Don't Mention the Writer

In its October 1-2 edition, The Australian newspaper made a factual error with entertainment article, ‘Nice and Funny.’ In the interview with Steve Carell (NBC’s The Office, Little Miss Sunshine), the writer seemed to appreciate the actor’s new romantic comedy, Crazy, Stupid, Love. However, the article – by Michael Bodey – repeatedly asserted that directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa wrote the film, which is not true. Rather, Crazy, Stupid, Love began as an original screenplay by Dan Fogelman, an American writer better known for his work on popular animated features Cars, Bolt, Tangled and Cars 2.

This curious error was exasperated by critic David Stratton’s review on the next page. Like Mr. Bodey, Mr. Stratton also like the film, and responded to the material’s warmth and charm, labelling it one of the better American comedies of this year (a category that also includes The Hangover Part II, Bridesmaids, Bad Teacher, Horrible Bosses and The Change-Up). Unfortunately, though, Mr. Stratton also failed to mention Mr. Fogelman in his write-up. Although his review did not credit the directors with the screenplay, the At the Movies co-host did not refer to the writer, even though Mr. Stratton twice quoted from the film’s dialogue (“I went to see the new Twilight movie by myself – it was so bad,” “Are you breaking up with me, Bernie?”).

What is going on? Why would two of Australia’s more intellectual mainstream critics – Mr. Bodey discussed the ‘auteur’ theory late last year whilst Mr. Stratton teaches at the University of Sydney – reduce the role of the writer?

Mr. Bodey insists that his was an editorial error: “a silly mistake in the craziness of newspapers,” he confesses (although one that has not been corrected on the site). In a phone interview, Mr. Bodey says that he specifically asked Mr. Carell about Mr. Fogelman in their interview. However, many film writers have failed to appreciate the writer’s role in the film. Mr. Stratton was not the only critic to overlook Mr. Fogelman’s efforts: the Herald Sun’s Leigh Paatsch and the Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern, too, did not mention Mr. Fogelman’s name in their write-ups. Meanwhile, The New Yorker’s David Denby was as concerned with Carell’s “elongated, almost-Cyrano nose” as a little thing like a screenplay.

Perhaps these critics felt that the writer-directors heavily rewrote the script, which is not an unreasonable assumption given that Mr. Ficarra and Mr. Requa are strong and inventively funny writers themselves, as illustrated by their excellent screenplays for Bad Santa and I Love You Phillip Morris (which they also directed). Alternatively, maybe they thought that Mr. Carell improvised his role, which –again – is understandable as the actor co-wrote The 40 Year Old Virgin and trained as an improv performer at Chicago’s Second City troupe.

However, Mr. Fogelman’s final draft is actually very close to the finished film. Certainly, there are clear instances of improvisation or rewriting: for instance, Julianne Moore’s Twilight line does not feature in Mr. Fogelman’s script. Essentially, though, the structure, format, humour and characterisation of Crazy, Stupid, Love is evident in Mr. Fogelman’s work, which offers at least three laugh-out-loud sequences (F.Y.I. those scenes are The Karate Kid discussion, the Carell/Moore/Marisa Tomei sequence and a celebration-turned-brawl).

Mr. Bodey says that – though he would like to read screenplays – legal difficulties mean that critics rarely have access to scripts to new releases. “I would love to. I was talking to a producer the other day about a U.S. film that has just been out and he said they were disappointed with it because they had gotten a director who totally changed the screenplay so the screenplay they approved didn’t make it to the screen,” Mr. Bodey says. “I asked if I could see the original screenplay because I thought it would be a great story and a great thing to look at. He’s got my email but he hasn’t sent it because it is all a bit testy, legally.”

Reporter-turned-screenwriter William Monahan (The Departed, Body of Lies, Edge of Darkness) is more blunt. In an interview with the film website Collider about directorial debut London Boulevard, Mr. Monahan suggests that film critics are often lazy when they discuss screenwriting: “people get quite liberal about saying ‘the script’ this and ‘the script’ that, when they’ve never read the script any more than they’ve read the latest report on Norwegian herring landings. I don’t think Roger Ebert has ever mentioned a screenplay … some reviewer might be out there saying, obviously Edge of Darkness didn’t come off because of the script, blah blah blah, but everybody has read the script, except the journalist attacking it.”

Perhaps this critical approach originates from the auteur theory. Developed by a group of French critics and directors in the mid-20^th Century, the theory suggests high art can only be achieved with a purely visual director. Therefore, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica, the director “is more to be considered the “author” of the movie than is the writer of the screenplay.” For example, Alfred Hitchcock (The 39 Steps, Psycho) is an auteur because his work is unified by common concerns and visual motifs. Later, the Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris attempted to create a rigid methodology around this concept, placing directors into 11 different categories of creative relevance: John Ford (The Searchers) is part of the ‘Pantheon’ of greats, Billy Wilder (Stalag 17) is ‘Less Than Meets The Eye’ and Stanley Kubrick (Spartacus) suffers from ‘Strained Seriousness.’

Of course, screenwriters like William Goldman (All the President’s Men, The Princess Bride) and Ernest Lehman (Sweet Smell of Success, North by Northwest) and critics like The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael spoke against this concept. In fact, Ms. Kael generated a life-long rivalry with Mr. Sarris when she wrote the essay ‘Circles and Squares,’ a direct, point-by-point attack against Mr. Sarris’ writing. Afterward, Ms. Kael wrote the essay ‘Raising Kane,’ which proposed that Orson Welles – co-writer/actor/director/producer of Citizen Kane – was not the true author of the screenplay and – by extension – the film, and that the famed egotist took credit for co-writer Herman Mankiewicz’ work. (Many of Ms. Kael assertions were disputed by a number of auteur writers, including film director Peter Bogdanovich who interviewed Mr. Welles).

Mr. Bodey suggests that – although useful for understanding the way in which Hollywood markets certain films and filmmakers – the auteur theory is just that: a theory. Mr. Bodey says that many critics adhere towards this concept because of the theory’s ease, pointing to the variety of factors that construct a film. “It is very rare to say that a director has total control film unless it is a small art film in which the budget allows them that,” Mr. Bodey says. “But when you are spending any more than AUD$20 million on a film you’ve got producers, who are sort of auteurs in a way, to Harvey Weinstein (Pulp Fiction, The English Patient) to Jerry Bruckheimer (Top Gun, Pearl Harbour) and then you’ve got writers, writer-directors who are very strong. In Australia, there are a lot of writer-directors who have control. But I don’t subscribe to anything.”

