By Matt Zoller Seitz

The Eye of the Critic
What we see; plus, the year in pictures.

Nothing is ever as horrible or great as you’ve heard. That includes individual movies and entire moviegoing years. When you’re talking about any popular art form–cinema and pop music especially–assertions of quality are only provable in certain contexts. (Most people can probably agree that Lawrence of Arabia is a greater work of popular art than Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but Lawrence of Arabia versus Rules of the Game and The Holy Grail versus Office Space are not so clear-cut.) After a certain point, subjective responses take over, and the argument you’re having with your friends about whether this film or that film is The Best Film of the Year or A Complete Piece of Garbage becomes a circle jerk. Critics really hate admitting this because it damages our fantasies of oracular wisdom, but the continual evaluation of quality and importance that goes on in our columns is a fancy-pants smokescreen–a ritual that lets us prattle about movies we either responded to or didn’t, often for reasons that have less to do with technical, esthetic or political merit than with our own personalities (and personal baggage).

A critic declares a movie The Year’s Best Film (as I did recently with Tim Burton’s Big Fish) not because he really thinks it’s the year’s best film but because he really, really, really liked it, usually for personal reasons he can’t or won’t explain, and desperately wants to get word-of-mouth going and make the movie a hit. I mean, really: How can anyone declare a particular title The Year’s Best Film without having seen all 400 or so features released to U.S. theaters during any calendar year, plus another approximately 400 features shown at film festivals that did not get released commercially, plus 200 more movies made for broadcast and cable tv and perhaps 1000-2000 foreign-language films that, for whatever reason, never got a North American release? The short answer is, we can’t. So we fudge, declaring the best American movie, the best Hollywood movie, the best fantasy movie, the best drama. Or we write pieces holding up a certain movie we liked or hated as an example of the Death of Cinema or the End of Narrative or The Rise of the Woman Filmmaker or the Corruption of Modern Youth.

It’s all part of the same transparent game: We’re trying to wrap our personal, in some ways inexplicable response with an outer layer of importance. The essence of every piece of criticism is the same: You might not like this, but I sure as hell did. Unfortunately, that doesn’t sound as grand or compelling or near-omniscient as "the film of the year" or "one of the most moving dramas of recent times" or "a litmus test for serious moviegoers."

I’ve been a professional critic and journalist for 13 years now. During that time, I’ve probably watched thousands of contemporary theatrical films and thousands more on tv or home video. I’ve learned a lot about different filmmaking styles and historical trends, and I’ve read and thought a lot about how politics and money affect films (and filmmakers). I’ve gotten into who knows how many arguments about the merits of particular directors, writers, actors and processes. (Spielberg vs. Kubrick is a fun one; so is ‘Scope versus flat.) I’ve read god knows how many books on film history and theory. I’ve also made features, an experience that has required me to learn a variety of technical skills–from lighting and shooting to sound recording and editing–that I did not have before. I wish I could say this combination of experience and enrichment brought me closer to understanding what makes a movie great as opposed to good, or enabled me to more effectively persuade readers of a certain movie’s merits, or improved my ability to predict which current releases will still be watched and discussed after I’m dead and buried. (That’s what all those yearly critics’ awards are: a charming attempt to jump-start historical consensus.)

But the truth is, I’m no closer to those goals than I was 13 years ago. And I’m beginning to think that the goals themselves are illusions that critics and wannabe-critics have been conditioned to believe in. (To quote the little bald kid in the first Matrix, "There is no spoon.") Right now, I feel sure that the Lord of the Rings movies will still be watched 50 years from now, not just because of their narrative expansiveness, exciting battle sequences, nifty creatures and motifs of loyalty and sacrifice, but because director Peter Jackson and his co-writers adapted a trilogy that’s beloved by generations of fantasy buffs and sneered at by many intellectuals, and did it without those twin hobgoblins of modern hipsterdom, condescension and irony. I also think that Cold Mountain and Mystic River will be viewed as honorable but rather prosaic Hollywood attempts to will a masterpiece into creation, and that Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation–a movie I adored–will be thought of not as a timeless classic, but as an idiosyncratic little movie with loads of personality that pointed the way toward later, grander efforts. (The rich-girl slurs against Coppola–the likes of which are never directed against rich-boy directors like Whit Stillman and Wes Anderson–will gradually fade as society becomes less sexist.) I think The Fog of War will one day be seen as 2003’s greatest documentary, and perhaps its greatest movie, period–a trenchant summing-up of America’s unquenchable desire to remake the world, a topic that will remain important as long as America remains powerful. But history will judge such things, not critics. It is possible that future generations will anoint as the best movie of 2003 a film that no major critic really showed much interest in, or that barely got a release. Criticism is such an inexact science, more like a cleverly disguised form of confession than a sincere or quantifiable attempt to separate wheat from chaff. (That’s why my yearly 10 Best list is titled 10 Favorites.)

I’ve gotten to the point where I now read critics not because I trust their opinions, but because I feel that I’ve gotten to know them well enough to be able to split the difference between their opinions and mine, and make a decision on whether to see a particular movie (or watch it again). When a critic steers me wrong, or fixates on particular details for reasons that strike me as counterproductive, I don’t feel mad or betrayed. I remind myself that everybody is different and every day and every week is different, and that if that critic had written the review in a different frame of mind or experienced a different upbringing, his verdict might not have been the same. (If you think critics don’t occasionally pan movies because they saw them after having a nasty fight with their significant other or writing a big check to the IRS, you are naive indeed.)

In the marvelous interview book Moviemakers Master Class, John Boorman, director of such films as Deliverance and Excalibur, admits: When I made Hope and Glory, which is about my childhood memories, it wasn’t until I saw it finished that I realized that my obsession with the Arthurian legends could be explained by the fact that my father’s best friend was in love with my mother. Like filmmaking, criticism is an art, and all art is autobiographical. Whether a critic intends to or not, each time he writes a column, he’s writing a diary entry that happens to be published. He is systematically revealing his prejudices, preferences and fears. He is, in some sense, an actor playing a part, and like any actor, the act of performance renders him simultaneously concealed and exposed. Human thought and action are part of an ongoing mystery, one that only gets solved years after the fact, if ever.

TEN FAVORITES

Big Fish (Tim Burton, USA)

The Company (Robert Altman, USA)

Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton & Lee Unkrich, USA)

The Fog of War (Errol Morris, USA)

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Peter Jackson, USA/New Zealand)

The Eye (The Pang brothers, Taiwan/China)

Northfork (The Polish brothers, USA)

The Secret Lives of Dentists (Alan Rudolph, USA)

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Kim Bartley & Donnacha O’Briain, Ireland)

The Triplets of Belleville (Sylvain Chomet, France/Canada)

Rerelease of the year: Alien.

I’d also like to express my admiration for Manito, Washington Heights and Raising Victor Vargas for attempting, imperfectly but honestly, to bring urban Neorealist drama into the new century.