OK so I know this is a week late, but Roger Ebert died. Oh man. I mean, just in terms of pure ability to get inside movies, to understand how and why they connected with us on our most basic level and in terms of being able to take us from laughter to insight as quickly as the best of the movies he loved… he can’t really ever be replaced. We’d be insane to try.
So, after I heard the news and got done with being temporarily depressed, I started to think about film criticism. Like, can we even have people who get paid to watch movies and tell us which are good and which are bad?
The answer is yes; yes we can. I know a lot of people who would say, “No way, movies are all about personal taste, you can’t tell me my opinion is wrong.” And to a certain degree they have a point.
But here’s the thing: There is a definite, objective scale on which to measure the quality of a film. In terms of its innovation, the techniques it invented, rules it broke, messages it delivered and how effectively it delivered them—one movie can be said to be better than the next.
Now obviously we all have opinions. Without them discussing film would be unbelievably boring. It’s just that there’s a difference between not personally connecting with Charles Foster Kane’s futile search for happiness and not acknowledging “Citizen Kane” as a brilliant, inventive and rightfully influential film.
There is a line between “best” and “favorite.”
To use the most personal example, there’s a very clear division between my favorite movie, “The Royal Tenenbaums,” and what I believe to be objectively one of the best movies, “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
One is a deeply personal black comedy about an incredibly dysfunctional family living in a tightly stylized dollhouse world narrated by Alec Baldwin; the other is an epic spanning several million years of human evolution, predicting most things about space travel before we’d been to the moon and sans dialogue or direct communication for the majority of its two and a half hour run time.
However, there’s probably a point to all this. You see, despite this absolutely massive difference in scope, tone, theme and narrative, there are still some comparisons and connections that can be drawn between the two films.
First of all, both Wes Anderson (favorite director) and Stanley Kubrick (best director) are super detail-oriented, precise filmmakers who favor wide, symmetrical shots, which tend to give their films a sort of disconnected or even impersonal feel.
However, it’s in the way they each use this effect where you can clearly see the two of them deviate from the norm and strive to create an intensely unique and, ultimately, effective storytelling tool through their films.
Anderson’s use of techniques that tend to distance the audience actually plays with the micromanagement to the last detail aesthetic that he creates to draw viewers in and make his characters more emotionally accessible.
By deliberately creating this unrealistic, ungrounded world for his characters to inhabit and by having them stare straight to the camera from it and deadpan their way through severe emotional trauma, he takes the exterior out of the equation and forces you to confront what the Tenenbaums are going through in a very direct, very human way.
Like driving east until you’re eventually driving west, he takes all these alienating, detached techniques and turns them into something profoundly moving. The sets are still immaculate and beautiful and create these stunning mise-en-scenes, but they’re ultimately secondary; they’re just the vehicles for the message.
Contrast this with “2001: A Space Odyssey,” in which Kubrick embraces the full effect of the style he intentionally creates to remove the human element from the narrative and allow the focus to fall on the subtext of the film and engage the audience on an intellectual level more fitting to the themes of human evolution and man’s role in the universe that he’s exploring.
He even acknowledged as much when he said, “I don’t like to talk about ‘2001’ too much because it’s essentially a non-verbal experience. It attempts to communicate more to the subconscious and to the feelings than it does to the intellect. I think clearly there’s a problem with people who are not paying attention with their eyes. They’re listening. And they don’t get much from listening to this film.”
This was the exact effect he was going for as he masterfully blended the wide, distancing shots, the impersonal compositions, the pre-CGI space station sequences and Pink Floyd space voyages, perfectly conducting technical innovation and narrative experimentation in a meditation on the relationship between humanity and, um…everything else.
I mixed up my metaphors a bit, but the result is one of the true landmarks of cinema—a film that set new benchmarks in nearly every aspect of filmmaking while delivering a profoundly original and artistic statement on an entirely different level than most filmmakers.
It is, objectively, a great movie. Granted it isn’t always as much fun to watch. But it’s a high point of human artistic achievement and I understand perfectly well why it’s considered a greater film than, say “The Royal Tenenbaums,” a movie I vastly prefer.
I will defend “RT,” but when I do I understand why parts of my argument are subjective, and why parts are objective.
If someone thinks the compositions are weird and connect with the film the way I did, fine. But we also need to be able to acknowledge some parts of the film are inarguably well done and understand neither half of the discussion is necessarily more important than the other.
This has to be our attitude toward every conversation about film if we’re going to have a productive, enlightening and civil discussion.
This is, I think, what Roger Ebert was all about, respecting opinions while still forcing us to acknowledge—and I’m quoting Douglas Adams—not all opinions are created equal and sometimes movies are just objectively good or bad.
This is what we need more of in our discussion of film; this is what Roger Ebert did better than anyone else; this is what he dedicated his life to and… damn, I’m gonna miss that.
