The shot is technically simple, but builds like a drumroll, and it conveys the seedy energy of the carnival crowd and the cheap, bountiful thrills of summer nights; it captures Luke’s tawdry but undeniable glamour and the small towns where it thrives; and it establishes Luke as a man willing to take chances, a man totally immersed in the strange and specific life he’s built for himself, a man who seems to have a calm, matter-of-fact approach to danger and love and almost everything else.

After the show, Luke discovers that a fling he had the previous year, when he last passed through town, has produced a son. He decides that he, the baby, and the mother, Romina (Eva Mendes), should be a family (“My father was never around me, and look how I turned out,” he warns Romina), and he quits his carnival job to try to win her back from Kofi (Mahershala Ali), her current boyfriend and a committed father to the baby. But when Luke has trouble finding enough work, he takes to robbing banks.

This opening section is one of three related plotlines, and it’s by far the strongest. It’s hard not to wonder what this movie might have been if director and co-writer Derek Cianfranco had limited himself to a smaller-scale study of character and place, instead of reaching for an epic. This section stands out because of Gosling, of course. He does his Gosling thing—the brooding, the easy charm, the torso—but he manages, in his minimalist way, to give Luke nuances that are almost too good for such a sloppily written film: For example, when he’s robbing a bank, Luke’s voice rises into a shriek bordering on panic—he seems distinctly desperate in a way the Kid, his character from Drive, never was. And in the hours after he’s pulled off a job, he’s cocky, self-assured again, he revels in it. Even after he’s gotten away with several robberies and his partner wants to quit, Luke wants to do more; he’s almost frenzied in his insistence. It’s fair to ask where the need to earn money for his baby leaves off and where the thrill of it all takes over, but this tension comes entirely from Gosling, who remains freer from his public persona than his audience may be. We think of him as the coolest guy in any movie, but he’s still willing to exploit the essential strangeness he first showed playing a sociopath in the otherwise forgettable Sandra Bullock thriller Murder By Numbers. The script of Pines is not his equal.

The second section follows the cop who took Luke down, Avery (Bradley Cooper). After his act of heroism, Avery finds himself in the spotlight, a celebrated cop with a bright future, and then before we know it he finds himself pulled into department corruption. Stopping Luke was largely a matter of luck, but exposing the crooked cops around him is more calculated, and Avery, who has a law degree but chose to join the police force out of a sense of idealism, parlays it into a promotion to assistant D.A.

In other words, the second section of Pines boils down to a fairly rote tale of ambition, but it’s a half-built contraption at best. Part of the problem is Cooper, who’s a reliable actor doing a reasonably good job of not becoming the next Matthew McConaughey, but who remains better at nailing single scenes than he is at making those scenes hang together into something larger. He makes Avery earnest, kind, and idealistic almost to naiveté, but he fails to add any note of darkness of ruthlessness that would explain his aggressive career maneuvering and eventual transformation from devoted father and husband to icy political climber and eventual divorcé. He isn’t helped by the script, which lacks a moment when that pivot happens, the moment when Avery has to choose sides, and chooses wrong (Michael Corleone at the hospital with Vito and whispering, “I’m with you, Pop. I’m with you.”).

The third act is where Cianfranco tries to bring it all together, but by then the story’s momentum is long gone. The story flashes forward 15 years, and the two babies are grown and, in a coincidence that almost works, become high school friends. The two actors here are exceptional, especially Emory Cohen, who plays Avery’s son, AJ. Like Gosling, he brings a great deal more to the role than is written, but again, it only serves to underscore the movie’s shortcomings: Cohen’s performance swings between his scenes with friends, when he’s all rich kid bravado and goombah posturing, and a handful of scenes with his absentee father, where the pain of neglect and rejection is written all over his face. But the movie hasn’t taken the pains to explain or even show us that neglect, and because we understand so little about Avery’s decisions and emotions, these scenes lack the punch Cianfranco obviously intended them to have. By the time the pieces have all moved into place for a calamitous reunion of these characters, you’ll be lucky if your interest holds out, never mind your emotional involvement.

Oh, and back to that opening shot: It doesn’t just capture everything that’s good about Pines, it captures all its failings, too. It telegraphs the greatness Cianfranco is striving for, because long tracking shots have been a badge of indie style and credibility ever since Orson Welles pushed his camera through the streets of Venice Beach, CA in 1958 for the electrifying opening shot of Touch of Evil. But if you’re going to announce yourself in that way, if you’re going to put yourself in the company of Welles and Scorsese and Tarkovsky, the audience is going to expect a lot. Ambition is a good thing. Pines simply isn’t up to the task.

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Is he the genius auteur he gets so much credit for being, maybe the most original voice of his generation? Or is he simply a regurgitator of the cinematic styles and subjects too obscure for most of us to have seen before?

Are his movies rich, layered texts full of meaning and dimension? Or are they skin-deep symphonies of blood, dialogue, and spectacle, style for the sake of style?

Is he the symbol of everything that’s right and distinctive about indie Hollywood, or everything that’s wrong, insincere, and vacuous?

Is he, as a friend recently described him, an unthinking cinema savant, a bundle of impulses that sometimes hits “the cultural soft spot,” but generally by accident? Or is he mindful of every move he makes, a sophisticated writer and cunning storyteller?

Do you love him because he’s brilliant? Or because he’s entertaining?

If you’re unsure of where you stand, Django Unchained, his new Western (or “Southern” as he prefers to call it), won’t help you decide. Because Django Unchained is everything above and more, either further confirmation of his audacious creativity, or another example of his inability to create a whole, mature, and focused movie.

Like most revenge films, Django is built on the simplest (and in this case, flimsiest) conceit: a bounty hunter, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), is trying to find three fugitives, the Brittle Brothers (M.C. Gainey, Cooper Huckabee, and Doc Duhame), but has never seen them. However, a certain slave, Django (Jamie Foxx), has seen them. Schultz buys Django, grants him his freedom, and makes a bargain: you help me identify the fugitives, and I’ll help you find and free your wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). They find and kill the Brittle Brothers with relative ease, and then (somewhat illogically, if we’re to believe that Django and Broomhilda have a great love), they spend an entire winter hunting down unrelated bounties before finally, in the spring, creating an unnecessarily complex plan to rescue Broomhilda from an infamously brutal plantation called Candyland.

If Django’s quest was more focused, the story might have had a building, gradual, Odyssey-like quality, the inevitable showdown with Candyland’s owner, Calvin J. Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), might have had more force, and the characters they encounter along the way might have added up to something more than a who’s who of antebellum stereotypes: slackjawed hillbillies, foppish plantation owners, sadistic slave drivers, preening Southern belles, cowardly townsfolk, and slaves from the mutinous to the comfortably supplicant. To say that Tarantino paints these characters broadly is an insult to cartoons everywhere. They’re not just generalized, they’re parade floats: plantation owner Big Daddy (Don Johnson; who knew he was hilarious?) swaggers and glowers in the whites and vandyke clearly intended to make him resemble Colonel Sanders; Candyland’s head house slave, Stephen (Samuel L Jackson), is adorned with white tufts of hair that make him look like a scowling Uncle Ben. The only one missing here is Aunt Jemima.

This cast of caricatures calls to mind Tarantino’s last film, Inglourious Basterds, with its sociopathic Jews and shrieking Hitler. But if that movie has genius, it’s in its anarchic, precisely timed shuffling off of the strictures of anything resembling historical accuracy. In other words, it worked because it put the broadness of its characters and their quest in service to a bold, satisfying fantasy. Maybe the problem with Django is that it isn’t broad enough.

This is not to say that Django Unchained isn’t entertaining. It is. It’s bloody and it’s funny and it’s tense when it needs to be and explosive when it should be. A Tarantino fan recently lauded his ability to use dialogue to build tension within a scene, and that’s on display here. And when he isn’t busy with ironic, stylized zooms and tiresomely redundant violence, he can pack his frame with beauty and meaning: Big Daddy’s white horse, galloping in slow-motion, shown from the saddle down, suddenly sprayed with blood, Big Daddy’s body tumbling off the far side and crumpling in the dust; Calvin Candie holding a clean, white chunk of a human skull at chest level, so that we can compare it with the white of his boutonnière. Everywhere, Tarantino juxtaposes savagery and civility, beauty and death, and the impression is of a world where human cruelty and violence are wrapped in the brightly colored tissue paper of Southern hospitality and custom that here looks at best absurd and at worst monstrous.

But I want more from Tarantino, especially if I’m going to be asked to accept him as a great filmmaker. He can do all these things, he’s technically skilled, but it’s like being able to rebuild a car’s transmission: it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a good driver. Django supposes itself to be a powerful anti-racism statement, but really it’s an anti-19^th-century-American-slavery statement, and Tarantino doesn’t seem to realize that these aren’t automatically the same thing. Slavery may be the origin of our national race problem, but it hasn’t been the problem itself for almost 150 years. Tarantino is drawn to it because it offers moral clarity, and, like most adolescents, he’s satisfied by raging against obvious, simplified evils: white people perpetrated it, and black people (for the most part) were the victims; it’s easy to know who to shoot in this scenario. But as we all know, there are generations upon generations of much more subtle and complicated American racial history that have echoed (and continued to echo) out from slavery, and Django isn’t necessarily meaningful to any of that. Vilifying plantation owners and slave traders may be fun, but it isn’t new or terribly useful. If Tarantino is going to give himself credit for creating an important, cathartic movie essential to the black experience of racism in this country (“I think [Django Unchained] could become a rite of passage for young black males,” he told the L.A. Times) he better bring more to the table.

And then there’s Django’s half-baked morality. As Django and Schultz make their way through the movie, gunning down bounties, it’s easy to watch these men die if you don’t stop to think about it. But the movie’s central conceit—that these murders are justified because, by proxy and implication if nothing else, they’re cogs in the machinery of American slavery—is fatally flawed: most of Django and Schultz’s victims don’t die for their complicity in slavery; they die because their corpses are valuable. We’re expected to enjoy their deaths simply because they’re white and southern. This robs the story of most of its righteousness, and many of the film’s images, seemingly ripe with meaning, are nothing more than interesting. For example, one of the Brittle Brothers is shot as he rides across an open field, and Tarantino shows a spray of his blood hit the white tufts of cotton—it’s arresting. But his death has no meaning. The difference between a filmmaker who can create that image and a filmmaker who can make it mean something is the difference between a good filmmaker and a great one.

In another scene, Django and Schultz are perched on the top of a ridge, a bounty in their sights, but Django hesitates because the target is with his son. Schultz makes it clear: these are bad men, and they deserve to die. It’s not pleasant, he tells Django, but in his world, “you have to get dirty.” But this morality remains as distant as the target is from the shooters. In Django, close-range shootings are never conducted with anything but a catchy song, a clever line of dialogue, and a tone of ironic detachment.