Mr. Bodey points to certain, very talented writers, including Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), as the key authority of their films. “Some writers are particularly strong. Charlie Kaufman is one very distinct writer, and you would always look at one of his films, no matter who directed it, as ‘A Charlie Kaufman Film.’ So I think they all make up the mix,” Mr. Bodey says. “I think you will just be silly to discredit one in favour of another. And that’s why I hate it when a director puts on the front ‘A Michael Bodey Film’ because it is a bit disingenuous to say that one person has made this film.”

Carson Reeves, too, argues about the importance of the screenwriter. A blogger, screenwriter and script reader, Mr. Reeves reads screenplays and reviews them for his blog, Script Shadow. In an email, Mr. Reeves suggests that the role of both director and screenwriter are very different, and that they perform distinct – but significant – functions for the creative success of a film. “On the one hand, the director's job is much harder. He has to juggle 15,000 plates at once and do so in an incredibly short amount of time. There are so many moving parts in film production, and being able to make all those parts work at the same time, with the same high level of quality, is a unique talent that only a small group of people in the world have,” Mr. Reeves says.

“Having said that, none of those people would be there if it weren't for the writer. Hollywood has tried to make movies without scripts before and the results are dreadful. Just check out Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen. I just think that you imagine a writer alone in a chair with their computer in front of them writing the script – and it seems easy. But it's really hard.”

Mr. Reeves’ allusion to the Michael Bay sequel is an interesting example. Mr. Bay has never been a particularly strong storyteller. Early films like Bad Boys, The Rock and Armageddon showed a disinterest in the fundamentals of storytelling, including subtext and characterisation. Consider his answer to a question of ‘story’ for the first film in the franchise: “Literally, I wanted to see if this movie could even work. Early on we did this Scorponok sequence, to make it more real and vicious and dangerous, and to make these things more lethal. All my friends, when I’m doing movies, my buddies are like, ‘Are you kidding me? You’re doing that movie? What is that?’ Everyone was saying that and I felt like such a jerk. I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, this is so risky.’ I kept thinking: I can make this real.” No, I didn’t read anything about conflict, drama or character: did you?

The second instalment in the franchise, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen suffered from more pronounced script problems than Mr. Bay’s other films. Because of the 2007/2008 writers’ strike, many big-budget features were rushed into production without the security of a script polish. In particular, 2009 films Transformers, GI Joe: Rise of Cobra and Terminator Salvation all underwent a number of drafts and screenwriters before the incoming deadline of the strike. Conversely, other major efforts like Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Star Trek did not suffer those pressures because their scripts were completed well before the strike. Consequentially, the intelligently scripted Harry Potter and Star Trek faired well with audiences and reviewers (83% and 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, respectively), whilst Transformers (20%), GI Joe (33%) and Terminator (33%) received a whipping from critics, with most citing story issues.

Mr. Reeves writes that the director should respect their screenplay, and try to find the best way to cinematically represent their story on-screen. In this way, the film does not become a replication of the screenplay, but a distillation of its narrative.

"He/she has to bring those words to life, which is not an easy task. How they interpret and convey those words is usually what separates the good directors from the bad ones,” Mr. Reeves says. “A good director, for example, might realize that an entire scene of dialogue is redundant, and he can achieve the same thing with a look from his lead actor.”

In a recent article, ‘Drive: Script to Screen,’ Mr. Reeves compared the finished film of Drive with its script, and pointed to the importance of the director to create pace, excitement and tension. Whilst, say, writer-director Dan Rush’s Everything Must Go seemed lethargic on-screen (“watching that movie was an exercise in futility. What seemed so alive on the page felt dead on the screen”), Mr. Reeves suggested, Drive benefited from Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn’s direction. “Somehow, Refn figured out a way to take a script that was already great, pare it down to its bare essence, and in the process make it better. This guy is just an amazingly talented director with such a unique voice. You can't write the way it feels to watch Gosling drive through the neon lighted night-time streets of LA with a soft focus lens and an eerie techno pop song playing over the radio. It conveys the loneliness and isolation of this character within 5 seconds, something that might take three or four scenes in a screenplay,” Mr. Reeves says.

Closer to home, Mr. Bodey points to the Australian film industry and the theory that filmmakers spend too little time on developing the screenplay (an argument that Joel Edgerton, one of the stars of Animal Kingdom and a co-writer on The Square, contends). “In some ways, that has been seen as a fault in Australia. That there has not been enough credit or time or resources put into screenwriting or the development of scripts and that is easy to see why because once they get financed they just rush them in and they don’t keep drafting and drafting. I was reading the press notes and they were saying, ‘The film that we got up to is the 20th draft!’” Look I am a writer, I will never underestimate the value of a writer, particularly in film,” Mr. Bodey says.

“Because if you don’t have a good story and good dialogue and good characterizations, they are three pretty essential things that you look at in films. And, if you don’t have that, it doesn’t matter what a director does or what the actors do or what the sound recordist do (sic.). They are the essential basic building blocks of any film.”

Surface judgements and the moral critic

Early in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, Ryan Gosling’s unnamed title character outlines his M.O.: “You give me a time and place, I give you a five minute window. Those five minutes I'm yours. Whatever goes down, I'm yours. Minute either side you're on your own.” The speech instantly states the Driver’s existential philosophy, and the following set-piece – a night-time car chase that begins in downtown Los Angeles and ends at LA’s Staple Centre car park – confirms his ease with action and non-violent action. It is a terrific sequence: tense, eloquent and – despite the potential difficulty of translating screenwriter Hossein Amini’s non-chronological staging of sequences onto the screen – coherently edited, as well. Cinematographer Newton Thomas Siegel (Three Kings, X-Men) gives LA a gloomy, but energetic look, filming the city’s grungier streets with very effective low-angles, point of view shots and minimal lighting techniques, courtesy of the production’s Arri Alexa digital camera.

