“Something within me resists Him,” or Ebert’s Honesty as a Model
Like most people, I probably disagreed with Roger Ebert as often as I agreed with him, though I must confess I miss reading his reviews of movies, whether I was in accord with his final verdicts or not.
He had some (what I felt were) inexplicable biases against some directors whose work I loved. He didn’t seem to like most of Tim Burton’s output (at least until Ed Wood), with his main criticism being that Burton’s storytelling skills weren’t commensurate to his imaginative and visual powers. Maybe, but I was a kid when I saw Edward Scissorhands and Batman, and they had a massive impact on my imagination as a child. I’m pretty sure that even Ebert, in his early childhood, was bowled over by a serial or some dumb Western five minute bumper film that was far worse than the Burton films he didn’t like, which he was perhaps too cynical (or just too old) to enjoy in the way that kids did, or do.
But then again, maybe he has a point about Tim Burton.
I’m thinking more now about what he said regarding David Lynch, in his review for Wild at Heart.
Wild at Heart is far from my favorite Lynch movie, though I do remember enjoying Willem Dafoe’s over-the-top wormy-gummed redneck psychopath Bobby Peru (“like the country”) who brings Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern in on a bank robbery that goes really, really wrong (like a dog walking around with a pleading man’s hand in its mouth wrong).
“I’ll admit,” Ebert said in his review (and I’m paraphrasing) “something in me resists David Lynch.”
It’s a rare admission, coming from a critic or from anyone really, that when evaluating the quality or meaning of a work, our own biases or prejudices might keep us from really seeing what’s up there on the screen or written on the page. What accounted for Ebert’s bias against Lynch, though?
I think it was that he felt David Lynch was a filmmaker with serious skill, who would build a creative work with some heft, and then undercut it with a very-well veiled skein of irony. He said words to the effect that David Lynch was a talented filmmaker, who would make a great movie, once he stopped screwing around.
Maybe there is some truth to Ebert’s suspicions. I read somewhere that whenever David Lynch or Isabella Rossellini watch that scene in Blue Velvet, in which Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) punches and sexually abuses Dorothy Vallens, they can’t help laughing uncontrollably. Is it funny? A man with some kind of oedipal insanity punching a woman in the face, taking a deep mouthful of nitrous oxide, and gazing between her legs?
To the man who filmed it and the woman who was playing the victim in the film, apparently (or apocryphally at least), the answer is an unfortunate but emphatic “Yes.”
Still, no matter what one thinks of Ebert’s review of Blue Velvet or Wild at Heart, he deserves credit for admitted that the fault may have lain with him, and his own biases, rather than the filmmaker’s creation. He didn’t like what he felt was Lynch’s emotional disingenuousness. A couple of Coen Brothers’ films (or maybe more than that) also seemed to grate on Ebert’s nerves, at least until Fargo when the Brothers Coen finally kept the irony muted and in the service of black humor.
Conversely, and strangely enough, Ebert didn’t like David Lynch’s earlier much-heralded black and white film Elephant Man because he thought it was kind of maudlin and manipulative. I remember, though, that Ebert dug the hell out of The Straight Story, that earnest and Disney-distributed (!) David Lynch movie about a man who crosses several states on his tractor in order to reunite with his brother, with whom he had a falling out and whom he hasn’t seen in a dog’s age.
Incidentally I remember watching The Straight Story with my father some years ago, and, to my recollection, it was the only time I ever saw the old man cry.
Anyway, if I had to pick the one artist who sets off this reaction in me, who makes me think my problem with their work lies within me rather than them, my one would be Wes Anderson.
I loved Rushmore, the movie about a parochial school boy who falls in love with a sexy teacher with an English accent, and battles for her affections against a haggard and sad-looking Bill Murray, who was the dad of two characters with thick (Scottish?) accents, a couple of freckled and muscled obnoxious kids who liked to beat up on the protagonist.
The movie was quirky but plausible, the kind of film with a sexual tension (more like agony) that recalls the pain of pubescence and the somber isolation of boarding school life that I remember very well from my own youth. The movie seems to take place in a leafy brown and redbrick world halfway between John Hughes’ eclogues of the 80s suburbs and the slightly more jaded (and yet still somewhat innocent) world where Robert Altman and Hal Ashby movies happened, where each moment it felt like Paul Simon might start strumming his guitar and humming to accompany the main character on his walk to school or run home after being rebuffed by some girl or woman he loves. There’s also an undercurrent of early 60s and late 50s America, as if Salinger’s Glass (Family) menagerie is peopling this world.
So yeah, I dug Rushmore.
And then something happened, either to me or to Wes Anderson. The style that was once charming for me started to feel precious, mannered, as if someone with less talent, imagination, and less understanding of the world had seen Rushmore, and then boiled it down to some kind of formula of quirk, kitsch, and a sort of designer artsy-quality intentionally aimed for upper-middle class people who weren’t nerds or alienated but knew that nerdiness had a certain cache (think people who watch The Big Bang or wear non-prescription glasses, or think Star Wars is science fiction). The velvet painting had somehow morphed into a velour tracksuit. Or at least that’s how I felt.
