Roger Ebert's Four Star Reviews, 1967-2007

by Roger Ebert

In Stone’s view, the infamous eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap on the White House tapes symbolizes a dark hole inside the president’s soul, a secret that Nixon hints at but never reveals. What is implied is that somehow a secret CIA operation against Cuba, started with Nixon’s knowledge during the last years of the Eisenhower administration, turned on itself and somehow led to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Then in 1968 I saw Don’t Look Back, D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary about Dylan’s 1965 tour of Great Britain. In my review I called the movie “a fascinating exercise in self-revelation” and added, “The portrait that emerges is not a pretty one.” Dylan is seen not as a “lone, ethical figure standing up against the phonies,” I wrote, but is “immature, petty, vindictive, lacking a sense of humor, overly impressed with his own importance, and not very bright.” I felt betrayed. In the film, he mercilessly puts down a student journalist and is rude to journalists, hotel managers, fans. Although Joan Baez was the first to call him on her stage when he was unknown, after she joins the tour, he does not ask her to sing with him. Eventually she bails out and goes home.

The movie uses revealing interviews made recently by Dylan, but its subject matter is essentially the years between 1960, when he first came into view, and 1966, when after the British tour and a motorcycle accident he didn’t tour for eight years. He was born in 1941, and the career that made him an icon essentially happened between his twentieth and twenty-fifth years.

At the 1965 Newport festival, Pete Seeger recalls: “The band was so loud, you couldn’t understand one word. I kept shouting, ‘Get that distortion out!’ If I had an ax I’d chop the mike cable right now!” For Seeger, it was always about the words and the message. For Dylan, it was about the words, and then it became about the words and the music, and it was never particularly about the message.

Key advisor Paul Wolfowitz’s immediate reaction to 9/11 was war on Iraq. Anarchy in that land was all but assured when the Iraqi army was disbanded against the urgent advice of Gen. Jay Garner, the American administrator, who was replaced by the neocon favorite Paul Bremer. That meant that a huge number of competent military men, most of them no lovers of Saddam, were rendered unemployed—and still armed. How was this disastrous decision arrived at? People directly involved said it came as an order from administration officials who had never been to Iraq.

They mostly felt that orders came from the precincts of Vice President Cheney, that Cheney’s group disregarded advice from veteran American officials, and in at least one case channeled a decision to avoid Bush’s scrutiny. The president signed, but didn’t read, and you can see the quizzical, betrayed looks in the eyes of the men and women in the film, who found that the more they knew about Iraq, the less they were heeded.

Twin Falls Idaho, about Siamese twins who deal with the fact that one of them is dying.

Before long, we are regarding the count himself. He is played totally without ego by Klaus Kinski. The count has a monstrous ego, of course—it is Kinski who has none. There is never a moment when we sense this actor enjoying what a fine juicy cornpone role he has, with fangs and long sharp fingernails and a cape to swirl. No, Kinski has grown far too old inside to play Dracula like that: He makes his body and gaunt skull transparent, so the role can flicker through.

Her husband, Walter (Merab Ninidze), reading the ominous signs of the rise of Nazism, has gone ahead to East Africa, and now writes asking them to join him—“and please bring a refrigerator, which we will really need, and not our china or anything like that.” What Jettel brings is a ballroom gown, which will be spectacularly unnecessary. The marriage is a troubled one. Jettel thinks herself in a godforsaken place, and Walter, who works hard but is not a natural farmer, has little sympathy with her. Their sex life fades: “You only let me under your shirt when I’m a lawyer,” he tells her once when his advance is turned away.

After the first month of training, there is a Regimental Ball. The women turn out with hope in their hearts and are sized up by the candidates. A man and a woman (Richard Gere and Debra Winger) pair off. We know more about them than they know about one another. He is a loner and a loser, whose mother died when he was young and whose father is a drunk. She is the daughter of an officer candidate who loved and left her mother twenty years before. They dance, they talk, they begin to date, they fall in love. She would like to marry him, but she refuses to do what the other local girls are willing to do—get pregnant or fake pregnancy to trap a future officer. For his part, the man is afraid of commitment, afraid of love, incapable of admitting that he cares for someone. All he wants is a nice, simple affair, and a clean break at the end of OCS.

The most dramatic point Graves makes is that the war almost literally exterminated the generation that would have ruled Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. Something like 90 percent of the field officers were killed on some fronts.

In its sexuality and violence, this is the kind of movie that can no longer easily be made in the United States; the standards of a puritanical minority, imposed on broadcasting and threatened even for cable, make studios unwilling to produce films that might face uncertain distribution. But content does not make a movie good or bad—it is merely what it is about. Oldboy is a powerful film not because of what it depicts, but because of the depths of the human heart it strips bare.

