Changing My Mind (29 page)

After the cultural violence of much nineteenth-century anthropology, there came a twentieth-century emphasis on reticence—we should no longer seek to explain people definitively, but rather observe them, respecting their otherness. Fortunately, no one told Werner Herzog, and that is why his
Grizzly Man
is so damn cool. Herzog (whose voice-over perfectly matches
The Simpsons’s
hard man, Rainier Wolfcastle) is an infamous egomaniacal, auteur nutjob (i.e., a great European director) with a bent for the Germanically literal. (To pay off a bet he once made a movie called
Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe
. It did not disappoint.) Herzog is hard-core. He’s not interested in your interpretation of why American nutjob Timothy Treadwell lived among bears. Who cares what you think? Herzog has his documentary in hand, explaining that what we have here “iz on astone-ishing story of beauty and depth.” He’s not wrong. The footage itself is mostly Treadwell’s, but the film is a discordant duet of two voices: Herzog’s old-world Schopenhaurian pessimism versus Treadwell’s new-world optimism (which, Herzog believes, masks a deep despair).

Herzog calls bears a “primordial encounter.” Timothy calls them Mr. Chocolate and Aunt Melissa. Herzog believes Timothy was “fighing against the civilization that cast Thoreau out of Walden.” According to Timothy’s parents, the motivation was more prosaic. Not to give the specifics away, but “failed TV actor” is at the root of the crisis. Still, Herzog is determined to spin grandeur out of poor Timmy. And fabulous though it is to hear Herzog shouting about the “ooltimatt indifference of nature,” it’s Timothy saying to a fox, “I love you. Thanks for being my friend. I like this—do you like this?” that brings real joy. All you need to know about indifference is right there in that fox’s face.

In the spring of 1945, when David Lean’s
Brief Encounter
was first released, my father was nineteen. I envy him that vintage year of cinema and all opening weekends between, say, 1933 and 1955. Instead of
Memoirs of a Geisha,
he saw
Woman of the Year
. Instead of
Shopgirl,
he got
Top Hat.
The first film he ever saw was
King Kong,
and it was a merciful hour and a half shorter than the beast I slept through in January. In New York and Paris, we can revisit the films of our fathers any night of the week in dozens of fine revival cinemas; in London we rely on the occasional largesse of film festivals and the BFI. To those who love them, any rerelease of a 1940s film is a draught of sunshine. I have never seen a movie of this period in which there was not something to like, just as I have never come across a cheese I wouldn’t eat.
Brief Encounter
is a Wensleydale: a lovely slice of English fare, familiar, inadvertently comic. It has become its own parody. The English are slightly ashamed of it, as the Aus trians are annoyed by
The Sound of Music
. In fact, its reputation as a period piece is unfair. It is not all cut-glass diction and antediluvian good manners. The film is really about the dream life of the English, those secret parts of us that are most important and to which we have least access. It’s a shame to go to the cinema only to laugh (as modern audiences laugh at the supposed camp excess of another sincere movie,
Now, Voyager
). If you pass over the superficial culture shocks of sixty years passed (A lending library in Boots the chemist! A string quartet in a railway café!), it is as astute about the English character as it ever was.

The story is easily paraphrased: Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) and Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) meet in a railway station and fall in love. Unfortunately, they are married to other people. Laura has a stolid, suburban husband, Fred, whose only connection to the Keatsian strain in English life is via the
Times
crossword, the clue in question being “When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high . . . (seven letters).” Laura suggests “romance.” It’s right—but it doesn’t fit with the other answers. In this moment the entire film is contained. There are many things that the English want and dream and believe. But they do not fit in with our other answers.

