San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Ask Mick LaSalle:
Bill Maher says reviews like “I Feel Pretty” aren’t reviews.
Dear Mick LaSalle: On “Real Time with Bill Maher,” the comedian was commenting on the ways that movie reviewers criticized Amy Schumer’s “I Feel Pretty” for what it is not, rather than what it is. He added that movie reviews “are not even reviews any more. They’re just ‘How come you made the movie you made and not the one I would have made?’ ” What is your reaction?
Ken Kirste, Sunnyvale
Dear Ken Kirste: He’s exaggerating for effect, and he’s being funny; but accounting for that, I’d say he’s right. Look, everybody is trying to do a good job, but people sometimes fall into patterns that are unproductive and not of much use to readers. And Maher’s monologue actually speaks to two big traps that critics can fall into if they’re not careful. To take the second example first, critics often make a mistake of talking about how something should have been written. But that kind of criticism has to be made very carefully, if not avoided altogether. Critics consider themselves writers, and so they think that they know what writers at the higher end of the art — movies, plays, books — are doing in their work, and often they don’t. And the solutions they offer are almost invariably things that the artist considered and rejected years ago, after careful consideration, because they didn’t work.
The other point Maher was making was about the influence of politics in criticism. This is not a new thing, of course. In the arts, politics has always been the last resort of the uninspired artist — and the first refuge of the uninsightful critic. Now without question, there is a place for relating a work of art to its cultural context. But it is wrong to assess a work of art’s quality on the basis of how well it comports to some outside set of moral and political values imposed by the critic. Everyone can recognize the ludicrousness of this, whenever we read a critic with either an extreme ideology or some point of view you just don’t expect to find in criticism. Imagine, for example, a conservative evangelical take on “Disobedience.” Except, let’s be fair: Conservative critics don’t do this. This is a failure of the left, almost exclusively.
Yet left or right, the practice is equally ridiculous. It assumes that the critic knows everything that’s good and right and moral and wonderful — and that civilization has advanced to the point where such things are completely known by nice people — and that a work of art’s value can therefore be assessed on the basis of how well the ideas contained in it advance the coming utopia, or at least reflect the critic’s refined sensibility.
But no, this is worse than ridiculous. This is all too easy, and it exalts non-thinking. It allows every review to become an effortless comparisoncontrast exercise, in which the artist’s inferred social and political leanings are compared with whatever the critic already thinks, and a grade is assigned on the basis of how well the two match up. A critic who works that way — and there are lots who do — can basically go an entire career without ever having to do any real observing or hard thinking. Can you see how that might be tempting to someone who has to generate a constant flow of opinions and arguments, four or five times a week, for years on end? Politics takes your feelings and disguises them as ideas, precooked and suitable for all occasions. And you get to feel high-minded in the process. All that makes it a tempting trap.
Hey Mick: TCM claims “The Swimmer” was one of Burt Lancaster’s top three films. Should I put a lock on the pool gate?
Patrick Fowler, San Francisco Hey Patrick: Interesting. I think that reflects the movie’s rise in recent years. With Lancaster, the top two are obvious — “Sweet Smell of Success” and “Elmer Gantry.” After that, everybody can have a big discussion: “Atlantic City,” “The Killers,” “From Here to Eternity,” “Birdman of Alcatraz,” “Seven Days in May.”
Have a question? Ask Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com. Include your name and city for publication, and a phone number for verification. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.