Critics of Sincerity

In his early sixties, Clint Eastwood picked up his first Oscar nomination for Best Director with his 1992 film, Unforgiven. In his seventies he was nominated for Best Director on three occasions: 2003 for Mystic River; 2004 for Million Dollar Baby, which he won; and 2006 for Letters from Iwo Jima. In his eighties Eastwood is not relenting; his boldest film, Hereafter, about people who can communicate with the dead, is in theaters now, but predictably little is being said about it. Like the rest of us humans, critics are averse to mortality, so woe to the filmmaker who tries to deal with death sincerely.

Every now and again, filmmakers take risks. Rather than choosing a project that a director thinks has a reasonable chance to get financed, draw crowds, earn money for all involved, receive critical acclaim, and guarantee a better next contract, a filmmaker will choose to focus on a subject that will likely lead to the opposite. Financing may be difficult, critics will misunderstand the work, moviegoers will misunderstand the trailer and never see the movie, and any subsequent undertaking by the filmmaker will run further risk of being viewed by ‘the biz’ with skepticism.

When passionate filmmakers take risks, the end result is not always a movie that represents the pinnacle of technical proficiency or story structure. There will possibly be moments of incoherence, or pretension, which flummox and anger both viewers and critiques. Take Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, for example. “The film is either a masterpiece,” writes The Guardian’s Peter Bradshow, “or a massively dysfunctional act of self-indulgence and self-laceration.” “I’m here to tell you that although Synecdoche, New York has its moments of brilliance,” Sean Dwyer writes for the film reviews blog, Film Junk, “overall it is one of the most impenetrable and frustrating movies I have seen in a very long time.”

Before a single frame can be shot, a filmmaker has to persuade financiers, studios, and star talent to want to take part in the project by invoking genre names or calling upon precedents. For example, if a filmmaker wants to make a horror film that is set in the woods with non-professional actors, then in pitch meetings he or she will likely invoke the successes of The Blair Witch Project—$600,000 to make $250 million gross. Among other things, a successful movie pitch from the financer’s or studio’s point of view identifies the genre, the target demographic, and what the film is ‘about.’ Easier said than done, especially for an art film budgeted at tens of millions of dollars.

In 2000, writer and director Darren Aronofsky procured the needed $70 million to get a green light to make The Fountain. It wasn’t the commercial viability of the story or genre that attracted the investment. The film is genre-less, and the story treads on new territory. The Fountain is three interwoven stories, about two lovers, spanning one millennium, as they try and find a way to be together for eternity. The film found funding when it found a star. But just before shooting was to commence, Brad Pitt dropped the role, taking half of the movie’s budget with him. Set pieces were auctioned off as years of preparatory work were scrapped. The DVD extras of The Fountain includes a ‘making of’ video, which devotes a few minutes of material to the collapse of the first attempt at production. In a memorable scene, Aronofsky announces the news to his crew that they are being shut down. After an ensuing moment of somber silence, Aronofsky chimes back in: “Anybody need a hug?”

If anyone needed a hug though, it was Aronofsky. It is often said in filmmaking that a director is the loneliest person on the set. If the work fails, is shut down, or becomes burdened by seemingly unsolvable dilemmas, the actors will find other work, the crews will move-on, and the studios and investors will find a new movie in which to invest. Worse than bearing the brunt of the blame for a failed film, the director is now an artist with images trapped drifting in the mind, pruning, desperately waiting for a new outlet to open.

The greatest directors are those with such strong visions of their work that nothing can possibly come between them and their film. Few directors could have withstood the mayhem that Frances Ford Coppolla did in the making of Apocalypse Now. After striking out with every other major Hollywood studio, a largely unknown director named Peter Jackson convinced New Line Cinema to undertake one of the largest efforts in filmmaking history (8 years, $285 million) to make Tolkien’s trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. Everything that could have gone wrong went worse than wrong in the making of the film Fitzcarraldo, but director Werner Herzog would stop at nothing to complete his film. Herzog was interviewed periodically throughout the production by a documentarian and had this to say about the possibility of not finishing his movie. "If I abandon this project, I would be a man without dreams, and I never want to live like that. I live my life or I end my life with this project.”

Part of the art, and therefore part of the skill of an artist, is making the art happen. Whether or not Aronofsky was willing to die to make The Fountain is inconsequential. What matters is that when his actor and money went out the window he replaced them with a new script, less costly methods of production, and actors Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz. After six long years of making a film that was supposed to take two years, The Fountain” premiered at the Venice Film Festival. When the film ended and the credits rolled, the audience booed.

