If you want to make art, don’t give up your day job. There are weekend painters and writers who teach by day (or deliver the mail) and treasure the evenings for their own work. But movie takes pride in being all-consuming, and sometimes offers itself as more than life. And thus the dilemma of many independent filmmakers—by which I mean those who don’t know where the next film is coming from—can be very tough. Two of the most impressive films I have seen while writing this book are Winter’s Bone and The Arbor. You may not have seen them, or heard of them, but they’re worth talking about in the attempt to convey the life of a director, and I’m sure they were both done in the glorious if vain hope of reaching the masses.
Debra Granik, the director of Winter’s Bone, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1963. She attended Brandeis before taking an MFA in film production at New York University. She made her first feature, Down to the Bone, in 2004, and it won prizes at Sundance, and elsewhere, notably for the performance by Vera Farmiga as a young mother attempting to recover from cocaine addiction. It was well reviewed, but its tough subject and remorseless treatment had difficulty finding proper distribution in the United States. Like so many first films, it was made for very little, with dribs and drabs of money gathered over a long period. With a reported gross income of $20,000, it was just one of the worthwhile films that gain respect and admiration while bringing the filmmaker to bankruptcy. So that person has to ask herself, what do I really want to do?
It was six years before Granik was able to complete her second feature, Winter’s Bone, about a seventeen-year-old girl, Ree, who tries to look after her mother, brother, and sister in the rural Ozarks while searching for her father, who faces a court date. If he doesn’t make that date, the family risks losing its house. The story came from a novel being written by Daniel Woodrell (published in 2006). This picture cost around $2 million, and again the funding was raised over a long period of time, with many setbacks along the way. But the picture got “proper” American distribution, from Roadside Attractions, which placed it in fewer than a hundred theaters. Still, it was noticed. In New York magazine, David Edelstein wrote, “For all the horror, it’s the drive toward life, not the decay, that lingers in the mind. As a modern heroine, Ree Dolly has no peer, and Winter’s Bone is the year’s most stirring film.”
Its festival showings prompted foreign rights deals, and word of mouth (the essential backup to good reviews) brought in a gross income of around $12 million. Edelstein is correct in his judgment, but by “horror,” he means the tough lives and the hardships people must battle with, and he is alluding to the physical harshness of life in the locations all found in rural Missouri. Ree has terrible problems to face, but this is not a horror film. If it had been—if Ree had been threatened by a mad killer in that same rural setting, and if the film had been loaded up with blood and suspense—its commercial horizons might have altered. Granik wanted to make a film that observed life honestly and was fair to the novel. So she ended up with a slice of life that many potential viewers would find uncomfortable—whereas the unhindered slipping into another genre, that of a slasher movie, might have been as sensational a coup as The Blair Witch Project (budget $60,000; gross revenue $248 million).
The people behind Winter’s Bone were delighted with their success. Many who had worked on spec got a little money. The picture received four Oscar nominations: John Hawkes for Best Supporting Actor; Jennifer Lawrence for Best Actress; Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini for Best Adapted Screenplay; and for Best Picture itself. Those nominations did not lead to a win, but they must have helped enlarge the audience for the movie. Still, at the age of forty-nine, Debra Granik has not yet announced a next project. That doesn’t mean she lacks ideas or hopes, and her chances of fund-raising must be easier after Winter’s Bone’s impact. But it’s evident already that her commitment to difficult material and the honesty in dealing with it will not be easily shaken. Which doesn’t mean the temptations won’t be there for something that might be called “Blood on the Bone.”
Yet I am even more impressed by Clio Barnard’s film The Arbor, which opened in Britain in 2010. This is a tricky film to describe, but it is a study of the life, work, and aftermath of Andrea Dunbar who had a brief London career as a playwright before drinking herself to death in 1990. Dunbar came from Bradford, in the north of England, and from a street fancifully named the Arbor. The film includes actual footage of Dunbar, but the great body of it is a creative amalgam of sound interviews with her children and friends that are played out on-screen by actors who are “voicing” to the soundtrack rather in the way that in a musical the actors mime to the playback recording.