Segregation was wrong and hurtful, but the system did provide a benefit: The black community was self-sufficient, supporting its own tradespeople, schoolteachers, ministers, and craftsmen, who provided role models for young people growing up. The movie remembers one-room schoolhouses, and churches where gospel music and fiery sermons uplifted a congregation after its week of work in the fields. It remembers juke joints and church picnics (with the cards hidden under a hat when the preacher approaches) and the way that old people were respected and consulted.

One of the unique qualities of the screenplay, and his direction, is that this is a film where the principals are three black people and three white people, and yet the movie is not about black-white “relationships” in the dreary way of so many other recent movies, which are motivated either by idealistic bonhomie or the clichés of ethnic stereotypes. Every character in this film, black and white, operates according to his or her own agenda. That’s why we care so very much about what happens to them.

Like all addictive gamblers he seeks the sensation of losing more money than he can afford. To win a great deal before losing it all back again creates a kind of fascination: Such gamblers need to confirm over and over that they cannot win.

As the film’s director, Eastwood has done some interesting things with his vision of the West. Instead of making the miners’ shacks into early American antique exhibits, he shows them as small and sparse. The sources of light are almost all from the outside. Interiors are dark and gloomy, and the sun is blinding in its intensity. The Eastwood character himself is almost always backlit, so we have to strain to see him and this strategy makes him more mysterious and fascinating than any dialogue could have.

The elements of the movie stand on their own. The Neve Campbell character is not simply the younger woman in Alex’s life, but creates plot space of her own, where Alex is a visitor.

Born in Mexico, he has worked there and overseas, like his gifted friends and contemporaries Alfonso Cuarón (born 1961) and Alejandro González Iñárritu (born 1963). Isn’t it time to start talking about a new Mexican Cinema, not always filmed in Mexico but always informed by the imagination and spirit of the nation? Think of del Toro’s remarkable films, and then consider too Cuarón’s Children of Men, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (the best-looking Potter film), Great Expectations (an overlooked masterpiece), and Y tu Mama Tambien. Or Iñárritu’s Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel.

Into his classroom every autumn come several dozen would-be Harvard law graduates, who fall into the categories we all remember from school: (a) the drones, who get everything right but will go forth to lead lives of impeccable mediocrity; (b) the truly intelligent, who will pass or fail entirely on the basis of whether they’re able to put up with the crap; (c) those with photographic memories, who can remember everything but connect nothing; (d) the students whose dogged earnestness will somehow pull them through; and (e) the doomed.

A reasonable person, I believe, will reflect that in this story set in a Jewish land, there are many characters with many motives, some good, some not, each one representing himself, none representing his religion. The story involves a Jew who tried no less than to replace the established religion and set himself up as the Messiah. He was understandably greeted with a jaundiced eye by the Jewish establishment while at the same time finding his support, his disciples, and the founders of his church entirely among his fellow Jews. The libel that the Jews “killed Christ” involves a willful misreading of testament and teaching: Jesus was made man and came to Earth in order to suffer and die in reparation for our sins. No race, no religion, no man, no priest, no governor, no executioner killed Jesus; he died by God’s will to fulfill his purpose, and with our sins we all killed him.

Patton is almost three hours long but it is a surprisingly uncomplicated movie, telling its story with clean, simple scenes and shots. Schaffner is at home here; one of the best things about his Planet of the Apes was the simplicity of style he found for it. If Planet had gotten complicated, we would have laughed at it. The simplicity of Patton does not lead to any loss of subtlety; just the reverse. Because we are freed from those semiobligatory junk scenes that clutter up most war movies (the wife at home, the “human interest” drained from ethnic character actors, the battle scenes that are allowed to run too long because they cost so much) we can concentrate on the man, and we can even begin to believe we understand a warrior like this one.

After seeing Platoon, I fell to wondering why Stone was able to make such an effective movie without falling into the trap Truffaut spoke about—how he made the movie riveting without making it exhilarating. Here’s how I think he did it. He abandoned the choreography that is standard in almost all war movies. He abandoned any attempt to make it clear where the various forces were in relation to each other, so that we never know where “our” side stands and where “they” are. Instead of battle scenes in which lines are clearly drawn, his combat scenes involve 360 degrees. Any shot might be aimed at friend or enemy, and in the desperate rush of combat, many of his soldiers never have a clear idea of exactly who they are shooting at, or why. Traditional movies impose a sense of order upon combat. Identifying with the soldiers, we feel that if we duck behind this tree or jump into this ditch, we will be safe from the fire that is coming from over there. In Platoon, there is the constant fear that any movement offers a fifty-fifty chance between a safe place or an exposed one. Stone sets up his shots to deny us the feeling that combat makes sense.