Lean’s sad, buttoned-up account of unconsummated love is about all of us and our cautious natures. It’s not that the English don’t want true love or self-knowledge. Rather, unlike our European cousins, we will not easily give up the real for the dream. We remain skeptical about throwing away a concrete asset like Fred in favor of “the faery power of unreflecting love,” no matter how much Keats may recommend it. Laura, a Midlands mother of two, is certainly not a fairy by temperament, despite her pixie face. She will not give up the reality of Fred for the dream of Alec. Alec, gentleman that he is, quite agrees. An Italian (or indeed, the modern English viewer of this film) will diagnose Laura and Alec as morbidly repressed. The film offers a different hypothesis: that the possibility of two people’s pleasure cannot override the certainty of other people’s pain.
Primum non nocere
is the principle upon which the film operates. As a national motto we could do a lot worse.

These days, carpe diem is more popular, and self-sacrifice invites sniggers. But the impulse behind Laura’s and Alec’s sacrifice seems to me neither smug, religious nor self-satisfied.
Brief Encounter
is not about English sexual repression or Christian values. It’s about personal grandeur. By the end of the film, Alec and Laura are truly grand; they are their best selves. And if there is a moral lesson, it is not about the sin of sexual infidelity but the secular sin of being unfaithful to oneself.

In the last few minutes of their good-bye, they are interrupted by Dolly, a silly woman whom Laura knows. She sits down uninvited and starts to talk about train timetables. She represents all the petty horror of English life, the inconsequential stuff and nonsense that gets in the way of our real lives and separates us from that “high romance” Keats knew the English have within them. It is sad that Alec and Laura must part, but what makes this an English tragedy is that they will politely listen to Dolly as they do it. They should be showing their souls. Instead they discuss the weather.

Hollywood recycles its actresses. Ava Gardner turned into Angelina Jolie. Claudette Colbert reincarnated as Reese Witherspoon. Cate Blanchett may one day prove worthy of the Katharine Hepburn echoes she evokes. Gwyneth Paltrow, star of the depressing misfire
Proof,
is Grace Kelly’s replacement, and that’s a poisoned chalice if ever there was one. The qualities of Grace and Gwyneth, as I see them, are as follows: a sense of entitlement, a glacial physical beauty and an apparently genuine submissive attitude to the opposite sex. They worship the men they play opposite and don’t so much act as react to them. It is this talent for silent reaction that won Paltrow an Oscar for
Shakespeare in Love,
one of the least verbal Oscar-winning performances in recent memory. Her face flushes, her eyes flood. If you hold her in your arms, she trembles. It’s all good old-fashioned movie actress stuff. If you were a male moviegoer looking for someone to love you, to just love you, and not drive you crazy with questions and smart talk like Bette Davis or Renée Zellweger, then Gwyneth’s your girl. Classy as she is, she’ll love you even if you’re completely unsuitable, even if you’re Ripley or Ted Hughes. But just as Grace did, Gwyneth has grown tired of the princess gig. She wants to be an actress.
Proof
sees her acting and acting and acting. I’m sure it’s true that on stage she made this role her own, wowing audiences with her portrayal of Catherine, the emotionally and mentally vulnerable daughter of a math genius who has lost his mind. Did the father write the mathematical proof posthumously found in a desk drawer—or did the daughter? The theatrical script uses the word
proof
as a metaphorical launchpad for discussions of work and love and life, as plays will. It’s that kind of verbal swordplay that so impresses onstage while seeming so redundant and brittle on-screen. Everyone involved tries really hard, and Jake Gyllenhaal is puppyishly excited by the whole project, but dominating it all is Paltrow’s voice, with its hipsterish high-rising terminals that sound as if she is saying only one thing, over and over: “Like, I can act, right?” She has something to prove, but it has nothing to do with math.

The best course of action for Paltrow is to remember her antecedent and follow her example. There is a way out of the princess gig. Grace Kelly cracked it in
High Society
and
Rear Window
. Paltrow glimpsed it in
Emma,
which was, in truth, the role that deserved an Oscar. Keep the vulnerability, but don’t be coy about the self-possession that is so obviously there. He goes down on his knees because you have something of value—and you know it. And if he left, you’d survive. Grace Kelly proved that princesses have power, too.