The layering takes getting used to, but its daring is to mingle Brechtian techniques with the raw emotion of the story that unfolds. In the Guardian in London, Peter Bradshaw said of it, “The effect is eerie and compelling: it merges the texture of fact and fiction. Her technique produces a hyper-real intensification of the pain in Dunbar’s art and her life, and the tragic story of how this pain was replicated, almost genetically, in the life of her daughter Lorraine.” The Arbor has found a form that digs into the disconcerting way film is both fact and fiction. For me it surpasses the defined but confined story of Winter’s Bone because its ambition is greater without any loss of emotion.
Clio Barnard was raised in Yorkshire and attended art school in Newcastle and Dundee before doing an advanced project at Britain’s National Film School. She was helped to make The Arbor by Artangel and the UK Film Council, and her picture cost close to £600,00. Artangel is a foundation that helps many different forms of art, and its beneficiaries have included Atom Egoyan, director Steve McQueen, Douglas Gordon, and John Berger. The Arbor received good reviews in Britain but did disappointing business: about £60,000 from fifteen theaters. An executive at Artangel says that the numbers were of “no interest at all.” The foundation is out to recognize artists, and Clio Barnard was one of four go-ahead projects out of a thousand applicants.
When The Arbor came to America, in 2011, though it won a prize at the Tribeca Film Festival (Best New Documentary Filmmaker, which is hardly an adequate description) and had some positive reviews, it did wretched business: its gross was a little over $20,000 on very few engagements.
The project took about four years, during which time Barnard taught film studies at the University of Kent and had a leave of absence. She wants to make other films, and is hopeful of getting money from the Film Fund. But the competition is intense. Artangel has a policy (which Barnard admires) of supporting no more than one project from any one person. And the UK Film Council was closed in March 2011, with many of its functions being passed over to the British Film Institute. This is local politics, you may say, but it is the situation that so many filmmakers face all over the world, and it is the pressure that weighs on them to do something more “commercial”—if they knew what that was. It’s hard enough to know what you want to do.
The most independent thing about any artistic venture is the wayward and lonely need that insists on doing it. Debra Granik and Clio Bernard may notice that they are a novelty in another way. In the age of Minnelli, from the 1940s through the ’60s and into the silver ’70s, it was so unusual to see a woman directing. They could edit, they could write scripts, they could be girl Fridays, and they could be beautiful. Some women worked cannily behind the scenes: Katharine Hepburn persuaded Louis B. Mayer to do The Philadelphia Story. Ida Lupino made a run of intriguing B pictures in the 1950s. In 1970 the actress Barbara Loden, then married to Elia Kazan, managed to make Wanda, on 16 mm, a fragile picture about a forlorn woman who tags along with a male criminal enterprise. It deserves to be a classic, but it took the risk of eliminating male romance—not just the way men might fall in love with women, but also the cultural climate in which men never question their own prowess and bravery. This cult is there in The Godfather (made in the age of alleged feminism), where the female characters have no larger function than having the male doors closed on the
ir anxious faces or being the hero’s sexual reward.
Barbara Loden died without making another film. Exceptional male careers have trailed away, too, when once the men might have been expected to work far longer. Brian De Palma, someone valued highly by Pauline Kael, has not in years matched the savage progression or cruel humor of Scarface. Bob Rafelson, Peter Bogdanovich, and William Friedkin, for various reasons, went into decline or withdrawal. Bob Fosse, Sam Peckinpah, and Hal Ashby died too young. Monte Hellman, Walter Hill, and Phil Kaufman made too few films. Paul Schrader, as well as being a bold and pioneering screenwriter (and a good critic), made American Gigolo (1980), Mishima (1985), and Auto Focus (2002), but has difficulty getting directing jobs now. Alan Rudolph has nearly retired—and retirement can be an honorable profession—leaving us to recall the wit and humor of The Moderns (1988, which is a better Paris dream than Woody Allen’s recent Midnight in Paris). Michael Cimino was never the same again after Heaven’s Gate, and is now a recluse who gathers more rumors than projects.