Whilst it is a little disappointing that this pre-credit opening will turn out to be the finest sequence in the film, it is also not surprising that the film has been acclaimed in America and internationally. The Cannes Film Festival awarded the film its Best Director prize, whilst The Chicago Sun Times’ Roger Ebert, The Guardian/BBC’s Mark Kermode and Rope of Silicon’s Brad Brevet gave the film excellent reviews (with Mr. Brevet, in particular, suggesting that Drive is one of the best of the year). Whatever issues the film has (including the love story, which suffers because Carey Mulligan’s love interest and her on-screen child lack personality and dimension, and the fact that Driver’s M.O. does not mean a hell of a lot if the character is stabbing, shooting and drowning his enemies), Drive certainly has an intelligent filmmaker well versed in original visual composition.

It is intriguing, therefore, that the film – despite its acclaim – has also faced some negative reviews, which cited its violence and existentialism as “a muddle of ultraviolence, hypocrisy and stylistic preening.” New York critics David Edelstein and A.O. Scott suggested that it was trashy and stylistically derivative, and The Age’s Jim Schembri was concise, if not exactly eloquent, in his 80-word review, with sound-bites that read more like Twitter comments than film criticism: “People get shot, blood spurts everywhere, he slowly loses control. Yawn... Directed without much of a clue by Nicolas Winding Refn” (I was a little disappointed when “Albert Brooks as a baddie? WTF? LOL, guys” did not pop up).

More curious, though, is the way in which some of the critics have objected morally to the film. The Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips liked the film’s opening, suggesting that it “is one of the more gripping openings of the year.” However, the writer did not appreciate the film’s later evolution into Gaspar Noé-style violence: “Refn has a compositional eye and considerable craft, as was clear in the earlier Bronson. He’s also a bit of an airhead when it comes to the moral implications of the brutality he portrays.”

Mr. Phillips' review is problematic, not least because he does not define the “moral implications” of the film or the moral obligations of the filmmaker, in any case. In particular, the violence in Drive never struck me as morally ambiguous or “preening,” at all. As a rule, I quite like Phillips as a writer. Whatever he lacks in talent in his prose, he more than makes up for with his logic and coherence as a writer: certainly, his thinking is often a lot more clear-headed than Mr. Scott’s tedious ‘writer-ness’ (the comment “this does not strike me as entirely an accident, or a wayward interpretation on my part” means nothing when the writer shows little evidence of self-reflection in later paragraphs) or David Denby’s frustrating pretension (it is difficult to stomach his assertions of Quentin Tarantino’s insensitivity in Inglourious Basterds when The New Yorker critic wrote “one of the extraordinary things about growing up French is that you can be absurd without ever quite knowing it” of French-language filmmaker Catherine Breillat).

However, the amoral violence that Mr. Phillips suggests is not apparent in Refn’s film. In contrast, the screenplay and direction depicts the violence as horrible, bloody and very, very disturbing. In one scene, the Gosling character stomps on another character’s head to the horror of the Mulligan character, Irene. In his screenplay, Mr. Amini describes as thus: “Driver turns to Irene as they take cover behind a pillar. She looks terrified – not just of Tan Suit but of him. It's as if all her worst fears have been confirmed... Driver stands there, his hands covered in Tan Suit's blood. The elevator doors finally close, hiding Irene from view.” In terms of Mr. Refn’s choreography and Mr. Amini’s narrative, the sequence suggests the physical and emotional toll of violence. Visually, the sequence shows the disturbing physical toll of the violence upon the victim, Tan Suit. Inspired by French filmmaker Noé (whom the filmmakers consulted in relation to this sequence), the moment shows violence and its physical consequence, intercutting the Driver’s blows with the man’s bloodied, deformed face and Irene’s shocked face. Narratively, the moment also signifies the disconnection between the Driver and Irene, who witnesses his capacity for violence for the first time. The Driver is trying to protect and care for her and her son, but – in committing such violence, even if it is in self-defence – he becomes the kind of man that she could never love. In this instance, he is not rewarded for his violence, but punished. Or, as Script Shadow’s Carson Reeves suggests, “And of course, we see that he cares so much for this family, that he actually puts his own life in danger to help the husband pay back the money he owes, so the family will be safe. That's another thing I loved about this script so much. There were so many layers going on. You're saving the two people you love, but in the process you're creating a scenario where those two people can never be yours.”

If Phillips’ discussion is shallow and problematic, it does bring up the issue of film criticism, and the propensity of critics to impose superficial moral judgements upon readers and viewers. In ‘Conversations with Pauline Kael’ – a fine collection of articles and interview transcripts with the late New Yorker critic – the venerable reviewer talks about the William Friedkin serial killer thriller Cruising. In the article by Sheila Benson, Ms. Kael talks about the film’s controversial reception: “Very often they take the surface attitudes of the movie and don’t go beneath that.” In the review, Mr Phillips does cite a particular example in Drive, writing that “the imagery politely points your attention to how the blood on the wallpaper contrasts with the green of the palm tree outside, against the blue sky,” but he refuses to define the way in which Mr. Refn “politely points your attention” visually, making it difficult to judge the likeliness or credibility of the critic’s suggestion.

Ideology is as expected on a writer as fingers and a pair of thumbs, and many film critics have significant political ideologies that are obvious in a number of their reviews. Ms. Kael was certainly not above her own moral and political convictions. In her review of Don Siegel’s now-seminal cop thriller Dirty Harry, she famously recalls at the film’s violence and glamorisation of conservative crime-fighting techniques with left-wing aggression: “the action genre has always had a fascist potential, and it surfaces in this movie.” Other critics have pet peeves, too. On At the Movies, David Stratton recoiled at The Book of Eli for its Christian concerns (in his recent review of Vera Farmiga’s Christian-focused Higher Ground, he admitted that “the subject matter really didn't interest me very much and you know how it is sometimes when you're watching a film and you feel quite remote from what's going on” and criticised that it was “barely critical” of the community). His ABC partner Margaret Pomeranz struggles with films that reduce the role of the female, which may account for her tepid reviews of the later films by Woody Allen (to be fair, though, in the cases of Melinda and Melinda and Scoop, she may have been perturbed by the clumsy scripts and their clumsy constructions). Armond White despises films with nihilistic themes or a post-modern approach, which explains why he attacks films such as There Will Be Blood, Precious and Black Swan, and praises the likes of Norbit. Genre specialist Mark Kermode dislikes sexually explicit films which do not conform to genre, which explains his loathing of Stanley Kubrick’s strange and epileptic Eyes Wide Shut, but gives a pass to Basic Instinct 2, the second in a series that has a truly disturbing and aggressively violent relationship between sexuality and sexual identity, but – regardless – deliver thriller conventions by the truckload (even if its does so incompetently).