In another scene, near the end of the film, after our heroes successfully rescue Broomhilda (albeit not in the way they’d intended), Schultz sits brooding over the failure of his plan, while a genteel Southern woman plays classical music on a harp. For the first time, Tarantino takes us inside Schultz’s character, and we see him tormented by memories of an especially brutal murder of a slave earlier in the film. He jumps from his chair and insists that the woman stop playing—the juxtaposition of man’s high, artistic accomplishments and his savage nature is finally too much for Schultz. Has this loquacious sociopath with a heart of gold developed a conscience? Maybe. But Tarantino doesn’t linger on it, or bring it to any point. He’s onto another entertaining gunfight. He has things to blow up, blood to shed, and white, Southern people to kill with a panache he substitutes for insight.

(Incidentally, forget his famously liberal use of the N-word: Tarantino’s decision to name a white, German murderer “Dr. King” succinctly illustrates the overreaching liberties he feels comfortable taking with African-American history and culture.)

I’ll always see Tarantino movies, because they’re unlike anything else being made; you’re not allowed to simultaneously complain about the sameness of Hollywood product, as I do, and fail to support things that are different. But uniqueness doesn’t equal greatness. Great filmmakers explore big issues in a big way, and Django Unchained is the work of an impulsive, shallow lightweight. His anger toward racism feels genuine, but it’s also generalized and shrill; it’s a wealthy, white man’s anger at something he read about in a book, not something he’s ever experienced. It’s a child’s emotion. I believe Tarantino has a great movie in him, but he’ll be 50 next spring. Will he ever make it?

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–Cary Grant, Father Goose, 1964

Late one day, when Cary Grant was 9 years old, he came home to find his mother gone. She’d been there in the morning, and then when he came home from school, she wasn’t. Grant—or Archie Leach, as he was then known—was first told that she’d gone on a trip, then that she’d died (in fact, she’d been committed to a mental institution). He left his Bristol, England home and went to Southampton, where his father had moved after divorcing Archie’s mother, and asked to be taken in. But the elder Leach was remarried and had a baby, and he told Archie there was no room in his new home. Archie stuck around town, found odd jobs and slept in flophouses. When he didn’t have enough money for a bunk, he’d sleep outside, in alleys or parks. Maybe Archie was hoping his father would reconsider, but he never did. After a year, Archie moved back to Bristol, where he lived with aunts and uncles and cousins, and sat in his room alone at night, holding a picture of his mother, crying.

Archie had learned the defining lesson of his life: he was not wanted. He was on the outside. To be accepted, to be relevant, he would need to become someone else. He would spend the next half-century creating that person and then, at age 60, decide that it was time to reveal his true self, in Father Goose. But it wouldn’t be as easy as that.

***

Cary Grant has been called the perfect movie star. It seems like a simple enough phrase, but the more you think about it, the more it means. It means that no one more fully embodied the glamour and romance of Hollywood movies, especially those from Hollywood’s golden age, which Grant’s career paralleled. It means, too, that no one was more fun to watch. And it means that no one was better at being simultaneously accessible and remote: even while he was our highest aspiration, we knew we could never become anything like him.

But more than anything, it means that no one was better at playing the career management game of movie stardom. The list of characters Cary Grant declined to play is varied (T.E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia; Humbert Humbert in Kubrick’s Lolita; Linus Larrabee in Sabrina; Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady), but they have one thing in common: they’re all outside the well-defined scope of Grant’s familiar screen persona. He may have been capable of playing these roles, but for the sake of his movie stardom, he wasn’t willing.

Because here’s the essential thing about movie stars: they play it safe. They create a persona, and hide in it. Movie stars aren’t like actors; in many ways, the two are opposite. Actors expose themselves; movie stars conceal. An actor has to take chances, use his pains and secrets and imagination, and create something new with every role. But a movie star doesn’t create so much as re-create: once he has the audience’s love, he tries to keep it by doing the same trick again and again, burnishing and refining his performance with each encore. A good actor creates many characters, a good movie star only one.

 ***

Separated from his real family, Archie found a proxy in the English Music Halls. At first he was a stagehand, then an acrobat, juggler, and mime. A child creates himself by trying out behaviors and reading the response from the world around him. Archie’s world was the audience, and their applause guided him to the person they wanted him to be. When he was 16, his troupe was invited to the U.S. for a visit, and when the tour was over, Archie stayed behind. After all, there was nothing to go back to. He worked in Vaudeville and briefly on the stage, and signed his first contract with Paramount in 1931. The studio chiefs made him choose a new name from a list. He picked Cary Grant because Gary Cooper and Clark Gable had found such success with the initials.

Like most actors of that era, Grant made movies at a breakneck pace, 30 in his first five years, but in none of them do we see the Cary Grant we’ve come to know. He quickly became a star, but only a middle-class star. His name was always on the poster, but never first. People liked him, but he was never the reason they came to the theater. He played detectives and playboys and lawyers and pilots. He played opposite some of the biggest names: Myrna Loy, Mae West, Carole Lombard. But while he showed flashes of what he would become, he never played Cary Grant, the one we know now. Seeing him on those early roles now is like seeing someone you know very well, but with a different haircut and wearing different clothes.

In 1935, Grant was approached at a party by MGM studio head Irving Thalberg. MGM was putting together a production of Mutiny on the Bounty. Charles Laughton and Clark Gable were already cast, and Thalberg wanted Grant to play Roger Byam, a major role. Grant read the book and the screenplay, and he knew that not only were they both exceptional, but that appearing in a film with Gable, the world’s biggest star, could push him to the next level. But when Thalberg approached Paramount head Adolph Zukor about loaning Grant out (a common practice), Zukor said no because he’d had the same realization as Grant: the role would make Grant a top-line star and give him too much bargaining power. With only a year left on Grant’s contract, Zukor thought it was more prudent to continue feeding him mediocre parts in mediocre films, then negotiate a new contract at a lower rate. Grant was forced to watch the role go to Franchot Tone, who won an Oscar for his performance, and he was so incensed that he vowed not only never to sign with Paramount again, but never to sign a long-term contract with anyone ever again. At the height of the studio system, this was considered career suicide, and friends advised strongly against it. But Grant was determined. He didn’t have Zukor looking out for him, and he didn’t have his mother or his father. The only person he had on his side was Cary Grant.

***

To explain Hollywood, Grant liked to describe a scene from Pay Day, by Charlie Chaplin. The Tramp is trying to get the last trolley home, and there’s a huge crowd. He fights his way on, but as the other passengers rush in, he’s pushed right out the other end. This, Grant liked to say, is how Hollywood works:

Actors and actresses are packed in like sardines. When I arrived in Hollywood,Carole Lombard, Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Warner Baxter, Greta Garbo, Fred Astaire, and others were crammed onto the car. They were the big stars. At the front, new actors and actresses pushed and shoved to get aboard. Some made it and slowly moved toward the center. When a new star came aboard, an old one had to be edged out the rear exit. The crowd was so big you were pushed right off. There was room for only so many and no more.

***

The Cary Grant we all know began with Jerry Warriner, the character he played in one of his first films as an independent, The Awful Truth (1937). A long description of Warriner is unnecessary; the easiest thing is simply to say that he was quintessential Cary Grant: suave but earnest, beautiful but unpretentious, hilarious but romantic. It was the first character he ever played that we can really recognize as Grant, with all the familiar gestures and rhythms and tics. It was the model for every role Grant would play for the next 27 years.

The Awful Truth, a romantic comedy of the kind Grant seems to have practically invented, couldn’t have been more different from Mutiny on the Bounty, and it did what no other movie could have: it made Grant not just successful, but unique. It allowed him to forge a new kind of screen persona: the light comedian who could be physical and ridiculous without sacrificing his romantic credentials. It made Grant a huge star, but watching him during this period (the late-1930s to the early-1950s), it’s almost as if he doesn’t quite believe it. There’s a restlessness to his performances, an eagerness. It’s the work of an actor who wants desperately to be liked, who’s trying as hard as he can to stay on the trolley. He’ll put on a dress, fall over a chair, slip into a mud puddle, be the butt of the jokes, let himself be beta to the alpha dogs. He redefined what it meant to be a man on screen—he wasn’t tough and he wasn’t trying to woo the girl; he let the girl chase him. Of course, he fell for the girl and he almost always wound up with her, but his first and one true love, no matter what, was that proxy, the audience.

***

Bristol was a working class town, and Grant’s natural accent was Cockney. When he came to the U.S., he tried to lose it, but he never really could. The best he could do was alter it, and his diction—a wrenched, at times slightly pained thing stranded between sophistication and bluntness—became as much a trademark as the dimple in his chin. His accent was one of the reasons he turned down the role of Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. Who would believe him as a phoneticist? At heart, he told friends, he was more Liza Doolittle than Higgins. Because no matter how fully Archie Leach had become Cary Grant, no matter how much he immersed himself in the persona, he always felt the specter of his past, of who he might have become under other circumstances, hanging over him.

The tension between who Grant thought he really was and who he thought everyone else thought he was, the effort of inventing himself every day, bit by bit, was enormous, and was at least part of what led him to retire briefly in 1953. He’d been in therapy for some time already, and was on his third marriage (there would be five in total). Ex-wives, though many remained friendly with Grant, all told similar stories: they described him as moody and depressive, controlling and given to frequent rages (his first wife, Virginia Cherrill, claimed in divorce proceedings that he hit her). He was also, in his earlier years, known to drink heavily and at least once attempted suicide. All was not well with Grant, and in retiring he announced that he was dedicating his life to traveling, reading, and above all unlocking the mystery of himself.

But his first retirement lasted less than a year. His marriage had begun to fall apart again, but more than that, who was he if he wasn’t Cary Grant? Where could Cary Grant exist but on the screen? He returned in Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, but he was different. He looks like a man who’s begun to disbelieve everything around him. He seems wary, even slightly annoyed. He can still do it all. He can be Cary Grant in his sleep. He’s still funny, he’s still charming. But there’s a gravity, a reticence. The bug-eyed expression he used so often in his early career is not just gone forever, but replaced by its opposite, a squint. He looks like a man who’s awoken in a strange place and, for all its glamour, begun to doubt its value.

***

There’s something else about movie stars, something problematic: they’re not allowed to age. Cary Grant created a 33-year-old identity and performed it again and again, but just like everyone else, he was getting older all the while. He spent a lot of the second half of his career trying to figure out who Cary Grant was at 45, 55, 60.

In Father Goose, Grant thought he may have found a way forward. He played Walter Eklund, a slovenly, drunken misanthrope intent on sitting out World War II in the seclusion of a South Seas island. To Grant, it was the perfect role, because it was him, the real him. Or rather, it was the idea he had of himself, because Eklund was the kind of person a Cockney kid from Bristol might grow up to be. After reading the script, he told friends, “I am Walter Eklund.” But playing himself was only half his goal. The other half was winning that ultimate badge of Hollywood club membership, an Academy Award. Because even though Grant was the ultimate product of the Hollywood machine, he was an outsider thanks to the lifelong enmity he earned from the industry when he went independent. In Walter Eklund, he hoped to reveal his true self and win true acceptance all at once.

