I spent the better part of last week’s column arguing that the dying film industry can’t foster new stars in its long twilight. A part of this is the factories shuttering their doors over the last six decades, favoring instead an ad hoc, diffuse world full of executive producers and union laborers that effectively work on a freelance basis with productions. Part of it is audiences retrained not to search for plot or performance, but instead specificity of detail (looking for plot holes rather than understanding genre expectation and subversion) and direct signifiers. This has led to the Marvel-era replacement of film stars with superheroes—no one goes to see a Chris Evans movie, but millions and millions turn out for the new Captain America. Because of this, action on screen has become more symbolic than emotional. That’s not to say symbolic action is unemotional in and of itself, I’d say it's the opposite—think about how affective the movement of a hand or stride and stop of feet is in Bresson’s films.
What I’m getting at is that this feeds directly back into the crisis of mise-en-scene, where audiences aren’t meant to extrapolate from anything that isn’t directly in front of them and immediately clear; Iron Man means a specific thing, as does Spider-Man, there isn’t anything ineffable behind their eyes, there’s nothing to learn from their internal lives: all we’re meant to glean from them is left on the surface. It’s what separates the current popular cinema from the historic. Take, for instance, Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) which has very basic inversions on archetypes—the sleazy gentleman, the kind outlaw, the drunken doctor, the hooker with a heart of gold—but it’s not merely those social reversals that make Stagecoach such a classic, it’s the poetry Ford finds between it all: it’s the silhouette of one character as the light spills around the hallway of another character looking on, it’s the glances, the moments of hesitation and the peering into the horizon. This is the cinema that’s largely lost, at least in the popular imagination of what contemporary movies are. There’s the image of these things, the brief bits of slow-motion dollies into a super-something as they look haggard and contemplative, but it's hollow: nothing more than TV-spot portraiture. It’s interstitial advertising material, meant to be seen in flashes on timelines or cut into fancams. These films don’t breathe.
This is why I’ve found comfort lately digging into the ditches and dregs of 1990s cinema—even the garbage has an authentic sense of rot and decay rather than plastics and preservatives. There’s less sheen, more grain.
My latest venture into the weird world of 90s film, that decade which the punks thought couldn’t get any worse and yet didn’t know that they were on top of the world, was with Nora Ephron’s Michael (1996), a film best-known for its off-putting poster of a close-up on John Travolta’s terrify Cheshire face. Ostensibly, Michael is about Travolta’s titular angel, a supposedly mythic presence yet a schlub when dropped into rural Iowa. Really, the beating heart of the movie is the trio of tabloid journalists sent by their editor Vartan Malt (played enthusiastically by the always great Bob Hoskins) from Chicago out to the sticks of middle America to see if this story about an angel on Earth is real. Over the course of the road trip back to Chicago, the decorated and disgraced journalist, Frank (William Hurt), and the young woman poised to take his spot at the magazine, Dorothy (Andie MacDowell), naturally start to fall for each other.
Much is made of Nora Ephron’s fixations on old Hollywood, like her penchant for referentiality feeding into her tightly textured approach to filming hyper-specific locals, but less is discussed of her actual directing. The scene where Hurt and MacDowell succumb to their feelings for each other is incredibly staged, letting the scene ebb and flow in a delicate wide shot as if she was channeling the spirit of Hawks and Lubitsch. It’s a long back-and-forth after a night of drinking at the honky-tonk adjacent to their motel in the middle of nowhere, with Hurt and MacDowell separated by a stairway banister. They shake each other’s hands a little too long, it’s the spill-over point for their emotions. They almost back away from each other but then ease in closer, they know they’re about to kiss but are afraid. They stumble offering each to come to the other’s room. The camera cranes, lightly following the pair up the stairs as they laugh about what they’re doing. They rush into the motel room, leaving the key dangling in the knob. A hand reaches back out of the dark and grabs it, we cut to the morning.
Long takes aren’t in short supply today, but they always come with a flashy caveat as they constantly try to bring attention to themselves, to prove a prowess. Even when mise-en-scene is artfully employed, it’s more in service of itself, to be talked about on social media. What we’ve largely lost is a style of direction that doesn’t wink and nudge. A style that, with deceptive simplicity, works not to make the film seem better but work better. Without that there’s no room for Hurt and MacDowell to act, and there’s no room for the next generation of them to exercise their chops either.