That’s one possibility. Another is that I lost some of my own innocence, became a bit Ebertized (sic) and started to resist the spell being cast by Anderson, and thereafter ceased to see the magic.
Then again, maybe not.
I know a lot of other people have the same impression of Wes Anderson’s output as I did. I’ve heard someone say that his post-Bottle Rocket and Rushmore films are his “dollhouse movies.”
Some years back (maybe a couple?) I went with my mother to the local movie palace in my hometown and we watched Moonrise Kingdom, a movie with a stellar cast (I guess Jason Schwartzman and Bill Murray are part of Anderson’s repertory company) and an at least nominally charming premise, about some kids in a Scouts’-like organization who are feuding in the woods while the lives of the adults around them slowly collapse, or something like that.
It was too cute for me, and after about twenty minutes I was ready to go home. And my mother and I did actually leave early.
That said, I forced myself to go see Grand Budapest Hotel, and can’t remember…for lack of a better word…feasting on a movie like that in years. It was like the first time I saw Pulp Fiction as a twelve-year old in the movie theater, or the first time I really sat down and watched a classic like any of Sergio Leone’s Dollars movies.
So much about Grand Budapest Hotel was just too beautiful, too technically wondrous, overstuffed with perfect performances, action, beautiful music, all kinds of sumptuousness, that I forgot about my former biases against Anderson’s films and just enjoyed the hell out of the movie on its own terms.
I found myself wondering, as I was writing the last paragraph, what Roger Ebert thought of Grand Budapest Hotel?
I just checked his website and the unimpeachable, never-wrong, and peer-reviewed Wikipedia website. Roger died in 2013. The movie came out in 2014.
Crap. Oh well. Rest in peace to Ebert, and thanks for your candor, which inspired these tepid meanderings on my part tonight. I’m sorry you didn’t live long enough to see what I think is Wes Anderson’s best film, or at least the one that broke down my resistance to him the way Mulholland Drive finally forced you to “forgive David Lynch,” as you so honestly and eloquently put it in your review, absolving him of the crimes of Lost Highway and Fire Walk with Me (both of which I liked, by the way).
To each their own, though. And I’ve heard Wes Anderson’s stop-motion films are enjoyable even for people who don’t like his live-action output. I’ll probably get around to watching Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs at some later date.
He had some (what I felt were) inexplicable biases against some directors whose work I loved. He didn’t seem to like most of Tim Burton’s output (at least until Ed Wood), with his main criticism being that Burton’s storytelling skills weren’t commensurate to his imaginative and visual powers. Maybe, but I was a kid when I saw Edward Scissorhands and Batman, and they had a massive impact on my imagination as a child. I’m pretty sure that even Ebert, in his early childhood, was bowled over by a serial or some dumb Western five minute bumper film that was far worse than the Burton films he didn’t like, which he was perhaps too cynical (or just too old) to enjoy in the way that kids did, or do.
But then again, maybe he has a point about Tim Burton.
I’m thinking more now about what he said regarding David Lynch, in his review for Wild at Heart.
Wild at Heart is far from my favorite Lynch movie, though I do remember enjoying Willem Dafoe’s over-the-top wormy-gummed redneck psychopath Bobby Peru (“like the country”) who brings Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern in on a bank robbery that goes really, really wrong (like a dog walking around with a pleading man’s hand in its mouth wrong).
“I’ll admit,” Ebert said in his review (and I’m paraphrasing) “something in me resists David Lynch.”
It’s a rare admission, coming from a critic or from anyone really, that when evaluating the quality or meaning of a work, our own biases or prejudices might keep us from really seeing what’s up there on the screen or written on the page. What accounted for Ebert’s bias against Lynch, though?
I think it was that he felt David Lynch was a filmmaker with serious skill, who would build a creative work with some heft, and then undercut it with a very-well veiled skein of irony. He said words to the effect that David Lynch was a talented filmmaker, who would make a great movie, once he stopped screwing around.
Maybe there is some truth to Ebert’s suspicions. I read somewhere that whenever David Lynch or Isabella Rossellini watch that scene in Blue Velvet, in which Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) punches and sexually abuses Dorothy Vallens, they can’t help laughing uncontrollably. Is it funny? A man with some kind of oedipal insanity punching a woman in the face, taking a deep mouthful of nitrous oxide, and gazing between her legs?
To the man who filmed it and the woman who was playing the victim in the film, apparently (or apocryphally at least), the answer is an unfortunate but emphatic “Yes.”
