WRB—Sept. 2025 Film Supplement

“I burn. I pine. I perish.”

I want the Washington Review of Books, I need the Washington Review of Books, oh baby oh baby.

Links:

• In The Sewanee Review, Matthew Zipf on Renata Adler’s film criticism:

  “House Critic” is a sharp essay, but not, Adler insists, a hatchet job. The terms in which writers have described her essay—the “demolition,” the “vivisection,” the “hatchet job,” the “autopsy report,” the “infamous evisceration,” the “legendary evisceration,” the “iconic evisceration,” the “8,000-word evisceration,” the “unforgettable and long-needed evisceration”—reproduce, even when the authors agree with Adler, some of the exact habits of mind that she was arguing against. Adler criticized Kael’s obsession with the body, her delight in blood and guts, her love, in fact, of the word “visceral.” These habits of mind, Adler wrote, have “proved contagious” in American writing, such that she struggled with them herself: “it becomes hard—even in reviewing Ms. Kael’s work—to write in any other Way.”

  But one can speak more plainly of Adler’s piece. If something is bad, and you show how it is bad, at great length and in great detail, then you have not done hatchet work. Adler was not out to chop just anything down. She was fair, in her way. These were, after all, Kael’s words.

  Long before the Kael piece, Adler had written one of her plainest, most definitive, and, I see now, possibly cruelest sentences: “I believe in quotes.”

  [“I believe in quotes” is a pithy version of “for by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.” And “visceral” really does deserve a place on the list of words writers use when they can’t be bothered to think of other better words, up there with WRB classics “luminous” and “vital.” I’d like to know which particular viscera are affected. Personally, I find that film has the greatest effect on my spleen, while my gallbladder is quite sensitive to poetry. —Steve]

• In The New Statesman, Tanjil Rashid interviews Whit Stillman:

  Stillman thinks similarly. “I love literary criticism,” he enthuses. “Samuel Johnson is my favorite writer.” Only one film other than his own—René Clair’s Under the Roofs of Paris (1930)—has been mentioned in our conversation. Otherwise, perhaps in keeping with his screenplays’ verbosity, he cites writers and literary critics, not auteurs and film theorists. Book reviews by Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy and Alfred Kazin find their way into the chatter of his films. “You really like Trilling?” Audrey asks. “I think he’s very strange.”

  Why is literary criticism so central to the vision of Stillman’s films? It recalls a time when the practice was not merely about art, but life itself, illuminating “the moral imagination,” Trilling writes, “inviting us to put our own motives under examination.” Stillman’s films do that. Their creator is a moralist, but not in the puritanical sense employed by Ellis; rather in the capacious sense of the so-called English moralists, the mainline of English literary criticism going back to Johnson. At Harvard, Stillman tells me, he’d studied under Johnson’s biographer, Walter Jackson Bate. “A lot of his theories and insights are with me to this day,” says Stillman. Importantly, Bate wrote that “the aim of art,” for Johnson, was “the moral enlargement of man.” This is the true meaning of Stillman the moralist: not one who judges narrow-mindedly, but mind-openingly.

  [The world of film criticism has a little bias towards writer-directors with the emphasis on writer—Billy Wilder, Éric Rohmer, Richard Linklater, Stillman, to name a few (to be clear, I like all these directors, at a minimum, and Rohmer might be my favorite director period)—simply because they are more like film critics, with all their words, than the average director, who for obvious reasons tends to have a more visual intelligence.

  I recently rewatched Ball of Fire (1941), which was directed by Howard Hawks from a script co-written by Billy Wilder, and then read something about it calling attention to the “Match Boogie” reprise of “Drum Boogie” and claiming (correctly, I think) that if Wilder had directed his own script it would not have been there. It doesn’t advance the plot, and it doesn’t reveal anything about any characters. It’s just there because it looks cool. Most directors are in the business of putting cool-looking things in their movies for their own sake; Billy Wilder thought of movies differently and so was not. —Steve]

• In Defector,

  Robert Rubsam
  on Kiyoshi Kurosawa:

