In the finale of the third season of Curb Your Enthusiasm – the season where Larry invests flailing efforts in an upstart restaurant – our socially awkward hero inadvertently breaks the thumbs of a curmudgeonly TV food critic whose trademarked rating systems (thumbs up/thumbs down) are based on those of the American film critic Rober Ebert. The critic gets his own back by suggesting to Larry a head-chef who suffers from Tourette’s Syndrome. This chef goes on to shame Larry and his co-restauranteurs by f-ing and cursing his way through opening service at their upscale restaurant. My thoughts often revert to this episode when I’m sifting through the UK film critics’ weekly reviews.
While most of the serious newspapers in Britain only permit their critics space for one or two longish notices each week, even their most articulate reviewers seldom seem willing to engage with the work at hand. Instead they seem better inclined to write with their thumbs (either up or down) rather than their full-four-fingered hands.
And so I found myself pleasantly surprised this morning on discovering that the art of film criticism is not entirely dead in the UK. The evidence: a raging row on the film pages of Britain’s most aesthetically pleasing paper, The Guardian.
The furore started a couple of weeks ago when their chief film critic, Peter Bradshaw slammed prettty much everything about the The Reader (with the exception of Kate Winslet’s Golden Globe winning performance) in his brutal one-star review. He was not alone. The film was similarly reviled in a number of indepth reviews as: an ethically troubled piece of ‘cynically calculated Oscar bait’ (Wendy Ide for The Times); guilty of priviledging ‘tastefulness over truthfulness’ (Anthony Quinn for The Independent); and, most scathingly, ‘high-gloss preposterousness’ (Mike McCahill for The Telegraph).
It fell on the inestimable Anthony Lane (whose critique Bradshaw’s closely echoed) to make the most sense when he questioned the purpose of making this very British ‘woefully polite’ take on a foreign horror. ‘Was there really noone from the fierce new wave of German film-making, prepared to dramatize the Schlink? Or did they feel, as I did, that it was pernicious from the start – a low-grade musing on atrocity, garnished with erotic titillation?’ he asked.
The man behind the adapatation of Bernard Schlink’s novel, the award-winning dramatist Sir David Hare, has taken umbrage at these critical notices and now joined the argument by sarcastically attacking Bradshaw’s review as being symptomatic of the critic’s sense of moral superioity. In retort Bradshaw refocussed his attack, accusing the film of biting off ‘more than it has any intention of chewing’, and concluding with the suggestion that some of Hare’s earlier work for the stage contained ‘power and subtlety [which] far exceeded the contrived mawkishness of The Reader.’
In reading all of this I was immediately reminded of Max von Sydow’s misanthropic statement in Hannah and Her Sisters (which itself echoes certain statements by another Hannah in her brilliant study of the nature of ‘evil’, 'Eichmann in Jerusalem'):
‘You missed a very dull TV show on Aushwitz. More gruesome film clips, and more puzzled intellectuals declaring their mystification over the systematic murder of millions. The reason they can never answer the question ‘How could it possibly happen?’ is that it’s the wrong question. Given what people are, the question is ‘Why doesn’t it happen more often?’
While I don’t have any desire to get involved in a Holocaust argument on these pages, this final question here could equally be asked of the current debate: Why do mainstream British film critics so rarely trigger this kind of heated discussion, why does this kind of debate not happen more often?
Is it because we British cinema-lovers are unwilling or too unsophisticated to engage on with a film on anything other than a totally superficial level? Or is it, as I suspect, because movie-goers and film-professionals have for too long allowed critics to use their thumbs and their tastes while analysing a film rather than their intellect and their wits?
SL
