Newman

Paul Newman has died, and, with him, I think one of the very last of the Sixties rebels of classical Hollywood cinema. Sure, we still have some rebels around (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper and Terence Stamp and Malcolm MacDowell and some others are still kicking, but they're really more of the '70s generation and are generally consistently making shit--check out the trailer for the television version of Crash, starring Hopper, and you'll see what I mean...), but Newman was the last of the truly iconic rebels of film in that period. He was every bit as much to '60s filmmaking what Brando was to the '50s and what Nicholson was to the '70s: and we know all to well what happened to Brando as he aged, and Jack is perfectly content to make crap like The Bucket List, totally complacent with his star persona, leaving us to ask (as his last decent character did), "What if this is as good as it gets?"

Walter Chaw over at Film Freak Central has an excellent appreciation of Newman which isolates what was so great about him as an actor:

Paul Newman’s death is shaking. I was more personally traumatized by the death of Roy Scheider, though, and I think that it has a lot to do with my not understanding Newman until I got a little older and got ahold of Hud and The Hustler and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - all those movies where he played fags and rapists and long-time losers that facilitate their girlfriend’s rape and suicide. Hardly matinee idol stuff, but that was Newman, right? One of the two or three most beautiful people to ever flicker on that luminous scrim and choosing to play assholes and miscreants (Cool Hand Luke, Hombre, and his Lew Archer and on and on and on) – that’s integrity. His films are the tumult and displacement of the sixties; he’s the sixties. Forget about bullshit like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting - Newman was fucking steel, man, the s’truth unfiltered.

Got it nailed for Newman as an actor: I think it even holds for his later work. Even if The Road to Perdition is a little too sanctimonious for its own good, Newman exerts a kind of rakish charm that melds so perfectly with the world-weary cynicism his character embodies.

Great performance, but even greater when we consider that (at least in his public persona) Newman never seemed to succumb to that kind of cynicism himself. As many of his rebellious compatriots of '60s radicalism steadily settled into a compromise with the status quo, we saw as Newman transformed his image as the screen's favorite "assholes and miscreants" into someone who was too world-weary not to try to save the world in some small way (and, seriously, hundreds of millions of dollars donated to charity through his Newman's Own line is not exactly "some small way"). It's the perfect melding of an antiheroic politics of representation with a quietly and casually heroic politics of giving.

Roger Ebert (to whom I'm warming up--I think losing the ability to speak has somehow given him a different and interesting new perspective on how to mourn what the media do in our culture, but that's a different post altogether) writes about Newman as a star persona:

We linger on such moments because movie stars are important to us. They represent an ideal form we are deluded to think exists inside of us. Paul Newman seemed to represent the best of what we could hope for. He was handsome, yes. He had those blue eyes, yes. Helpful in making him a star, but inconsequential to his ultimate achievement. What he expressed above all was grace, and comfort within his own skin. If he had demons, he had faced them and dealt with them. Is this my fantasy? Of course. That's what movie stars represent, our fantasies. His wife, children and grandchildren knew him, and which of us would not hope to receive such a loving tribute after we're gone? ("Our father was a rare symbol of selfless humility, the last to acknowledge what he was doing was special. Intensely private, he quietly succeeded beyond measure in impacting the lives of so many with his generosity.")

What I've written about Newman's transformation across the screen from rebel with a cause to subdued defender of a cause is most certainly a fantasy, one to which I imagine many subscribe. I've grown cynical enough that this has become a very easily-deconstructible thing, but I'll let the last vestiges of my idealism shine through to mourn him a bit and check out some of those movies of his that I never saw (Hombre comes to mind).

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Incidentally, I've had a weird instinct to mourn lately in a manner that has never really been a part of my personality until now. David Foster Wallace was a young-ish writer with whose works I never got the chance to acquaint myself while he was alive, and now I'm tearing (slowly) through Infinite Jest.... There's sure to be a post about the work of mourning in culture coming up soon, but for now I have to perform that work myself in a more private manner.

10 Best Films of 2007: Overview

It's that time of year, when critics professional and amateur (or, as in this case, professional critics of a different stripe) chime in with passionate pleas for an "objective" look at the very best that cinema had to offer in the past year. Beyond a kind of preview of the awards season chaos to ensue shortly (if they aren't challenged by the writer's strike, that is), this is a strange effort to create a canon based on a quality that ultimately gets tallied and statistically weighed to give added weight to what are fundamentally subjective portraits of what represents a film of "quality." Just as many critics weigh in with half-hearted critiques of the ideology behind these lists each year as critics who weigh in with half-hearted attempts to justify that ideology on its own terms. Others, like Ted Pigeon, will comment on the social value that this kind of public forum on the nature of taste holds for us, and I tend to agree. Top ten lists aren't merely an effort at canonizing the "great films" of any given year: they are an effort to examine precisely those values that we label as canonical in any given year, and this is a politics of contemporary concerns that is too important to wave off in an ill-fated attempt to subvert the authority of the critical establishment.

