Talking Pictures

INTRODUCTION

THERE ARE A FEW INEVITABLE questions film critics face when we stagger our way into the sunlit world outside the darkened theaters in which we spend so much of our time. The first, almost always, is, "Film critic, wow, how did you get that job?" (Implied follow-up: "How do I go about getting paid to sit around and watch movies all day, too?")

The answer, in my case, is: pure accident. I did not grow up a congenital movie geek. If anything, I was a bookworm, avoiding my family's usual weekend pastimes of board games, cards, and watching Iowa college football on TV to burrow into Harriet the Spy and, as a teenager, On the Road and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I went to movies, sure: Fantasia, Mary Poppins, and Oliver! as a little kid; Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles as a fourteen-year-old (I can still remember the frisson of hearing Robert Redford's "Oooooh shit" when my friends and I saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as easily scandalized youngsters). I credit one of my formative cinematic experiences to a favorite babysitter who took me to see the melodrama Dark Victory at the Varsity Theatre next door to Drake University, purely for the camp value of Bette Davis voraciously devouring the scenery as a rich party girl elegantly succumbing to a brain tumor. But I didn't eat, sleep, and breathe movies like so many contemporaries who would become my colleagues in the field.

Instead, I came to reviewing as a writer: after graduating from Smith College with a degree in government, I moved to New York to become a journalist. I worked at Ms. Magazine as a researcher and, for two wonderful years, as Gloria Steinem's administrative assistant. It was Gloria who urged me to become a freelancer, because she had found the freedom and variety of freelancing to be both fulfilling and fruitful in discovering her own voice as a young writer. By the time I summoned the courage to take her advice, a handsome New York–based movie magazine called Premiere had come into being. I began writing about filmmakers for their Cameo section—edited with superb taste by the poet April Bernard—where I wrote short profiles of the documentarian Albert Maysles, the costume designer Ellen Mirojnick, and the casting director Margery Simkin, among others.

Within a few years, I was writing film-related stories for The New York Times Arts & Leisure section, for which I interviewed the documentarians Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, the experimental filmmaker Jem Cohen, emerging directors Noah Baumbach and Ang Lee, and a then little-known actor named Stanley Tucci.

This is all by way of explaining that, with the exception of a year spent studying filmmaking and cinema history at the University of Georgia under the auspices of a Pew National Arts Journalism Fellowship, I've learned my craft on the job, as well as through frequent visits to my local video stores (remember those?). By the time I was invited to be the film critic at the Austin American-Statesman in 1995, I had watched enough movies—and had learned enough from their makers—to feel confident that I could evaluate films knowledgeably and fairly. What's more, my background as a non-expert allowed me to approach movies more like my readers, who even in our movie-mad culture only go out to see an average of five or six movies per year.

Still, I'll never forget the paralyzing experience of sitting down to write my first official review—of To Die For, Gus Van Sant's based-on-a-true-story satire about murder, self-deception, and postmodern celebrity starring Nicole Kidman. I had adored the movie, of that I was certain. The question was: Why? As I stared at the cursor insistently blinking back at me in the Statesman newsroom, my mind was as blank as the computer screen. How on earth could I explain to thousands of readers—of wildly divergent ages, backgrounds, tastes, and temperaments—what made this movie so brilliant? How could I quantify the ways in which Kidman delivered such a shrewd, well-judged performance, or prove how Van Sant interpreted Buck Henry's stingingly funny screenplay so adroitly?

Luckily, I had received some advice just before moving to Austin that helped me forge ahead, counsel that has held me in good stead throughout the intervening twenty years. At one of several going-away get-togethers, my dear friend and fellow journalist David Friedman took me aside to share some wisdom he himself had received years before, when he became the television critic at the Philadelphia Daily News. "Before you write any review," David told me, "ask yourself three questions: 'What was the artist trying to achieve?' 'Did they achieve it?' And 'Was it worth doing?'"

I later learned that David was paraphrasing Goethe, who had similar advice for evaluating a piece of theater. No matter: those three questions have served as something of a north star throughout my career, as I've tried to write reviews that go beyond mere subjective, thumbs-up-thumbs-down opinion and instead judge movies on their own merits, to help readers put them into context, and, if they should decide to see the film in question, to prepare them for the encounter—without including pesky spoilers and time-wasting synopses.

After working in Austin for two delightful years of music, movies, and Tex-Mex (enriched by director Richard Linklater's Austin Film Society, whose screenings of vintage repertory and avant-garde contemporary cinema helped enormously in my continuing film education), I went to the Baltimore Sun, and from there to the Washington Post. In all three newsrooms, I've sought continually to improve my understanding of filmmakers' artistic aims and the challenges they face, as well as the assumptions and expectations of viewers with dauntingly diverse opinions as to what constitutes a "good movie." An Iron Man and Dark Knight fanatic may have no intention of attending the latest Nicole Holofcener comedy of manners, but being a critic requires that I evaluate each of those movies in a way that's useful both to its natural constituency and to general audiences who simply want to keep abreast of what's happening in pop culture. And who knows? On the strength of one of my reviews, someone might decide to take a flier on a film they never would have considered before, and emerge a newly minted fan.

EACH MOVIE IS ITS OWN animal, with its own genre DNA, tonal quirks, and artistic and intellectual aspirations. Just as it's not fair to subject a period Western to the same standards as a post-Soviet Romanian family drama, it's not useful to expect a movie that simply sets out to be a slick piece of mainstream entertainment to traffic in lofty ideas about meaning and existence (although slick entertainment and deep meaning aren't at all mutually exclusive). But it is reasonable to expect that all these films will be original, well-crafted, and smart, and that they won't pander or condescend to their audiences. No matter what expectations they're seeking to fulfill, all films have an essential grammar in common: a lexicon of visual, aural, and performance conventions that link them to each other, or, when those conventions are cleverly subverted, constitute an invigorating break. The job of the critic is to recognize these connections and disruptions, not in order to be pedantic or superior to the reader, but to open up interpretive possibilities that will enrich the viewing experience, or at least provide some thought-provoking reading.

