The Weekly Screed (#703)

The fresh eye dances,
the jaded eye drifts
by David Benjamin

PARIS — A.O. Scott, the Times’ venerable movie critic has named his Ten Best Films of 2014. I confess that I didn’t pay it much heed, despite my respect for Scott’s erudition. A guilty glance told me I hadn’t seen any of his Ten. Nor would I ever. Nor would 99 percent of normal movie-goers ever get a load of A.O.’s faves.

It would be more accurate to title the list “The Year’s Ten Snootiest Films for Artsy-Fartsy Snobs.” By this, I don’t mean to be critical. I sympathize with critics who, I’m sure, must be burned-out and dog-tired from screening, often more than once, every film released anywhere all year. To do the job, every reviewer eventually turns a beloved childhood pastime — movies, plays, books, video games — into a dream job, which then becomes a career-long forced march through a bog of mediocrity. Those “ten best” are moments of blessed relief from the tedium.

As our critics (if they’re any good) often remind us, most of the stuff produced by the global entertainment/industrial complex is bread and circus. It’s opium for the masses. It’s Rocky 12 and the umpteenth iteration  of  “Bond… James Bond.” A guy like Scott, assigned to sit though every flick down the pike —  the good, the bad and Adam Sandler — finds himself most of the time hip-deep in crap.

Who could blame your typical film critic for growing weary, cynical and pathologically finicky? He’d have to be a saint not to harbor a sneaking resentment for us mere “buffs” who still see the movies as a big night out, who retain our capacity for cinematic joy, who can still be surprised when Rosebud turns out to be Charles Foster Kane’s rubber ducky. The fresh eye dances, the jaded eye drifts — and it tends to drift away from the ordinary. It seeks the avant garde, the bizarre and grimly documentary, the experimental and the infinitesimally subtle.

I thought about the critic’s loss of wonder a few years ago at a Broadway revival of Anything Goes. Even as I admired the slick production, the vintage costumes, the $150 admission price and the delectable lyrics of Cole Porter, my mind wandered. I’d been here, done this — too many times.

In my newspaper days, I covered the theater in and around Boston. There were weeks when I reviewed three plays in five days, ranging from Theater District premiers to church halls in Rhode Island. I had orchestra seats to Julie Harris, Vincent Price, Jessica Tandy, Hume Cronyn, Madeleine Kahn, James Earl Jones, Frank Langella, Tovah Feldshuh, Robert Preston, Hal Holbrook, Ann Reinking and Twiggy. I panned Dreamgirls while others raved. I loved The Prince of Grand Street just before it died on the road. I got blacklisted from the American Rep by Robert Brustein. I loved it. I saw more than 300 shows in an overdose of razzle-dazzle and Athol Fugard that pretty much ruined live theater for me, forever.

Any good critic figures out quickly that the lively arts are designed to manipulate the emotions of an audience that’s paying through the nose to be tricked and mesmerized — an audience who wants to laugh, wants to cry, wants all the fluff and fakery to linger in its heart and wants to walk out with the title tune on its lips. (Which is why I hated Dreamgirls. A Motown operetta that sent you away, after three hours, with nothing to hum? Seriously?)

The critic is the spoilsport in the best seat who can’t be fooled, moved or surprised. He’s the turd in the punchbowl. Your typical critic is a know-it-all whose greatest pleasure is tossing off an allusion so obscure — Orlando Furioso, perhaps, or the Gnostic gospels — that not one other soul in the tri-state region has the foggiest notion what he’s talking about.

While the audience is clapping, leaping to its feet and going “Whoo!”, the critic crouches below with scalpel and notebook, comparing, contrasting, doubting, dissecting. He seeks only what’s different (ideally, nothing), what worked or failed. He must decide, before deadline, whether this show met a standard of excellence so subjective that no one beyond this one lonesome critic knows what the hell it is.

If he sticks with the job long enough, the critic becomes a sort of theologian, counting tiny Eleanor Powells tapdancing on the head of an invisible pin. He’s the biologist peering through the lens and — where everybody else just sees a smudge — distinguishing paramecia from the stentors and amoebae. The elements of film, art, literature, theater, opera that he cherishes are so personal and esoteric that his reviews become a kind of eloquent jabberwocky, useless but oddly entertaining.

This syndrome infects all criticism, but it’s most advanced in the art world, where — today — no museum-goer knows for sure whether a banana peel in the stairwell is a million-dollar “installation,” or just a banana peel in the stairwell.

Since James Joyce finished “Work In Progress” and titled it Finnegan’s Wake, 20th-century literature has cultivated an entire genre of novels so self-allusive, gimmicky and opaque that only lit-critics and grad students ever make it through all 900 pages. “Modern classics.” Really? Or banana peels in the stairwell?

With movies, our A-list reviewers tend to fall iconoclastically in love with the more motionless of motion pictures, movies that most resemble books — and sad books, at that! Among each year’s “ten best” there’s always a subtitled Third World “indie,” typically filmed out-of-focus entirely with one hand-held camera in smoke-filled cellars and dark alleys where starving urchins with huge sunken eyes and sticklike limbs flee incestuous stepfathers only to suffer ghastly outrages at the sadistic hands of toothless fiends, only to transcend the horrors of captivity with heart-warming pluck and mutual sacrifice, only to be snuffed out cruelly, heart-rendingly (but transcendently) in the end, like butterflies under the dung-covered boot-heel of life, only to awaken — in the “brilliantly inventive” final scene — in a SoHo loft where the whole thing turns out to be just a dream that never happened.

In the words of Fred Astaire, “That’s entertainment!”