(originally
published in The Outreach Connection
in December 2008)
It’s
hard not to like Kevin Smith, the writer-director-sometime actor. He might cram
his movies with dirty talk, but you know he wouldn’t hurt a fly. I don’t recall
whether anyone ever held a gun in any of his films, but if they did, I’m sure
it came across as a toy store prop. Of all high-profile American filmmakers,
he’s probably the one working most consistently in the “write what you know”
vein. And it’s not even so aggravating that he doesn’t seem to know very much.
His cinema’s increasingly static quality seems to me an increasingly intriguing
touchstone, for those of us who find ourselves in a bemused, no-direction-home
middle age.
Kevin Smith
A
few years ago, Smith conspicuously announced he was done with the whole Jay and
Silent Bob thing, announcing Jersey Girl
as the demarcation of his new mature phase. That movie went nowhere, and he
soon retrenched to (and there’s an almost defiant quality to this unashamed
announcement of reversing fortune) Jay
and Silent Bob Strike Back. Embracing being stuck in reverse, he then went
back to his very first film, making Clerks
II. Like I say, it’s easy enough to enjoy this stuff. Especially I imagine
if you’re stuck in a dead end job, and the extent of your life’s ambition is to
buy up the dead end job, put up a
nicer sign, meet some strippers, marry a blue-collar princess, and develop a
good repertoire of scatological heckler’s retorts. And who among us, sometimes
at least, wouldn’t sign up for that?
His
new film Zack and Miri Make a Porno sounds like progress, no? Nah, don’t be fooled. Zack and Miri are
platonic best friends, sharing a rental, barely keeping afloat via their
dead-end jobs (here we go again), who devise a good idea to raise some dough –
make a porn movie, centering on their own first (business-only) coupling: they
figure the sales to people who knew them in school alone will get them into the
black. So they assemble a posse of porn wanna-bes and away they go…except it’s
not so easy to make a porno, logistically nor, if you have unaddressed feelings
regarding your co-star, emotionally.
Zack and Miri
Many
people have commented on how Smith almost seems marginalized in his own movie
by the spirit of Judd Apatow, who’s taken out the lease on the slacker male
territory – Apatow’s frequent co-star Seth Rogan plays Zack. It’s especially
evident because Smith’s forte – his skill at making dialogue that evokes a
talking toilet (and yet never the same way twice!) - seems muted here. The porn
milieu provides some obvious scope for riffing on pop culture (of these
inventions, Star Whores is the only
repeatable one that comes to mind), but what really gets Smith’s creative motor
going – not for the first time – is gay sex. Even at the climactic moment of
Zack’s big declaration to Miri (if I spoiled the suspense for you there, you
definitely need to get out more), he’s suddenly talking to someone else about a
male mutual pleasuring technique. It’s awfully tempting at times to see all
this as a massive exercise in displacement (especially since it always seems a
little odd to me how Smith casts his real-life wife, Jennifer, in horribly
unflattering roles).
But
even suggesting that much complexity and nuance tends to oversell the movie’s
merits. Smith has a good (if over-studied) feel for economically marginal
lifestyles, and he keeps things rattling efficiently along. But he’s never
learned a thing about camera language – a limitation that, again, almost starts
to seem defiant by now. Zack and Miri
is emotionally a little fuller than most of his films, in large part because of
Elizabeth Banks as Miri. But his attempt to turn the porn-makers into a plucky
community of the marginalized (as if in a threadbare homage to Boogie Nights) falls very flat, and I
cringed early on at how Smith whips up a painfully contrived monologue about
racial insensitivity.
So
why watch it, and why write about it even to the extent I have? Because, all
these reservations notwithstanding, Kevin Smith is interesting. Close on forty
now, he has it made by many measures, but you can’t imagine he either wants to
or would be allowed to keep making films in this mode. So I admit I’m intrigued
by the question – what will he do? In part because for all his lack of artistic
resonance, there’s a bit of me that says Smith’s answer to that question might
be relevant to my own. I mean, I’m not very much like him, but I have the same
uncertainty about how to evaluate the journey so far, how to take it from here.
I was thinking about porn too, but now I’ve dropped that idea.
Slumdog
Millionaire
Conventional wisdom suggests I should
have been writing instead about Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, this year’s winner of the Toronto festival
People’s Choice Award, viewed as a feel-good long-shot Oscar contender. Shot in
Mumbai by the director of Trainspotting
and Sunshine, it pivots on a lowly
call-centre employee on the verge of winning it all in the local Who Wants to be a Millionaire, for which
he’s hauled off to the cops under suspicion of cheating. Turns out the
questions all tied into key moments in his life – a life encompassing torture,
child exploitation, rampant crime, and all manner of misery. There’s more style
and imagination in any five minutes of this film than in all of Zach and Miri – it’s the product of
creative imaginations working as if at their limit.
But I just didn’t care for the film.
It’s a close cousin to the other festival triumph (and subsequent Oscar-winner)
Tsotsi – another movie that shows
something of the reality of life in a wretched time and place, but then zooms
in on one plucky protagonist, puts him through a string of implausible events,
and purports thereby to be illustrating something about that dreaded phrase
“the human spirit” (like Rocky, but
with more aesthetically bracing suffering).
Slumdog Millionaire is the
more egregious of the two – it’s massively contrived, and crammed full of cheap
villainy that might as well belong to any Hollywood B action movie. At the end
the population appears united in celebrating his triumph, but I find it hard to
enjoy seeing India’s grim reality used as an aesthetically zesty backdrop to a
story that says nothing about their prospects, or ours. Almost everyone likes
the movie, and I guess India itself (despite coming across as a bona fide
hellhole) would be grateful for the business, but I find the whole calculation
hard to trust. Sometimes, wild ambition and over-achieving energy are just
off-putting, even if you’re not a slacker.
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