Harvard
Man
Directed
by James Toback
Currently, the most misused word in movie culture is "masterpiece." Lots of critics used it after the ordeal of The Fast Runner (Atyerownrisk). But how can that first Inuit drama be a "masterpiece" if its maker has not previously demonstrated mastery? It recalls the risible 80s ad-blurb that hailed Man of Marble as "The Citizen Kane of Polish movies." The M-word has become a film pundit’s equivalent to a burp. Reviewers of The Fast Runner know they saw something, but unsure of what it was exactly (and, as always, unable to accurately consult the movie heritage), they grasp after handy adjectives, and expel gas.
Midway through this movie year, there have been films that offer perspective on modern experience while also demonstrating remarkable invention and serious creativity–but The Fast Runner ain’t one of ’em. And it’s embarrassing to indulge Western cultural condescension by overrating a movie from Upnorth that stretches out hoary cultural myths about people of color for the delectation of Southern white sophisticates. Star Wars does a better job of cultural anthropology–and at least it was shot on film. Maybe this Fast Runner shell-game (or igloo game) is just an attempt by critics to keep up with the digital changeover. Instead of criticizing the awful visual quality (favoring a film style that might inspire 20 different words for snow), they shill for the barbarous new technology.
Happily, the best movies so far this year really were shot on film. A couple would qualify as masterpieces if we could restore meaning to that fast-and-loosely used term. This mid-year list might help:
Minority Report–Spielberg’s treatise on vision and violence. Time Out–the Taxi Driver of global economics movies. Storytelling–a dark-humored view of American hypocrisies. The Cat’s Meow–a moving speculation on love, genius and movies. The Triumph of Love–Marivaux made modern by Clare Peploe. Borstal Boy–the Brendan Behan biography treats sex and politics poetically. Human Nature–wild behavioral farce with an enchanted look. CQ–retro and rad; 60s film culture charms/infects the present. The Sleepy Time Gal–reconciles extended families and reinvents Jacqueline Bisset as an actress. Circuit–gay soap opera with stinging social detail and the year’s most underrated performances. Last Orders–a male weepie redeemed by the best British reserve. Trouble Every Day–Claire Denis’ weird vampiric social critique. Too serious to dismiss. A Walk to Remember–a rarity: teen gospel drama.
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At the polls, at a union picnic, a happy-hour bar, maybe even a culturally mixed dance club, John Sayles and I might share working-class sympathies and a good joke. It’s at the movies that we differ. Standing for the idea of independent filmmaking isn’t enough when the closest Sayles gets to a cinematic triumph is taking off the lens cap. Sunshine State might be the best recent Sayles film, but it shares with his others the unsurprising, absolutely standard pingpong dialogue and visual static. It’s a chore to sit through.
This is unfortunate since Sayles takes on territory that most filmmakers ignore. His is public-service-announcement cinema. Certainly we can stand to know how the citizens of a Florida beach town react to the encroachment of condominium speculators as a mirror of possible, nationwide community crises. Sayles’ different versions of grassroots activism are...well, admirable. Marly (Edie Falco) and Desiree (Angela Bassett) divide the story (in not quite equal portions), showing the white and black sides of town; the unmarried and married life-approaches developed by independent-minded middle-aged women. All to the good, but also all according to Sayles’ bland plan. He operates on his own Fairness Doctrine, making sure he shows both sides of social issues. Problem is, Sunshine State seems made of issues–not ideas. They’re acted out by principled performers, rather than people.
Sayles may switch the locales of his screenplays, getting far beyond the New Jersey milieu of his earlier projects, but this is only topographical diversity (like Ang Lee’s superficial genre-hopping). At base, Sayles continues his do-gooder, paint-by-number socialscapes. The backgrounds may change (whether Texas, Louisiana, Ireland, Alaska, it’s still backdrop in a Sayles movie) but the action is always spoken. Medium shot, reverse angle, medium shot; cutting on dialogue punctuation rather than emotion, or weather. Seeing Sunshine State on the same day I saw Minority Report was culture shock–from sensory deprivation to sensory excitement. But the contrast pointed out why Sayles is so highly regarded by esthetically impaired critics. Sayles’ primitive style makes his political forthrightness stand out–you can’t miss it. And liberal critics mistake his conscientiousness–okay, his daring–for artistic valor.