This is material Altman knows from the inside and the outside. He owned Hollywood in the 1970s, when his films like M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and Nashville were the most audacious work in town. Hollywood cast him into the outer darkness in the 1980s, when his eclectic vision didn’t fit with movies made by marketing studies.

I go to the movies for many reasons. Here is one of them: I want to see wondrous sights not available in the real world, in stories where myth and dreams are set free to play. Animation opens that possibility because it is freed from gravity and the chains of the possible. Realistic films show the physical world; animation shows its essence. Animated films are not copies of “real movies,” are not shadows of reality, but create a new existence in their own right. True, a lot of animation is insipid and insulting, even to the children it is made for. But great animation can make the mind sing.

Have you read Blood Meridian, the novel by Cormac McCarthy? This movie comes close to realizing the vision of that dread and despairing story. The critic Harold Bloom believes no other living American novelist has written a book as strong. He compares it with Faulkner and Melville but confesses his first two attempts to read it failed, “because I flinched from the overwhelming carnage.”

What of the land itself? There is a sense of palpable fear of the outback in many Australian films, from Walkabout to Japanese Story, not neglecting the tamer landscapes in Picnic at Hanging Rock. There is the sense that spaces there are too empty to admit human content. There are times in The Proposition when you think the characters might abandon their human concerns and simply flee from the land itself.

Young men, like old ones, find it easy to believe hired love is real, and so believe a girl like Phuong would prefer a young man to an old one, when all youth represents is more work.

Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American (1955) told the story of this triangle against the background of America’s adventure in Vietnam in the early 1950s—when, he shows us, the CIA used pleasant, presentable agents like Pyle to pose as “aid workers” while arranging terrorist acts that would justify our intervention there. The novel inspired a 1958 Hollywood version in which the director Joseph Mankiewicz turned the story on its head, making Fowler the bad guy and Pyle the hero. Did the CIA have a hand in funding this film? Stranger things have happened: The animated version of Animal Farm (1954) was paid for by a CIA front, and twisted Orwell’s fable about totalitarianism both East and West into a simplistic anti-Communist cartoon.

Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull is a movie about brute force, anger, and grief. It is also, like several of Scorsese’s other movies, about a man’s inability to understand a woman except in terms of the only two roles he knows how to assign her: virgin or whore. There is no room inside the mind of the prizefighter in this movie for the notion that a woman might be a friend, a lover, or a partner. She is only, to begin with, an inaccessible sexual fantasy. And then, after he has possessed her, she becomes tarnished by sex. Insecure in his own manhood, the man becomes obsessed by jealousy—and releases his jealousy in violence.

And we share, too, the La Motta character’s limited and tragic hang-ups. This man we see is not, I think, supposed to be any more subtle than he seems. He does not have additional “qualities” to share with us. He is an engine driven by his own rage. The equation between his prizefighting and his sexuality is inescapable, and we see the trap he’s in: La Motta is the victim of base needs and instincts that, in his case, are not accompanied by the insights and maturity necessary for him to cope with them. The raging bull. The poor sap.

The

We enter into the sealed world of the rich man’s house, and see how jealousies fester in its hothouse atmosphere. Each of the four wives is treated with the greatest luxury, pampered with food and care, servants and massages, but they are like horses in a great racing stable, cared for at the whim of the master. The new wife, whose name is Songlian, is at first furious at her fate. Then she begins to learn the routine of the house, and is drawn into its intrigues and alliances. If you are given only one game to play, it is human nature to try to win it.

Alas, the monstrous food critic Anton Ego (Peter O’Toole) issues a scathing indictment of Gusteau’s recent cooking, the chef dies in a paroxysm of grief, or perhaps it is not a paroxysm, but I like the word, and the kitchen is taken over by the sniveling little snipe Skinner (Ian Holm).

I can imagine a performance in which Ray Charles would come across like a manic clown. But Foxx correctly interprets his body language as a kind of choreography, in which he was conducting his music with himself, instead of with a baton. Foxx so accurately reflects my own images and memories of Charles that I abandoned thoughts of how much “like” Charles he was, and just accepted him as Charles, and got on with the story.

There is a scene in which he slowly breaks down and begins to cry, and his face screws up in misery. The audience laughed, perhaps because it’s supposed to be “funny” to see a man cry. The audience should have been taken outside and shot.

The director, Bertrand Tavernier, believes that in earlier jazz films, the audience could sense that the actors were not really playing; that you could see in their eyes that they were not listening to the other musicians onstage with them. In ’Round Midnight, the music happens as we hear it, played by Gordon, Herbie Hancock on piano, and such others as Freddie Hubbard, Bobby Hutcherson, Ron Carter, and Billy Higgins, with Lonette McKee on vocals. You do not need to know a lot about jazz to appreciate what is going on, because in a certain sense this movie teaches you everything about jazz that you really need to know.