In the case of Mr. Phillips and his criticism of Drive, his review is a little hard to stomach when there are far more dishonest and troubling depictions of on-screen violence, notably John Michael McDonagh’s The Guard, an unlikely and episodic comedy/action thriller that has some good (un-PC) gags, but ultimately and consistently reverts to the cultural stereotyping and violence-fetishism of any Dirty Harry film. In The Guard, Brendan Gleeson’s gleefully corrupt Irish copper annoys a FBI Agent played by Don Cheadle with his comic racism. The sidekick may be played by a well known, Oscar-nominated actor, but – honestly – how is the guy any different from any of Dirty Harry’s sidekicks, who suffer from the bigotry from the hero, but then grow to accept and respect the character’s unconventional, corrupt approach to crime fighting. Moreover, the film’s final action set-piece is weirdly unironic, too. For a film so divorced of action set pieces, the filmmaker goes gung ho, indulging in Sergio Leone’s influenced imagery and gun-worship in the way Mr. Cheadle’s buttoned-up American and Mr. Gleeson’s loveable Irishman unload on the drug dealers. Yet, try telling that to Phillips, who does not discuss the problems of gun-worship and violence in his review of The Guard, skimming over the sequence with “when the time comes for McDonagh's action climax the filmmaking comes up slightly short,” and preferring to reference Joel and Ethan Coen, John Millington Synge and Walter Matthau, instead (rather than John Wayne or any other Western motifs). In contrast to Mr. McDonagh’s work on The Guard, Edgar Wright treats the action set-pieces in Hot Fuzz as equal parts wish-fulfilment and satire, with super-cop Nick Angel’s victory transforming a sleepy, casually corrupt town into a quasi-fascist state in the film’s ironic coda: “Chief, we’ve had a report of some hippie-types messing with the recycling bins at the supermarket” (co-writer/actor Simon Pegg confirms this interpretation, “it was supposed to be, like, things aren’t as right as they look”).

Is it wrong for critics to object morally to a film? Of course, not. However, as Ms. Kael suggests, critics often look at the obvious, surface elements of a film and refuse to examine the material any further. Granted, this is not exactly the Daily Mail (in which columnists suggest that Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist “confirms our jihadist enemies’ view of us,” even though writer Christopher Hart had not seen it: “merely reading about Antichrist is stomach-turning, and enough to form a judgment”), but it is always tricky and difficult when film writers attempt to form moralistic judgements about cinema, especially when they attack the “surface attitudes of the movie and don’t go beneath that.”

Band of Brothers

In Jim Sheridan’s Brothers, Capt. Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire) returns from his tour of duty in Afghanistan a changed man: tender, responsive and attentive to the well-being of his young wife (Natalie Portman) and two daughters before the tour. His sickening, inhumane experiences in a Taliban prison camp have left him have rendered him a fearsome, bullying monster to his family, overcome with a possessive jealousy of his younger brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal). Sam, unable to express his remorse for a particularly dehumanising incident in the camp, unleashes his rage on his wife after a particularly awkward family dinner. “I’m no fucking hero,” he screams, as he smashes a golf club into Tommy’s restoration of his kitchen.

This interlocking, changing family dynamic becomes the foreground for the battle in the Middle East, as Sam’s homecoming serves as a painful reminder for their hardened military father’s difficult return from Vietnam.

Brothers is an American remake of the Danish drama Brødre. Directed by Susanne Bier (Open Hearts, After the Wedding), the 2005 film explored the Western occupation in Afghanistan in the form of a Biblical melodrama. Bier’s work is undoubtedly the better film: unlike the romantic, edgy quality of Bier’s very fine film, Sheridan’s obvious, stolid work has little of the earthy texture of the original (the Irish director is not helped by Thomas Newman’s incessant, misjudged score, a techno-infused remix of homespun Americana that smothers much of the drama).

But both productions attempt to relocate the war’s impact within the family unit and personalize the conflict as drama. In each film, the destruction of the kitchen epitomizes the soldier’s frightening inability to express his feelings to loved ones. Brødre and Brothers serve as an effective, personal counterpoint to the raft of overblown, preachy political films in the later part of last decade, including Peter Berg’s The Kingdom, Robert Redford’s UA relaunching Lions for Lambs, Gavin Hood’s Rendition and Brian De Palma’s Redacted (in fact, their heavy, aggressive political lines prompted a brief return on the part of the studios to more familiar World War Two archetypes in Daniel Craig’s robust savior in Defiance, David Thewlis’ patriarchal, repellent Nazi officer in The Boy in The Striped Balloon and Kate Winslet’s Oscar-winning turn as an SS guard in The Reader).

As opposed to the highly drawn political battle-lines of Stop-Loss and Lambs, Sheridan’s film juxtaposes the hellish, externalized conflict with an internalized anguish for the modern soldier, where their masked vulnerabilities and pain are brought to the fore in the family unit. In particular, the film’s later scenes are startling in the way the hero’s extraordinarily precise skills in Iraq modulate into bewildered vulnerability and awkward confusion in a materialistic Western society: a shot in which Jeremy Renner’s Staff Sergeant William James struggles to select a cereal box in a supermarket aisle is tinged with sad irony and pathos.

Unlike the earlier batch of post-9/11 productions (which, boringly, seemed intent on extending Hollywood’s fierce, vitriolic Culture Wars in the late ‘70s between Michael Cimino’s conservative, Gone With The Wind-style traditionalist epic The Deer Hunter, which won 1978’s Best Picture Oscar, and Hal Ashby’s strongly anti-War Coming Home, which starred “Hanoi Jane” Fonda), there is little political divide in the new films. If you would like to recognise the vastly contrasting ideological differences in the earlier films, compare the vastly diverse portrayals of the military in De Palma’s violent, digital-video experiment Redacted to the almost-saintly depiction of the idealistic, College-educated soldiers in Redford’s Lions for Lambs.