But it’s a funny thing about playing a part: if you do it long enough, eventually you can’t stop. Grant may have wanted to use Eklund as a way back to himself, but when he got there Eklund looked an awful lot like Cary Grant. There was no gruff, lower-class self hiding in there, at least not one he could put on the screen. There was a rich, tanned movie star, who could grow a beard and scowl, but remained essentially the same.

In the film, Eklund has barely arrived, grudgingly, on the island where he’s been rooked into acting as a plane spotter, when he gets stuck with Catherine Freneau (Leslie Caron), a French nanny, and seven young schoolgirls. The proper Freneau and the disheveled Eklund fight like cats and dogs and, naturally, get married in the end. In other words, it’s the plot of a perfect Cary Grant movie. Although Grant was reportedly embarrassed by the age difference between him and Audrey Hepburn in his previous film, Charade (they were 59 and 34, respectively), here the gap has only widened: Grant’s 60 to Caron’s 33. And for all his superficial unfriendliness, his wrinkled khakis, and his stubble, Walter Eklund charms Caron, gets the laughs, let’s the girl catch him, and wins the audience.

Father Goose was released late in 1964, perfectly timed for awards season. Grant, who normally did a minimum of press, made himself unusually available for interviews. He based his Oscar hopes on the Academy’s fondness for actors playing against type, and saw Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen as his model, and indeed the screenplay did win. But seeing Father Goose now, an Oscar for Grant seems far-fetched. It isn’t that the film is bad, but it’s very slight. And above it all, it’s quite typical. Grant imagined it as a radical departure, the moment when, for the first time, he stepped out on the stage not as the audience’s idea of who he should be, but as himself. But when the cameras started to roll, there was no one else to be but Cary Grant.

***

After Father Goose, Grant announced that he would make one more movie, then retire for good. His last was Walk, Don’t Run, and he played Sir William Rutland, a British businessman visiting Tokyo, and about the furthest thing you can imagine from a hard-drinking Cockney grouch.

Over the last several years of his life, he toured the country performing a one-man show, Conversations With Cary Grant, telling anecdotes about his career. He was retired from the screen, but seemed to have accepted that Cary Grant was the only him he’d ever have. Maybe it was enough, or maybe it was more than enough, as authentic an identity as anyone ever has. In between touring, he spoke with Gene Siskel in one of his last interviews, and he brought up the trolley again. When Siskel pointed out that Grant had earned himself a permanent place, that he’d managed to rise above the usual jockeying for position most stars had to endure, Grant offered his final pronouncement on Hollywood.

“I forgot to tell you,” Grant said. “When you get off the trolley, you notice that it`s been doing nothing but going around in circles. It doesn`t go anywhere. You see the same things over and over. So you might as well get off.”

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Quell has wandered, literally, into Dodd’s life and cult by chance. He’s a psychologically disturbed Navy veteran adrift in the post-war years, and one night out walking in San Francisco, having fled his accidental poisoning of a co-worker in the cabbage fields of Salinas, he sees Dodd’s lit-up cruise ship, docked as if waiting for him. People dance and drink and laugh on the ship’s decks, and he leaves the darkness and hops the rail and floats off under the Golden Gate with dance music drifting on the night air.

The Master is about these two men: the verbose, charismatic Dodd, flying by the seat of his pants as he spins out the doctrine of a movement that’s half religious faith, half self-help, made of time-travel and memories and, more than anything else, the kind of hope the U.S. had in such abundance in the middle of the century—hope that personal limitations and pains can be overcome, hope that happiness can be found, hope that mankind can survive; and Quell, the scarred, alcoholic drifter, mixing cocktails from whatever’s handy (Scotch, whiskey, gin, paint thinner, darkroom chemicals), obeying his urges and appetites and not much else, and wandering blindly, never thinking or feeling anything too far ahead of the moment. The morning after the party he’s pulled, hungover, from a bunk, and brought before Dodd, who takes a liking to him and admits to having drunk all of the most recent cocktail from Quell’s hip flask while Quell was passed out. “What’s in it?” Dodd asks playfully. “Secrets,” is the answer.

Quell is invited to the wedding of Dodd’s daughter, which is taking place aboard the ship that very day. When Dodd invites Quell, he makes him feel welcome, but says, “Your memories aren’t invited.” Quell, for a while, is all too eager to leave them behind. He has an uneasy relationship with convention. He’s not a part of the great push forward, the post-war bonanza that must have felt for many like a reward in heaven after the misery of the Depression, like the shiny, gold prize for vanquishing fascism. Earlier in the film he works as a photographer in a department store, posing men and woman and couples and families in freeze-frames of mid-century, nuclear family perfection. One day a man comes in to sit for a portrait to give to his wife, and he begins to quietly harass the man, and the session ends in a fistfight.

But Dodd’s religious movement, the Cause, represents a different kind of normality. For a while Quell is welcomed into the fold, becoming a part of the cadre of children and family and followers that sail to New York, then travel down the eastern seaboard, with stops at the homes of various wealthy benefactors, all eager for an audience with Dodd. Followers of the Cause imagine themselves to be persecuted, which to them proves their rectitude, and the Cause family feels like a closed circle. There’s a strange passion between Dodd and Quell, a fascination that movie critics seem to be taking as sexual. I think it has more to do with love, or understanding, or maybe just acceptance; each has found in the other the fulfillment of his greatest need: Dodd’s for a man to save, Quell’s for someone to care enough to try to save him. But also these men are two sides of the same coin, one miserable in his subjugation to his desires (sexual, alcoholic), the other miserable in his compulsive—and, he seems to understand, futile—pursuit of defeating those desires. When the police come to arrest Dodd for damage done to that cruise ship (borrowed, it turns out), and money defrauded from its owner, Quell gets violent, and they wind up in adjacent cells, and turn on each other. As Quell goes berserk—smashing the toilet, screaming, tearing at a bunk’s blankets with his teeth—Dodd stands with his hands on his hips and lectures him on his behavior. Dodd tells Quell he’s an animal, and Quell tells Dodd he’s a fake, and Dodd’s grandiloquence collapses into shouted obscenities. Anderson shoots them with a static camera, the cells divided evenly down the middle, the instinct and the intellect, the id and the ego, always at odds, but both suffering the same imprisonment.

As Quell, Phoenix is mesmerizing, casting his performance so far beyond mimicry or simple verisimilitude that it eclipses the other acting in the film, (even though it’s full of fine performances, most especially from Hoffman). Phoenix makes Quell physically twisted, his back almost kyphotic, his elbows stuck out from his hips at odd angles, his face contorted, lopsided, lined, and gaunt. Here we see Anderson’s genius for casting. He exploits Phoenix’s fundamental mix of strangeness and sweetness, and Phoenix fills the performance with unexpected gestures. When he meets a wealthy, elderly hostess, he briefly runs his forefinger under her string of pearls. It reminded me of Brando with the glove in On the Waterfront: a tiny detail, easily missed, that says more than pages of dialogue ever could. Quell is a monster, and it’s fair to question his sanity and mental wholeness. But thanks to Phoenix, we don’t just understand him, we love him.

A sense of unrest, of longing, of unease bubbles beneath the surface of The Master. For all the plenty of mid-century America (and the story is set in 1950, exactly halfway across, like a ship bobbing in the middle of a vast ocean, the possibilities endless, but with no land in sight), there was the nagging undercurrent: we defeated all our enemies—now what? Arguing with Dodd’s son-in-law, Clark (Rami Malek), Quell talks about his Navy service and says, “We won the war—what did you do?” Phoenix lets a momentary expression of triumph cross his face before a blankness sets in, a lost look, as if he’s suddenly realized there’s no longer any ground beneath his feet.

Quell can be seen as an animal, but there are hints of greater depths. He has a lost love, a girl in his hometown who seems to have loved him completely and without hesitation, and who he left behind for no good reason. His mother is dead, his father gone. The movie is filled with naked women—in the department store darkroom, he fumbles drunkenly with a salesgirl’s breasts; at a party, he imagines every woman naked except for shoes and the embellishment of jewelry; on the beach, before his Navy discharge, he mounts a woman the other servicemen have formed from sand, her legs spread in a position that simultaneously suggests intercourse and childbirth. Quell longs for things he’s lost, and he longs for rebirth.

Throughout the movie, Dodd tells Quell that he’s sure they’ve met before, and in the characters’ final scene together, he says he’s finally remembered: In another life, they were stationed together in Paris during the Franco-Prussian war, and they were in charge of sending out mail balloons past the enemy forces, almost all successfully. The Master, while garnering rapturous reviews wherever it’s played, has been criticized for its obliqueness, and there are moments that burst with indecipherable meaning. In describing the process of making the movie, Anderson has sounded almost Malick-like: he talks about unused footage, significant narrative changes made in editing, and an overall sense of playfulness and experimentation. In other words, Anderson didn’t always know where the story was going or what it meant. He’s become unafraid of ambiguity, and trusts the audience to interpret the story and characters for themselves. His job is just to send out the balloons. Who receives them and what message they deliver is beyond his control.

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Everyone worships at the altar of Brando, but Brando never did. Close friend Jack Nicholson said that he was sure Brando considered himself the best actor alive, but Brando also once told Elia Kazan, “Here I am a balding, middle-aged failure, and I feel like a fraud when I act.” It isn’t that he didn’t think he was good; it’s that he didn’t think being good at acting amounted to much. As far as Brando was concerned, he was a genius at an idiotic pursuit.

He approached Hollywood—once he got around to approaching it at all—as if it was “one big cash register,” as he told an interviewer when he arrived in 1950 for his first film, The Men. He wasn’t happy to be there, wasn’t grateful for the opportunity, and didn’t try to hide it. “The only reason I’m here,” he famously said, “is because I don’t yet have the moral courage to turn down the money.”

But Brando didn’t just spend his life doing something he judged worthless—he poured himself into it, tearing off his own thin veneer and exposing his greatest agonies, again and again. Even in his worst performances he dug a finger into his own wounds, not only because this is more or less the foundation of Method acting (a term Brando disdained for various reasons), but also because this was his temperament. His suffering, in both art and life, often seemed willful. Pauline Kael, among others, noted that in nearly every role he ever played, Brando’s character was killed, savagely beaten, or both.

In role after role, Brando subjected himself to the full concussive force of the roles he played. He could be a bad actor, but he couldn’t be an indifferent actor. Not, at least, until after playing the role that completely and permanently changed his life and approach to acting: Paul in Last Tango in Paris.