Still, the question lingers: What makes a movie "good"? And, conversely, what makes a movie "bad"? As a way of exploring the answer, in 2009 I embarked on a series of articles intended to help readers analyze and evaluate films in the same ways I do when I sit down to watch them. Called "How to Watch a Movie," the series explored various categories of filmmaking production and how the average movie-watcher can recognize fluency, ambition, and excellence when they've seen it. Returning to my roots as a reporter, I interviewed directors, screenwriters, producers, actors, sound technicians, cinematographers, and editors about their crafts and about what they wished audiences appreciated more about their work. How do we know when a movie's been well-written, aside from some memorable lines and a shock ending? How can we tell if a film's been well-edited? What exactly is cinematography, and how does it affect the viewer's visual and emotional experience? How does a virtuosic screen performance differ from one on stage or TV?

The series inspired me to write Talking Pictures, which is designed to guide readers through a medium that, as it morphs into an ever more constant presence in our lives, has called upon everyone to be their own most trusted film critics. Fans deliver instant reviews on Twitter to their friends, collectively deciding a movie's fate in 140 characters or less. Friends gather over a glass of wine or an espresso after a film, trading opinions on the screenplay or a star's performance. Extras on DVDs and streaming platforms have introduced consumers to information and background knowledge once reserved for archive-dwelling historians. The days of passive viewing are over. We're all experts now.

More than ever, viewers care deeply about what they're seeing and want to bring a critical eye to a medium that, uniquely, is simultaneously an art form, a mass entertainment medium, and a complex, rationalized industrial practice. They want the means and language to make sense of the sounds, stories, and visual images they encounter on screens that seem to proliferate with each passing day.

As many observers have pointed out, film is an amalgamation of almost every mode of expression—painting, theater, dance, music, architecture, photography, and writing. At their most analytically attentive, viewers must be aware of how each of those disciplines is informing what's happening on the screen, as well as its physiological, psychological, emotional, and even subconscious effect. That's a lot to take in for audiences, let alone tease apart while powerful images and sounds are washing over them.

And, make no mistake: that sensory baptism is vitally important. Although this book is intended as a primer in evaluating movies, the best way to appreciate them is through complete surrender. At its best, cinema should resemble a kind of dream-state that we enter collectively and experience personally. If we're constantly deconstructing an actor's performance or scrutinizing the lighting or production design of particular scenes, then either we're not letting the movie "in," or it wasn't made well enough to achieve that complete, almost cellular merging with our own consciousness that defines cinema at its most powerful and immersive.

The first duty of the critical viewer, then, is a mental one. You must cleanse your mind of any defenses, biases, or lingering distractions that might get in the way of succumbing entirely to the work on offer. Ideally, the movie will cast enough of a spell that you won't be tempted to engage in mental box-checking or second-guessing while it plays. If that's the case, your "critical mind" won't turn on until the end credits begin to roll. If the movie isn't working, for whatever reason, then you'll most likely begin your analysis while still in the theater, trying to figure out what's going wrong and where, and what the filmmakers might have done to create a more rewarding viewing experience.

Talking Pictures is meant to be useful in both circumstances—as a guide for appreciating movies more fully when they succeed, and for explaining their missteps when they fall short. The book is structured roughly according to a film's production—starting with the script, then moving to casting and production design, cinematography, and so forth. I've saved the chapter on directors until the end, because—ideally, at least—it's the director whose guidance and creative vision most influence the entire film, from the first day of shooting through the final edit. (Admittedly, when movies are mega-budgeted, big-studio blockbusters, the directors' roles become murkier; often they're at the mercy of studio executives who dictate casting and plot elements.)

In every chapter, I've tried to include examples of movies that capture the principles and best practices of a particular cinematic discipline; readers will note that most of them are culled from Hollywood's "Golden Age" from the 1930s through the 1950s, and from the 1970s through the present moment, a period that coincides with my most memorable filmgoing experiences as a fan and as a critic. I've included two or three leading questions viewers can ask themselves after they've seen a movie to ascertain whether it succeeded in particular craft areas.

Certain titles will keep popping up throughout Talking Pictures, from wartime dramas such as The Best Years of Our Lives and The Hurt Locker to wry "serio-comedies" like The Graduate and You Can Count on Me, from taut thrillers, including All the President's Men, Michael Clayton, and Children of Men, to such classics as Do the Right Thing and GoodFellas. These are all personal favorites of mine, and each exemplifies discrete areas of the craft—script, acting, design, camerawork, sound—as well as the kind of unifying directorial vision it takes to make them work as a beautifully integrated whole. And at the end of each chapter, I've included a "mini-canon" of movies that exemplify the best in each discipline.

Readers will also notice that certain words recur throughout the book—adjectives like "seamless," "expressive," "authentic," and "specific," and phrases like "emotional connection," "genuine feeling," "service to the story," and "building a world on-screen." In speaking with the hundreds of artists, technicians, and craftspeople who have been my unofficial tutors over the past quarter century, it's become clear that the ones at the top of their respective games keep these ideals foremost in their minds during the creative process, whether they're scouting a location, assessing the proper neckline for a seventeenth-century ball gown, choosing a camera lens, or preparing a monologue for a pivotal scene. It never ceases to amaze me to what lengths writers, actors, directors, designers, and technicians will go in order to finesse every single detail. The least the rest of us can do is notice. With luck, that's precisely what this book will help you do.