There was major talent involved in these enterprises, but the films failed to engage with the psychology and emotions of its characters with any kind of depth or dramatic purpose. Former Hollywood golden-boy Redford won few new admirers with Lambs (an early stumbling block for star Tom Cruise and his present venture as co-owner of United Artists studio), the critical and commercial failure of Rendition drove the Oscar-winning Hood into soulless blockbuster filmmaking with the thoroughly underwhelming X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Redacted’’s miserable response from critics and audiences further cemented the once-great filmmaker’s further decline into cultural irrelevance. American screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan found himself at the forefront of this trend with the polemic Lions for Lambs¸ shapeless action film The Kingdom and bland, ineffective BBC adaptation State of Play, forgoing intelligent, specific character detailing for broad, bland statements about America’s role in the Middle East.

But with the 2009 release of The Hurt Locker (in actuality a 2008 production, as it debuted to middling reviews at that year’s Venice Film Festival and was ignored by the Jury in favor of Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler), the Iraq/Afghanistan War dramas what they were lacking: a fierce, wholly cinematic voice in Bigelow’s striking, compelling direction and intimate reflection in Mark Boal’s unconventional, fierily apolitical screenplay. Like ex-husband and collaborator James Cameron, Bigelow is an action filmmaker uncomfortable with long passages of dialogue (some of the writing in her biggest hit, Point Break, is almost excruciating in its cheesiness: delivering the line “little hand says it's time to rock and roll” was not one of Patrick Swayze’s finest moments as a performer), but she has a brilliant eye for creating clear, clean characterization through swift, unpretentious action. While the film contains more incident than half a dozen war dramas- as structured by Boal’s screenplay, the story is a series of unbelievably tense action sequences set around the disposal of bombs in Iraq- the character details of individual scenes contain more credibility and intelligence than the faux-documentary “realism” of previous films like Berg’s The Kingdom. 

In contrast to Brothers scribe David Benioff (a lightweight novelist-turned-screenwriter who made his debut with the hyped, but underwhelming Spike Lee film 25th Hour), debut screenwriter Boal is a former journalist who was embedded with a group of soldiers in Iraq. He is not only the better writer, but bolder and more ambitious, as well. Whilst Benioff generated a bluntly emotive dramatic charge in the film’s later scenes at the expense of the earlier film’s spiritual and romantic impulses, Boal’s concern with the personal implications of war for American soldiers is more deft and intelligent, slyly conveying the shifting dynamic between the three central characters through action and movement rather than pious clichés. The film is powered by its characterizations, including Renner’s heroic Staff Sergeant William James, Brian Geraghty’s troubled, confused young Specialist Owen Eldridge and the fine young actor Anthony Mackie (Half Nelson, Million Dollar Baby), who makes a fine counterpoint to the reckless, virtuoso James as his second-in-command Sergeant JT Sanborn, embodying a modest, unshowy heroism to Renner’s wild, reckless cowboy.

Even Grant Heslov’s The Men Who Stare at Goats- a fun, if uneven attempt to replicate the Vietnam-era energy of filmmakers Mike Nichols, Robert Altman and Norman Jewison- is as much concerned with the psyche and frailties of the modern soldier as it is making political messages about the futility and evil of torture against enemy combatants.

Heslov and star George Clooney’s liberal leanings are well known (as evidenced in Clooney’s sophomore effort behind the camera, the morally alert study of MacCarthyism Good Night, and Good Luck, co-written by Heslov), but this fictionalised account of the American military’s attempt to create extrasensory, telepathic “super-soldiers” reflects the intense psychological damage inflicted by war on the modern soldier.

True, the film has its problems (as a madcap, Coen-esque farce, playwright Peter Straughan’s screenplay is not on the same level as its actors and is far more comfortable in the now-relatively safer pastures of post-Nam America than the present conflict in the Middle East), but The Men Who Stare at Goats makes its points with purpose and a refreshing absence of pretension. Its scattershot structure and slow start eventually builds into a rousing battle between Clooney and Jeff Bridges’ peace-seeking “Warrior Monks” (or “Jedi Warriors”) and Kevin’s Spacey’s unctuous, self-serving careerist soldier. 

Paul Greengrass’ hyped, powerful Green Zone is a more successful, coherent attempt to merge genre filmmaking with critical political discourse, focusing on a loyalist’s growth into cynicism and dissolution to embody the wider military’s growing unease with Washington duplicity in the first months of the Iraq War. The liberal, politically conscious Greengrass is best known for his brilliant transformation of The Bourne Identity’s classicalism and formalist homage to the Cold War into an angry attack on blind American imperialism in the series’ sequels (the franchise’s originator, Swinger’s Doug Liman, has noted the series’ ideological shift since he jumped ship after 2002, telling Empire Magazine that the “sequels became very good action movies”, but “in The Bourne Identity, Chris Cooper is probably more sympathetic than Jason Bourne in terms of the problem he’s facing. Chris is a patriot. He’s doing the bidding of the United States, he’s doing what needs to be done. Bourne’s the one who’s off the reservation”).

Greengrass reconsiders the scorching political sub-text of his mega-budget Bourne pictures for an intelligent response to the West’s invasion into Iraq and their desire to unearth WMDs. Actor Jason Isaacs (who plays the vile, thuggish Major Briggs, a vicious point man to Greg Kinnear’s unctuous political mover) suggested that the adaptation of Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone is an effective amalgam of the personal filmmaking of Bloody Sunday and United 93 with the star-powered excitement and propulsive entertainment of the Bourne series. Whilst the film does not quite find the visceral intensity of United 93, it is still an exciting, exhilarating thriller of the highest order, melding Lambs and Rendition’s earlier, unsuccessful attempts to re-conceptualize the conflict in the Middle East as an intellectual and moral argument with the robust action of the dramatically inert The Kingdom.

This time the fiery discourse between Pentagon officials, CIA chiefs and intelligence operatives do not feel like the lazy conceit of Hollywood screenwriters, but are the result of intense, intelligent research on the part of the filmmakers, enriching this very exciting thriller with a forceful moral intelligence. “There are no easy answers. We only have hard choices,” Brendan Gleeson’s CIA Baghdad bureau chief Martin Brown says, a striking, pointed response to the glib, easy liberalism of Lambs or Rendition.