First, a disclaimer. With regard to
Good Night, and Good Luck,
George Clooney’s strident political docudrama, I find myself in a difficult position. I watched it and liked it. Then I spent two hours on the Internet and changed my mind.

What remains is still the review I intended, but it is qualified by the obvious fact that liberal films like this are made to please liberals like me. In terms of historical content, the film is neither quite honest nor quite true. That’s a shame, because it’s a good film. I don’t have space to discuss the several disappointing inaccuracies, elisions of fact and deliberate obfuscations. All I can do is direct you to the Internet and to Joseph E. Persico’s 1988 biography
Edward R. Murrow: An American Original
. What follows, then, is a glowing review of a fine piece of agitprop leftist cinema, which I very much enjoyed in the same spirit a person of the opposite sensibility will enjoy Ann Coulter’s recent celebratory defense of McCarthyism,
Treason,
not because it is entirely true but because she’s fighting in your corner. Clooney’s fighting in mine, and doing it in style.

And how. This is a beautifully made, superficially coherent, effective movie, and you have to pinch yourself to believe an actor directed it, wrote it and produced it. The generosity of the ensemble casting, the control of the heavily verbal material, the expert pacing—it is a mature work. Clooney understands that style is what you leave out, and in its taut ninety minutes he leaves out so much of what we have come to expect that Warner refused to fund the film. He left out the color. He left out the subplots. He left out the love interest. He sidelined historical reenactments in favor of the real thing: archive footage.

What remains is strongly reminiscent of
Citizen Kane,
not simply for its loquacious, crusading journalists, but because it is both visually luscious and aurally self-sufficient. You could close your eyes and understand everything. But don’t close your eyes. Here in sumptuous black and white is a perfectly recreated Capraesque newsroom. Here are quick-fire conversations à la Pres ton Sturges. The period detail is given a kick in the pants by the witty camera work (borrowed from Soderbergh and the Coen brothers), shooting faces from below, zooming in on a finger worrying a shirt button.

Clooney himself avoids the camera, slinking through the film as unobtrusively as a star can. In a film that is about editorializing and is itself heavily editorialized, Clooney edits himself out for the sake of the material. Into the Clooney-shaped hole slips an accomplished ensemble cast—Tate Donovan, Reed Diamond, Jeff Daniels, Robert Downey Jr., Patricia Clarkson—all of whom back up David Strathairn’s pitch-perfect Murrow impersonation by being entirely convincing newshounds. Well, all but one. I think you know who I’m talking about. Mr. Downey remains the most aggressive scene stealer in Hollywood. He’s barely restrained here, but if someone doesn’t give him free rein soon, there’s a danger of auto-combustion.

I digress. Like Murrow—the campaigning television broadcaster who squared off against Senator McCarthy in the mid-1950s—Clooney uses the “wires and lights” of his medium to make simple, forceful arguments. His case against McCarthy is familiar and correct: the paranoid fervor of McCarthyism placed the right to fair trial and the rights of the First Amendment under serious threat. Today, these rights are endangered once more. “We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home,” argues Murrow in 1956, foreshadowing our present concerns. Clooney doesn’t have to push hard for analogies like this—they’re everywhere. In fact, they’re a little too easy, and so admiring is he of Murrow that he follows his hero’s editorial style to the letter. (Clooney has always seemed boyishly prone to masculine hero worship, from his consecration of his own newscaster father to the re-creation—both on- and offscreen—of Sinatra’s rat-pack heyday.) Just as Murrow gave McCarthy enough rope to hang himself by allowing him “right to reply” on Murrow’s own prime-time show,
See It Now,
so Clooney refrains from casting an actor as McCarthy and simply replays the archive film. The edited archive film. He chooses all the same shots as Murrow did for his TV show: the off-guard, twitching, sweating, hysterical McCarthy, asking pointless questions, chasing phantoms that were not there.