Still, no matter what one thinks of Ebert’s review of Blue Velvet or Wild at Heart, he deserves credit for admitted that the fault may have lain with him, and his own biases, rather than the filmmaker’s creation. He didn’t like what he felt was Lynch’s emotional disingenuousness. A couple of Coen Brothers’ films (or maybe more than that) also seemed to grate on Ebert’s nerves, at least until Fargo when the Brothers Coen finally kept the irony muted and in the service of black humor.
Conversely, and strangely enough, Ebert didn’t like David Lynch’s earlier much-heralded black and white film Elephant Man because he thought it was kind of maudlin and manipulative. I remember, though, that Ebert dug the hell out of The Straight Story, that earnest and Disney-distributed (!) David Lynch movie about a man who crosses several states on his tractor in order to reunite with his brother, with whom he had a falling out and whom he hasn’t seen in a dog’s age.
Incidentally I remember watching The Straight Story with my father some years ago, and, to my recollection, it was the only time I ever saw the old man cry.
Anyway, if I had to pick the one artist who sets off this reaction in me, who makes me think my problem with their work lies within me rather than them, my one would be Wes Anderson.
I loved Rushmore, the movie about a parochial school boy who falls in love with a sexy teacher with an English accent, and battles for her affections against a haggard and sad-looking Bill Murray, who was the dad of two characters with thick (Scottish?) accents, a couple of freckled and muscled obnoxious kids who liked to beat up on the protagonist.
The movie was quirky but plausible, the kind of film with a sexual tension (more like agony) that recalls the pain of pubescence and the somber isolation of boarding school life that I remember very well from my own youth. The movie seems to take place in a leafy brown and redbrick world halfway between John Hughes’ eclogues of the 80s suburbs and the slightly more jaded (and yet still somewhat innocent) world where Robert Altman and Hal Ashby movies happened, where each moment it felt like Paul Simon might start strumming his guitar and humming to accompany the main character on his walk to school or run home after being rebuffed by some girl or woman he loves. There’s also an undercurrent of early 60s and late 50s America, as if Salinger’s Glass (Family) menagerie is peopling this world.
So yeah, I dug Rushmore.
And then something happened, either to me or to Wes Anderson. The style that was once charming for me started to feel precious, mannered, as if someone with less talent, imagination, and less understanding of the world had seen Rushmore, and then boiled it down to some kind of formula of quirk, kitsch, and a sort of designer artsy-quality intentionally aimed for upper-middle class people who weren’t nerds or alienated but knew that nerdiness had a certain cache (think people who watch The Big Bang or wear non-prescription glasses, or think Star Wars is science fiction). The velvet painting had somehow morphed into a velour tracksuit. Or at least that’s how I felt.
That’s one possibility. Another is that I lost some of my own innocence, became a bit Ebertized (sic) and started to resist the spell being cast by Anderson, and thereafter ceased to see the magic.
Then again, maybe not.
I know a lot of other people have the same impression of Wes Anderson’s output as I did. I’ve heard someone say that his post-Bottle Rocket and Rushmore films are his “dollhouse movies.”
Some years back (maybe a couple?) I went with my mother to the local movie palace in my hometown and we watched Moonrise Kingdom, a movie with a stellar cast (I guess Jason Schwartzman and Bill Murray are part of Anderson’s repertory company) and an at least nominally charming premise, about some kids in a Scouts’-like organization who are feuding in the woods while the lives of the adults around them slowly collapse, or something like that.
It was too cute for me, and after about twenty minutes I was ready to go home. And my mother and I did actually leave early.
That said, I forced myself to go see Grand Budapest Hotel, and can’t remember…for lack of a better word…feasting on a movie like that in years. It was like the first time I saw Pulp Fiction as a twelve-year old in the movie theater, or the first time I really sat down and watched a classic like any of Sergio Leone’s Dollars movies.
So much about Grand Budapest Hotel was just too beautiful, too technically wondrous, overstuffed with perfect performances, action, beautiful music, all kinds of sumptuousness, that I forgot about my former biases against Anderson’s films and just enjoyed the hell out of the movie on its own terms.
I found myself wondering, as I was writing the last paragraph, what Roger Ebert thought of Grand Budapest Hotel?
I just checked his website and the unimpeachable, never-wrong, and peer-reviewed Wikipedia website. Roger died in 2013. The movie came out in 2014.
Crap. Oh well. Rest in peace to Ebert, and thanks for your candor, which inspired these tepid meanderings on my part tonight. I’m sorry you didn’t live long enough to see what I think is Wes Anderson’s best film, or at least the one that broke down my resistance to him the way Mulholland Drive finally forced you to “forgive David Lynch,” as you so honestly and eloquently put it in your review, absolving him of the crimes of Lost Highway and Fire Walk with Me (both of which I liked, by the way).
To each their own, though. And I’ve heard Wes Anderson’s stop-motion films are enjoyable even for people who don’t like his live-action output. I’ll probably get around to watching Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs at some later date.
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