The Great Movies III

Soon after I returned home I turned to Bergman, who is a filmmaker for thoughtful moods. The new Criterion discs of his trilogy have been restored to an astonishing blackand-white beauty, and I fell into them. It's conventional to write of "his great cinematographer, Sven Nykvist," but my God, he is great, and I found myself trying to describe the perfection of his lighting. I responded strongly to Bergman's passion about fundamental questions of life and death, guilt, mortality, and what he regards as the silence of God. I'd seen all these films on first release, but at an older age, having walked through the valley, I saw them quite differently. Norman Cousins famously found during an illness that comedy helped heal him. For me, it was Bergman. In those months I wasn't finding many things funny.

Indeed, looking over the list, I'm surprised to see only four pure comedy entries, the Chuck Jones cartoons, My Man Godfrey, Chaplin's The Great Dictator, and Harold Lloyd's Safety Last. A good case can be made for The Scarlet Empress and Playtime. There are lots of smiles in The Bandwagon, My Fair Lady, Top Hat, and Thief of Bagdad, but you can't call them comedies. Groundhog Day is sort of a comedy, and sort of a profound exploration of why time makes it possible for us to connect with others.

For that matter, some of the funniest film scenes don't play as comedy at all. In my review of Toucbez Pas au Grisbi, I describe a scene where the Gabin character returns to his secret gangster's hideout, a room with a comfy charm, a phonograph, fresh clothes, and even guest pajamas. He has a voiceover, a monologue about his old pal who has stupidly made it necessary for him to go into hiding. He's angry but affectionate. Gabin mirrors his inner monologue with subtle body language. The scene has truth in it but is also funny, although no one in the audience laughs. There's that kind of comedy, too.

People often ask me, "Do you ever change your mind about a movie?" Hardly ever, although I may refine my opinion. Among the films here, I've changed on The Godfather: Part II and Blade Runner. My original review of Part II puts me in mind of the "brain cloud" that besets Tom Hanks in Joe versus the Volcano. I was simply wrong. In the case of Blade Runner, I think the director's cut by Ridley Scott simply plays much better.

I also turned around on Groundhog Day, which made it into this book when I belatedly caught on that it wasn't about the weatherman's predicament but about the nature of time and will. Perhaps when I first saw it I allowed myself to be distracted by Bill Murray's mainstream comedy reputation. But someone in film school somewhere is probably even now writing a thesis about how Murray's famous cameos represent an injection of his philosophy into those pictures. The cameos may be the subversive flowering of what he was trying to express more conventionally in The Razor's Edge, and what also underlies Groundhog Dog, a spiritual view of existence that helps give weight to the basically comic presentation.

I see another group of pictures here I'm fond of. the strange films. So many movies repeat the same tired formulas that I find myself grateful for one that does something unexpected and new, and does it well. Consider Leolo, Withnail and I, Exotica, and Jodorowsky's fevered Santa Sangre. The strangest of all is BelaTarr's Werckmeister Harmonies, although some readers may not be persuaded by my claim, "If you have not walked out after zo or 30 minutes, you will thereafter not be able to move from your seat."

A few other titles require mention. A Woman's Tale is a masterwork by the wrongly overlooked Australian director Paul Cox. Moolade is the last film by the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene, who I met at eightyone in the lobby of my small Cannes hotel, puffing contentedly on a Sherlock Holmes pipe. In this group I include the problematical Triumph of the Will. This is a movie I had been struggling with because it forced me to confront the ultimate question, "What is a great film, anyway?"

Then there is A Prairie Home Companion, which I believe, wrongly or not, Robert Altman may have made as a farewell of sorts. He died while I was in a coma, and my wife didn't tell me for two months. Rightly so. From the day I saw the premiere of MASH, Altman graced my personal cinema as an example of an exemplary filmmaker, a man whose life and films were in complete sympathy.

I ruffled some feathers after Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was released in 2oo9. It was so stupid it was almost criminal. Noting that some of its fans considered it one of the greatest films ever made, I suggested perhaps they were not "sufficiently evolved." Oh, did that make people angry. What snobbery! Who did I think I was?