Watching for the MAGIC
Professional moviegoer reflects on why some films connect while others unplug
There were only a couple of people in the theater when we went to see Bad Santa 2 the day before Thanksgiving. And maybe that’s what the film deserves — I was happy not to have to review it, for if I had I would have probably concentrated on its narrative laziness and the odd sense I received that Billy Bob Thornton and Kathy Bates somehow knew they were trapped in a movie far beneath their superlative talents and were simply trying to amuse each other.
But I don’t have to write that review — I don’t have to think anything else about Bad Santa 2 if I don’t want to. I still admire Thornton — an actor who seems simply incapable of being false onscreen — and Bates, and I don’t hold the misbegotten movie against any of the filmmakers. It cost me a couple of hours and the price of the ticket. I laughed at some inappropriate jokes. I experienced the movie like most people probably experience most movies.
And maybe there is value in that. Anyone who sees a lot of movies is more likely to be more discriminating than people who see only a few — I understand that my personal taste is shaped by my experience. I don’t enjoy most of the event movies that draw a lot of people to the theaters for reasons that have more to do with cultural and social engagement than experiencing the sort of self-for-
getting that real art (and the best movies) can provide, but I understand why people go to them. They’re looking for what they might call escape, a release from their everyday routines and schedules. A movie is a chance to sit in the dark with a date, to eat popcorn, to be involved with something other than your particular troubles.
I’m not immune to the lures of silly superhero movies and lowbrow comedies. I get them and appreciate them if they’re able to surprise me and be genuinely affecting and/or funny. I didn’t hate Sausage Party with the heat of a thousand white-hot suns; I found it amusingly vulgar.
But I’m glad I didn’t review that one either.
My biggest problem with most popular movies is that I’ve come to believe that weekend after weekend of explosions and bodily function gags wears on your sensibility. I honestly think watching nothing but junk week after week, night after night changes the way we perceive the world. We start to believe that this is what movies are — cynical overt attempts to manipulate our emotions, to shock our core puritan sensibilities and stir us with sensational visuals. Most popular cinema these days is engineered to cast as broad a demographic net as possible. These days, if you’re making a superhero movie, you have to think about how it will, or will not, be received in China.
I believe we’ve been trained to receive movies less as a way of telling stories than as sensation delivery devices, that an awful lot of us no longer recognize cinema’s potential for telling the truth about the human condition.
I think that’s made us coarser, less perceptive people. I think it feeds a certain laziness and that the ramifications of this sort of soothing, narcotizing mass entertainment infect more than the ways we seek to occupy ourselves in those hours when we’re not actively trying to earn a living or secure a place in the world. I think they rob us of our capacity for sitting still and thinking about things — I think they tend to make us crave excitement and drama, to expect reality to be as blunt and parse-able as these common dreams.
It is commonplace to say that we go to the movies to escape boredom. But what so many movies seem to do is to normalize boredom; to give us the same simplistic tropes rearranged and prettied up again and again. How many times can we watch Jason Bourne embarrass his would-be assassins? How many times can we watch the computer-generated miracles? I suspect that after a while all of us become inured and desensitized, and that if we watch enough movies we eventually start to see around the sides of the production, to understand and take pleasure in the illusory nature of the dream. Eventually we start to experience a sort of lucid dreaming in the theater — we are very much aware that what we’re seeing onscreen is just a movie, and we disconnect ourselves from the putative hopes and dreams of the characters onscreen. We start to see Billy Bob Thornton and Kathy Bates, a little embarrassed but doing their best, instead of an estranged son reunited with his criminal mother to help her pull off one final, career-capping heist.
And so I love movies that make me forget I’m watching a movie; movies about plausible human beings leading plausible lives. Movies like Jeff Nichols’ Loving that focus on unique individuals who don’t possess superpowers but who have to find their way in a world that’s mostly indifferent to their plight.
And I realize that movies like this are not to everyone’s taste, that they don’t provide the sort of catharsis that a lot of people enjoy, that they don’t show them amazing, stunning pictures. And I guess that’s all right, I don’t think we ought to dismiss anyone else’s taste, I just think that all of us can develop an appreciation for the sublime if it’s offered to us often enough. There’s a humility in Loving — in all of Nichols’ work — that I think deserves our consideration. I love how often his movies revolve about the humiliation and perseverance of ordinary folk. And while I get how some people could dismiss this particular film as too quiet, and maybe even too polite, I empathetically disagree.
The way human beings court affection, the way our institutions can suppress our humanity — the themes of Loving are important themes, especially in the world in which we find ourselves. In important ways, I feel the movie is twinned with Scottish director David Mackenzie’s stunning modern western Hell or High Water. Chris Pine’s character in that film is, like Joel Edgerton’s in Loving, mistreated by authority; he responds in a very different, but still highly understandable way.
Superficially, these two movies — a bloody bank robber heist that plays with the conventions of genre films and a quiet love story about an interracial couple in pre-civil rights-era Virginia — might seem very different. But I love them both for similar reasons; because they presented me with characters I could believe and empathize with, who were very much like real people I know.
I don’t know any Jason Bournes; I only know silly men who think that they could be Jason Bourne given the right circumstances. And we all can be silly sometimes; it’s fun to be silly. But it’s dangerous to believe too much in the Jason Bourne/Jack Reacher paradigm. In the real world, people get hurt and bones are broken and only sociopaths aren’t bothered by the damage they have caused.
I don’t have any answer for people who say they go to the movies to avoid having to think — I’m not sure I understand the concept. My guess is that they just want to think about other things for a while, to root for recognizable good to triumph over unrepentant evil and to not have to work through the sort of moral calculus required by daily life. People are free to enjoy whatever they enjoy, but we shouldn’t pretend that there’s no consequences to consuming a diet of junk food.
One of the things you learn when you write about movies for 30 years is that people really enjoy pointing out that your opinion is just that. And that they can get very upset when you offer an opinion that doesn’t flatter their own — someone who thinks Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge is a wonderful, uplifting story about a nonviolent saint might be upset by a critic who points out that the movie seems to be more about the director’s ongoing obsession with the violent tearing of human flesh than the primacy of conscience.
But you call ’em as you see ’em and, honestly, try to allow the poor things a chance to work on your callused sensibilities. You have to try to hold yourself open to the possibilities of every film you see; you have to try to set aside your expectations and your knowledge of how business impinges on even the most independent of projects and actually watch the movie.
Because while magic is rare, it exists. And because you can’t catch it without watching. Watching hard.
And if you end up watching Billy Bob Thornton and Kathy Bates trying to keep each other awake, so be it.