Hollywood in general sees strippers and hookers in a curiously positive light, as if the sex business is a good one for a woman to get into. Maybe that’s how a lot of men in the movie business feel. Many Hollywood female characters are prostitutes even when there’s no earthly reason in the plot for them to be one. See True Romance, for example.

When I go to the movies, one of my strongest desires is to be shown something new. I want to go to new places, meet new people, have new experiences. When I see Hollywood formulas mindlessly repeated, a little something dies inside of me: I have lost two hours to boors who insist on telling me stories I have heard before.

The movie is not about the resolution of this plot. It is about the way people persist in creating misery by placing the demands of their egos above the need for happiness—their own happiness and that of those around them. In some sense, Johan and Henrik live in these adjacent houses, in the middle of nowhere, simply so that they can hate each other. If they parted, each would lose a reason for living.

Whatever else he is telling us in Saraband, Bergman is telling us that life will end on the terms by which we have lived it. If we are bitter now, we will not be victorious later; we will still be bitter.

Christine Keeler is played by Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, an actress previously unknown to me, and she walks a fine line with great confidence, seeming neither innocent nor sluttish, but more of a smart, ambitious, and essentially honest young woman who finds that it is no more unpleasant to sleep with rich and important men than with her poor and obscure boyfriend.

Wouldn’t we all like to be rich and powerful, have desirable sex partners, live in a mansion, be catered to by faithful servants—and hardly have to work? Well, yeah, now that you mention it. Dealing drugs offers the possibility of such a lifestyle, but it also involves selling your soul. Montana gets it all and he loses it all. That’s predictable. What is original about this movie is the attention it gives to how little Montana enjoys it while he has it. Two scenes are truly pathetic; in one of them, he sits in a nightclub with his blond mistress and his faithful sidekick, and he’s so wiped out on cocaine that the only emotions he can really feel are impatience and boredom. In the other one, trying for a desperate transfusion of energy, he plunges his face into a pile of cocaine and inhales as if he were a drowning man.

At the end of the film, there is a sequence of overwhelming emotional impact, involving the actual people who were saved by Schindler. We learn then “Schindler’s Jews” and their descendants today number some six thousand, and that the Jewish population of Poland is four thousand. The obvious lesson would seem to be that Schindler did more than a whole nation to spare its Jews.

Some of the strangest passages in the film are the interviews with the officials who were running the camps and making the “Final Solution” work smoothly and efficiently. None of them, at least by their testimony, seem to have witnessed the whole picture. They only participated in a small part of it, doing their little jobs in their little corners. If they are to be believed, they didn’t personally kill anybody, they just did small portions of larger tasks, and somehow all of the tasks, when added up and completed, resulted in people dying.

The cop would probably be happier talking with the phone-sex girl than carrying on his endless affairs, which have no purpose except to anger his wife, who is past caring. He likes the deception more than the sex, and could get off by telling the stranger on the other end of the phone that he’d been cheating with another phone-sex girl.

They needed each other. Spungen needed someone to mother, and Vicious, according to his friends, needed self-esteem and was immensely proud that he had an American girlfriend. They were meant for each other, but by the end it was all just ashes and bewilderment, because they were so strung out on drugs that whole days would slip by unnoticed. In their fantasies of doomed romance, they planned to go out together in a suicide pact, but by the end they were too sick to even go out together for a pizza.

Sid & Nancy suggests that Vicious never lived long enough to really get his feet on the ground, to figure out where he stood and where his center was. He was handed great fame and a certain amount of power and money, and indirectly told that his success depended on staying fucked up. This is a big assignment for a kid who would otherwise be unemployable.

Silkwood is the story of some American workers. They happen to work in a KerrMcGee nuclear plant in Oklahoma, making plutonium fuel rods for nuclear reactors. But they could just as easily be working in a southern textile mill (there are echoes of Norma Rae), or on an assembly line, or for a metropolitan public school district. The movie isn’t about plutonium, it’s about the American working class. Its villains aren’t monsters; they’re organization men, labor union hotshots, and people afraid of losing their jobs.

This isn’t an adaptation of a comic book; it’s like a comic book brought to life and pumped with steroids. It contains characters who occupy stories, but to describe the characters and summarize the stories would be like replacing the weather with a weather map.

Paltrow and Law do a good job of creating the kind of camaraderie that flourished between the genders in the 1930s and 1940s, in films like The Lady Eve, with Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck, or His Girl Friday, with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. The women in this tradition are tomboys (Katharine Hepburn is the prototype), and although romance is not unknown to them, they’re often running too fast to kiss anyone.