Coppola has not been his old self for decades, and George Lucas’s comeback felt drained of creative need. Billy Wilder spent many final years in his office with half a dozen Oscars and a row of unproduced scripts that no one would green-light because he was deemed “too old.” He was bitter and funny, still, and he was about the age of Clint Eastwood now. But youthfulness by then had invaded the executive class, and sometimes those new men (and women) were hard-pressed to believe that anyone that old might understand their world and its movies, even if the new vice presidents kept posters for Double Indemnity and Sunset Blvd. on their walls in homage.
So there’s all the more reason to respect the stamina of a few old men now (whether they like that label or not) who have soldiered on in difficult times. In 2011, Midnight in Paris proved the most commercially successful film Woody Allen had made and won an Oscar for Best Screenplay, which helped suggest that his core audience—urbane, urban, middle-aged liberals—had learned to live with their distaste when he photographed and then married the adopted daughter of his long-term companion, Mia Farrow. Or perhaps that constituency had just faded with the years.
“Woody” was seventy-six that year, and an institution as well as a chronic filmmaker: he seems uncomfortable without a project, and he has managed to find budgetary levels that work well enough, just as he has been locked into recycling his own anxious attitudes. (Despite his melancholy, he has ended up with a net worth around $40 million.) He is a film buff from the 1960s, yet he realizes how far that supportive audience has disappeared. Talking to Sight & Sound in 2011 about the “influence” of Preston Sturges and the Marx Brothers, he said:
I think those kinds of films are gone—they’re history. Films from that era and with that sophistication—Sturges, who you mentioned, and also I was a great fan of Ernst Lubitsch—they don’t resonate with most audiences in the United States. We have an audience—and it is an intelligent audience—that is more technological.
It’s true what Marshall McLuhan said—“the medium is the message”—and the technology is the message, so you see films that are, in a certain sense, not apparently about anything. They may have silly plots, and there’s not much of a story, but they are about a technology.
The same old whimsical anhedonia inspires his comedies, though sometimes “inspires” is a generous word. We should be grateful for a comic turn of mind in an age that has made its comedies increasingly coarse and juvenile. Yet I’m not sure Allen exactly believes in comedy as a response to life, rather than a wisecracking routine for holding attention and deflecting greater depth. Actors seem to like working for him, but he gives them little direction or challenge. He makes films about social groups, but his eye is uninterested in space or arrangement—indeed, he tends to convert his scripts into films with scant joy or fascination in the process. (The contrast with Altman is most pointed in this respect.)
Allen had a striking arrival where he was more given to slapstick and catching the sexual and satirical voice of the early 1970s: Bananas (1971), Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask (1972), and Sleeper (1973), culminating in Annie Hall (1977), the rare occasion where a player, Diane Keaton, brought unstrained charm to an Allen film. Then he made Interiors, a doomed imitation of Ingmar Bergman. Pauline Kael snapped that Interiors was “deep—on the surface.” Fair enough, but so were the comedies superficial, and Allen would surely have a wisecrack about the necessity of staying shallow if you’re not going to drown. There are some original and arresting films, such as Manhattan (1979), Stardust Memories (1980), Zelig (1983), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), and Radio Days (1987, blessed by not having Woody as an actor), which may be his finest work. And then the list goes on, as if Allen has been growing older but hardly changing. It’s an open question as to whether his pictures will last or seem more profound—something that has happened with some of the best American comics, from Buster Keaton to W. C. Fields. Those two seem to be broken but brave souls facing the abyss. Woody Allen only complains about that predicament, and declines to be a fictional person—he is there like his own brand image more than an actor or a character. He has never let us, or possibly himself, into his own heart, and when a man works so hard, that omission becomes disconcerting.
No one could charge Clint Eastwood with not changing, and he is another filmmaker compelled to work as if Hollywood still existed and were waiting patiently to enact his wishes. It is an extraordinary journey, worthy of Dreiser, and possibly more interesting than Eastwood’s films. Eastwood was born in San Francisco in 1930 and grew up middling poor, rather wild as the son of an itinerant father, but enjoying the good old movies. He did a spell of military service as a lifeguard, and it was his physique and his looks that got him into the Universal talent school.