Damon, the beloved American star who helped redefine the Mad Max/Man With No Name, silent hero archetype for the 21st Century in the Bourne series, gives a rounded, sympathetic portrait of the dedicated intelligence officer soldier Roy Miller. Like Bourne, Damon’s Miller is a man of action (“Do you want to sit around here digging holes all day?” he asks his men, before leading them on a mission to upturn an underground Iraqi general). But- even more significantly- he is a modern, sharp soldier, as willing to listen to his men as understanding Iraqi citizens, such as the like-minded, sympathetic Freddy (well played by The Kite Runner’s Khalid Abdalla), whom Miller hires as a translator and also serves as an unofficial advisor to the American soldiers. 

It is their dynamic - between American and Iraqi - that gives the film much of its effectiveness. Like the film’s other characters, Miller is a professional and his desire to find the WMDs stemming from his loyalty to his country, but, for Freddy, the matter is deeply personal. A former-soldier himself (he lost a leg during an earlier conflict in Iran), he deeply cares for his country and sees well-intentioned American soldiers like Miller as a way of bringing calm and peace to his troubled, upturned nation.

Written by Brian Helgeland (LA Confidential, Mystic River), their relationship prompts a great deal of uneasy questions for the soldier: what is his place within the newly restructured Middle East? How will his actions as a US soldier impact on Iraqi citizens? How can he help this nation when he is misinformed by his own Government?

Green Zone may not have all the answers, but it is the film’s desire to grapple with these issues that demonstrates courage on the part of its filmmakers, and the studio system.

Leigh Paatsch interview

Herald Sun film critic Leigh Paatsch has been writing about television, music and film for over 20 years. News Hit talks to Paatsch about The Hurt Locker, his career and how fellow critic Jim Schembri is still a model of integrity.

In March, the lowest grossing film of the ten nominated films at the Academy Awards won Best Picture against the largest grossing film of all time? Is this significant in our understanding of the changing structure of film production and distribution- where major studios are attempting to make incredibly expensive and inexpensive films- and little in between?

Basically, I don’t think the Academy Awards are any kind of hard-stick as to what is really happening in the world of cinema. It is basically a seasonal thing, like Moomba, Valentine’s Day, whatever. Films are released within a certain window, traditionally, films of a certain “worthy” nature and they are marketed to be very successful within this very small season in the entire calendar. And I know that The Hurt Locker is an exception- released much, much earlier than traditional Oscar winners- but I think that the company releasing that film definitely saw the potential for that film to be very, very successful on DVD. And a lot of winners in the previous years have been films that traditionally did not do too well at the box office, but were a certain level of quality, had a certain subject matter and the DVD release date happened to come out during the Oscar award season so I do not think that the Oscars are any kind of window for where the world is at. I honestly think that film- mainstream, commercial film- has not changed one iota since I have been writing about it, really.

Did you think that the ten-picture field gave a better snapshot of the broad range of best films of its year or not?

Absolutely not. When you think about American TV ratings of the live telecast has been going down the toilet ever since Titanic- which was probably the last high rating telecast in America. They have done everything they can to try and freshen up and attract people and try and watch the telecast. In America, in some years, middle America had not seen any of the nominees that were there for Best Picture, so- by broadening it out to ten- you can get maybe a sci-fi film, maybe a big comedy, maybe an action film, maybe a(nother) sci-fi film to broaden the telecast.

Or The Blind Side, which was very popular in middle America. Let’s talk about The Hurt Locker. What qualities does Bigelow’s film have that make it a great war film and a great film?

I think the thing I like about The Hurt Locker is that it is a film about an Army bomb-disposal unit- and- if you can’t make that film work on a tension level, on a manipulation level manipulating the audience- then you have blown it. But I was really impressed by how restrained the film was. It had parts to play, but it did not play them in an obvious manner. The more restraint it showed, the more you leaned from your seat to see what it was going to do next. For all its unprecedented success as a film and (the fact) it was directed by a woman- you know, it still is a pretty conventional war-time film. But for me- after seeing as many dud films from the beginning of the year- it came along at the right time and knocked me over like a feather. But, you know, I have probably overrated The Hurt Locker looking back, the way I have written about it, but it is still a pretty good film.

On the other hand, Nine, which you did not like and a lot of people did not like. But it was directed by a Tony-winning director, it was written by Anthony Minghella, who made The English Patient and Michael Tolkin, who wrote Robert Altman’s The Player. And it has a fantastic cast- and Nicole Kidman. Why does something like that not work?

I only have a working knowledge of film musicals. But, in the particular case of Nine, the songs just absolutely sucked. The song that the Marion Cotillard-character sings I can vaguely remember, but the songs aren’t memorable. It is a terrible songbook. It just did not work for me whatsoever. That’s all I can say about Nine. It just did not work for me whatsoever. And I think that- for the movie musical to work these days- you can do the Broadway model and blow it up with cinema images, (but) I think that model is completely broken now. For the musical to work, you have to head off in a different type of direction or blend music and narrative in a way that we have not seen before.

Earlier this year, News Hit featured a story detailing a writer’s favourite films of the last decade, naming The Lives of Others as the best film- also including Capturing the Friedman’s, There Will Be Blood and Eternal Sunshine. Who is the best director working today and what films would you point to as the best from the last decade?

That’s a tough one. Who is the best director of the last decade? I have one. Although not all of his films (he is wildly inconsistent), but I really admire Steven Soderbergh as a director. When his films work for me, they just really command my attention. Love Wong Kar Wai, the… China or Hong Kong?

I think Hong Kong.

But I think I am a sucker for him more for Christopher Doyle’s cinematography than anything else. Directors? Oh, I really love Jason Reitman- Thank You for Smoking, Juno and Up in the Air- I think he has a really brilliant film in him coming up in the next four to five years. And best film of the decade? For me, it did not get much better than Traffic, Steven Soderbergh’s film, which just landed in the year 2000, which just qualified for the best films of the decade. I loved The Lives of Others, which you just mentioned. I am also a sucker for anything that Quentin Tarantino does. The two Kill Bills which is just one film is probably one of my favourite experiences of the decade. And the Australian film Lantana I can watch that at the drop of a hat and it always engrosses me. So that pretty much covers the decade for me as such.