*  *  *

For the role of Paul, Brando had to do something he’d never done before: play himself. Bernardo Bertolucci had first conceived of the story’s basic set-up—an older man meets a younger woman for totally anonymous sexual encounters—after seeing a beautiful woman in Paris. Paul was to stand in for Bertolucci’s desires and fantasies.

Brando wasn’t Bertolucci’s first choice for the role. The character—American in the finished film—was originally French, and Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Alain Delon had all turned the role down. Brando’s name was brought up by the film’s producer, Alberto Grimaldi, who was then suing the actor for causing delays during the shooting of another of his films, director Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1969 Burn!. Grimaldi offered to drop the suit if Brando would appear in Tango. Brando, who had walked off the set of Burn! to protest the treatment of Colombian extras and was likely to lose the case, agreed.

After signing up for Tango, Brando came to Paris, where he and Bertolucci holed up in an apartment and talked. The talking went on for weeks. Bertolucci laid himself bare, revealing childhood pains, private aspirations, personal secrets. Brando did the same. Brando, who had once broken a paparazzo’s jaw, had always been intensely private, but Bertolucci drew him out. Brando had been in psychotherapy since the 1950s and knew well where his soft spots were, the sources of his depression and instability, even if he never seemed to escape them: his mother was a binge drinker who regularly abandoned Brando and his sisters without warning for weeks at a time; his father was an alcoholic, bullying, emotionally abusive womanizer who quite thoroughly convinced Marlon he was worthless. Psychoanalyzing famous people from the sidelines is a fool’s errand, but it’s almost impossible to consider Brando without doing so. He was defined by abandonment, neglect, abuse, humiliation, and despair, and he wrought those same things throughout his adult life, with wives, lovers, co-workers, children, and most of all himself. As longtime friend Maureen Stapleton succinctly put it: “Marlon—oh, man, you want to talk about pain?”

As Brando and Bertolucci collaborated on the story, the character of Paul stopped being Bertolucci, and started being Brando. In his memoir, Brando writes plainly, “[Bertolucci] wanted me to play myself, to improvise completely and portray Paul as if he were an autobiographical mirror of me.” Bertolucci, who spoke little English and had no grasp of American slang, let Brando write or improvise nearly all his lines. Unlike so many previous roles, the pain in Tango doesn’t just lurk around the edges of the performance. It is the performance.

*  *  *

Last Tango in Paris is about Paul, whose wife has just killed herself in the hotel they owned, operated, and lived in together. When the movie opens, he’s walking under an elevated train platform. As the train roars overhead Paul throws his head back and blocks his ears and lets loose a profane howl of anguish. The tone for the film is set.

Paul then meets a young woman, Jeanne (Maria Schneider), and they begin an affair. Though Jeanne is engaged, she meets Paul regularly at a squalid apartment. Paul is not a gentle lover, and he seems to do everything he can to drive her away, insisting that no names be used and no biographical facts be shared while they’re in the apartment (“Everything outside this place is bullshit,” he asserts), and refusing to recognize Jeanne as anything but a warm body. Eventually Paul simply disappears from the apartment, abandoning Jeanne. Later, he reemerges, pledging his love, wanting to start anew with a proper romance, but Jeanne isn’t interested. As he follows her back to her parents’ apartment, she grows increasingly frantic to escape him. Once there, she’s trapped and he closes in. She shoots him dead with her father’s old Army pistol.

*  *  *

There’s a disagreement about Method acting. It’s based on the teachings of the Russian Constantin Stanislavski, who wrote of actors transliterating their own selves into their characters. He called it “living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” But what this means is up for debate. Lee Strasberg, one of the most influential acting coaches in history and a teacher at the New School for Social Research, where Brando studied, maintained that it meant simply recalling emotions that correspond to those of your character. But for Stella Adler—the New School teacher Brando credited with truly teaching him to act—recalling your own emotions was just the starting point. In the 2000 compilation of Adler’s teachings, The Art of Acting, she says:

“It is the actor’s job to delve into [a character’s details], to imagine them, not just to find circumstances in his own life that correspond to them. There are none. You felt miserable when your beloved grandmother died. You were inconsolable when the dog you had all through your childhood was run over by a car. The memory of these things can give you clues about how Hamlet feels about his father’s death, but only clues. Whatever you reconstruct from your emotional memory is no substitute for putting your imagination to work.”

This, in a nutshell, was Brando’s approach to his craft, but in Tango Bertolocci asked him to recall not just similar emotions, but genuine emotions, and to live them on the screen, no imagination required. In revising the story, countless details were rewritten with Brando’s life and experiences in mind. Early in the film, for example, he stands in the hotel bathroom where his wife killed herself and listens to a maid—busy scrubbing the blood from the tile—recount being questioned by the police about Paul’s background. She says she told them that:

“[Paul] became an actor, bongo player, revolutionary in South America, journalist in Japan, one day he lands in Tahiti, hangs around, learns French. Then he went to Paris. There he meets a woman with money and marries her. Since then, what has your boss done? Nothing.”

In most movies, this is exposition. But not here. Every item listed is a ghost of something from Brando’s life or career, from Tahiti, where he owned an island, to Paris, where he now finds himself. And the most telling point of all, the question at the end of it: What does it all add up to, this life he’s led? What has he accomplished? Nothing. All during the speech Brando stands mute, offering not a word of contradiction.

*  *  *

Brando was 48 when he made Last Tango in Paris. He was still recognizably Brando, but his handsomeness was fraying around the edges. His charm was beginning to drift into sleaze; his charisma felt predatory. Because things change when you reach middle age. Your body begins to break down in earnest, of course, but also your fire dims. When you get knocked down, you wonder if you can pick yourself up, or if you even want to, or if it matters whether you do. And the costs of your mistakes begin to come due.

Near the end of shooting Tango, Brando learned that his thirteen-year-old son, Christian, had been kidnapped from his boarding school. It would turn out to be a plot by Brando’s unstable, alcoholic first wife, Anna Kashfi, to keep Brando from gaining custody. Brando hired private detectives, who found the boy under a pile of dirty laundry in a tent in the Mexican desert. It was a sensational incident that set the tone for decades of sensational incidents to follow, many involving his children, and violence or death: there were years of custody fights, lawsuits, divorces, and compulsive womanizing, and in 1990 Christian would shoot and kill the boyfriend of his half-sister, Cheyenne, in Marlon’s home. Marlon whisked Cheyenne, who’d been mentally unstable for years, out of the country to prevent her giving any damning testimony against Christian. He hired a cadre of celebrity lawyers to defend Christian. There were even charges that Marlon tampered with the crime scene. He avoided as long as he could giving his own eye-witness testimony. Christian would eventually be found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Cheyenne was never the same after the shooting, and after several unsuccessful attempts, committed suicide in 1995. Brando, an absentee parent for so long, pursued his children at the end, just as Paul had pursued Jeanne, and in the end they all got away.

This all matters because as Brando’s personal turmoil began to engulf his professional excellence, he made a movie that’s not about sex, but regret and mistakes. It’s about the opposite of sex. Not connection, but disconnection. Sex in this movie is like a wound. There’s no joy in it. It’s anesthesia and escape. For Paul, it’s ostensibly escape from the despair of his wife’s suicide, but really the suicide is a device. Brando’s pain becomes indistinguishable from Paul’s, and it’s the pain of regret. It’s the pain of a life poorly lived, and of possibilities closing off around him. Jeanne wants to talk, to be found, to create herself, but Paul wants to be lost, to erase his mistakes and missteps, and even his identity. Youth wants to imagine. Age needs to forget.

*  *  *

In Tango’s final act, Paul returns, catching up to Jeanne under the same elevated train track where the film began. He’s changed. He’s wearing a blazer and has a boyish vivacity. And he can’t tell Jeanne enough about himself. He wants to be with her. He wants her to come back and live with him at his hotel. He lists his physical ailments, but says he can still fuck; he’s still “a good stick man.”

But it’s all an act. Pledging romantic love, he seems as out of place as he was comfortably at home slumped in the shadows of that filthy apartment. He’s trying to play a young man’s game, but he can’t go back. He’s a pretender and he’s out of options. Like Orson Welles’ Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil, his future’s all used up.

*  *  *

“You’re alone,” Brando says in Last Tango in Paris. “You’re all alone. And you won’t be able to be free of that feeling of being alone until you look death right in the face.”

*  *  *

After Last Tango in Paris, Brando was absent from the screen for four years, the longest break of his career to that point. When he returned, it was to play an assassin in The Missouri Breaks. It’s a strange performance, mostly composed of odd hats and unexplained accents. The substitution of accents and wardrobe for authenticity and rawness became the norm in his work. He’d always struggled with his weight, and in this movie he was heavier than he’d ever been. His character winds up having his throat slit, awakening just long enough to see his killer. Two years later he made Superman, and was heavier still, over 300 pounds on a 5’ 9” frame. His character dies on an exploding planet. When he made Apocalypse Now,  he was so heavy Coppola used a double in long shots. His Colonel Kurtz is hacked to death with a machete, his murder intercut with the ritual slaughter of a water buffalo.

In the first 20 years of his career, Brando made 23 movies, almost exactly one per year. In the last 29 years, he made just 17 more, most forgettable, some straight to video, almost all made to raise money for the escalating legal costs of his chaotic personal life. His performances range from embarrassing (Free Money, The Island of Dr. Moreau) to competent (A Dry White Season, The Freshman), but in these later films Brando—the one who had suffered so much for so long in so many previous roles—is gone. His pain is something he is no longer willing to display for the sake of acting. Great art can consume the artist, and it had consumed Brando.

“When Last Tango in Paris was finished,” Brando wrote in his memoir, “I decided that I wasn’t ever again going to destroy myself emotionally to make a movie. I felt I had violated my innermost self and didn’t want to suffer like that anymore… In subsequent pictures I stopped trying to experience the emotions of my characters as I had always done before and simply [tried] to act the part in a technical way.”

Then he adds a final note, one he was too smart and too experienced—but maybe just dismissive enough of his life’s work—to actually believe: “The audience doesn’t know the difference.”

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What happens in Drive is not greatly distinguishable from what happens in countless other crime films, perhaps most directly Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978). The Kid (Gosling) is an inexpressive mechanic moonlighting as a movie stunt driver and, more importantly, a getaway driver. When he’s behind the wheel or in a fistfight, we can see exactly who he is: he’s a master, a man with ice in his veins and savagery in his heart. In every other way, he’s inscrutable, almost totally opaque. When he meets next-door neighbor Irene (Cary Mulligan), they fall easily, almost wordlessly in love, and they—along with Irene’s young son Benicio (Kaden Leos)—soon become inseparable. Then Irene’s husband, Standard (Oscar Isaac), returns from prison and, in standard film noir fashion, the Kid finds himself drawn deep into the criminal underworld he’d previously only skirted.