  For Kurosawa, true escape—from social responsibility, self-knowledge, and moral consequence—is ultimately impossible. Though superficially a melodrama, the tone of Tokyo Sonata (2009) is much closer to a psychological thriller. He has compassion for his characters, but not empathy. Straitjacketed within their social and familial roles, the Sasakis can only express themselves through easily disproved lies and facial muscles that ripple during a nightmare. In the films of David Cronenberg, psychological evolution expresses itself through physical transformation, in all those grotesque appendages that externalize what has already changed below the surface. For Kurosawa’s characters, the mental and social strictures are simply too strong; no matter how deeply they have been transformed on the inside, they go on living their lives as if nothing has changed, incapable of articulating this shift in conscious or corporeal terms. Their professional identity, their familial role, even their private personality erect a containing wall around their deeply unstable self. But these protections become their own prison; whether the dam holds or collapses, no one survives. When it turns out that the pair’s adolescent son is a piano prodigy, the effect isn’t uplift but horror at the thought of a precocious genius suffocated by a family too insensate to recognize it.

• Alan Jacobs on Allan Dwan:

  He told Bogdanovich that when directors started taking seventeen weeks to make a picture that he would have made in seventeen days, that brought in the producers to manage everything. After that, no director was safe from studio interference. This reminds me of something Christopher Nolan said in his Desert Island Discs interview a few years ago: that right from the beginning of his career he made a particular point of bringing his movies in ahead of schedule and under budget because that was the only way to keep the studio execs away from his sets.

  Dwan’s stories are wonderful because they show what it was like for Hollywood to be invented. Nobody knew what they were doing. He tells about his days as a writer and scenario manager: he showed up at a shoot in Arizona only to discover that the director had disappeared and the actors were just sitting around. He called his bosses in Chicago to report what had happened, and they told him, “Well, you’re the director now.” He had no idea what a director did—but, with the help of the actors, he directed the movie. This happened in 1911. Dwan kept directing movies until 1961.

  [1911 was probably the perfect time for this to happen—just before they started making feature-length films in America, so Dwan’s job was to make something short. And they weren’t just inventing Hollywood; they were also inventing directing and editing. —Steve]

  • Clint Eastwood (who makes basically all of his films on time and under budget):

    The objective is to make everything sound like the first time it’s said, so the only thing I can do is try to pick it up the very first time it is said. So a lot of times I’ll do it that way. I know some people don’t like to do that. And if it doesn’t come out perfect the first time, you have to go onward and upward with it. But you’d be surprised with good performers how interesting something can be the first time they try it.

    [I appreciate the obvious annoyance at sometimes having to shoot more than one take. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In Sidecar (the NLR blog), Leo Robson reviews Eddington (2025):

  Eddington has things in common with Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing (1989)—that phrase is used—in which a conflict of perspectives in a tight-knight community boils over into violence, Falling Down (1993), Joel Schumacher’s thriller about a middle-aged man stressed-out to the point of murderous vigilantism, and The Simpsons Movie (2007), which traces the fallout after the people of Springfield are forced to live under a glass dome. But the closest precedent for the way things unfold is the work of Joel and Ethan Coen, both of whom are thanked in the end credits. Joe Ross is a confounding meld of Coen Brothers types. His sense of being out of step or out of his depth, recalls Ed in No Country for Old Men (2007), a sheriff in—neighboring—west Texas, and the Minnesotan physics teacher in A Serious Man (2009), who feels that reality is conspiring against him, except that Joe’s response is to fight back. At first he resembles Marge, the local policewoman in Fargo (1996)—a debt perhaps reflected in Aster’s town-name title—and even the Dude in The Big Lebowski (1998), sleepy and grunting, but he quickly mutates into Walter Sobchak, the Dude’s pal, who pulls out a pistol and asks, “Has the whole world gone crazy?” though the grievance in that case is the disregard of rules—crossing the foul line in a game of ten-pin bowling—not their arbitrary imposition.

  But while Eddington shares those films’ reluctance to reconcile competing visions of reality, or display a preference, its exit route is closer to despair than shrugging nihilism, less diminuendo than deus ex machina and reductio ad absurdum—not life going on in its pointless, baffling way but going to hell in a handcart. And whereas the Coen Brothers retreat from polemic, using their occasional freighted backdrops—the Gulf War in The Big Lebowski, Washington, D.C. in Burn after Reading (2008)—as a source of abstract concepts or allusive gags, Aster is genuinely engaged with America in the age of Twitter and Trump.

