ASK MICK LASALLE
Dear Mr. LaSalle: I was interested in your comment about the classics: “They stay the same, and we grow into them.” Are there others you had to grow into? Or are there movies that you think will become classics as people come to understand and grow into them?
Barbara Heninger Los Altos Dear Ms. Heninger: Movies that are great tend to be great from a variety of angles, and so you can see them at 15 and see some things, and then see them again at 50 and see other things. They don’t necessarily get better, because they’re as good as they can be from the start, but they expand. And though you can say this about almost any great movie, the ones that change most are ones that deal with a particular stage of life. “Before Sunrise” meant something to 23-year-olds in 1995, but it’s going to mean something different to them 20 years from now. As for classics that people need to grow into, they tend to be small-scale works of art that capture their time so completely that nobody even notices that they did it until the times change. “The Great Gatsby” is the classic example of that in literature. I think “Lady of the Night” (1925), “The Voice of the Turtle” (1947) and “Before Sunrise” (1995) are examples of that in movies. Dear Mick: I was glad to see that “Knight of Cups” remains your No. 1 film of the year, but I’ve been disappointed with the critical dismissal it has received from most critics. The film is clearly a serious and passionate work, but a number of critics can’t seem to look beyond the “Hollywood satire” angle.
Juzo Greenwood, Berkeley Dear Juzo: Film is an art of surfaces, and so I find filmmakers who can convey internal states through pictures to be the most interesting: Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson, Jacques Rivette ... and Terrence Malick. In the case of Malick, I seem to understand what he’s doing in a visceral and spontaneous way. It’s not anything I’m doing. I’m just able to receive it. But I also understand that not everyone is looking for that kind of experience, so his appeal is going to be limited. If Clint Eastwood is like Hemingway, Malick is like James Joyce. Hemingway and Joyce were both great writers, but Hemingway is always going to have more readers, because most people don’t want what Joyce is selling. Hence, it’s OK for regular viewers not to recognize the achievement of “Knight of Cups,” because people like what they like, and they reflexively think that whatever they like is good and whatever they don’t is bad. But critics don’t have an excuse. Critics aren’t obligated to like anything, but critics should understand what they’re looking at, or at least try. To review “Knight of Cups” as a failed satire would be like reviewing “Ulysses” and complaining that it wasn’t “The Killers.” It reveals either a misunderstanding or, worse, an intentional refusal to engage with the work on its own terms. Hello Mick the Man: In the recent bio-drama “Churchill’s Secret,” the most poignant scenes are not between Winston and his wife but between him and his young nurse, Millie. What may be seen as a problem is that Millie is a fictional character. I consider this distortion of biographical facts to be unacceptable. Do you agree?
Robert Campbell, San Francisco Hello Robert the Man: Well, there is no rule about this, and I wouldn’t give a movie a bad review on that basis. But sure, I agree with you. I don’t like it, either. As Churchill himself once put it, his life was long and “not entirely uneventful.” One would think they could find an interesting story to tell, and an interesting way of telling it, without resorting to a complete fiction. Perhaps I’m just not understanding the inspiration here — the impulse to do a story about Winston Churchill but have it not be true. Maybe we’re both missing something.