In other words, if you judge by what’s happening you’re bound to be disappointed, because none of the plot is very original. Neither are the characters. Every one is an echo from another crime movie, an old noir, a thriller on cable at 3 a.m. One reviewer, panning Drive, asked: What kind of character wears a gold satin jacket embroidered on the back with a huge scorpion, like the one the Kid wears? The answer, of course, is a stock character, the kind Steve McQueen or Robert Mitchum used to play. And when the Kid, late in the film, asks mob boss Bernie (Albert Brooks, nicely cast against type), if he’s heard the story of the scorpion and the frog, it’s hard not to remember that that was already an old story when Orson Welles’ Mr. Arkadin brought it up in 1955. (“Let’s drink to character,” indeed.)

To understand the greatness of Drive you have to consider what’s not happening – its absences, the lulls and silences it creates and sustains. It’s the best, most stylish use of genre since Rian Johnson’s Brick (2005).  Within a simple framework, endless variation is possible. But unlike Brick, which retooled noir’s conventions and threw them at us from unexpected directions, Drive’s innovation is in creating silences and spaces that beg to be filled with meaning.

Take, for example, the movie’s violence. To me it felt like a brutal film. In truth, its instances of violence are not only few, but notably brief. Why do they stand out so much? Because every burst of visceral bloodletting has some quiet, almost poetic moment as a counterpoint. Like the scene in the hotel: The Kid has agreed to help Standard rob a pawnshop to get him out of a debt to the mob, but of course it’s gone terribly wrong. Afterward, the Kid and a hapless cohort, Blanche (Christina Hendricks), are attacked very suddenly in a very small hotel room, where they’re holed up with the requisite duffel bag of cash. It’s true – the battle is gruesome, but what gives it weight is the long, long (I didn’t time it, but it had to have been close to a full minute) interlude immediately after the shootout, when a blood-spattered Gosling peers out from the bathroom where he’s just offed the last thug. There is no sound at all; director Nicolas Winding Refn simply holds it. It’s just us and the moment: slow, observant, begging to be filled with some sort of meaning, emotional or otherwise.

These quiet moments in the narrative have their corollary in the way the characters are developed—or, more to the point, aren’t developed. Time and again the script and performers lead us to moments where we expect to learn who they are and why they do what they do. But then everything stops short. Drinking a glass of water in Irene’s kitchen after he first meets her and gives her a lift home, the Kid answers her questions minimally. He doesn’t elaborate about himself and she doesn’t press him for information. It’s not the conversation we expect during the expositional period of a story. There’s a gap. This is a movie that understands how to use negative space, and how negative space creates—or at any rate encourages—meaning.

Drive also works to create space between the story and the viewer. It’s full of distancing artifice. At one point the Kid conceals his identity by wearing the rubber mask he wore stunt-driving in a movie, a facsimile of the face of the fake star of that fake movie within this fake story—layers on layers of pretending until we hardly know what we’re looking at or what we’re supposed to feel.

And there are constant instances of self-commentary. During the opening chase (a masterpiece of restraint, during which almost no actual chasing occurs), a radio plays a sports broadcast so generic we can’t even tell what sport it’s supposed to be—it becomes clear that the play-by-play isn’t about a game at all, but the chase we’re watching. In another scene, the Kid and Benicio sit watching a children’s TV show, and the Kid asks if a shark character is a bad guy. Of course, replies Benicio. He’s a shark. There aren’t any good guy sharks? asks the Kid. No, Benicio replies. Everyone knows sharks are all bad. The Kid isn’t talking about the show, of course. It’s an actor pretending to be a character, saying lines that are questions about that character.

But here, in these spaces, it’s hard not to project meaning. Gosling, as the Kid, is asking: Are all movie characters who are adept at killing other movies characters rotten, evil, irredeemable? Are we so totally defined by what we do that it’s synonymous with who we are? If so, then there’s nothing more to know about the characters than what we see on the screen. There’s no need to know where they came from or how they got the way they are. There’s just the movie, the character, and what he does.

The question for me, I guess, is whether it’s possible, as a viewer, to have a genuine emotional experience amidst all this artifice and emptiness, or whether, more fundamentally, the filmmakers even want us to. I think they do, maybe, and there are moments when feeling comes through. There’s this elevator scene, for example.

It’s the Kid and Irene in an elevator with a goon sent to kill the Kid. There’s a great deal of silence, and the Kid and the goon sneak peeks at each other. It’s tense. Then comes a lull. The Kid reaches back and gently nudges Irene into the corner of the elevator, away from what’s about to happen—not just the violence, but what it will reveal. Then, prolonging the moment, he leans back and kisses her. It’s a long, slow, silent kiss. It seems to last forever. And then the explosion of violence. In 15 seconds the Kid has dispatched the goon, stomping him to death in a mounting frenzy of bloodlust. The elevator reaches the garage and Irene—who knew nothing about why the goon was there—backs out. Her expression says it all: to her, the Kid is a monster. The Kid’s face is flushed and bloated with ebbing rage and fury, his eyes heavy and dull, spittle on his lips and blood sprayed across his jacket. In what’s perhaps a three-second shot with no dialogue, Gosling tells us more about the Kid than we learn in the whole rest of the movie. He conveys fury, shame, regret, compulsion, love, and a kind of helplessness. He looks like an animal caught devouring its prey. He looks captive to his own native traits—and those of every noir anti-hero that came before him—like that scorpion he and Mr. Arkadin like to talk about. He lets us peek behind the nothing to see the something.

At least, that’s what I think I saw while I was busy ignoring what was happening in favor of what wasn’t. Maybe it was just me. Maybe it’s just a movie doing what all movies do, only more honestly. Maybe it’s a savvy filmmaker and a brilliant actor who know that they just make the images; we make the meaning.

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Will I regret doing this? If it goes anything like last year, definitely. Better get started. I get my $6 matinee ticket and head upstairs.

10:00 a.m.

Rise of Planet of the Apes

I always think of science fiction as our most earnest genre, and for me it’s often an uncomfortable union of big ideas and ridiculous execution. Take Star Trek, for instance. How can I seriously consider the weighty philosophical issues so often promoted in science fiction when I have to look at aliens that are nothing but homely character actors wearing plastic foreheads? I can’t, is the answer. Over and above budget consideration, even the most revered science fiction movies are often marred by heavy-handed symbolism that undermines any interesting themes. For me, the gold standard of distractingly earnest, homemade-looking sci-fi has always been the rubber masks and ridiculous tunics of the original Planet of the Apes.

In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Will Rodman (James Franco) is a scientist trying to develop a cure for Alzheimer’s, which has afflicted his father, Charles (John Lithgow, who I realized halfway through was born to play a guy with Alzheimer’s). Lo and behold the drug Will tests on apes improves their intelligence dramatically. A baby chimp named Caesar (Andy Serkis) winds up being the lone surviving recipient. He’ll become their liberator.

Naturally there are no rubber monkey masks in sight, the filmmakers opting instead for CGI apes. Like most CGI creatures, they’re beautifully rendered but, once they start to move around, oddly stiff. In theory, moving toward something more visually believable should let the ideas shine through, and often they do. For example, it’s hard not to at least momentarily ponder the definition of humanity when Caesar stares ruefully at the collar Will forces him to wear. But when it comes down to it, the movie might be a little too reliant on horror movie clichés and shallow ideas to ever really take off. Maybe they spent too much time making it look better than the original. Ironically, I found myself fondly recalling those old masks and tunics, because while the actors in that film might be a little hard to take seriously, there are moments—like when Heston’s character finally learns the truth–that this film simply can’t rival.

(As an aside, the movie is set in the Bay area, and I just feel like I have to ask: How many loose primates do they get out there? Because when Caesar gets hauled away by animal control, it’s not to a catch-all stray animal facility, but a site specifically for primates (and run by Brian Cox sporting Rip Torn’s hair), where there are something like 50 chimps, orangutans and gorillas all just awaiting a leader and some of that sweet brain enhancement. A whole site just for stray primates? And when they inevitably break out and start the uprising, the Bay area is revealed to be home to hundreds of apes. Their destination? Marin, just like everyone else. No wonder they’re so cultured in the later movies.)

Trailers: In Time, Contagion, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Killer Elite (in which every cast member seems to play an assassin, except for Clive Owen, whose mustache suggests an assassin who’s also a pedophile)

Intermission 1

So is there much real risk of being caught? I suppose. But I’ve decided that the friend who tried and failed to sneak in an extra movie was just an amateur. If you plan well and take a few basic precautions, you can eliminate most of the risk. The fact is that the system of film exhibition isn’t designed to prevent all-day movie orgies, because really, how many people even want to do try it?

12:05 p.m.

Horrible Bosses

People talk about big summer action movies being critic-proof, and they are, but what about frat comedies? As long as you cast a few of the people from the Zack Galifianakis/Steve Carrell/Jason Sudeikis set, throw in a barf/diarrhea/cumshot joke or three, and hit a few characters in the nuts/head for good measure, you’re golden. I swear, they could make them from a template, like Mad Libs for date rapists.

The only really interesting thing in these kinds of movies is the gender politics, and Horrible Bosses’ are pretty strange, though I’m sure unintentionally so, since beneath its veneer of knee-jerk misogyny and fashionable racism, this movie is about as subversive as a church bake sale. Consider: It’s the boss’ aggression that’s causing all the problems—Nick (Jason Bateman) has Dave Harken (Kevin Spacey), a manipulative, power-hungry sadist who could really only be played by Kevin Spacey; Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) has Bobby Pellitt (Colin Ferrell), a coked-up degenerate intent on wrecking his newly deceased father Jack’s (Donald Sutherland) company; and Dale (Charle Day) has Julia (Jennifer Aniston), perhaps the most stereotypically make of them all, a libidinous cougar (sorry, Jen) whose determination to get Dale to sleep with her threatens his impending nuptials. All three characters feel so cornered, so helpless, they decide to murder the bosses.

(By the way, Jennifer Aniston, if you’re reading, let me just say that both your body and your body of work look exactly like they should considering that you spend 90% of your time on the former, and 10% on the latter.)

But wait—is the real problem the aggression of the bosses, or is it our heroes’ lack of aggression? Nick has spent eight years under David’s thumb, groveling and subjugating himself for a promotion that never comes. Eight years. I wouldn’t want to do anything pleasant for eight years. What kind of a milquetoast subjects himself to that kind of suffering for that long? Kurt, meanwhile, loves his job, but his passivity in the face of the unhinged, confrontational Bobby makes it hard to sympathize. As for Dale, it feels like he could escape Julia’s advances pretty easily with a legal consultation.

The attitude of Horrible Bosses is that extreme aggression is the only solution to the problem of male weakness. There’s no room here for adulthood (a central characteristic of this whole genre, really). Your choices as a man are suffering, or murder, the ultimate domination. Take David, for example. He’s haunted by paranoia and insecurity over his wife’s (Julie Bowen) faithfulness, and when he discovers what he considers evidence that his fears are founded, he doesn’t hesitate to murder the presumed lover. Everything about him screams male aggression: his Escalade, his gun, his decisiveness, his swagger. What’s beneath it all? The film doesn’t say. And the only other model is weakness.

