My winter Lifequest class has started, which means I'm spending three hours every Friday morning on Zoom, talking with a virtual classroom full of smart and experienced people. Interesting conversations ensue.
Last week, during a discussion of Arthur Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde," led to us talking about how critics perceived the film. I talked about Bosley Crowther's tone-deaf dismissal of the film almost certainly cut short his career at The New York Times, and Pauline Kael's review in the New Yorker -- read it here, tinyurl.com/3lbk59r3, if you don't know it -- was important both for the movie's prospects and her own legend.
I went a little further, talking about how there is a certain style of film criticism I dislike -- the book report formula sort that lays out plot and technical specs like so many bullet points before concluding with a verdict, an up or down thumb -- one of the participants asked me what I thought of the work of the late Roger Ebert.
Now, it was probably just me, but I presumed that my questioner thought Ebert was precisely the sort of accessible critic I had in mind. He wasn't (though I did have a specific writer in mind, who was also widely syndicated at one point). I answered that I greatly admire Ebert, a man I came to know a few years before he died. But as good a critic as Roger was, and he was excellent, I like a lot of his other writing better than his day-to-day movie reviews. He wrote a lot of these reviews, he wrote them quickly on newspaper deadlines, and sometimes he -- as we all do -- made mistakes. He was better when he wrote longer form pieces. He was very good on subjects other than the movies.
(For the record, Ebert started off his review of "Bonnie and Clyde" by calling it "a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance" that was "also pitilessly cruel, filled with sympathy, nauseating, funny, heartbreaking, and astonishingly beautiful.")
Basically I was kind of stammering around, talking about how we all make misjudgments and how no one ever sees the same movie as anyone else, when I got a chat message from a member of the class who had known Ebert for many years. It said simply: "Roger was a kind man. He disliked giving anyone a bad review."
And I think that goes a long way toward explaining his work. Ebert was always honest with us, his audience, but he also rooted for the people who risked their time, money and self-esteem to make movies. Some critics relish panning films, and I understand that bad movies do allow critics a performative opportunity to crack wise. It's fun to make fun of a failed film, and in some ways it's easier to rip a movie than to try to understand it. And you can always fall back on the idea that if an artist does not connect for any reason, it's a failure of the artist. As Kurt Cobain sang, "Here we are, now entertain us."
It's not quite true that nobody sets out to make a bad movie.
Some people do. They make cynical calculations and build movies for people they disdain. They make movies that they themselves would never watch. These movies deserve to be set afire and mocked.
But it's hard to give a bad review to a movie like "Our Friend," which opened theatrically last week and is now available to stream in all the usual video-on-demand channels.
"Our Friend" is based on a true story about a mother and wife who died young. (Of ovarian cancer. Last week I wrote "stomach cancer," which I think I mis-remembered from reading the original magazine article on which the film was based a few years ago. That this is the sort of mistake that Roger Ebert also sometimes made is no excuse, it's still a mistake and I wish I'd double-checked it.)
I stand by my review. I didn't care for the film.
I can see why some people might, and I don't think anyone involved with the movie had bad intentions.
But after the review ran I read a New York Times story about the reception that "Our Friend" had received. Nicole Sperling interviewed Matthew Teague, who had written the essay the film was based on, about the death of his wife.
After the film screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019, Teague "felt nothing but love from that audience." But the early reviews were not good. Sperling writes:
"The Hollywood Reporter called it 'out of touch with the very emotions it desperately tries to evoke.' Variety took issue with turning his 'devastating essay' into an 'inspirational group hug.' In that review, critic Peter Debruge commended the actors' performances but wrote, 'So much of the unpleasantness has been scrubbed from the picture, until what remains is precisely the kind of dishonest, sanitized no-help-to-anyone TV-movie version of death that inspired Teague to set the record straight in the first place.'
"... Teague still bristles at this criticism. Despite spending years in newsrooms and understanding the role of critics, this particular critique rings as unfair.
"'I had just come from a room full of people who had never read the essay, didn't know anything about the essay and just took the movie on its own terms and found it to be very moving,' he said. 'So to have my own story used to beat up my own story was really painful.'"
I imagine it is painful.
And it is complicated. Had I not read Teague's essay before seeing the film, had I not perceived the story as a fictionalized version of a real story, I might have received it differently. (I don't think so, but we bring all our baggage to the movies and it's impossible to sort out what is of consequence and what isn't.)
And I know if I'd read Sperling's piece before seeing the film I would have thought about it differently.
Critics who think writing pans are fun are generally operating under the assumption that everyone in the industry is a grown up and anyone who offers their work for sale or rent is fair game. And they are.
But there are stories within stories. And I'm sorry "Our Friend" didn't work better for me.
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