• Two in UnHerd:

  • Geoff Dyer reviews About Dry Grasses (2024):

    In other words, this was the opposite of being bored which means it was the opposite of watching action scenes which bore the living shit out of me. In The Whole Equation (2004), David Thomson writes that in the history of cinema no effect is “as momentous as shots of a face as its mind is being changed.” I’d push this a bit further and draw attention to the face that can’t make up its mind, that perhaps doesn’t know for sure what its owner is thinking, or that is taking pains to make sure that this process is concealed from the other participants in the scene but is somehow revealed to the audience so that the face on screen effectively holds up a mirror to our attempts to work out what we’re seeing, if we are capable of attending closely enough. That, it goes without saying, is worth attending to very closely. About Dry Grasses insists not only that we attend very closely, but that we do so over an uncomfortably extended period of time. As a result time, if you have a comfortable seat, flies by, almost.

  • Frederick Kaufman reviews Sunset Boulevard (1950):

    Wilder was particularly attuned to the moral dangers of narcissism, as his family had fled a European continent drenched in images of Adolf Hitler. He knew the hazards of personality cults, which echoed his native Jewish distrust of false idols. Yet in Hollywood, Wilder had made a living out of idol worship. His spiritual dilemma hearkened back to John Bunyan’s seventeenth-century allegorical novel, The Pilgrim’s Progress, in which characters named Christian and Faithful are drawn to a marketplace called Vanity Fair, which in many ways resembles Fifties Hollywood. Here, money and materialism override “lives, blood, bodies, souls”, so that the worth of an individual can only be measured through his or her commodification. While Faithful manages to escape, his companion Christian is burned at the stake.

    A similar fate awaits Gillis, as when the writer finally packs his bags and tries to save his soul by getting the hell out, Norma shoots him three times in the back. As the press crowds her living room, Desmond tips over the edge. Unable to comprehend that she is about to become a lurid headline, she can only interpret the attention as an increase of her power. “This is my life,” Norma says. “Just us. And the cameras.”

    [I was going to ask if we need to explain what The Pilgrim’s Progress is, but then I remembered that during a red-carpet interview a few years ago Hugh Grant described the Oscars as “Vanity Fair” and the interviewer thought he was talking about the afterparty put on by the magazine of that name. —Steve]

Reviews of books:

• In the local Post,

  becca rothfeld
  reviews a book about Humphrey Bogart and John Huston (Bogart and Huston: Their Lives, Their Adventures, and the Classic Movies They Made Together, by Nat Segaloff, August):

  Worst of all, Bogart and Huston leaves the central question untouched. What of their friendship? What light does it shed on their films? In truth, a perfunctory remark in Segaloff’s introduction just about sums it up: Bogart and Huston were “close friends who didn’t spend much time together between films.” Attempts at formulating a more daring thesis—much less one that has anything substantive to do with the films in question—remain unconvincing.

  And even if the book did treat us to enlightening or salacious disclosures about its principal characters’ friendship, what would they reveal? Could they make sense of the taut precision of The Maltese Falcon (1941) or the clenched tension of Key Largo (1948)? Could they tell us why The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) is a great movie and Across the Pacific (1942) is only a decent one? Criticism is the only way to penetrate the question of quality, but it is almost wholly absent from Bogart and Huston.

N.B.:

• An interview with Emma Thompson.

• An oral history of The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005). [I will continue to insist that it is one of the few movies from this century participating in the tradition of the great romantic comedies. —Steve]

• The Sound of Music (1965) was not popular in Austria when it came out—“the whole film must have felt to audiences there like a reminder that they had been on the wrong side of history.” [The Sound of Music is one of the five or so movies I hate the most—perhaps widespread exposure to it is responsible for the prevalence of type 2 diabetes in America?—and so it brings me no pleasure to report that other people dislike it for the wrong reasons. I simply stand with Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen when it comes to movie musicals:

  When asked to direct, Stanley Donen refused to have anything to do with it. When Lehman sounded out Gene Kelly about directing, he led his questioner to the door of his home and said, “Go find someone else to direct this piece of shit!”

  —Steve]

• China is making a lot of movies about the Second World War.

• Terence Stamp died on Sunday, August 17. R.I.P.

Movies across the decades:

Kiss Me, Kate (dir. George Sidney, 1953), 10 Things I Hate About You (dir. Gil Junger, 1999)