He made a few movies in small parts and then won a regular role in the TV series Rawhide (1959–66), where he began to appreciate underplaying, and the prospect of directing. He went to Spain (for $15,000 and coach airfare) for the Italian director Sergio Leone and made the Dollars trilogy of films as the Man with No Name, iconic and superior to the point of camp, raffishly dressed and hysterically tight-lipped, but eventually these films gave him authority and stardom in America. (They now seem an early sign of the Esperanto of action films: very noisy, but like silent films in that so little of interest was said. And yet, that cheerful din gave us the two Terminator films, the best things James Cameron has done, and the divided soul of Arnold Schwarzenegger, a presenter of self in everyday life.)
By 1971, Eastwood had directed his first film, Play Misty for Me, an efficient suspense story that flirted with mocking his macho image. In the same year, for director Don Siegel (an important mentor), he made Dirty Harry, which helped introduce the loner or rogue cop with a taste for lengthy one-liners, though Harry owed something to Bullitt (1968) and Steve McQueen—two San Francisco cops and two actors born just weeks apart.
In the 1970s he made a franchise out of Dirty Harry, he did a couple of films with an orangutan, and a good Western with a lot of unexpected humor, The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), after he had fired Philip Kaufman as his director when Kaufman seemed not to share Eastwood’s preference for first-take shooting. There was growing interest in Eastwood and the journey he had made, but I’m not sure the public at large, or the critical community, yet rated him as too different from Sylvester Stallone (and Rocky was acclaimed years before Eastwood got prizes). So the flash-forward can be made very dramatically.
Eastwood has won Best Director and Best Picture Oscars for Unforgiven (1992) and Million Dollar Baby (2004). He has received the Irving Thalberg Award and the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award, and he is a member of the Légion d’Honneur. He was mayor of Carmel in California (without party affiliation), and he is probably among the most highly esteemed Americans alive now. President Obama, in giving him an arts and humanities award, said his films were “essays in individuality, hard truths and the essence of what it means to
be American.” Not even Eastwood would deny the care with which from the early 1980s he went about cultivating or rehabilitating his image (which does include having seven children by five different women). There is no crime in that, but the campaign for respect helps us understand the nature and determination of the man, and seldom fits with the outsider roles he played before the age of fifty.
So what is to be said about Eastwood the filmmaker? He is somewhere between a modest and a reluctant actor who understood Gary Cooper’s treasured economy, though he has rivaled it very seldom and never had access to Cooper’s inner anguish. As a director, he is at best efficient, economical, and quick. As an icon, he is often confused: Unforgiven is still talked about as an anti-Western, where men are mortal, flawed, and inept—until his character, Will Munny, reverts to being the angel of death (as if recalling Leone) at the end of the film and shoots down every enemy in sight. Eastwood has played heroic too many times, and entered into that aura so completely, that he lacks an edge of intelligent doubt that marks so many of the best directors. Still, as a director, he has made one outstanding film, Mystic River (2003, derived from a Dennis Lehane novel), where the quality of life penetrates recesses that the regular Eastwood hardly knows exist. The distance between Play Misty for Me and Mystic River is large enough to remind us how hard Eastwood studies. He can be earnest and dogged; there is even a hint in his recent years of Stanley Kramer in his appetite for important subjects. So, moving on from the orangutan, he has made films about Iwo Jima, Nelson Mandela, and J. Edgar Hoover under an increasing cloak of respectability.
But as a producer, he is without equal—and not just in his own time. He has worked independently a great deal. Even when he helped sustain Warner Bros. fiscally, he lived close to Carmel and had his own small world, Malpaso Productions, at the studio, along with his team, some of whom ended up being fired if they incurred his wrath. He made a fortune for himself and for his studios—his films are said to have grossed $1.68 billion domestically, and he is reported to have a net worth of $85 million. He has enabled several documentaries on jazz and popular music, and he has shown private generosity to people close to him. He is tough, limited yet aware of his limits, ambitious and cautious, practical and decision-oriented, and able to dress his essential conservatism in liberal language and gestures. He might have had a chance of running an old studio, or being president of the United States. But he has done something more than presidents can manage: he has continued to exist in that past where a movie star (or a leader) can be rich, honored, and beloved—trusted, even. It is not sensible to rate him as an artist, but his is exactly the type of career that old Hollywood wanted. There will never be anyone like him again.
The Big Screen - The Story of the Movies Page 60
