[1969] Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Hope is a hell of a hallucinogen. My brain, at least, allows me to think about a future amidst an array of outcomes, one after the other answering the question, “What if this goes right?” Hope allows for aspirations; it allows us to forge a path forward that isn’t totally entropic. Some of our friends and colleagues traffic in swimming upstream, brimming with positivity for a perfect future. We all know these people—and we’re disappointed by them. Too much hope is toxic. We need darkness to appreciate the light and we need to ween ourselves off expecting things to be one way when they’re the other way.

This is how watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid feels, it’s a clever trick, and it’s certainly on purpose. Our experience as an audience feels totally orthogonal to the experiences of titular Butch and his partner, Sundance. Redford and Newman gallop together toward futility, dragging the audience along, tied by the ankle behind their (dead) horse. It’s a subtle asymmetry, because of the character/actors’ sparkling charisma. We almost believe that they’ll survive anything, no matter how wacky or odds-against. It’s what makes this movie magical and spiritually different from its natural successor, 1991’s Thelma and Louise, which sells its nihilism and feminism to great effect. That’s not this.

In both cases, the motif works because we’re programmed to seek thrill but not accept its consequence. It’s also why we watch narrative fiction, to escape from our defined reality into worlds where we believe the rules might be different or contradictory. The most ambitious movies and television seek to subvert this alternative programming, too. The Sopranos allows its audience into the mind of a vicious human with deep, unresolved emotional trauma. Which of these traits reflects our desire for fiction and/or truth? 1969’s winner, Midnight Cowboy, dumps its audience into a torrid New York—opening us up to a world we’ve maybe grazed but never dived into. Why do we want to watch people suffer and why do we reward it? It’s the other, scary side of hope: we hope others’ problems don’t befall us.

[1973] The Sting

Pauline Kael is easily the most influential film critic that most of the world has forgotten. What makes her style—and voice—more distinct than her peers and especially modern critics is the absolute sincerity with which she wields her devastating pen. Tone is near impossible to master and it’s important to understand how hard it is to douse your words in them without trying to. It’s the game all writers play. Kael had mastered it and then some.

To be critical without being unfair, to pick apart a film with legendary wit without being sarcastic or even sardonic is Kael’s greatest strength. Pauline Kael always told her own story without rewriting the work she covered, but always accepted the work as is—a trait armchair critics and bloggers can’t seem to shed; “but if only director X had done such and such” was most often nowhere near Kael’s reviews. She would always do well to play, not Devil’s advocate, but critic’s advocate, putting words to exactly why a beloved movie was just not as good as we thought it was. Her work, which often got her in hot hot heat with editors and made few friends behind the camera, gave cover to every other critic and ran counter-cultural to a pervasive narrative that popular was either good or bad. Kael’s writing focused on the work. She’s a driving force behind why I’m adamant to finish this blog: I’m looking for a why.

Her review of Bertolucci’s Last Tango In Paris is as artful as the film itself. It’s a brilliant trick of phrasing and construction, matching Bertolucci’s inward eroticism made outward by Brando’s performance of American masochism. It would seem that Kael thinks of two minds of Last Tango: shock and awe that it was made and shock and awe that the top masters of their craft would make this movie, effectively turning the deck of cards upwards and demanding audiences to pick a card. It’s what Kael does with her reviews. She’ll always guess your card but not because she was looking at the deck.

This review, written the same year as her one-shot takedown of 1973’s Best Picture winner, The Sting, infantilizes the Redford/Newman “thriller.” Her criticism is valid if the reader is looking for reasons not to like it, but it’s the undertones—not so soft—that make a very simple point. She is, in effect, calling out some combination of actor, director, film, industry for straight-washing and woman-erasure in about 200 words. And she’s right and she says it right in the review. What if Last Tango was about a gay “relationship?” What if Shaw (Newman) and Kelly (Redford) sought a relationship that wasn’t poking fun at homoerotic tropes, or propped women instead of equalizing a whole gender? Not to fall into the trap that I’d set for myself: director George Roy Hill made the movie he made and therefore we must judge it for its merits and faults on its face, which Kael does, too.

[1976] All The President’s Men

There’s a film (not nominated for Best Picture, probably incorrectly) called The Thin Blue Line, which doesn’t really distinguish between narrative fiction and fictional narrative, but asks the audience to follow incredibly closely and decide for themselves what happened. Errol Morris took this film in a brilliant direction as each person watching the movie (documentary?) was asked to examine their own biases for the name of fairness, correctness, and real life tragedy. His work is an important distinction and groundbreaking in that before The Thin Blue Line, film was very obviously either true or false; a director took license only where absolutely necessary. A few hypotheses why this was the case, in order from probably the truth to certainly not the truth:

• Technical limitations set the parameters for what could be staged, shot, edited, and pressed. Until the advent of more advanced cameras and computers and software to handle the ambition, storytellers limited their ideas to plausible narratives and the naturally insane.
• Film was expensive, and filming too much more in the wayward sense of exposition and exploration, would have driven budgets beyond what a financier would consider “acceptable” overruns.
• Inventing a whole new type of storytelling takes a bold visionary, and they had not yet come along.
• Audiences cared much more and were entirely more naive about what was truth and what was not. Critical narratives were not readily accessible and without them audiences could not fathom a distinction between manipulative intent and honesty.
• There was no incentive or market to bust up inertia and jump-start creativity [Ed. – This might be true in the 2010s, somewhat]

This last point is not true, though film in the mid-to late 1980s had lost some of the ferocity brought forth starting in the late 1960s and The Thin Blue Line had started to shake up some of the storytelling techniques that would carry forward, especially into Oliver Stone’s JFK in 1990 and lots of neo-noir works like LA Confidential in 1997 and Mystic River in 2003. There was a cascading acceptance of newness toward the late 1980s.