Trailers: Footloose, Our Idiot Brother, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, Colombiana (“From the writer of Taken,” just in case you can remember Taken, or think writing matters)

Intermission 2

If you want to plan your own all-day movie extravaganza, start by making a schedule, because there’s no surer way to be caught than to wander around aimlessly looking for another movie to see. A movie binge should be well-planned and -timed, like a military invasion. Only with M&Ms. Choose the theater with the largest number of screens, because it will obviously have the most options as you plot your day. Find the earliest movie, and start with that one. Then find the one that starts the latest. Then fill in everything in between. Remember that if there are 3D movies, you’ll need the glasses, so bring your own from home or keep an eye out once you get the theater (don’t sweat it, though, because 3D glasses are about as well-secured as Russian nukes).

2:05 p.m.

Conan the Barbarian

You know what the characters in Horrible Bosses could have used? A little quality time with Conan the Barbarian (Jason Mamoa).

Considering our current appetites for vicarious sadism and homoerotic violence this seems like to the perfect time to adapt Conan again. And since the character has its roots in the pulps of the 1930s and a cinematic heritage that involves Arnold Schwarzenegger, the bar is set pretty low. This version clears it with ease. You got your bare-chested slave girls. You got your swordplay. You got your gory battle sequences (during one of which I swear to God I saw someone punch a horse in the face). The whole thing looks like something airbrushed on the side of a van.

There’s also a pretty thin plot, a warmed over Lord of the Rings thing about a mask made from the bones of dead kings (or something). The mask is supposed to allow the villain, Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang), to bring his sorceress wife back from the dead. Once the mask is his, he tells his daughter, Marique (somewhere, Tyler Perry is kicking himself or not thinking of this name; here, it’s Rose McGowan, with the approximate wardrobe, hair, and dramatic heft of the goth girl who makes your Frappuccino), “My wife will make me a god and we will cast all rivals into oceans of blood.” Pretty big talk. But once he gets the mask… not much happens. Some more fighting. A lot of screaming. More blood. Slave girls, of course. But he can’t fly, he doesn’t grow any extra arms, and he stays the same size. Hell, his eyes don’t even glow. Then again, any of those things would have involved special effects, and by that point they’d already blown a lot of budget on HGH, hair extensions and Styrofoam rocks.

Trailers: Warrior, Abduction, The Thing, Immortals, Sherlock Holmes, Ghost Rider (Here’s a line I wrote weeks before embarking on this project: “Some cold, snowy winter day, I’ll recall with regret that I spent 16 hours of summer watching things like __________.“ I knew there’d be something exceptionally stupid to tack onto the end of that sentence. That something is a skeleton demon peeing fire. Thanks, Nic Cage.)

Intermission 3

And then there’s the issue of food. Unless you plan to eating all day at the concession stands (which, first, sounds like a gastronomic apocalypse and, second, gives a whole lot more theater employees a much better chance to catch onto what you’re doing), you should pack a lot. Think protein. I favor hard-boiled eggs (I brought four), but a hardboiled egg smells like nothing so much as a hardboiled egg, so maybe wait until the lights are down to break those out. Oh, and peel them ahead of time. This time around I also brought two turkey sandwiches, some Baby Bells, four apples, and two Clif bars. Remember, you’re trying not to draw attention to yourself, so think about what your food is wrapped in. Cling wrap is almost silent. Just a thought.

4:00 p.m.

Captain America

It’s probably a mistake to read much into this movie. (It’s a mistake, in fact, to see this movie, but such mistakes are what I’ve dedicated my day to.) The only reason this movie exists is because a bunch of Marvel Comics executives are convinced that 1) an Avengers movie can be huge, 2) there can be no Avengers movie without Captain America, and maybe even 3) Captain America is iconic. Number one is plausible; two is probably untrue; and three is unquestionably wrong. Captain America has never crossed over to Spiderman/Superman/Batman cultural relevance. He’s a relic from the super-patriotic climate of the early 1940s, mysteriously surviving from an earlier age, like Tang. The average person on the street, I guarantee you, had very little idea who he was before this movie came out.

Anyway, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is a dedicated but physically feeble Army enlistee chosen to receive an experimental drug meant to transform him into a supersoldier. In Rogers’ case, it not only adds about 8 inches of height and 100 pounds of muscle, it also somehow waxes and oils his chest. (The focus on Evans’ torso is so great, in fact, that he isn’t even required to remove his pants for the procedure.)

We’re supposed to root for Rogers because of his determination and courage, and because he wants to join the Army to defeat “bullies.” But the handsome, hulking, blond Evans is more Aryan than the Nazis his character hates so much, and once he becomes endowed with superhuman strength, the action sequences are tedious exercises in predictable physical domination. The take-away isn’t that bullies need to be defeated. It’s that you should make sure your side has the biggest bully.

The problem isn’t helped by the choice of villain. The Red Skull (Hug0 Weaving) is ostensibly a Nazi agent, but early on we learn that he has ambitions for power that would exceed Hitler’s, and from that point forward we hear no more about the Fuhrer. I get that the Red Skull is Captain America’s arch-nemesis, but the choice causes complications. If you want to get audiences riled up about a war that happened before most of them were born, making the villain a guy who killed six million people is a good place to start. By instead making the focus the horribly disfigured, curiously sympathetic Red Skull, the filmmakers have put the story in a vacuum. The battle stands for, and relates to, nothing.

Trailers: No idea—I got in late thanks to Conan’s epic battles.

Intermission 4

This is a good time to remember that by the time you’ve been at the theater for eight hours, the people who saw you come have probably gone home. I keep telling myself this as I skulk about, trying to remember the basic tenets of theater-hopping: keep moving, make small changes to your outfit frequently, act natural. It also doesn’t hurt, depending on your level of self-respect, so hang out in a bathroom stall between shows, where something as simple as adding a hat can turn you into a different person. This is the time of the day that’s easiest, because this is when the crowds start to pick up. They have a lot of people to look at, and they probably don’t expect anyone to be spending 16 hours ripping them off.

6:30 p.m.

Final Destination 5 3D

After waiting for 30 minutes, they cancel the show due to technical problems. But don’t worry, they announce: Everyone will be getting a free pass good at any future show. Seriously? Am I about to get a free pass out this? We line up down the stairs where a girl by the door is handing them out. With about five people in front of me, she runs out. The remaining audience members are instructed to go downstairs to the box office, present a stub, and get a free pass. Of course, I have no stub. And I have business to tend to.

Unfortunately, the delay throws my tightly packed schedule into disarray. I consult Fandango, and quickly come up with: Crazy Stupid Love followed by my originally scheduled The Help. This takes me down from seven movies to only six, and eliminates the almost-surely terrible Cowboys and Aliens. Damn you, 3D projectors. Damn you.

7:40 p.m.

Crazy Stupid Love

By the end of the 1980s, Hollywood was so much in love with the big-budget blockbuster that independent movies didn’t get that much mainstream play. Then along came the Coen brothers, and Tarantino, and Miramax and others, and we had a resurgence of the quirky, intimate, not-necessarily-commercial films that had been the bread-and-butter of the maverick 1970s. And then they figured out how to sell indies to mainstream audiences. And then indie movies started to get a little safer. And then we started getting movies like Crazy Stupid Love. All in all, when Hollywood makes or backs an indie, it tends to look a lot like a blockbuster writ small.

Cal (Steve Carell) is a frumpy middle-aged father married to Emily (Julianne Moore). One night over dinner, Emily suddenly reveals that after 20-plus years of marriage she’s had an affair and wants a divorce. Cal is shocked enough to throw himself from a moving car on the way home (possibly the movie’s best moment). This all occurs within the first five minutes. The real plot catalyst is the introduction of Jacob (Ryan Gosling), an arrogant ladykiller who does his work at the bar Cal begins to frequent after moving out of the house.

Crazy Stupid Love has most of the characteristics we’re taught to associate with indie dramedies: attention to character detail, a small scale, strict verisimilitude, and a cast with considerable indie credibility. But watching it feels a little like buying Stop & Shop’s organic raisin brand: Yeah, maybe it’s organic enough that they can use the word, but is the word much more than a marketing idea at this point?

Crazy Stupid Love wants to have grit, but the only thing it ever punishes anyone for is being dull, and it doesn’t really want to hold any of its characters accountable for their real sins. Jacob, for instance, is a condescending, manipulative cad, and the movie wants to have the guts to make him suffer. In the end, though, his penance amounts to nothing more than a few lines of dialogue about his being “horribly lonely,” and then he’s off to a fairly effortless romance with the substantive, sees-right-through-him Hannah (Jim Carrey’s favorite, Emma Stone). Same with Emily, who’s allowed to chalk up her infidelity to a “mid-life crisis,” and her paramour, David (Kevin Bacon), who gets to be a pretty nice, earnest guy despite breaking up a family. Often, the only thing sustaining any tension is the handful of manufactured conflicts.

All in all, I’d rather watch an honest blockbuster.

Trailer: New Year’s Eve, I Don’t Know How She Does It, What’s Your Number, Machine Gun Preacher, Contagion (they cast this movie by dragging an Oscar statuette behind a Bentley through Beverly Hills)

Intermission 4

By this time of night, after this many hours of movies and this number of hardboiled eggs, it’s hard to care about getting caught. And it’s hard to imagine that anyone working at the theater gives any more of a shit than you do. Myself, I’ve had a piercing headache in my right temple for about six hours. I’m struggling to recall the logic behind saving a bloated drama for last, but here I am. No turning back now. (I wish it was Cowboys and Aliens.)

10:20 p.m.

The Help

Hey, have you heard? Racism is terrible. Same with segregation. In case you’ve somehow missed that point, though, there’s The Help, a movie that answers the question: What’s more tedious than yet another Holocaust movie?

Racial tensions aren’t exactly topping the news in the U.S. these days, but it’s no mystery why The Help was made. The book of the same name has sold something like 40 zillion copies, so there’s a ready audience. But it has more than than that going for it: it’s the Oprah-est story you could ever ask for, comforting us with such messages as: good wins, mean people are punished, courage is rewarded, and so on. Along the way, we also get some cathartic racist comeuppance, but until Gene Hackman comes out of retirement, it’ll be tough to top the satisfying barbershop scene in Mississippi Burning.

Set in the early 1960s, The Help tells the story of Eugenia ‘Skeeter’ Phelan (Emma Stone, again), a recent Ole Miss graduate who returns to her hometown of Jackson, MS to confront the horrors of segregation, gender bias and the Junior League. Skeeter isn’t like other Jackson folks. She’s progressive. She isn’t just pleasant to the many black maids, drivers, and groundkeepers that people the film, she actually regards them as human beings. She’s somehow untouched by the racial, class and cultural biases that have engulfed everyone around her. Ultimately spurred by her parents’ dismissal of Constantine (Cicely Tyson), the black maid who raised her, Skeeter, an aspiring writer, starts working on a book about the experiences of the help. Expect to hear the exclamation “Scandalous!” repeatedly.

