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Atoning

Friday, 14th September 2007

OK, I feel thoroughly vindicated now, thanks to Stephen. Although I will say I'm glad I didn't walk out on the film, otherwise I'd have missed the chance to savour the spectacle of Vanessa Redgrave playing Herself, not for the first time. (A bit like "Al Pacino is Al Pacino..." You have to say that part in the deep, gruff voice of the coming attraction ads.)

Being able to walk out on bad films or plays is one of the little perks of being a grown-up. When you're in your twenties, and you have all the time in the world (and no baby-sitters running a meter) you don't mind wasting time on the latest over-praised rubbish. Once you get past thirty, you see things differently. I can remember many an evening at the Notting Hill Gate where I've ended up pacing up the foyer after forty minutes of art-house torment. (I couldn't go home because Mrs D is one of those saintly souls who hate leaving early.) No wonder the staff used to give me strange looks. And then there was the abysmal West End production of An Enemy of the People where I spent the last half-hour loitering at the back of the stalls, exchanging baffled looks with the ushers.

But why is it that so many films are a disappointment, and why do so many critics seem so over-indulgent? Andrew O'Hagan nailed the problem in an excellent piece written a couple of years ago after a brief and unhappy stint as a reviewer. I'm not sure the article is online any more, so I've lifted this part from my old blog. Sorry if you've read it before, but it really is the wisest thing I've ever read on why we keep getting let-down at the box office:

Critics are sometimes said to be as good as their period, and I'd like to be able to say that I took up my position during a great flowering of world cinema, that my term coincided with the weekly emergence of celluloid wonders guaranteed to set the old prose dancing like Nijinsky, but that was slightly more than far from the case. I have considered the matter quite closely - incorporating a recognition of every manner of deficiency, including my own - and still I have to conclude that I wrote about film during a period so fundamentally morose for the form that it makes me shudder to think about it. When I look back on my weekly diet of movies I almost pass out with misrecognition. Did I really sit down with a notepad and high hopes for so many of those films?

In short, most of the product is so bad that anything reasonably coherent is seized on like some long-lost Shakespeare manuscript. The movie PRs play their part in the charade, as you can imagine:

Packs of publicists would haul you to screenings in a diamond-encrusted sleigh if they surmised a film was about to be ignored or demoted, but it's a sorry life, and they would get their revenge, turning haughty as soon as they had a sure-fire hit on their hands. "What's your name again? No can do. You missed the screening? I'm sorry. I just can't do anything for you. What paper do you write for again? All the evening screenings are packed, I'm afraid..." That was their afternoon of glory and revenge; the next week, of course, they'd be back on the phone offering you back-rubs, saying they'd never worked on anything so powerfully moving as "Teen Pants 6".

There speaks a man who has peered into the heart of darkness. Something to bear in mind the next time you decide you must catch the latest "masterpiece".