On critical consensus and the vicissitudes of time

Versão em português

Last week I was reading a book I got in the used bin on my last US trip called Produced and Abandoned, a collection of reviews of 70s/80s “underrated” movies put out by the National Society of Film Critics, and that made me think about the passing of time and movies original reception as it is mostly a collection of movies who got some strong critical push that for one reason or another never found an audience at their time (multiple Jonathan Demme movies, for instance) with the very rare personal idiosyncrasy like J Hoberman on Jerry Lewis’ Smorgasbord. The 1970s selection can be a little more adventurous, but the 1980s ones are very safe if you are old enough to have read a decent amount of criticism of the period. There’s no Heaven’s Gate or The Thing kind of movies covered, if a review has made into the book, the author is unlikely to have his opinion pushed hard in any critics meeting.

What it made me think the most is how many titles there never manage to use any of that critical support into much of a rediscovery and how many other films used to be videostore staples (the book is clearly pitched among other things to serve as a video guide) but get much lower profile as time passes. One of the biggest lies critics love to tell themselves is that our favorites will survive some fictional test of time—something that has way more to do with the vicissitudes of money, distribution and curatorial/programming taste. In this era when everything must be commodified into a function, the “critic should find hidden gems” idea seems to get a new lease of life. When it strikes me as more of a sort of inevitability, if you watch lots of movies, you will probably see some worthwhile ones that didn’t get much attention, than some part of the job description.

For instance, two 1982 movies covered there are Tony Richardson’s The Border and Barry Levinson’s Diner. The Border, a fine movie if my memory serves, a corrupt cop who redeems himself in a crime movie with a lot of issue-heavy discussion about immigration and the tension in the US/Mexico border, would seem like a natural to get some retrospective love: it is a self-serious genre movie with a subject matter that is topical, with a huge star (Jack Nicholson) and recognizable supporting cast. Yet, I almost never seen it getting mentioned at all anymore. The organizers feel apologetic for including Levinson’s movie, which was probably at the height of its videostore boosted popularity at the time, but it seems a much less well-remembered now. Levinson used to be one of the most annoying overrated American filmmakers when I was becoming a cinephile, but his name seems to only come up nowadays related to his three times more annoying son. It probably does not help that the Levinson movies one is most likely to find at a streaming service (Rain Man, Good Morning Vietnam) are not among his best, but the small ones 180s critics eat up (Tin Men, Avalon) weren’t nowhere as good as their reputations either. The Diner review there praises it for standing out among early 80s nostalgia pieces, when now it just feels like a part of Reagan days nostalgia. It is probably that some of the movie’s specificities got erased into cliché, but at the same time, its quietness next to the more brash tone of the post-Animal House period youth movie doesn’t mean as much four decades later.

Critical reputation can be a funny thing. When this came out, Peter Bogdanovich and William Friedkin were at the peak of their fall from grace punching bag images, so neither shows up, even though they actually did have movies (Saint Jack, To Live and Die in LA) that would fit nicely. On their side, there is two Roger Spottiswoode movies, and I think there’s been more than a quarter of century since the last attempt at Roger Spottiswoode auteurism, although I do remember some 90s critics doing their best to find traces of Under Fire progressive politics on Air America or Tomorrow Never Dies (perfect decent movies by a perfect solid filmmaker).

On the subject of critical consensus, I also recently rewatched two 1990s American movies that would probably be in that book if it come out a decade later: Carl Franklin’s excellent and much-loved Devil in a Blue Dress and Lawrence Kasdan definitely not excellent and mostly forgotten Grand Canyon. They both got very good reviews at the time, Devil won best supporting actor and cinematography on the NSFC that year, and Grand Canyon had a predictable best script Oscar nom and somehow won the Golden Bear in Berlin (a decision that looks very embarrassing now).

Devil is now part of the Criterion Collection, and very much in the canon, from time to time there is a “it is a shame Carl Franklin didn’t get more opportunities” piece (which I very much agree on) or an attempt to use it to beat the more successful LA Confidential (they are both very good, no need to turn it into a silly competition), but they always come with the idea that the movie didn’t get much of its due at time. I found out about Devil in Blue Dress back in the mid-1990s, in part because critics at the time loved it (not that I really needed that much push to watch a Denzel Washington crime movie back then), so that always strikes me as strange, but then one of the things critics love the most when it comes to old movies is “discovering” a movie that never really needed to be discovered, something the economy of film writing, which seems to push for bigger and bigger statements, does not help (most of the time it seems that writing on old movies has to either be an anniversary piece or congratulate was for finding a movie that for one reason or another was suppressed back then). This does have the unfortunate effect of making a movie like Devil in a Blue Dress get called underrated so often it can feel a little overrated, even if it is still as good as it was in 1995.

One thing I tend to be very apart from the current critical consensus is that I’m fascinated by the idea of movies as time capsules to when they were made, so the concept of a movie “aging badly” for political/sociological reasons seems so foreign to me, and forgotten/failed prestige items like Grand Canyon can be very intriguing even when they are not any good. This one was pitched as a big statement on violence and race in Los Angeles through one of those “we are all connected” narratives that were very popular at the time. It is a sermon, so unlike Devil (which could also be described as a “movie about violence and race in Los Angeles”), it very much screams its themes, but one of the more interesting things from a distance is observing Kasdan trying to find a populist balance, so everything is very serious, but also accessible enough (the movie even ends with its film producer character justifying going back to make violent movies by quoting Preston Sturges’ Sullivan Travels). There is a scene late in the movie that predictably got plenty of praise at the time with Kevin Kline giving a driving lesson to his son that is so labored in its drive/life metaphor, it would be embarrassing without the actual skills involved in keeping it tense and earnest. The covering its tracks’ logic, of course, also leads to Danny Glover and Alfre Woodward making fun of Kline for setting them on a date as the only Black people he knew before actually falling in love because she is indeed the only Black person in the movie that isn’t either related to him or part of raising violence theme. The current versions of Grand Canyon, and there is many, are every bit as self-important and self-congratulatory, but also a good deal duller because withholding pleasure as a way to suggest importance is much more fashionable now. Anyway, the movie navel-gazing at least tells me plenty about Kasdan, which is not nothing, and its current variations might also be bad but curious by 2055.

This also makes me think some about the differences between the way film culture and film criticism function today. So many articles on that book belong to months/year later re-releases of movies that had failed something that is hard to even imagine today and a few even are for movies that were not getting released at all in the area, imagine trying to pitch for a paper/site for general audiences something that goes like “I saw this movie at a private screening, and it is quite good unfortunately the distributor has decided not to bring it to town”, one might make a post on social media or a blog like mine, but criticism is far too interwoven with consumer guide logic to allow for the idea that readers might be interested in film writing because there are movies out there that might be worth reading about even if they are not easy to see or by the same token, that a critic might have a dialogue with a distributor and its practices with the hopes that it might be listened. The economy of film writing as well as that of film culture mostly moves around an either/or dichotomy: movies must be must-sees or not, which also means they must sound great most of the time, even though they are usually flawed but worthwhile, even quite a few bad ones.

I assume that if people are still watching movies in a couple of decades, a lot of dreck from now will look better for multiple reasons, one of the main constants of the relationship between movies and time is that the tired tics of the day become far more endearing when disconnected from their context, and many others that are part of the current critical consensus will fall to the wayside, sometimes unfairly. Time is not a test or a fair judge, but it can be as hard to pin down as the critical consensus.