If you’re thinking that this all sounds like a breeding ground for some good, old-fashioned Magical Negroism, you’re right. To date, our most condescending films have settled for one or two Magical Negroes, but this one is just plain full of them. Segregation and southern culture during the Civil Rights movement are complex things, but you’d never know it from this movie. Here we get bigots whose bigotry is cartoonish but conveniently nonviolent, and saints whose enlightenment is anomalous and unexplained, but the only thing we get in between is Skeeter, a spunky (I like her, Jim Carry, I swear to God I do) but standard-issue surrogate for our liberal outrage.

The Help is a handsome, well-made film. The photography is golden and blandly attractive, like an ad for a sexual dysfunction drug, and the sets and costumes are note-perfect to the era. The performances are all sincere. The script is… I don’t know, let’s call it ‘workmanlike,’ because I’m running out of adjectives for ‘mediocre.’ And in case you were thinking it wasn’t about anything important, consider how long it is: over 6 hours, according to my internal clock. (What? Fandango says it’s only two hours and 17 minutes? That can’t be right.)

Trailers: The Odd Life of Timothy Green, Tower Heist, Ides of March, The Warrior, How Does She Do It, Warhorse (The main emotion I get from this trailer is wanting to punch it in the face. That’s an emotion, right?)

12: 35 a.m.

Walking through the almost-deserted theater lobby on my way out and seeing the skeleton crew left to wipe down the counters and restock the Nips feels like running into an old girlfriend a year after your break-up: everything seems a little silly now. Did we really fight about that? The tension has been drained away. I give one of them a smile. He pauses, then turns and goes back to work. He may want to be here even less than I do.

I should feel worse physically. Last year as I left the theater, there was some numbness in the extremities, dizziness, and mental incoherence. This year, just a headache (which will persist for about 24 hours). Am I getting used to this? The thought is both encouraging and a little unnerving.

Today’s totals: $6 for six movies totaling 11 hours of movies—well short of my goal. Same time next year, Boston Common 19? Same time next year.

[Editor's note: For more thoughts on The Help, see Roxane Gay's essay, "The Solace of Preparing Fried Foods and Other Quaint Remembrances from 1960s Mississippi: Thoughts on The Help."]

***

Rumpus Original art by Jason Novak.

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Like most great filmmakers, Malick’s movies are all about the same things, and in this case they’re big things. He’s interested in death, God, the meaning of life, the origins and purpose of evil, and the human struggle to live well in a violent world. But in Tree of Life, he’s through screwing around. You want a movie about God? This time, Malick’s not giving you Guadalcanal, or Pocahontas, or the Nebraska Badlands, or the Texas Panhandle. To quote Dennis Hopper: fuck that shit. This time around Malick goes “where God lives,” as Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain) puts it: he gives us the cosmos, the spinning galaxies, the dawn of time, the earth’s shifting plates and spewing volcanoes and primordial, striving ocean life.  He gives us all of creation ordering and reordering itself, breaking down and building up and breaking down again in the endless cycle. He doesn’t just give us dinosaurs, for God’s sake, he gives us the death of dinosaurs, too. You want the meaning of life? Malick will show you where it began.

We also get a story—as much of a story, anyway, as Malick ever gives us, which is to say not much of a story, but at least something to hold together all the philosophical cud-chewing. We get Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt, aging well), the disciplinarian dad (or “father” as he angrily insists on being called) with a fistful of stifled ambitions and a chip on his shoulder, determined to make his sons into what he feels he never was or will be. We get Mrs. O’Brien, the mom, who offers endless and mostly mute love and understanding to the three O’Brien boys, principally Jack (Hunter McCracken). Jack is a scowling, loving, trouble-making, gentle pre-adolescent whose emotions are beginning to churn like the roiling surf and bursting magma we see so much of. He breaks windows and shoots his trusting brother with a bee-bee gun and sneaks into an unlocked neighbor’s house where he paws through a lingerie drawer in confused, nameless longing. We get this family moving through their dreamy days in dreamy, late-1940s Waco, Texas, and in bits and pieces, we also get adult Jack (Sean Penn, not aging quite as well), moving through the washed-out colors of his adult life.

And of course we get whispered voiceover. Malick is the all-time league leader in whispered voiceover.

Is this movie any good? It depends on whom you ask. In his rave review, Roger Ebert compares the movie’s ambition to that of 2001, which is where you have to reach to find a movie that tried to do this much. Ebert notes that Kubrick lacked Malick’s feeling. Most people do. But it’s a useful comparison. Kubrick is among the least feeling filmmakers, I would argue, a great artist whose genius is intellectual and visual, but—unless you count terror and violence as emotions—never emotional (which for me has always explained his weakness: directing actors; most of his movies are marred by one or more simply terrible performances, and he was especially susceptible to committed hams like Kirk Douglas and Jack Nicholson; he had absolutely no eye for performance). Malick shares Kubrick’s interest in ideas (Malick reportedly came close to earning a doctorate of philosophy from Oxford University before dropping out), but at the end of the day he’s more interested in the emotions; for Malick, the ideas are just a way to make sense of our emotional lives, which are what really matter.

The trouble with sincerity is that it has less of a place in the world than it used to. There’s always some wag or cynic ready to knock it down, and no shortage of means by which to do so. Whether you’ll find Tree of Life profound or tedious depends to a large extent on how open you are to a sincere filmmaker doing his sincere best. If you simply can’t approach any of the silence and symbolic, nonlinear digressions and ominously unanswered questions with a straight face, well, then this may not be for you, because while Malick is as interested in ideas as Kubrick ever was, he doesn’t explore them with the same depth or sophistication. In Malick’s vision, the world is a nasty place, and you can follow your natural instincts, trying to dominate and build and occasionally destroy (like Mr. O’Brien), or you can choose to live your life with grace (Mrs. O’Brien). Grace, in this context, is another word for love, for kindness, for tenderness and understanding of one another. It’s a simple and beautiful idea, but some people may find it merely simple.

I’ll go this far, though: If you like movies, you should see Tree of Life. Like all of Malick’s films, it’s beautifully shot and edited. Watching it all unfurl, I was thinking less of 2001 than Baraka, another quiet, observant movie that took its time with the rhythms and chaos and beauty of nature, and tried to locate man within them. There’s little dialog in Tree of Life, and almost none that you could consider truly necessary. Whether he’s showing you a gauzy, billowing curtain or the boys wrestling on the front lawn or planets being formed from the void of space, Malick is advancing his ideas and, somehow, advancing our emotional experience with it all, and he’s doing it visually.

But the best reason to see Tree of Life is because there aren’t any other movies like it. Its scope, ambition, methods, and risk-taking are all unique, and so is Malick. That may sound like faint praise, but when you sift through the Fast and Furiouses, the Pirates of the Caribbeans and the latest slapped-together, 3D superhero nonsense, you see that’s a significant thing. I wouldn’t want to live in a world without mindless entertainment, but neither would I want to do without the occasional Terrance Malick who, if nothing else, really means it.

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Jack is more than just a gruff introvert with a gun who uses violence and threats to solve problems (though he is that, only the latest in the long tradition of such De Niro characters). As we learn in an effective if somewhat stilted opening scene, Jack is a lost man—no, not as unnervingly lost as Travis Bickle, and not as pitiably, palpably lost as Jake LaMotta, but lost nonetheless, dogged by an aimlessness and pain and an inability to live in the world, groping for a meaning and purpose he’s been waiting all his adult life to find. He listens to Christian talk radio, reads the Bible, and attends church every Sunday with his long- and for the most part quietly suffering wife, Madlyn (Frances Conroy, so good at being simultaneously cowed and furious), but he remains adrift, and feels it deeply. When he corners his pastor (David A. Hendricks) for help, all the church leader can offer is vague bromides  (“There’s an old Bible passage,” the pastor tells Jack; are there a lot of new Bible passages? “It says, ‘Be still, and know that I am the light.’ It means that God has a plan for you.”). Jack, waiting in years of pained, bitter silence for God’s plan to become apparent, is forced to make due with bourbon and hitting golf balls into the cornfields near his rural home.

Then Lucetta appears, all bedroom-eyed and slithery. At Stone’s urging, she begins to contact Jack, flattering him and charming him in an effort to secure Jack’s recommendation to the board (the movie never explains what the actual plan is, whether to seduce and blackmail Jack, or to use sexual favors as a bribe, and Stone seems at times to be going in more than one direction and motivated by more than one thing—sometimes in the same scene; this seems less like a designed contradiction than a flaw in the writing, and it gives the marketers plenty of fodder for their bait-and-switch). Lucetta being played by Milla Jovovich, the plan works and Jack falls into an affair with her. It would likely have worked for anyone at that point. Jack is weeks away from retirement and wondering what it’s all been about, this endless cycle of imprisoning and releasing people, chasing a redemption that never seems to be entirely real or achievable. Feeling the profound lack of spiritual truths, he opts for a physical one (“If the body feels good, the mind just follows,” Lucetta tells Jack when they first meet. A bird pendant dangles from her neck, a counterpoint to the trapped bee motif that recurs for Madlyn.).

Stone, too, is more than a sleazy criminal with a hot wife and a plan, and Norton is doing more than a mash-up of Aaron Stampler from Primal Fear and Derek Vinyard from American History X. As much as Jack, but less mindfully, Stone is lost, too, and he happens upon true revelation one day in the prison library in the form of a pamphlet about a quack religion which, nevertheless, holds meaning for him. In a matter of days, he finds the beatified truth that has eluded Jack for a lifetime. It’s pat, but Norton makes Stone thoughtful and watchful even as he edges up to insanity, and it works.

More notable, even, than the revelation that this movie is trying something interesting is the revelation that in his performance as Jack, De Niro is, well, trying. If you want to know the state of De Niro’s career, how about this: A movie about him being generically tough is considered more saleable than one in which he does something to justify his reputation as the Greatest Actor of His Generation. Watching De Niro in these scenes inspires a complex reaction, part invigoration, part nostalgia, part frustration. The performance is intricate and thrilling. In a scene with Lucetta, Jack mentions his granddaughter, and when Lucetta asks him how much he sees the girl, De Niro manages—in his tone and pauses, in his face and his body language, but mostly in that wordless something that’s at the heart of his best work—to instantly convey that Jack can never see the granddaughter because his relationship with his daughter, the girl’s mother, is hopelessly broken. Indeed, we understand in a crushing flash just how it’s broken, just what an inarticulate mess this man must have been as a father, how inaccessible he must have been, how unable to reconcile his needs to hers. But even more than that, De Niro makes it impossible in that small moment not to feel the pain all this causes Jack. He knows he’s failed, and he may even know how and why, but he’s a powerless bystander to it all. “They live upstate,” Jack’s dialogue goes. “We don’t see them much.” But De Niro makes it mean so much more than the words.

