LITTLE ROCK — As a rule, I don’t read reviews of movies (or other works) that I intend to review myself before I write (and publish) my own pieces.
The reason for this ought to be obvious: It’s easy to be infected by the opinions of others, especially when they’re expressed eloquently.
One of the tricks of reviewing is to seem to capture the inchoate feelings of others who’ve seen the work; some of the best reviews seem to consolidate and name whatever art has stirred up in us. So if you read a lot and write a lot, it’s easy to mistake someone else’s deft turn of phrase for your own. You take credit for it, because you felt it.
Still, Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter is scheduled to open in Arkansas this week, and it has been hard for me to not read what others are saying about the movie. While not everybody loves it — it’s got a 94 percent positive rating at RottenTomatoes.com and a score of 85 on Metacritic (which is very good on their scale; on the scale we use in our MovieStyle section, 85 is average) — most of the critics I pay attention to are enthusiastic about it.
Roger Ebert calls it “a frightening thriller based not on special effects gimmicks but on a dread that seems quietly spreading in the land,” and in New York Magazine David Edelstein cites Nichols’ “genius for making landscapes and everyday objects resonate like crazy, for nailing the texture of dread.” Some reviews are more measured — the Conway-based critic Noel Murray, who writes for the Onion A.V. Club, likes the film but isn’t effusive and Mick LaSalle, the San Francisco Chronicle writer who’s another of my favorites, doesn’t seem to like the movie at all — but the consensus seems to be that Take Shelter is one of the year’s best films and a possible Oscar contender.
You don’t need me to tell you that.
Nichols, as you probably know, is a Little Rock product now based in Austin, Texas. Right now he’s busy shooting his third film — Mud — in eastern Arkansas. His first film, 2007’s Shotgun Stories, one of the best-reviewed movies of that year, was also shot in the state, mostly around England.
As it happened, I first saw Shotgun Stories in New York, when it was showing as part of the Tribeca Film Festival. It had already made a bit of a splash in Europe — it had a buzz. I prepared myself to be disappointed, because that is usually what happens when we hear wonderful things about a movie we’ve yet to see.
But I was simply astounded by what I saw on the screen. I’ve only felt a few times what I felt then — that I was watching something genuinely great, the product of a wonderfully wise and highly disciplined sensibility. In some ways Shotgun Stories seems an almost perfect movie — it tells its story with economy and it features a couple of preternaturally excellent performances, one by the highly professional Michael Shannon, who has gone on to do remarkable work in films and TV, and the other by Douglas Ligon, who — as far as I can tell — hasn’t acted since.
Anyway, another thing I don’t often do is go back and read my old reviews. Most of the time, I find it a little embarrassing. But, for the record, this is what I wrote about Shotgun Stories back in 2007:
Shotgun Stories is a great movie.
There’s no need to qualify that statement — to say it’s great considering its relatively small budget, or the fact it was filmed locally without movie stars. We don’t need to grant it any dispensations. There are a lot of very good movies this year, and Shotgun Stories is in the top tier of them, a cut above many obvious awards contenders. It might be the most affecting, a simple human story with the archetypal power of Greek myth. It feels like an American classic.
I wondered, when Shotgun Stories screened at the Little Rock Film Festival in June, if I’d still feel as strongly about it. I hadn’t seen it in a couple of years, and time has a way of moderating strong opinion. But I was mesmerized by Shotgun Stories all over again — I not only have no problem standing by the review; if anything I feel stronger than ever that Shotgun Stories is one of the best American movies of the past decade.
And it sort of scares me that I think Take Shelter is better. We might be present at the beginning of the career of a great filmmaker. That’s both exciting and a little scary to me.
I’ve just written the first draft of my review of Take Shelter (it will run where our movie reviews always run, in our newspaper’s Friday Movie-Style section). I’ll probably rewrite it a couple of times before I have to reluctantly give it over to the editors. They’ll make their improvements, and the thing will run and people will read it or not, and it’ll be electronically archived.
Whatever I say, however well or cruddily I say it, won’t have much impact on the fortunes of the movie. That’s sort of the deal when you work for a newspaper — you usually serve up your opinions hot, and even if they’re greedily devoured upon presentation, nobody thinks about them the next day.
And there’s freedom in that, because most people implicitly understand how the system works and they don’t hold you to a very high standard. I think a review is successful if it’s honest and says something — anything — interesting about the work under consideration. The bar is pretty low.
But I’d be lying if I pretended I didn’t really want these reviews to matter more than they do, if I claimed I didn’t see them as a species of performance, with aspirations to art. What I do is creative; it’s not — or at least it’s not meant to be — mortar to hold the advertising together. Though I see lots of hack work, I think everyone who expresses himself publicly has (or had) at least a secret hope of producing something fine — just because the world is filled with junk doesn’t mean that people aren’t trying to do good work.
And the saddest thing is maybe understanding that you’re incapable of producing the sort of art you deeply want to make.
So I’ll admit that I’m at least a little jealous of Jeff Nichols and people like him, who have, at a relatively young age, made full-blown works of art likely to outlive their makers. Not a lot jealous maybe, because I understand that there is plenty of recompense in doing what I do and that I don’t think I could live the long slow walking death of a moviemaker, but yeah, a little.
It is a fallacy to presume every critic is a failed artist, for criticism itself is a form. Pauline Kael overstated things somewhat when she suggested those who “think it is so easy to be a critic” and “so difficult to be a poet or painter ... try both” and “discover why there are so few critics, and so many poets” but I understand her point.
To be a genuine poet or transcendent painter is extraordinarily difficult, while anyone can turn in a book report. Good criticism is rare, and the market for it is extremely small, but the work is reward enough for those impelled to do it. It must be, otherwise no one would bother.
Personally, I do all sorts of things — some better than others. I aspire to do things as well as I can and I’m frustrated by those limitations I can’t convert to virtues. Sometimes when you look at something fine — something like Shotgun Stories or Lucinda Williams’ “Copenhagen” or one of Charles Portis’ novels — you feel a mix of envy and dissatisfaction with yourself that nearly (but not quite) extinguishes the joy of the experience. I’m not so good a person that I can help hating — at least a little — artists who do what I wish I could.
Writing “Eddie the Eunuch” wasn’t Kris Kristofferson’s finest hour, but there’s some truth in the bile: “Eddie makes a damn good living/ Puttin’ other people down/ Eddie can never forgive them, baby/ ’Cause he wasn’t born Jackson Browne.”
Yeah. It’s like that sometimes. Sit on it, Nichols.
E-mail:
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
Style, Pages 55 on 10/23/2011