I have literally nothing to say other than "Enjoy the writeups," so... enjoy the writeups!
Sophie's Choice is one of those rare movies to have sort of become a punchline—not because of any real fault of the movie itself (as opposed to something like, say, the Star Wars prequels, which yes, definitely are at fault) but rather because the mere premise of the movie is so irresistibly referable that it's pretty much become a joke. For every time anyone has to face some sort of hard decision, you can bet there's going to be someone who calls it a "Sophie's choice." Choosing which one of your coworkers to let go—that's a Sophie's choice; deciding which books to put in your too-small backpack—that's a Sophie's choice; being able to fit only four of your days-of-the-week underwear into your suitcase—you better believe that's a Sophie's choice. I'm sure it'll differ from viewer to viewer whether or not the overexposure will diminish the power of the eventual reveal of what Sophie's choice actually is (I won't spoil it here), but the uncomfortable truth behind the reference is that it's essentially a joke about the Holocaust, which, yes, I'm definitely guilty of. That's maybe an issue to be taken up with the movie itself, too (and, I assume, the source novel). It's not that the film treats the Holocaust as a joke, per se, but there is probably a productive conversation to be had (and maybe it's already been had) about the film's making a sort of "gotcha" moment out of an Auschwitz-related event in the middle of what is otherwise a sort of three-character, non-party-filled version of The Great Gatsby. It's a powerful moment, for sure, but does the rest of the film provide a suitable scaffold for that power? I'm not sure. Anyway, I don't want to pick the film to death[1]. There's a lot to love here, from the uniformly excellent acting (is this pretty much the movie that vaulted Maryl Streep from '70s supporting actor to the revered powerhouse she is today? I'm not sure, but I can't think of an earlier role of such prominence and I-have-an-accent-and-lots-of-pain seriousness) to the stately direction to the often-captivating screenplay. The film may collapse just the slightest bit under its own weight by the end, but the journey getting there is a pretty good one.
When I say that I like Martin Scorsese (a claim that you readers may find suspect after my qualified acceptances of both Raging Bull and Taxi Driver), this is the movie I'm thinking of. Scorsese's got a lot of good films (among which, for the record, I do include Taxi Driver and Raging Bull—not to sound too defensive or anything), but I don't think I'd ever hesitate to name Goodfellas as his masterpiece and possibly even the masterpiece of American cinema[2]. I say that because even if Goodfellas isn't his best movie (though I certainly think it is), it's the movie that best distills the Scorseseness of his filmography[3] into a working whole that feels like the product of both a single vision and egalitarian collaboration. The tracking shots, the richness of composition, the stellar marriage of soundtrack with film, the brutality, the hard-nosed worldview, the Italian heritage, the feeling that every bit of the film is just one match away from explosion—all those Scorsese hallmarks are here and in tremendous form. But more so than most Scorsese films, Goodfellas also gives the actors agency in building the movie's world. And not just the actors portraying the towering, existential, Travis-Bickle types either. Nearly all the actors onscreen, from the Joe-Pesci-challenging bus boy to the assorted one-off head nodders in the introductory tracking sequence, bring the improvisation and verve of reality to their performances, and the movie is generous enough to give them the space to do so, making every scene feel like an ecstatic rush to capture every bit of life around the camera. Of course, what makes that rush doubly great is that the film is well-constructed enough that even with its appearance of unpredictability, it never loses track of its ultimate social message either. It's not a moral film in that it matters whether or not evil-doers get their comeuppance in the end, but it is a movie that is meticulously focused on the mechanics and complacencies of the American lifestyle and particularly the ways in which that lifestyle informs organized crime. Yeah, Goodfellas is one of those movies that stares into the dark, rotten heart of the American Dream. Yeah, it's old thematic ground, but Goodfellas manages to find unexplored crevices of that ground time and time again. It's dazzling.
Going into The French Connection, I knew two things about the film: 1) It starred Gene Hackman, and 2) it had a really famous chase sequence in it. Well, now that I have actually seen the movie, here are a few things I most definitely didn't know about The French Connection: 1) It also stars Roy Schneider, aka Brody from Jaws; 2) it has a killer, killer score written by Don Ellis that dabbles in experimental and minimalist influences; 3) it's an extremely dark, not altogether pleasant movie that 4) features a cop (Gene Hackman) who is unapologetically bigoted and 5) also shows said cop lethally gunning down or attempting to lethally gun down perps; 6) it's a film that not only has the aforementioned famous chase scene but also includes so many other chase scenes that they make up what must be at least a third of its runtime. I only mention #s 4 and 5 to bring up a brief point about the effect of a viewer's personal context on the power of a movie—given recent events and a national climate that has nothing to do with this movie, I really wasn't in the mood to see a police officer shooting at fleeing suspects, regardless of how criminal or violent the suspects may be in the film. Consequently, I'm sure I would have enjoyed this movie much more if I had seen it a month ago[4]. It's not the movie's fault, of course, and that gets into #3, where a large part of the film's darkness comes from the complicated reality that the people responsible for conventionally heroic tasks like breaking up drug rings can also be capable of not-so-heroic things, too, with some of that not-so-heroism even enabling them to perform the heroism. Not to bog this writeup down too much, though, let's transition into #6, which is really the meat of the film anyway. See, probably the most surprising thing to me about this movie was the sheer abundance of action setpieces, to the point where The French Connection feels like as much of a forebear to the modern action blockbuster as Jaws itself. That's not a complaint in the slightest. I love a good action sequence, and The French Connection is full of them. It's essentially a New Hollywood update of the classic cops 'n robbers flick in the same way that The Godfather updates the old gangster movie tropes into the modern cinematic era, and for all its '70s cynicism and moral ambiguity, The French Connection still succeeds on basically the same rubric as those old pulp classics. It's a frequently thrilling movie, and that it manages to thrill without being "fun" is a pretty neat trick, too, one that movies can't always pull off when they want to be both socially serious and viscerally exciting. So, good on you, The French Connection.
Let me know what y'all think about these movies. Love them? Hate them? Inquiring minds want to know. Until next time!
Feel free to visit the previous post in this series, #s 88-90, here.
Update: The next post, #s 94-96, is up here.
1] Plus, given that director Pakula is of Polish Jewish decent, I don't want to question his decisions regarding the subject too hard.
2] "The masterpiece of American cinema"... Okay, okay, not really. You got me. But this is the sort of statement that's extremely gratifying to write, even if it is complete hyperbole, so, despite the ridiculousness of it, I decided to leave it in there for the pure critical pleasure of making such ridiculous claims. Not good form, I know, but hey, I really, really like Goodfellas.
3] In fact, there's an argument to be made that Goodfellas is the movie that solidified what "Scorseseness" is in the first place, given that it came on the heels of a decade in which the guy seemed to be self-consciously pushing his filmmaking beyond the Mean Streets/Taxi Driver/Raging Bull pillars of his early career with movies like The Last Temptation of Christ and The King of Comedy. With Goodfellas, he definitely makes a sort of return to the contours of his '70s work, and that's a return he's only occasionally ventured out from since.
4] Which of course speaks to how colossally entitled I am, that at times when things like this don't dominate the national news cycle, I can just sort of shrug off the existence of certain kinds of violence, but yeah. That's a whole other can of worms.
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