Have you seen Animal Kingdom yet?

In the case of Australian films, I am really strategic in choosing when I go and see them. And it is the same thing as comedies really, I try and see them with an audience, a typical theatre environment. I don’t go to the premieres. I don’t go to the movie previews, the media previews or anything like that. I am led to believe that Animal Kingdom will have sneak previews for the public the weekend before it is released. in something like Doncaster Shoppingtown or Melbourne Central, I will try and sneak in on an Monday afternoon and see how it will play for the paying punter and we will go from there.

I wanted to ask about your style. How would you describe your style?

As in what kind of movies I like?

Your writing style.

Look, I would say in my defence and my own damnation I am not a trained journalist. I did not study journalism and I have been learning as I have being going along. I have probably been writing actively for 20, 25 years now, but I am still just discovering it everyday. I also write in an untrained and also peculiar way. I will kind of write all the week’s copy in one spurt with no regard for house style, word length-required, things like that. And then, given my mandate these days is to write for the Herald Sun and its equivalents in other states, I just take this copy and I bash away at it and turn it into something tabloid-esque that vaguely falls within the house style of newspapers. It is very, for me, long and very freeform process for something that appears in a very streamlined product.

I also wanted to ask about who you read prior to being a reviewer in terms of film criticism. Did you read Sarris and Kael or was your reading more localised- like Evan Williams and Stratton.

I would say that I did not really read anyone from Australia, per se. Pauline Kael, I was probably more on her side than an Andrew Sarris-kind-of-guy. Look, when I was started out as a writer, I wanted to write more about music. The biggest influences on me has probably been the famous music journalist who worked for the English music press in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Probably starting with someone like Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons, probably chuck in a little bit of Nick Kemp when he was not on the smack. Yeah, NME and The Plague in particular created two really huge impressions as an impressionable reader in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s growing up. I took even more so from the writing style from the first time I just took their writer’s kind of supreme confidence in their attitude, their willingness to be thrown outside the bus and their willingness to be either right or wrong is something g that I really took with me and got me interested in writing as a way of expressing myself. And, you know, it turned out to be expressing myself about film and I still find myself reacting quite violently or unpredictably about films that you thought weren’t really possible while I am still prone to those kind of mood swings I will definitely still keep on writing about film.

You have mentioned writing about music. You wrote about music in The Big Issue. Can you talk about developing yourself as a writer in terms of how you have changed since you have gone from not being paid for your work to being paid. Has your writing changed? Have you changed? Are you conscious of those thoughts?

(Pause) I am trying to think of the year I started writing. The year I started writing was 1988 until last year I was technically a freelance writer for all of those years. Writing as a way of sustaining yourself invariably forces a form of compromise, without sounding like too much of a tosser. Probably the biggest flashpoint in my career was deciding, after writing, you know, cool or worthy with people I liked to be connected with, was crossing the drawbridge and writing for Fairfax publications to writing for Murdoch publications. I really did have to think long and hard about how I was going to keep writing in the way that I have.

Since I have started with the Murdoch papers, I have still found a way within. You know, they have a very tight house style with a lot of their papers and I still found a way to interest myself as a writer and keep my skills up. I have learnt a lot about self-editing within the Murdoch papers that I would not have learnt by writing for longer-form papers. And that can be a very valuable skill. But, in terms of style, it really comes and goes with me and I am not a really good judge of my own writing. Some of the stuff that I think is not absolute pulp, but not much better, is a lot of the stuff people really talk about or what people try and remember whilst something I am really proud of, the stuff that I really get past the system, no one really notices.

Can you cite a piece that you get asked about and you think, “well, I don’t know…”

I can’t think of any particular examples at the moment but, over time, as a writer you just… Any writer has an ego and they are trying to listen to what people are reacting to and what they’re noticing. So, as a general rule of thumb, the stuff that I do not really rate or the stuff that I did not spend much time on, did quite unconsciously, these are kind of things that have generally been quoted back at me over time. I cannot remember a lot of what I have written, to be honest.

I am also interested in the kinds of television that a film critic watches and admires. For instance, the likes of Mark Kermode and David Stratton have both said that they do not watch television whilst Richard Corliss used his review for State of Play to comment that he prefers television over film now. What television do you watch?

I watch a lot of TV and I generally a big buyer of DVDs from overseas. Stuff that I really like? I really like a lot of hogwash, English comedy. I kind of worked my way back- Look Around You, the work of Peter Serafinowicz I like a lot, the work of Steve Coogan, Chris Morris is someone who I cannot get enough of. He has also got a new film coming out later this year, which I cannot wait to see. I am also a bit of a sucker with the American HBO badge on it. I have just started watching a series called How to Make It in America which is a half-hour junkie-type show about going out in New York. And it is from the same production team as Entourage. But, as junk, it can’t be beaten.

But, yeah, I also like a British Show called Harry Hill’s TV Burp. There was an Australian version of that which came out earlier this year, but the English version of that is just a masterpiece of mainstream, commercial TV. And it is one of those shows that you can just imagine the whole of the audience watching it whenever it goes to air on 7:30 or 8:00 at night and it is just incredibly surreal, really funny and acceptable humour going on there. In terms of long-form TV drama. I have drunk the Mad Men-Kool-Aid. Come and go with that. I have started watching recently a show called Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. It was the show that Aaron Sorkin did as a writer after The West Wing.

One season.

Yeah, one season. It is one of those shows that I absolutely hate with a passion. But I coming to the end of the series and I cannot believe it is coming out of my life. It’s terrible. Absolutely terrible. But I like TV as much as I like film and I think that TV serves a purpose in your downtime at home. You can get just as much out of it as the best films really.

A couple of TV shows have recently been adapted to films, like State of Play and Edge of Darkness. Would you ever watch those shows before seeing the film? When a book is adapted for the screen do you try to read the book before seeing the movie? What about reading screenplays?

