Film 2

Today's contentious statement? That actors can ruin films; stars most of all. They're so very much there, aren't they? They're either barnstorming for your attention or they resemble a congealing lump. Warren Beatty's features, for example, are perfectly symmetrical and perfectly bland. In McCabe and Mrs Miller, he's meant to be a gunman: ornery and tough and weirdly innocent underneath. But all he is, really, is a pampered Californian. What he does is mumble, enunciate round a cigar and make disconnected gestures. Oh, and he has a great smile. Julie Christie, meanwhile, volunteered to lumber herself with a godawful mockney accent. And what this does, I think, is remind you that you're watching a film. This is fine, I suppose, in most films because most films are undemandingly artificial. Everything, even in a film as great as Taxi Driver, is in the service of the plot. You're being hustled along, even when you don't think that that's the case. But Altman is different. Watch a long enough sequence of shots and what you get is a film that seems to lope happily and unhurriedly from one place to another. There are scenes that are just there; the film seems to stop to examine something that has next-to-no bearing on the story. It's lovely, this, poetic and not. Then there's the overlapping dialogue, just like life, and the actors who don't seem to be acting at all. No. Altman should have been braver. He could have had Elliot Gould, but he decided that he wasn't bankable. Beatty and Christie take the film and they upend it; they turn it into something theatrical and false. And I don't care if Roger Ebert calls it "perfect" or that David Thomson writes that it's one of "the most beguiling films ever made in America". It isn't, and it's not.

You couldn't, meanwhile, call Scarface anything like beguiling. Brian de Palma's films are so bloody that, according to Martin Amis, his crew used to call him Brian de Plasma. Amis again:

"Scarface might as well have been called Shitface for all the subtlety he applied to... Tony Montana."

I'll come back to this but I do think it's fair to say that the film is absolutely fucking ridiculous. Listening to the soundtrack is like being mugged by a gang of synthesisers. De Palma said that he used "Hitchcock grammar" but what this often seems to amount to is the camera being shoved in someone's face while they get attacked. The script is basic, to say the least, but I did think, actually, that you can get a long way with swearing because it sounds like (no: it is) demotic language. It seems to provide life and colour until you realise that, actually, in this case, nothing's being said. It's pseudo-vivid. And the plot's the same: it lumbers along so clumsily that it needs a huge narrative push whenever it wants to move on to the next thing. It hit me, about two-thirds of the way through, that what we're getting, really, is a boy's eye view. There's no interest in emotion, just guns and coke and threat after threat after threat. Oh, and a climax that's so stupidly overblown that I was laughing out loud.

But Shitface? No. Because Scarface has Al Pacino, and you just have to compare The Godfather to Scarface to see what an astonishing actor Pacino is. In the former, his eyes appear so heavy by the end that you're surprised that his face is able to carry them. In the latter, they're like blowtorches. They burn up everything around them. He shows you every thought, and just because there aren't that many doesn't mean that his portrayal is particularly unsubtle. Michelle Pfeiffer's good, too. At first, she's just window dressing. Her part is so underwritten that she spends most of her time having to wear her dresses as convincingly as she can. But there's one scene, just after she's married Pacino, when she looks into the distance and she manages to seem abject and terrified and poised at the same time. That's quite a trick. It's a shame that so many of the other performers act like they're in a porn film or a Bruce Lee movie. No, it's rubbish. Big budget rubbish, but rubbish nonetheless, despite what a lot of critics say. I try not to care about the critics, and this leads me to the following question: How should we approach them? With the mental equivalent of tongs, I would suggest. When I disagree with an established film critic it can feel like something of an existential crisis. Have I been somehow watching in the wrong way? In which case, what is the right way and why won't they tell me? Item: Blue Velvet and David Thompson. This, by Adam Mars Jones, is a perfect summary of the film's central section:

"The arrival of the terrifying Frank is somehow linked to the collapse and hospitalisation of Jeffrey's gentle father. Frank is pure id, both brutally adult and infantile, insisting on playing the role of Dorothy's baby while he rapes her. Jeffrey watches from a hiding place in her wardrobe, but the hallowed theme of voyeurism is given a perverse twist, since she knows he is there. Her husband and son are being held hostage, so she must submit to Frank's assaults and also keep Jeffrey's existence secret. When this young man becomes her lover, she insists on a continuation of maltreatment. At first he resists then responds."

You're deep in the murk here, and the rape scene is made even worse by its wilful perversity. It's extremely shocking, which, aesthetically, is how it should be. But here, you see, right here, is the heart of what I think of as my critical dilemma. David Thompson writes that "I believe [the film] is... an allegory on sexual awakening, about innocence and peril, family ties and adulthood, such as no American film has achieved". If he's saying that it's very different, then, um, yes, quite. But if he's inferring that it's more successful then I think that's nonsense. How do you go from this particular scene to what Thompson wants the film to be about? I mean, you could; I can see how you could. But Mars-Jones is right. He says:

"Synthesis has no part to play in David Lynch's cosmos, and even this, his most tightly constructed screenplay, offers no resolution... The mutual attraction of innocence and damage seemed to be written deeply into the plot of the film, but it has evaporated before the final credits."

In other words, it can't meaningfully be about sexual awakening and all the rest of it because each section is essentially distinct. Not in terms of plot: everything has mingled quite alarmingly by the end. But, in terms of the lives shown here, nothing has a deep affect on anything else. The scenes of Jeffrey and his high school sweetheart are dopey and dorky and the scenes with Rosselini are dark and highly charged. But the dopiness and the dorkiness aren't affected. They seem to become more pronounced, if anything. In the end, Jeffrey has sloughed off his own experiences; he isn't implicated in any way. This is how a child sees: one thing and then another and then another – all sequence and no cause. In which case, it can't, surely, be an exploration of the things that Thompson talks about. So, yes, a great film. Intensely imagined. Brilliantly performed. But a callow one, I think. Perhaps worse than callow because the rape and mutilation are so very thoroughly imagined rather than felt.

Meanwhile, The Guardian says: "What Thompson does not know or feel about films is not worth knowing or feeling." It's a tough one, and I experience this dysjunction not only with Thompson but also with Roger Ebert and even with Pauline Kael. (You have to imagine me genuflecting here.) Is everything just a matter of taste? That seems to me to be defeatist nonsense. We all know, surely, that Blue Velvet is a better film than Dirty Dancing but why can't we agree on how it is? Thompson says that it "kept surrealism, hallucination, and 'experiment' in perfect balance with Americana" and I think he's almost right. But I think the Americana that we're presented with is itself a form of hallucination. Nothing is, quite, natural. A fire truck in slow motion is just a fire truck. But it's also, in Lynch's hands, a form of hyper-real expression. The young people in this film talk like they're reciting song lyrics. There's a profound lack of affect, and while that doesn't make it any the less a work of art it does preclude, I think, the emotions that Thompson seems to want to feel. I disagree with him. It makes me anxious, but I do. And here's where I think I've got to: his Blue Velvet is better than mine. But that's OK, because my Easy Rider is way better than his.