Uncritical Critics
Warner Bros. took the
unprecedented step last week of refusing to let reviewers see The
Avengers before it was released. The widespread assumption was that the
studio knew the movie was a dog but was hoping to salvage a good opening
weekend before people found out. But by locking the critics out, knowing this
would be widely publicized, Warner Bros. was essentially announcing to the
world that The Avengers was a dog. It's as futile as a restaurant
publicly refusing to allow a health department inspection.
Maybe it
was a big bluff. Maybe Warner Bros. was trying to propitiate the film
critics--a largely disgruntled and demoralized bunch. By publicly sacrificing
The Avengers , a sure flop in any case, studio executives flattered the
critics by pretending to be deeply afraid of them. They also bolstered an
important delusion: that a movie as awful as The Avengers is the
exception and not the rule. Singling out The Avengers as terrible
implies that the other current Warner Bros. releases-- Lethal Weapon 4 ,
The Negotiator , and A Perfect Murder-- are not equally worthless.
Reviewers too have a stake in keeping up the pretense that most films are worth
reviewing. Were they to acknowledge that 95 percent of what comes out of
Hollywood is eyewash, there wouldn't be much left for most of them to do.
You might argue that movies aren't so bad nowadays. But
that would only prove that you haven't spent much time at the multiplex this
summer. Here are the big summer releases from the other major studios: The
X-Files ; Small Soldiers ; Armageddon ; Six Days, Seven
Nights ; Something About Mary ; Ever After ; The Mask of
Zorro ; Dr. Dolittle ; Mulan ; Jane Austen's Mafia ;
BASEketball ; Disturbing Behavior ; Madeline ; Out of
Sight ; Halloween: H20 ; Saving Private Ryan ; The Parent
Trap ; and Snake Eyes . Subtract Saving Private Ryan , which was
a virtuoso piece of moviemaking despite its hack storytelling, and subtract one
or two others that qualify as harmless fun. What you have left is a run of
formula films and glorified video games pitched to the adolescent audience.
It's not necessary to see these films to know how dismal they are, because they
are reiterations of other bad films. To be sure, there were plenty of crummy
genre films in the golden age of cinema. And good ones still break through from
time to time. But it would be seriously perverse to maintain that mainstream
film is a robust popular art form.
The sorry
condition of popular cinema leaves film critics in a quandary. David Denby
argued in a New Yorker article earlier this year that they face a choice
of being either hucksters or cranks. Either they declare that pablum is
delicious, or they sink into chronic dyspepsia. I think Denby is right in
saying that these are the twin poles, but most critics actually fall somewhere
on the continuum between them. Relatively few reviewers are either blurb-whores
or kvetching sourpusses. Most are simply battle-fatigued and judgment-impaired,
trapped in what has become a journalistic dead end, an untenable profession.
(My colleague,
Slate
's own David Edelstein, is a thinker and
writer whose oeuvre rises to a level beyond all pigeonholing, and he is
therefore omitted from the following analysis.)
Let's consider the fringes first. In addition
to Denby at New York magazine, the legion of honorable cranks includes
Anthony Lane of The New Yorker and Stanley Kauffmann of the New
Republic . These are writers of widely divergent disposition. Denby is
high-minded and dour, Lane biting, Kauffmann gentle and wise. But all take
basically the same approach to their job. As far as possible, they ignore
brain-rot movies and focus on independent and foreign films. At the
uncompromising extreme are J. Hoberman of the Village Voice and Jonathan
Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader , who ignore the Hollywood wasteland
almost entirely. They concentrate on obscure films, which may be wonderful but
which hardly anyone has an opportunity to see.
Reviewing
only A Taste of Cherry and Pi is not a viable alternative for
most critics. Even relatively successful independent films have no distribution
beyond big cities, and if you want to see foreign films nowadays, you have to
go to festivals. Most newspaper arts editors, not to mention TV and radio
producers, understandably want their critics to write about movies advertised
in their pages, movies that also happen to be the only ones average people are
likely to see. The worst hucksters are the reviewers who spend their weekends
on previewing junkets in New York and Los Angeles. They fly first class, stay
at the Four Seasons, and get $100 a day for incidentals. In return, they
provide the blurbs quoted in advance newspaper ads ("An ending that will knock
your socks off"-- Tucson Gazette ). The junketeers deliver these squibs,
which seldom appear in actual reviews, to the studio publicists. In some cases,
publicists write the blurbs themselves and find "critics" to accept
attribution.
Most movie reviewers occupy a middle ground between Don
Quixote and the Yellow Kid. Typically, they fell in love with movies when
movies were better and are trying not to notice that their love object has
shriveled into hagdom. They're not overtly corrupt, but their standards are in
a condition of collapse. They appraise poor films as good and fair films as
great. When something flawed but interesting such as Bulworth or The
Truman Show breaks through, they overpraise it in an cringe-making way.
Into this category go Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune , who recently
gave a rave to Armageddon ; his Sneak Previews buddy Roger Ebert
(who calls The Negotiator "a thriller that really hums along"); David
Ansen of Newsweek ; and Richard Schickel of Time . Even Janet
Maslin of the New York Times , intelligent though she is, seems headed
down this slope when she enthuses about Lethal Weapon 4 or prostrates
herself before the latest Spielberg.
I have two theories about why
movie critics are so uncritical--one aesthetic, the other economic. The
aesthetic explanation is that critics see so many bad movies that their taste
deteriorates. If you are forced to spend your afternoon sitting through
Godzilla , Armageddon comes as a relief. The economic explanation
is that movie reviewers are really part of the movie industry. They exist to
encourage people to see movies in general, even if they must discourage them
from seeing some in particular. In all but a few places, a reviewer who
consistently pans blockbusters is likely to run into trouble with his
superiors. Movie ads are a major source of revenue for papers and magazines and
TV stations, and editors and publishers don't want some "elitist" reviewer
threatening that money. Most critics can tell you stories about the pressure on
them to be upbeat and populist.
A couple of years ago, Susan
Sontag argued in an article in the New York Times Magazine that the
decline of film quality is a demand-driven problem. What's killing cinema as an
art form is the demise of the audience with a taste for serious and challenging
films. If she's right, there may not be much reviewers can do. But it would be
nice to see them rage a little against the degradation of the medium they're
supposed to love. One way to protest would be to follow the "crank" critics in
acknowledging that movies such as Deep Impact and Small Soldiers
don't require evaluation. A newspaper that wants to serve its readers well can
provide a paragraph-long capsule and a Zagat -style reader rating
instead. Critics should address the larger question of why Hollywood thinks so
little of today's film audience. And if Warner Bros. doesn't want The
Avengers reviewed, reviewers should be only too happy to oblige.