No. Part of my Modus Agendi is that I try and go to a film as cold as possible. I don’t look at the trailers. I don’t go to the film website. I don’t read the press releases. I try and keep myself as blank as absolutely possible. Hype in this day and age is completely unavoidable, but if you can try and close down as many unwanted sources as you can it gives you the opportunity to experience a film. If you have heard much about it before hand, or if you have heard the best jokes, it is just coded in the trailer, which is 2:33 minutes these days. If you can look at a film with a blank canvass and if the film really blows you away, those are the films that really stay with you for a long time.

What about the time that are unavoidable: when you have walked into a film after reading the book and think, “oh…”

I would say, again, I am not and have never been a great reader of books. I read a lot of magazines. I am still a great fan of the British music press and I still read a Word, also Uncut. I love The New Yorker. And, I’d say between those three, four magazines that constitutes the bulk of my reading. The rest of the time I really just cherry-pick books that have no chance of being made into a film. I am reading a lot of books now that deal with the making of a film. I am reading Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy, about the making of The Bonfire of the Vanities, and I have really enjoyed that. And I have recently read a book about M Night Shyamalan while he was making Lady in the Water. I like reading non-fiction and a lot of magazines. The whole book-into-movie thing has really passed me by. Every one in a while I will have actually read. I have read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo because I was stuck on a plain trip and somebody gave me a copy. But those are happy accidents for me. I am not a great book reader.

One thing I wanted to ask- you mentioned The New Yorker- do you read critic David Dendby. Are there any critics you seek out right now, or do you prefer not reading them?

Ala not watching trailers or going to websites or stuff like that, I do not go to any reviews for films until I have written my own. So- say usually my reviews go to print on a Thursday- it’s usually late on a Friday afternoon I will do a lap of critics that I like reading and don’t like reading. And, you know, it will be like a wet thumb in the breeze, and see if I were in the ballpark or completely out of hand. Newspaper critics that I like reading? I like Manohla Dargis, A.O. Scott, all those dudes that write for The New York Times. The LA Times, I always go there. Roger Ebert I always check in, even if he gets it wrong, he writes it in such a beautiful way that you have to tip your hat to him. Very few English film writers get me, I must admit. Most of the film writers I read are American. I don’t read any Australian film writers at all. I might poke my head in The Age EG and see what’s going on in there, but there is no one really yanking my chain since Adrian Martin has been out of the picture. We were talking about that before. Yeah, it is fairly sad out there. But I am feeling fairly sad myself.

You mentioned A.O. Scott and earlier this year, Disney announced that the latest version of America’s At the Movies- formerly Siskel and Ebert At the Movies and co-hosted by Scott- would be ending. This has obvious comparisons to SBS’s attempts to replicate the success of Pomeranz and Stratton from 2004-2006. Why did you think viewers did not necessarily respond to the four new critics- Megan Spencer, Fenella Kernebone, Jaimie Leonarder and Marc Fennell in that second incarnation?

The American show that you were talking about was always going to be a soft-target for programmers who did not want it on air because it was a syndicated program which means it was reliant on the mercy of ABC-affiliates to try and pick it up on air and put it in a decent time slot. I understand that it works well in urban areas, but Joe Public in the American Midwest could not give a rat’s ass about it. So it was always a big shot. I will say on a more general level pertaining to that program that any film review show on a commercial TV network is always going to be under pressure to compromise and maintain still the true nature of what’s it’s about because the commercial obligations of American TV networks are more important than they ever had been before.

I have had vague experiences with the three commercial networks in Australia and they have always been kind of gun shy about putting incredibly negative reviews of comedies or films from there because they may be showing that as a Sunday movie of the week in two, three years time or they might have another advertising campaign pushing that film in another timeslot. They might have a cross-promotional deal to give away tickets. The only rightful place for a decent film review show on TV is a public broadcaster ala what David and Margaret are doing on the ABC. What they are doing, they do quite well. They seem to put bums on seats with certain films or scare the cattle away with others.

But SBS tried to do that themselves. Why did that not work or people did not respond to that?

I would say- as a viewer- SBS was too quick to dance on the grave that they had dug for David and Margaret, anyway. And they went too far in the opposite direction. And if I were SBS I would have left the slate blank for a full year. I think they waited for four or five months.

Two months.

Two months, did they? Look, as a non-New South Wales person, I see there are certain types of Australian TV as being way too Sydney. And the all-new Movie Show, whatever year that was, it was too Sydney and God knows what a movie fan in Bendigo or Freo or Kalgoorlie would not have a clue about a lot of the reference points that the new critics were talking about and where they were positioning themselves. It was too much of the wrong thing, too soon.

Some TV reviewers and audience members felt they were a little too precious, citing one of the reviewers commenting that The Cinderella Man (a film that you said was good, not great) made their skin “crawl”. In this regard, what do you think a film reviewer has to be to an audience? What is an audience looking out of that?

I don’t know. I have no problem with that particular review of The Cinderella Man. If the guy or the girl in that case is being honest, by all means say it. In terms of the responsibility to the viewer or reader or listener or whatever, if they can get the vibe from you that you are being honest and expressing your opinion- and being as justifiable and honest about your opinion as possible- that is about as much as you can do. And if they like it, they like it and if they don’t, they don’t. I will say myself, as a reader, I like reading reviews that I do not understand or do not relate to, but if it is written with a purity or a tainted honesty or whatever- if they can put themselves in the charcoal- I will tip my head to them every time. I will always tip my head to Jim Schembri, The Age’s Jim Schembri, because Jim Schembri is a master of throwing himself under a bus for no apparent reason, dusting himself off and then doing it again the next week. And, when I say I don’t read Australian critics, I always read Jim Schembri.

Last question. When a lot of students start to write reviews, they try and take a more formalist approach- trying to intellectualise their feelings and give these broad, sweeping statements about the film, as if it is some kind of essay. Gene Siskel said much the same here. What advice do you give students in writing criticism?

The beauty about writing about films is that you do not need a formalist, structured approach. You can use a wide array of writing skills. You don’t have to do a kind of call-and-response of the plot, who directed it, who is starring in it. You can make all kinds of bizarre analogies. To use an example: the guy from Time when he was writing about TV when he should have been writing about film. What was that film again?

It was State of Play.

State of Play. Because of the myriad of elements that it takes to make a film, you should mirror that with your writing and checkerboard it and quilt it any way that you see fit. As long as it is legible, readable and your voice comes through, I think that is 90% of the work right there.