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Cut! By Kimberly Chun IN THE PAGES of his Herculean The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Knopf), San Francisco-by-way-of-London film critic David Thomson resembles a swashbuckler in one of his beloved Errol Flynn movies – there's a fierce derring-do to his highly opinionated, sometimes magisterial pronouncements, which are delivered with the wit and authority of a pirate king. They're also incredibly fun to read, if infuriating for fans of a director or actor who suffers Thomson's seemingly dismissive cuts. Turn to any entry to take in the view: he compares John Cassavetes unfavorably to both Orson Welles and John Sayles and jabs poetically, "He had a grinding laugh when he acted, yet I'd guess he was humorless." Of Ralph Fiennes, he writes, some "remark on the extraordinary opportunities he has had, coupled with the strange reticence – call it a lack of stamina, a kind of metaphysical disinterest, or a reluctance to expose himself (I mean his spirit – he takes his clothes off regularly)." Angelina Jolie, he offers, has "a mouth made in Braille on the flattest of screens." Wong Kar-wai is considered warily, Wes Anderson appears to receive a brush-off ("Watch this space. What does that mean? That he might be something one day"), and Alexander Payne gets nothing at all. Poring through the dictionary, you brace yourself for each passionate stroke or blow. His recent opinionated history of the mechanics of Hollywood moviemaking, The Whole Equation (Knopf), shows off Thomson's capability of setting off erudite, carefully considered depth charges, though it's no less startlingly personal than the dictionary when he writes plainly and conversationally about the studio system, Howard Hawks, Robert Towne, Charlie Chaplin's love life, and the author's own attraction to Nicole Kidman, prosthetic nose or no. On the phone from his San Francisco home, the 63-year-old Thomson is less intimidating and more down-to-earth than one imagines. The former Dartmouth professor immediately defuses any controversy clinging to the dictionary by assuring me that he plans to rewrite old entries he has since rethought and to fix any errors or omissions (Anderson is well-liked after all, and expect trash cinema icon Russ Meyer in the fifth edition). Bay Guardian: So how did this Pacific Film Archive program come to be? Not many movie critics have the opportunity to curate such a sizable series. David Thomson: Well, I've known [PFA film curator] Edith [Kramer] a long time, and I've curated a couple of programs at the PFA in the last 20 years since I've lived out here in the Bay Area, and we were talking, and she heard about [The Whole Equation] coming out, and she said, 'Do you think it would make the basis of a season?' and I said, 'Well, it could, in the sense that there are several films I talk about in the book.' You could certainly pick some classic Hollywood films as demonstrations of one thing or another. I'm very happy with the films chosen. I think there are some famous films, but equally there are some Hollywood films that not many people will have seen – they'll be quite fresh. There's also one or two controversial things, like Heaven's Gate. We're showing the full uncut version, which I think will be an occasion for quite a lot of talk. BG: So you'd say it was a problematic film that was worth looking at again? DT: Well, it's a famously disastrous film in the sense that it ended United Artists. It was such a calamity, and it went so over budget, and at the time, there had been a mounting alarm about it. I think in hindsight it looks like a very interesting film. I think Michael Cimino was not an idiot. He may have been extravagant. He may have been out of control. But I think he was still trying to do something extremely interesting, and certainly in presenting that film, I will try to say, let's forget what happened in the film business. Let's try and look at it, and let's try and see that it's quite an unusual western, almost a history film, really. It's a dramatization of the battle between the wealthy and the poor, between the landholders and the immigrants. There aren't many films that treat it as directly as that and that have such deep allegiance to the side of the newcomers, the foreigners, the immigrants, the workers, the poor. BG: Now that the new edition of the dictionary is out, have you gotten any feedback? DT: Well, the dictionary is a book that's been around a long time. It first came out in 1975. The fourth edition came out in hardback in 2002, and it was no question that when that edition came out, it was almost as if suddenly everyone knew the book. In the past, the book had done quite well, and it had done better every time it came out, and you felt still that there were a lot of people who never heard of it. It was somewhere between a cult book and film student's book. When the fourth edition came out, it got a lot of big reviews very quickly, and the reviewers all sort of treated it as if 'well, here it is again, and we've all known about it.' All of a sudden everyone was talking about it as if it was a sort of fixture on the film bookshelf, and for me, that was very nice because it meant that I was taken seriously in a way that I hadn't been before. But equally, if you become anything like an institution, people start to take pot shots at you. While the book got its best reviews in that fourth edition, there have been a lot of people quite justifiably who have been finding fault with the book. I think that's absolutely fair, and I will do everything I can in the fifth edition to repair the faults. BG: Is there anything quite like it? DT: No, I don't think there is, and I think that's because it was an insane book to do. It was my idea, but the idea was a slender version of what it became. I was just young and fired up, and I had so much to say, and the book grew and grew, and in the end, the idea of one person taking the whole thing on is sort of crazy. I think nowadays the cinema has grown so much, it's grown internationally in so many ways, that the notion of one person being able to see everything, let alone have interesting ideas about it, that has become more strained. BG: What do you think of film criticism these days? DT: We're in sadder times. The public doesn't spend as much time reading criticism, and I don't think there's as much good criticism as there was in the late '60s and '70s, and I think one of the reasons why this is so is that an awful lot of the films, in my opinion, really don't deserve reviewing. I find it incongruous, to say the least, that every film that opens gets reviewed, whereas not every book that's published gets reviewed, and many, many good books barely get reviewed, whereas every rubbishy film gets paid attention to. I think that's out of proportion, and I think one of the toughest things about being a film critic today is literally to have to go see all the junk. It's the films themselves. I think so many of them are pretty depressing. They're just not very good. What are you going to say about them? It's almost as if talking about them afterwards is out of key with them. I mean, does Meet the Fockers deserve reviewing? People will go see it one way or another. It's review-proof. BG: There's a lot of soul-searching in the introduction to the dictionary – talk of growing old and wanting other people involved in the dictionary. DT: I think the movies are a medium for young people. I love the movies still, but I do find that I don't love as many of them as I used to, and I think that's in part a measure of my growing old, and growing old is one of those sadnesses that settles on everyone. I'm less sanguine about the overall achievement of the movies now than when I began the dictionary, I'd say. I've become a little more suspicious of film as a whole. BG: You feel like less of a booster? DT: It's a huge question, but I think that the overall question of what film has done to us is more troubling than I once thought it was. I begin to be worried about what film has done to a literary culture, I think – old-fashioned literacy and the ability to reason and talk and present one's feelings eloquently. BG: Do you have any guilty pleasures? DT: I never feel guilty about pleasure. |
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