The early months of any year are usually lean, but this was extraordinary. Last year, for example, both “Erin Brockovitch” and “Wonder Boys” came out by springtime. This year-zip. It’s probably a good thing Hollywood was preoccupied by the looming (now averted) writer’s strike; otherwise they might have had to face the fact that the industry seems in the grip of a creative crisis.
I’m not saying there haven’t been good movies this year, but the only ones I could wholeheartedly recommend are either foreign films or American independents such as “Memento” and “Series 7” and the entertaining if slightly clumsy “Bridget Jones’s Diary.” From France we’ve had “The Taste of Others” and “The Widow of St. Pierre,” films both witty and stylish and deeply felt. Iran has given us two stunning films dealing with the plight of women: “The Circle” and “The Day I Became a Woman.” Hong Kong released the gorgeously elliptical “In the Mood for Love”; Japan, the haunting 3-hour-and-40-minute “Eureka”; and Mexico, the brutal but unforgettable “Amores Perros.” From England, there was the trenchant but little seen “The Last Resort.”
Hollywood, in contrast, has offered up fare that either seems hopelessly out of sync with the times, fatally compromised or so eager to pander to the crowd that even the crowd turns its back. Consider the Heather Graham/Chris Klein comedy “Say it Isn’t So,” a gross-out flick produced by the Farrelly Brothers, but utterly lacking their comic finesse or mad invention. Near the end of this opus, the hapless Klein improbably gets his arm stuck in the posterior of a cow, which drags him down the street of a small town. The novice director doesn’t even try to wring any funny variations out of this dubious spectacle: the poor actor just has to trot along after the cow, his arm awkwardly caught in its bovine prison. Instead of laughing, the audience just wants to avert its eyes.
“Say it Isn’t So” was just one of several ka-ka, poo-poo epics that struck out at the box office this year-and that may be good news. Kids did not flock, sheeplike, to see either “Saving Silverman” or “Tomcats,” raunchy sex farces that were considered by the savvy executives to be surefire money machines. What this bodes for this summer’s “American Pie 2” remains to be seen, but the suits must be getting nervous. The zeitgeist is moving faster than the trend-addicted studios can keep up with. One more gross-out strikeout and the whole genre may go down the toilet from whence it came.
At the other extreme, consider “Town and Country,” the much-delayed, $85 million Warren Beatty comedy of adultery. This was intended as an upscale sex comedy for an older crowd, and it was stocked with former Oscar winners-Beatty, Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn. The movie is not the total disaster some critics, lusting for another “Ishtar,” proclaimed it to be. (Neither was “Ishtar,” for that matter.) I actually got a few laughs out of it. But there was no avoiding the fact that this tale of marital infidelity among the rich felt marooned in the wrong decade. It harkened back not, as many suggested, to the masterly 1975 Beatty movie “Shampoo” but to the passe farces of the ’60s like “Divorce, American Style” when the notion of cheating on your wife seemed really racy. What a waste of talent-not just of the stars, but of the English director Peter Chelsom, who made one of the most brilliantly idiosyncratic comedies of the ’90s, “Funny Bones.”
Another purported sex comedy, “Heartbreakers,” seemed caught in a similar time warp. The conniving mother-daughter team of Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love Hewitt travel around the country bilking rich men of their fortunes with the promise of flesh. (While their avarice was seen as OK, they never actually had sex with their victims; God forbid we thought these gold diggers were loose women.) These femme fatales could have stepped right out of a ’30s movie, but it was hard to swallow them as 21st-century heroines and even harder to swallow the charmless Hewitt as Weaver’s daughter. They were cast together, obviously, to appeal to their demographic constituencies, but there wasn’t a shred of familial chemistry between them. Without it, this souffle didn’t have a chance of rising.
A bigger bust-and bigger disappointment-was the would-be epic “Enemy at the Gate,” set against the background of the battle of Stalingrad. The cat-and-mouse game between Russian sniper Jude Law and German sniper-killer Ed Harris produced some tense action sequences, but when any of the characters were required to talk, out rolled some of the phoniest dialogue heard on screen in years. This, at least, was understandable: the movie was in English, but the writers were French. But where were the well-paid studio executives whose job it was to point out to the filmmakers that their ears were 100 percent tin?
Contemplating the January-to-April dross, you have to wonder whether anyone in Hollywood knows or cares about good storytelling. Yes, “Hannibal” was a big hit, and the execs at MGM may be patting themselves on the back for their success, but how much bigger a hit would it have been if the story had had any real suspense, or if its two protagonists, Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lector, had actually met before the very end of the film? (Granted, the problems started with Thomas Harris’s book, but they were never solved by the screenwriters or director.) If “Hannibal” had been the first in the series, there never would have been a sequel.
The one studio film that looked like it might add up to something was “Blow.” For the first 45 minutes, the movie had vitality, style and a point of view. And then it proceeded to crumble before your eyes, becoming a mawkish apologia for a drug dealer whose stupidity and venality the movie doesn’t have the courage to acknowledge, preferring to turn him into an innocent victimized by women, Colombians and bad drug dealers.
After such an arid patch of studio filmmaking, what a relief to encounter “Shrek.” What’s startling about this irreverent fairy tale is how sure-footed and well-shaped every scene is. “Shrek” packs an incredible amount of mirth, good spirits and sophistication into its under-90-minute running time. Here, finally, is a screenplay put together by people who seemed to know exactly what they were doing and what effects they were after. The last time there was a screenplay with similar lack of wasted motion was “Toy Story 2,” and before that, “Toy Story.” (And come to think of it, “A Bug’s Life” came pretty close.)
For all the attention paid to the technological breakthroughs in these CGI movies-and the acclaim is well-deserved-the real secret of these movies’ success is in the writing. What is it about computer animation that seems to inspire the kind of classic screenwriting carpentry we associate with the Hollywood of old? Why can’t scripts this smart and economical be written for flesh-and-blood actors? Because of the nature of the way these films are made, with the actors recording the dialogue before the images are actually put together, it is understood that the scaffolding must be sound before the walls can be mounted and the paint applied.
The folks at Pixar and DreamWorks who produced these films understand that every image counts and is part of a whole. These tight, delightful CGI movies may be on the cutting edge of technology, but they are in fact throwbacks to the classical style of Hollywood filmmaking, where the story came first, the stars knew their place, and the movies were made to please the widest possible audience without stooping to the lowest common denominator. The movies are also, it has to be acknowledged, a rebuke to the notion of personal, auteurist cinema. There are four credited writers on “Shrek,” two directors and clearly DreamWorks honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg-former Disney studio chief-had a major say in the production.
The cultural irony in this era of terrible studio films is that these CGI movies are complete studio creations; they’re team efforts in which groupthink, instead of deadening the artistic impulse, quickens it. It’s like a throwback to the platonic ideal of the studio system, though it may fly in the face of our romantic notions of how art is made. The question is, why do the studios’ best instincts only seem to emerge in animation, while live-action movies tend to bring out Hollywood’s most cynical calculations? There is a lesson in this, but is anyone in Hollywood listening?