But even if Sayles is no Spielberg, he’s no Sinclair Lewis either. One can respond to Sayles characters like Desiree and Marly; or the black and white underestimated mothers Eunice (Mary Alice) and Delia (Jane Alexander); or the black and white neglected husbands Reggie (James McDaniel) and Earl (Gordon Clapp) as standard-bearers, not complicated human beings. And with this comes a sense of self-gratifying superiority that makes people think Sayles has created a detailed social panorama. They’ll even accept Eunice responding to the news her son-in-law is an anesthesiologist with the question, "You knock people out with gas?" (That’s either false hominess or she’s a cretin.) Yet the shaky families, the balanced antagonists (a blind old segregationist played by Ralph Waite; a visionary old activist played by Bill Cobbs, both lovable) and the relay of errant lovers for the female leads don’t represent ideas. They’re hot buttons that ever-topical Sayles pushes while Sunshine State’s plot presumes to explore specific contemporary problems. Characters parade Sayles’ binary topics–slavery-integration, plantations-corporations, business-government, athletics-medicine. Their dialogue–all exposition–points up then-now dailiness leading to the climactic revelation that throughout American history nothing changes.
Given New York media’s recent indifference to the African burial ground near Wall Street, it’s heartening to see Eunice respond to a golf course built near a community cemetery. ("It’s a resting place, not a playpen!" says Mary Alice with breathtaking authority.) You want a man like Sayles on your community board, not necessarily behind the camera. Few socially conscious filmmakers are also dramatically adept. Martin Ritt (Conrack and Norma Rae) and Michael Ritchie (Smile) come to mind. Those would be good models for Sayles to study if he weren’t (as I suspect) enamored by his own position as a t-shirted indie pioneer, proud that he lacks Ritt’s and Ritchie’s corduroy and denim elan.
After almost a quarter century of filmmaking, Sayles can’t help claiming his turf. Sunshine State defends a municipal beach where black people could "step and just breathe." There are several laments by small businessmen (an indie’s plaint). And as Delia, Jane Alexander returns to movies–after a stint at the National Endowment for the Arts–surprising locals with her ability to talk turkey with sly developers. ("Don’t gape at me darlin’, I ran a nonprofit theater for 25 years.") Delia personifies Sayles’ indie pride, putting on productions of As I Lay Dying and Electra, their eccentricity amusing the townies. But Sayles himself doesn’t know the purpose of art or culture or cinema beyond the simplistically political. In Minority Report Spielberg shows that government is run by people, a result of ethical choices individuals make (that was also the essence of the legal-moral reverie in Amistad). Sayles’ p.c. report on assorted minorities insists on a banal, sentimental concept of democracy. Plus, it’s stodgy.
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Had James Toback gone into publishing, he might have gotten the respectable, middlebrow reputation of dubious writers like Rick Moody, Chuck Palahniuk, Nick Hornby and Russell Banks, whose idiosyncratic ideas make dreadful but lauded movies. But because Toback seizes his day, he channeled his imagination, his mind and his proven writing talent into truly personal movies that are rarely lauded. His latest, Harvard Man, barely got released. Not just because today’s film culture (producers, distributors, critics) neglects genuine eccentricity but because it’s the first film in which Toback has tried to accommodate today’s Teen Sex Comedy culture and lost sight of his own terms.
Sending his semi-autobiographical protagonist Alan (Adrien Grenier) on a bildungsroman through b-ball, gangsters, LSD, philosophy and women, Toback presents his usual preoccupations, but in a jury-rigged TSC milieu that doesn’t service the flow of obsessions as well as did the documentary-fantasy hybrid of his best recent movie, Black and White. Not smutty but not quite erotic either, Harvard Man suffers from Toback’s profligate ambition to transform TSC. Alan’s racing against the world is (as with all Toback characters) a race with himself; it isn’t simply a story of college experimentation but also Toback’s venture into multileveled narrative. David Ferrara’s lush camerawork circles every scene, the music track clashes pop and classical and the characters talk. Unlike Sayles, Toback takes a curt visual approach to exposition, letting his characters expound private soliloquies on morality, fate, sex, drugs, sports, race. It’s the kind of ideational ventriloquism novelists are praised for but raises eyebrows (or lowers eyelids) at American movies.
Harvard Man needed a great young actor to turn Toback’s gambits into coups. Grenier is no Robert Downey Jr. His light eyes make him seem alien rather than a dreamer, his light voice is impertinent, not compelling. Alan’s women–mob-daughter Cindy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Heidegger prof Chesney (Joey Lauren Adams)–seem attracted to a void. They come off as self-destructive screwballs except for Harvard Man’s one grace note: a sweet, almost tender, evocation in Chesney of a wise older lover–with a bigger budget Toback could have dubbed Adams’ unfortunate delivery of bookish lines (like De Palma dubbed the Gloria Revelle character in Body Double). Harvard Man makes a siren from the past vividly present. That’s a lesson American Pie never risked with its older female character. Instead of valorizing Alan’s recklessness, Toback’s peripatetic self-analysis amounts to a work of forgiveness (he’s too honestly confessional to be called self-indulgent). Harvard Man has ideas about youth, sex and drugs that Andre Techine handled better in Les Voleurs. That should be Toback’s model. Sadly, in American film culture he has none.
