. You don't like it, find another
actor. To some degree every actor simply is what he is. Does Denzel Washington
ever put you in mind of treacly black-guy triumphalism? In The Bone
Collector , for example? Or are both Hanks and Washington in scripts you
don't like because as scripts they embody treacly triumphalism?

            But of course America loves Tom Hanks. Quite often I do, too. I think it is
important that as film critics we stay in touch with ordinary audiences--not to
reflect their values, because we must have our own, but to understand them.
Most of the ideological criticisms of The Green Mile are by and for
sophisticated and subtle observers, writing for one another. The average
moviegoer with $8 and a seat in an Abilene multiplex is likely to find himself
or herself subtly more complex, humane, and liberal after seeing that film than
before. It is reductive and stereotyped to a media cineaste, but perhaps the
best and most evolved movie that many of its viewers will see all year.

            I agree with you, by the way, in feeling fed up to here with movies about
men being on the ropes. The most offensive example of that trend, of course,
was Fight Club , which I notice is very absent from most of the year-end
best-film lists. Having recently returned from Calcutta, where the extent of
the poverty was almost inconceivable to me, I now have even less sympathy for
pathetic preppies who have to beat up each other to feel authentic. I am
thinking now of an e-mail from a twentysomething whiner who said that his
generation needed Fight Club because they have been denied a war like
Vietnam to test themselves in.

            Best,
Roger