More AFI, y'all. Read on.
Upon first seeing Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (about 11 pm Sunday night, if you're curious), I was struck by what seem to me as the two most major aspects of historical import in this very historically important film. First of all (and this is something that has been noted time and time again), it's a tremendously taboo-breaking film, one of the first American films to include with such frequency the depths (or heights, I suppose, depending on your position) of profanity such as "goddamn" and "Christ," as well as a few phrases that have become a little more PG than R-rated in the near-fifty years since the film's release (for instance, um, "hump the hostess"). As I've said before, though, taboo-breaking is a meaningless (even irritating) action without some kind of philosophical or aesthetic purpose behind it, which is why I'm much more interested in what I see as the second major historical innovation of this film, which is that it's one of the first American films that appears steeped in an acute awareness of world cinema. My first idea for this writeup had something to do with comparing Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to the works of Ingmar Bergman, and although I'll admit that that idea probably came from dwelling on the obvious signifiers (marital strife, black & white cinematography, connections to stage drama) without actually analyzing anything deeper (there's got to be some significance to the fact that Woolf's camera is way busier than Bergman would have ever allowed), that I even thought to make that comparison at all speaks volumes about how strikingly different the craft of Woolf is from any of the other pre-'70s films on this list. In that regard, this film feels like a true ground-zero for New American Cinema. As for the content of the film beyond the craft, I did find it a tad bit overwrought for my tastes [1], particularly in the early goings, where the characters are introduced with turned-to-11 emotions. Still, there's no denying that the intensity builds to a baroque beauty by the third act. And as long as there's beauty, I can make peace with an awful lot of flaws.
And speaking of beauty, mother of Spielberg! this movie has spades of it. One of the central premises of Unforgiven is that time-honored film tradition of using gorgeous cinematography to stage brutal violence. It's a technique that pretty much made the careers of Joel and Ethan Coen (although yes, I know that they don't only make brutally violent movies), and it serves Clint Eastwood and cinematographer Jack Green tremendously here. Cinematography aside, Unforgiven's other central premise is to be a sort of anti-western, pretty much the anti-True Grit, in fact (which was itself a kind of anti-western—there's like... layers, man). Like True Grit, Unforgiven features an aging gunslinger (played in both cases by actors who are themselves in the post-gunslinging end of their career) thrust into the young man's game of a traditional western scenario, and in doing so the man must not only confront his own mortality but also the death of the gunslinging way of life in society[2]. The different is that whereas True Grit is a funny, fist-pumping sort of send up of western tropes, characterized of course by the lackadaisical John Wayne, Unforgiven gives the western the long, cold Clint Eastwood stare, and by golly, that stare doesn't let up for fun send-uppery. The western has been declared dead so many times that it's accumulated quite its share of elegies, but for me, Unforgiven will always be the definitive one. It's a stark, uncompromising work that gazes into the abyss with an intensity that few movies of any genre do. One of the best, for sure.
Fun fact about this AFI list: the most represented subgenre of comedy behind the romantic comedy is the gender-bending comedy [3], which tells me two things: first, that there needs to be more comedies on this list, and second, that yeah, gender-bending comedies can be freaking funny when they're done right. And boy, can they be done wrong; for every Some Like It Hot in Hollywood's history are at least three White Chicks, which, believe me, is an awful thing to foist on the world. And maybe Some Like It Hot is part of the problem, given that the majority of the genre's worst offenders end up taking that earlier film's only-joking-stakes approach, where everything is a joke. That approach wouldn't be so bad if those movies were half as funny as Some Like It Hot, but more often than not they end up being not only laughless and dull but also irritatingly gender normative (an especially disappointing characteristic considering Some Like It Hot's freewheeling take on gender). Tootsie, on the other hand (yes, I still remember that I'm supposed to be talking about this movie), takes pretty much the opposite approach to Some Like It Hot's jokiness. Don't get me wrong; Tootsie is plenty hilarious. But unlike its predecessor, Tootsie is also a serious study of the social forces influencing gender, particularly those that affect females in the workplace. As in Some Like It Hot, the protagonist (here Dustin Hoffman) accumulates would-be male suitors while dressed as a woman at work, but instead of the sweet-but-idiotic-but-mostly-harmless-anyway fellow that pines for Jack Lemmon, Hoffman's Dorothy is warned that a fellow male actor is known by the women on-set as "The Tongue," so named for his aggressively invasive behavior when acting out scripted kisses. It's a joke and a funny one at that, but there's also an undercurrent of darkness in that moment that is indicative of the more straight-faced subtext of the film. It's a very funny movie, but it's also one that wants to use its laughs to say something meaningful about the human experience.
And that's that. Let me know what you think. Until next time!
If you want, you can read the previous entry, #s 64-66, here.
Update: The next post, #s 70-72, is up here.
1] I haven't, by the way, read or seen the play this movie is based on, although if Wikipedia is to be trusted, it's not all that different from what I saw in the film.
2] Or at least in the fantasy society in which the gunslinger archetype actually exists. Which, thankfully, is mostly mythical, although I do mourn that the phrase "This town ain't big enough for the two of us" was almost certainly never used in a real-life context.
3] Most of which are romantic comedies, too, so maybe that's not the most interesting fact after all.
No comments:
Post a Comment