Whatever Happened to Movies for Grownups? : The New Yorker

I still love going to a theatre with strangers?even a screening room with near-strangers?and submitting to an overwhelming experience in the dark. It?s a primal romantic-religious hope, and when the movie is good, the pleasure is enormous. Have you ever noticed the faces of people streaming out of a good movie? They are mostly quiet, trancelike, zombie-like. They are trying to hold on to the mood, the image, playing the picture over and over in their heads.

I?m lucky to live in New York, where there?s a constant flood of independent movies, foreign films, documentaries, and everything else playing all the time. There?s always something interesting to see, something to write about. Movie hunger never dies. My critical collection, ?Do the Movies Have a Future?? (out today from Simon & Schuster), is a written record of the past dozen years or so (mostly drawn from The New Yorker). The book is a mix of business analysis; celebrations of good movies; writing about such genres as chick flicks and romantic comedies; homages to past mentors, James Agee (spiritual) and Pauline Kael (literal?ouch!); and occasional blasts of exaltation and misery. As you may have figured out, I?m not made exactly happy by the way the business of movies is strangling the art and entertainment of movies. None of what I?m about to say is new, of course. It?s been true for twenty-five years, ever since the conglomerates tightened their grip on the studios. But it gets worse each year.

The big picture (allowing for some exceptions) is this: The six major studios want to make three kinds of movies. They want to make blockbusters costing a hundred and fifty million dollars and up (with another fifty to a hundred million dollars spent on promotion)?that is, films that are based on comic books, video games, and young-adult novels. These movies mostly feature angry pixels contending in the dead air?action sequences of total physical abandonment and virtually total meaninglessness, in which nothing imprints itself on your memory except the experience of being excited. They want to make animated features for families, some of which?especially the ones from Pixar?are very good. And they want to make genre movies?thrillers, chick flicks, romantic comedies, weekend-debauch movies (female as well as male), horror movies. Movies that have a mostly assured audience. Some of those are very good, too, and I sometimes praise them. ?End of Watch,? which is out right now, is a good buddy-cop picture. But it?s not all that we want from movies.

The range of films made by the studios has shrunk?serious drama is virtually out of the question. A good, solid movie like Tony Gilroy?s ?Michael Clayton? (2007), with George Clooney, wouldn?t have a shot at being made now. I suspect ?The Social Network? got made only because Aaron Sorkin wrote the script. ?Lawrence of Arabia,? from 1962, which is playing all over the county October 4th for one day on big screens, wouldn?t even be considered now. At the studios, the blockbuster obsession joins with the opening-weekend obsession. Since grownups tend to wait for reviews or word from friends, they don?t go the first few days the movie is playing. That means, as it has for years, that people from, say, fifteen to twenty-five years of age exercise an influence on what gets made by the studios way out of proportion to their numbers in the population. My friends under about forty-five accept this as normal: They don?t know that movies, for the first eighty years of their existence, were essentially made for adults. Apart from the fall season, adults are mostly abandoned for the rest of the year. They wander about looking for something to see and usually retreat (quite rightly) into television.

My younger friends are innocents who think they are wised-up modernists accepting the market realities. Realities that I can?t accept. The studios could make more interesting choices. They could play for a series of small and medium-sized winners rather than constantly trying for the big killing; they could reduce costs by paying stars and directors minimal amounts up front and dividing all revenues at the back end by fixed percentages?that would bring the initial costs way down and allow them to greenlight more daring projects. Steven Soderbergh has advocated this for years, and certain actors, like George Clooney and Channing Tatum, may be getting the point?they want to make more interesting movies than the projects the studios are offering them. A few more directors like Soderbergh, backed by adventuous millionaires, could start a mini-trend among independents. Let us pray. The studios have openly, willingly put themselves in the box they find themselves in now, when the entire management rests on the success or failure of a single inane movie designed for kids. If the movie fails, the head of the studio gets replaced. Nuts.

Yes, there are artists and entertainers like Wes Anderson, Soderbergh, and Judd Apatow who can function very well within this system, but there are many directors who cannot?who have been forced out to the edges and have to spend four, five, six years rounding up money from odd sources (Abu Dhabi, Meg Ellison, you name it) in order to say what they want to say. Don?t forget that the old Hollywood?which appreciated money just as much as this Hollywood?allowed John Ford, Howard Hawks, John Huston, Raoul Walsh, and many other great directors to make two or three movies a year. After making ?Capote,? Bennett Miller was idle for six years before making ?Moneyball.? Alexander Payne waited seven years (after ?Sideways?) before making ?The Descendants.? You get the point: Many of the most talented people are not working very much.

There?s always the independent cinema, of course, and these productions range from moderately expensive to virtually nothing (literally a few thousand dollars). But it?s very hard for many serious independent films to gain traction in the theaters. Marketing is extraordinarily expensive, and the theatre chains can be hostile to independent movies (money is made in the complexes by the maximum number of bodies lining up at concession stands). Still, every year, two or three things break through to a decent-sized audience. In 2011, it was ?Margin Call,? a very articulate and handsomely acted version of a Lehman Brothers-type meltdown. This year, it?s the extraordinary ?Beasts of the Southern Wild,? which, at this writing, looks like a leading contender for an Oscar nomination, even a victory. Here is a movie costing exactly a million three hundred thousand dollars, and set in an obscure corner of the country?the messy bayous southwest of New Orleans?and starring non-actors. It offers a visionary picture of life as imagined by a six-year-old girl. You may not love it, but I guarantee that you have never seen anything that looks and feels like it.

Obviously, there?s still great hope. It?s not as if there?s an absence of talent out there. (American acting, for instance, has never been better.) I am greatly anticipating such fall movies as ?Zero Dark Thirty? (Kathyrn Bigelow?s movie about the Navy Seals), Spielberg?s ?Lincoln,? David O. Russell?s ?Silver Linings Playbook,? the complicated ?Cloud Atlas,? and many other things. And then there?s always that surprise, which springs out of nowhere and takes your breath away. My book is devoted both to the gruesome truths of the system (movies on an iPod?) and the exhilarations of a shocking, disruptive event.

Read David Denby?s review of ?Beasts of the Southern Wild.?

Source: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/10/whatever-happened-to-movies-for-grown-ups.html

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