Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 11/29/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, November 29, 2019

Avengers: Endgame (Anthony Russo, Joe Russo, 2019)

Avengers: Endgame (Anthony Russo, Joe Russo, 2019)

Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Don Cheadle, Paul Rudd, Karen Gillan, Josh Brolin. Screenplay: Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely. Cinematography: Trent Opaloch. Production design: Charles Wood. Film editing: Jeffrey Ford, Matthew Schmidt. Music: Alan Silvestri.

Back in September, I had this to say about Aquaman (James Wan, 2018):

"I sometimes feel with the comic-book-sourced superhero movie that we have moved not just into a separate genre but into an entirely separate medium: a fusion of video games, technology, and neo-mythology that's something other than traditional cinematic storytelling."

A few weeks later, Martin Scorsese said much the same thing:

“I don’t see them. I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema,” Scorsese told Empire magazine. “Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”

I bring this up not to express some sort of solidarity with Scorsese, or to try to boast that I said it first, especially since Scorsese's remarks have been bouncing around the internet ever after. It should be pretty apparent from the films that I write about in this blog that my interests are centered largely in "the cinema of human beings," in Scorsese's phrase. But I think, too, that there's a place for movies like the ones Scorsese seems to be excluding from the canon of cinema. And I bring this up because last night I was faced with a choice: I could watch Scorsese's The Irishman on Netflix, or Avengers: Endgame on Disney+, to which a family member subscribes and had given me her password.

I chose Avengers: Endgame because I was tired and full of Thanksgiving dinner, and I wanted to give Scorsese's movie my full attention. I also knew that there would be no surprises in the movie I chose to watch instead: There would be familiar characters, some jokes, some emotional moments, and lots and lots of action. I would not have to think, to puzzle out motives, to try to place the film in the canon of its auteur.

And I was happy with my choice. I was entertained by actors doing fine work in their métier, with bright and colorful action, with a few sci-fi conundrums about time travel. I enjoyed seeing characters from other Marvel movies come together in new combinations. I was pleased with the richness of the casting -- dazzled, in short, by so many handsome stars. I turned off the movie relaxed and satisfied.

Will I think about Avengers: Endgame and want to see it again? Probably not. Certainly not in the way I will think about and perhaps rewatch Carlos Reygadas's Japón, Hirokazu Koreeda's The Third Murder, Julián Hernández's Raging Sun, Raging Sky, or even Otto Preminger's The Man With the Golden Arm, to name some of the works from the "cinema of human beings" I've seen and written about recently. But that doesn't mean that blockbuster movies, the ones that cost and make millions of dollars and are seen by millions of people around the world, are unworthy of my attention. It's just that they serve a different need, they speak to a different part of the soul.

The Hucksters (Jack Conway, 1947)

The Hucksters (Jack Conway, 1947)

Cast: Clark Gable, Deborah Kerr, Sydney Greenstreet, Adolphe Menjou, Ava Gardner, Keenan Wynn, Edward Arnold, Aubrey Mather, Richard Gaines. Screenplay: Luther Davis, Edward Chodorov, George Wells, based on a novel by Frederic Wakeman. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Urie McCleary. Film editing: Frank Sullivan. Music: Lennie Hayton.

The Hucksters was made in the era depicted in Mad Men, when men who had served in World War II were returning to their civilian jobs. In the advertising business, that included men like Don Draper in the TV series and Victor Norman in the movie, men whose wartime experience had toughened them and given them a fresh angle on the business of selling to the postwar clientele. If Mad Men seems to us to have a more reliable point of view than The Hucksters on that business, it's partly because hindsight is keener than the contemporary view, but also because popular entertainment is less tight-assed now. Frederic Wakeman's novel was a bestseller in part because it was frank about the sex lives of its characters, which movies in the Production Code era couldn't be. So Gable's Victor Norman is turned into a more buttoned-up character than Jon Hamm's Don Draper, but censorship especially worked to a disadvantage for Deborah Kerr, in her first American film. Kerr is forced to be chaste and prim -- characteristics that would type her in the movies until 1953, when Fred Zinnemann finally allowed her to have a sex life in From Here to Eternity. Kerr's character may agree to go away for a weekend with Vic, but only after she's assured that they will have separate rooms at opposite ends of the hotel. And when she discovers that they instead have adjoining rooms with a connecting door, she bolts. The effect on the movie is to sap any chemistry that MGM might have hoped Gable and Kerr would have. In contrast, Gable and Ava Gardner, as one of Vic's old girlfriends, strike fire immediately, which makes the ending of the movie, in which Gable's and Kerr's characters wind up together, feel phony. The Hucksters, coming a year after her breakthrough performance in Robert Siodmak's The Killers, helped make Gardner a star. Kerr had to muddle through in costume parts in movies like Quo Vadis (Mervyn LeRoy, 1951) and The Prisoner of Zenda (Richard Thorpe, 1952) before finally getting a chance to be sexy. There is some zippy dialogue in the movie, and the hits on the advertising business are often funny, but the only real reason to see The Hucksters today is to watch some skillful old character actors like Adolphe Menjou and especially Sydney Greenstreet do their thing. Greenstreet plays an imperious soap manufacturer sponsor with non-negotiable ideas about what his commercials should be, and likes to intimidate his advertising clients by doing things like hocking a loogie on the conference table to get their attention. If the film had stuck with the ad biz and not strayed off into tiresomely predictable romance, it might have been a classic, or at least a lot better.