After director Robert Zemeckis brought us the beloved Back to the Future trilogy, he made a much bolder attempt at the Science Fiction genre by adapting a novel by Carl Sagan. Contact follows Dr. Eleanor Alloway, played by Jodie Foster, on an exploration into the possibility of the existence of intelligent alien life. Contact is a normal-enough Science Fiction movie until about three quarters of the way through the film, when Foster’s character finds out that her lack of faith in the divine disqualifies her as a suitable representative to meet and greet the extraterrestrials. The remainder of the film explores concepts of the afterlife, culminating in a ten-minute scene on an unknown planet between Jodie Foster and her dead father, played by a wonderfully Zen-like performance by David Morse (kudos to the casting on that one). Contact is now mostly a revered film, but it was initially met with very mixed reviews. “While the movie doesn’t qualify as an awful waste of space by any means,” wrote Dennis Howe in the Washington Post, “it has so many creative black holes, you’ll have to weigh the entertainment odds before making this journey.”

In 2001 Richard Kelly came out with his remarkable directorial debut about a teenage boy named Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) who learns from his dreams that he is able to see multiple dimensions and manipulate both space and time. Kelly packaged the movie into a high school satire, science fiction, horror, thriller, and drama, called Donnie Darko. But the reviews were not flattering. "Donnie Darko has plenty of problems,” writes Todd McCarthy in Variety, “But most stem from a young filmmaker over-swinging on his first time up to the plate and hitting a deep fly out rather than a home run. This overweaningly ambitious picture will be difficult to market.” Donnie Darko has since become a cult classic.

Hereafter, Clint Eastwood’s latest directing effort written by Peter Morgan, tracks the separate stories of three individuals whose lives will eventually intersect. One of our heroes is a French journalist (Cecile De France), another is a blue-collar American man (Matt Damon), and lastly an orphaned English boy (Frankie McLaren), but they are all united by a common thread: A special connection to the afterlife. Even if the movie were a disaster, Eastwood would still be due credit for the audaciousness of attempting a genuine film about death without hiding behind an inch of frivolous comedy, action, or sex. But the reviewers mostly disagree.

New Yorker film critic David Denby writes, “most of the movie is not about what the dead mean to the living; it’s about having nice little chats with ghosts, and neither Eastwood nor [screenwriter Peter] Morgan has the taste for such flamboyant stuff." Erik Childress at Cinematical called it “a unchallenging dullard.” Peter Sciretta at Slashfilm wrote that the movie ended with, “logically-laughable coincidences,” and noted that, “coincidences are bad storytelling.”

Though there are outliers, movie critics respond in predictable ways. When it comes to action movies, critics look for clever plot twists and innovative action sequences (Google: critical response to Inception). With drama and thriller films, critics tend to favor the movies with the highest levels of atrocity (Crash, Babel, Precious). But when it comes to films that make sincere efforts at grappling with something cosmic, unless the movie is science fiction, critics never like it. Roger Ebert seems to agree with this assessment. In his review of The Fountain he wrote, “The movie’s biggest aesthetic gamble: its earnestness.”

At the very least Hereafter is worth seeing if only to prompt a discussion with your buddy, date, self, or Mommy, about a topic people often like to avoid until it happens. Death. Though they are absolutely all must-sees in my opinion, Donnie Darko, Contact, and Hereafter are not flawless films, but as consumers or experiencers of art, if we do not allow artists some space for miss-steps, or even total failure, then we can’t complain when everything comes out looking, sounding, and feeling the same.

Having reached the age of 80 and continuing to direct damn good movies, if there is one man who has earned the right to direct from the heart, it is Clint Eastwood. And if there is one movie worth seeing right now it is Hereafter.

I will leave you with a portion of Roger Ebert’s review of The Fountain.

Yes, The Fountain overreaches on every level, and that's exactly what I like about it. Big subject, big canvas, big ambitions. A young director's ungainly and overwrought folly? By all means, in the sense that Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia" or Gus Van Sant's "My Own Private Idaho" or Martin Scorsese's "New York, New York" or Bernardo Bertolucci's "1900" are follies.

They're all bold attempts -- some more successful than others -- by passionate young filmmakers in their late 20s to mid-30s to sum up their own sensibilities and experience, to cram just about everything they know and feel, about life and about movies, on the screen at once.

That doesn't make for smooth, comfortable viewing, but I'd much rather watch somebody shoot for the moon when the stakes are sky-high than sit back while they play it safe.