Thus, in that spirit, I've cooked up a list in twelve volumes that will hopefully speak to those conerns that go into determining what we value and what we devalue this year. To start it off, I've provided a brief overview of those concerns below, an analysis of what critics at one time called the zeitgeist of our cinema before the term became passe for its univeralizing tendencies. I can only say that this analysis is far from comprehensive: these are just some trends that I've noticed in the movies I admired personally this year. The next eleven volumes will count down will count down what I felt were the most important and personally affecting movies this year, starting with a short list of great movies that don't fall within the traditional ten, and then moving up to the "best." In each individual review, I'll try to point out where I think the film fits (or doesn't fit) into the general political mood that cinema established this past year, hopefully giving the list the kind of complexity and attention to difference that tends to characterize some of the more interesting lists out there. So, without further ado:

The best (American, mostly--due more to my own viewing habits than to the films themselves) movies of 2007 were generally characterized by the kind of quiet, resigned melancholy that also characterized some of the best American cinema of the 1970s. Beyond a similarity in tone, the films from that decade have come back to us as some kind of cinematic return of the repressed: how else to explain why Andrew Dominik would mimic Once Upon a Time in the West, why Billy Ray and David Fincher would riff on All the President’s Men, Ben Affleck Chinatown, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo Dawn of the Dead, James Mangold The Wild Bunch, Paul Greengrass Three Days of the Condor, and even, in Judd Apatow’s aesthetic trade-off of drug-addled slackerism for yuppified neurosis, Annie Hall. That many of the actors in those classics have moved on to crap like Lions for Lambs, Scoop, and The Bucket List (while the rest are, sadly, dead) only shows how irrevocably lost that cinematic past is in today’s world even as we try to mine its paradoxically cynical hope once again.

The parallel with '70s cinema makes sense, though, when one considers how eerily familiar and yet completely alien are the socio-political climates in which the movies of today and those of yesteryear arose. Trapped in an unpopular war which has spawned protests at home and abroad and stuck with an unpopular president unwilling to lead us to some, any resolution, we’re once again struggling to find some form of comfort or answer to our problems, one that just doesn’t seem to be available to us through the standard political means. Filmmakers from the left have started to take notice, producing films like Rendition which at least appear so misguidedly reductive and self-satisfied that they only serve to remind everyone why the new New Left is failing to strike a popular chord in middle America today. In this context, with all of this public angst bubbling to a frustrated and disillusioned surface, it’s no surprise that some of the biggest popcorn entertainments of the year have either parodied the kinds of heroes we wish we could still appeal to in earnest (Ratatouille, Hot Fuzz, Stardust’s deliberate queering of heroism, Beowulf’s unintentional version of the same) or have posed some of the toughest ethical quandaries on film in recent memory (the latest Die Hard film, the latest Bourne movie, the latest Harry Potter, the latest zombie film, etc.). Perhaps this is also because they often resurrect characters or tropes born of different cinematic environments and place them in today’s screwed up world. And perhaps not coincidentally, it’s the task of the one non-English film on this list to literalize all of the thorny metaphors that articulate issues of power and control (that politics of the personal) to the dreamscape of the cinema, vividly imagining how the constant terrorist onslaught on our collective imaginary results in a very tangible hole at the center of our political life.

In this sense, astute observers may remember 2007’s cinema as a kind of hopeful postmortem of our murdered culture (notice how all of the top six films are actually about the failed investigations of some kind of crime). Filmmakers have echoed their own political situation and their own anxiety about the place of filmmaking in today’s world (with the ever-increasing rise of convergence technologies, the sudden awareness that the home market really determines the kinds of films that are made, and the ubiquity of the kind of pastiche-beyond-irony which characterizes the YouTube generation) both by going back to the well of great American cinema of the past and by turning their heroes into characters who are trapped by the past (not necessarily their own, either) and unable or unwilling to move into the kind of future that is forming before their eyes. The situation for these characters seems to be getting played out endlessly in our political discourse as well, in a coming election year whose only promise seems to be that we’re inevitably going to blow our chance for a fresh start once again. Our heroes this year (in politics as well as in characters like Ed Tom Bell in No Country, Patrick Kenzie in Gone Baby Gone, Robert Graysmith in Zodiac), in other words, are the latest version of what Nixon had termed “the silent majority,” mad as hell about the world but not mad enough not to take it anymore. Perhaps this is because, while the political scenarios abroad are so familiar, the wars taking place back home are no longer against poverty and institutionalized racism, but are, apparently, against abortion rights, gay marriage, and health care reform. The cultural landscape is vastly different, and, as a result, even some of our youngest heroes seem haggard and world-weary. At least we have Harry Potter (and, with any luck, at least a small percentage of his millions of young readers worldwide) growing into a genuine man of action.