The performance left me wondering something I’ve wondered countless times before: Why has De Niro’s late career work been so disappointing? Like most people, I suppose I’ve chalked it up to indifference, creative burnout, or both. With Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, The Godfather II, and all the rest under his belt, he reached middle age a rich, revered legend. Like Stevie Wonder or John Updike, his post-prime work has often felt like a matter of habit more than necessity, and his well-known selectivity and discernment seem to have vanished.

But I couldn’t help wonder, as I watched him bring Jack so vividly and painfully to life, if his latter-day work isn’t better than everyone usually thinks. Maybe the problem is as much us as him. Looking over his filmography, I was surprised to find a lot more variety in the last 15 years than I’d given him credit for: Yes, there are the City by the Seas, the Righteous Kills, the Ronins, the Heats (an awful film, I don’t care what anyone says), but he also played the Archbishop of Lima in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Captain Shakespeare in Stardust, the impulsive, semi-comic dullard Louis Gara in Jackie Brown, and Arthur Lustig in Great Expectations. This isn’t to say he necessarily played these roles brilliantly, or brought anything unique or unexpected to them (and he isn’t helped by the fact that none of these movies are much better than mediocre, which may be half his problem), but is it possible that in our decades-long anticipation of and craving for another Johnny Boy or Michael Vronsky, we’ve all give him too little credit for creating other characters in lesser films that still have something to offer? At a minimum, his credits suggest a greater spirit of adventure than I generally give him credit for. Maybe just working competently on projects that please him is enough—for him and us.

Ultimately, Stone succeeds at exploring the search for meaning and redemption, though there are some mechanical problems. For instance, because the motivations and intentions of the would-be thriller subplot are never understandable, especially for Stone himself, the tensions are confused. Are we supposed to be worried that Stone will resent Jack’s relationship with Lucetta? That Madlyn will find out about the affair? That Jack will get fired? We don’t know; it’s a moving target, and the stakes for the characters are unclear. But the plot devices the marketers put to such misleading use never feel like anything the movie is committed to, and the film is at its best when we’re seeing Stone and Jack grope their ways to something better. In the final scene, with Jack crouched beside the packed boxes in his office, he thinks he hears something, maybe the faint beginnings of ultimate redemption, and he looks up. Maybe De Niro hears it, too.

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• All Thumbs: Roger Ebert and the Decline of Film Criticism

At one end of the spectrum, there are critics who approach movies as art — works to be studied, analyzed, debated and (most importantly) enjoyed, but ultimately to be judged the only way they can be: subjectively, with meanings and values unique to each individual viewer. These kinds of critics are easy to identify because they’re so few: Anthony Lane in the New Yorker, Stanley Kauffman in the New Republic, apparently the entire staff of Sight and Sound, and a debatable handful of others.

Ebert is, at heart, the other kind of critic, the kind that sees movies as products, like cell phones or refrigerators or spatulas. These critics consider it their responsibility not to inspire debate or thought, not to use their cinematic expertise to give the reader insight. Rather, they want to judge a film’s fitness for purchase, recommend that a moviegoer either should or should not spend his or her money on the product. These critics are easy to spot. Every newspaper has at least one. They use a lot of puns when they dislike a film. They usually employ a grading system — a letter grade if they want to seem really nuanced, a ten-star scale if they want to make only a passing nod to intelligence, four stars if they’re especially simple-minded. They’re the Rex Reeds, the Leonard Maltins, the (why, God, why?) Gene Shalits. But this end of the critical spectrum is owned by the man who more or less created it: Roger Ebert.

It may not be fair to blame Ebert completely for the dumbing down of American film criticism, but there’s really no better choice. Ebert gained national fame, of course, as one half of the iconic “Siskel and Ebert” tandem. His show with Gene Siskel (and a rotating lineup of critics following Siskel’s 1999 death from complications from surgery to treat a brain tumor) was first called Opening Soon at a Theater Near You, then Sneak Previews, then At the Movies, and over the years by various other names. It also station- and network-hopped, beginning on Chicago PBS affiliate WTTW and later becoming nationally syndicated, but always keeping its guiding light burning: the simplified, binary system of judgment that told the viewer, in plain terms, whether a given film was good or bad. Each film they reviewed was briefly discussed, its merits and faults tallied up along the lines of verisimilitude, emotional impact, and production values, and a final judgment was rendered: thumbs up or thumbs down. If you’re really interested in film analysis, the Siskel and Ebert approach, adopted by most mainstream critics, is about as interesting as a Consumer Reports dot chart.

The first incarnation of the show premiered in 1975, and it shares its birth year with another watershed event in American film history: the release of Jaws. Fairly or not, Jaws is often cited as the film that launched the age of the modern Hollywood blockbuster. Most of this has to do with the way in which the film was released and promoted, but its significance was greater than that: it marked the beginning of the end of New Hollywood, that golden, bizarre, wondrous period in Hollywood history when the artists actually ran the place and American film produced some its richest and most challenging works. Because no matter how much Jaws owes to its promotional innovations, it would never have succeeded to such a degree if it had been, say, Raging Bull or The Conversation. (From BoxOfficeMojo.com: lifetime gross of Raging Bull: about $23M; lifetime gross of Jaws: around $470M.) In other words, Jaws was a smash hit largely because eschewed the core principles of New Hollywood: challenging subject matter, a personal approach, a willingness to embrace the unhappy ending, the unlikable protagonist, the ambiguous meaning. New Hollywood films were still made after Jaws, of course; Raging Bull itself came along a full five years later, in 1980. But Raging Bull pretty much marked the end of the maverick period. By 1982, Heaven’s Gate had destroyed both Michael Cimino and United Artists, Francis Ford Coppola had destroyed himself with One From the Heart, Dennis Hopper was nearing the bottom of his seemingly bottomless personal and professional plunge, and E. T. the Extra Terrestrial topped the box office with $359.2M on its initial run. As it happens, 1982 was the same year that Siskel and Ebert walked away from their increasingly popular and now-syndicated show over a contract dispute with WTTW, leaving the backwater of the Chicago station and relaunching the show with mainstream media titan Tribune Entertainment. When it came to movies, commercialism and mass consumption were the business, and business was good.

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I couldn’t help but think of Ebert and his ilk recently when watching Paul Verhoeven’s generally despised 2000 sci-fi thriller Hollow Man. In the likely case you’ve forgotten about, or never even noticed the film, it’s another take on H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man. In this version, Dr. Sebastion Caine (Kevin Bacon) is the brilliant scientist, leading a military-funded team in their research to discover the means to make people invisible. He succeeds on a gorilla, and it isn’t long, of course, before he makes himself the first human test subject, goes mad with power, and tries to kill everyone who wants to stop him, including Linda McKay (Elisabeth Shue), his assistant and former girlfriend, Matthew Kensington (Josh Brolin), another team member and McKay’s current lover, and damn near every other character.

Let’s be clear: Hollow Man is not a good film. Ebert and Richard Roeper, reviewing it on At the Movies, gave it the dreaded two thumbs down. They both complained that it wasted its intriguing premise and excellent visual effects by reverting to slasher film predictability, and Ebert mocked it for being, I kid you not, unrealistic. Roeper, meanwhile, condescendingly called it a “B-movie.”

“It’s just a B-movie.” This is a put-down commonly used by pop movie critics, and it reveals most of what you need to know about them. After all, the same could be said not only of every movie Verhoeven has ever made, but of some of the greatest films in Hollywood history. Gun Crazy was a B-movie. Scarlet Street was a B-movie. Johnny Guitar, Psycho, Touch of Evil – all B-movies. The other thing those movies all have in common is that they’re brilliant, complex and thrillingly unique. The term B-movie relates more to a film’s budget and cast than anything else, and by criticizing a film because it’s a B-movie there’s a nonsensical implication that big budgets and all-star casts somehow guarantee quality. We can all think of several hundred contradictions to this idea without breaking a sweat. B-movies are often interesting and even great because the stakes are so low. Free from the scrutiny and micromagement that often comes with large budgets, the makers of B-movies sometimes create great things, because their movies can afford to be daring.

Back to Hollow Man: I have to agree with all Ebert’s and Roeper’s criticisms of the movie, and of course I’m not suggesting that critics ought not to have opinions; reviews would be pretty dull without a point of view. But what we lose with critics like Ebert is the opportunity to appreciate bad art, or found art, or more importantly, art that actually tries something, but simply fails. To put it another way, by beginning with the basic assumption that there’s a universal standard of quality in films, we lose the opportunity to discover surprising, rewarding, unique and even life-changing films — films that may not pass the thumb test, but hold small pleasures and significant moments of clarity, meaning and insight. We lose, for example, the dark undercurrents in Hollow Man, the question of whether people behave well because they’re moral creatures or simply because they don’t want to face the consequences of indulging their ids (“it’s amazing what you can do when you don’t have to look at yourself in the mirror,” Caine says at one point). We lose its beguiling examination of the male gaze, its idea that what cannot be seen has no meaning. None of these ideas are brought to any conclusion, which is why I would call the film a failure. But there’s value and pleasure to be found in what the film tries to do.

There will always be critics like Ebert, of course, because there will always be moviegoers for whom movies really are like cell phones or refrigerators or spatulas. These moviegoers just want to know, should they choose to see a certain movie, if they’ll be entertained. My mother-in-law is such a person. Assigned to watch Taxi Driver for a movie group she belongs to, she seemed flabbergasted that the movie even exists. What purpose could there be in making such a thing? she seemed wonder. Fair enough. If you don’t like to be uncomfortable at the movies, there are some movies you simply shouldn’t see.

It could be, too, that I overestimate what I think of as the Golden Age of American film criticism, the early-1960s-to-late-1970s — it’s no coincidence that this coincides roughly with the New Hollywood era — when people like Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris led what I (probably romantically) imagine as a sort of national conversation about film. Their work was as challenging as the films themselves, rich and informed and intellectually alive. Ebert has outlasted them all, and seems like one of those figures who gains respect not because he’s the most talented or accomplished, but by virtue of having stuck around the longest, like LL Cool J or Lou Piniella. There’s a lot to be said for longevity. And lest you think Ebert might use his position to elevate the collective critical approach, you should know that he recently announced his intentions to relaunch his movie reviewing show early next year on WTTW, now to be called Roger Ebert Presents At the Movies and hosted by Christy Lemire and the increasingly Ebertian Elvis Mitchell. What will the show be like? Ebert, who’s co-producing it with his wife, will of course retain the Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down format (which his blog says is copyright; of course it’s copyrighted), which all but ensures that it won’t be able to tell you much about the movies it reviews, besides whether they’re good or bad. Which, all in all, seems like about the least important thing to know.

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