Random Thoughts on and around the Toronto Film Festival
2007; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoI have decided that the festival itself is 'no country for old men'. The constant rush and pressure, the lineups in which one waits for an hour to get a seat, the rush from theatre to theatre scattered over the city. I have learnt one lesson: avoid all the 'major works'. Easy to say in my position, where I don't have a deadline to worry about. Next year, if I'm still around, I shall choose entirely unknown films that no one has to line up for, and catch up with the big ones when they open commercially. Meanwhile ... 'America, America': 1. The Death of the Old West Oscar Wilde famously remarked that the United States is the only country that went directly from barbarism to decadence without any intervening period of civilization. An extreme reaction, perhaps, but with a certain credibility. It has long seemed to me that America's contribution to world culture lies not in its music (I can raise little excitement over Barber and Copland) or its literature (Henry James had to move to England to write his best novels) but in its cinema, and especially its period of glory roughly between the coming of sound and the coming of television: the heyday of Hawks, Ford and McCarey. But Ford made only two films that constructed a positive view of the new culture (Drums Along the Mohawk, which is also the bloodiest and most violent of all his westerns, and My Darling Clementine, with its celebrated unroofed church sequence that has no sequel subsequently in his work); he withdrew into the cavalry, defenders of a culture we never really get to see. Hawks' comedies are primarily dedicated to reducing the culture to ruins, and his adventure films are set as far from America as one could reasonably get. The heroes of Rio Bravo, to my mind the finest of all westerns, show remarkably little commitment to saving American civilization, which is reduced to a few occasional bystanders in long shot. They act primarily from a kind of primitive existentialism, a commitment to their own code of basic decency. Their enemy, however, is an equally primitive form of corporate capitalism and its paid gunmen. McCarey, alas, had his Catholicism to support him, but his best work (from Ruggles of Red Gap to Rally Round the Flag, Boys, via Make Way for Tomorrow) manifests a steady and ultimately devastating disillusionment with his country, Rally actually culminating in a clear wish-fulfilment fantasy that it had never existed. America's cinematic cultural history similarly culminates in No Country for Old Men (Cormac McCarthy's novel and its generally faithful adaptation by the Cohen Brothers). I've been puzzled by the film's (and book's) reviewers' apparent reluctance to take up the obvious reference to Yeats' poem (Sailing to Byzantium) (is it too obvious, perhaps?). The film's savage bitterness is surely summed up in its caustic irony: Yeats's 'no country for old men' is a celebration of youth ('... the young in one another's arms'), energy, and above all fertility ('the salmon falls, the mackerel-crowded seas'), contrasted with the film's world (the West today, with its twin wildernesses of prairie and city), gone sterile, ugly, brutal, meaningless. Its major villain is a kind of human robot who doesn't even appear to enjoy killing his victims--perhaps the ultimate form of alienation. Its hero is an old man who hasn't caught up with the times, remaining obsolete and effectually impotent. Is this the great film its been acclaimed as by practically every critic? I don't know. Certainly it's coherent and inexorable in its negativity. But it's a sorry state of affairs when negativity should become accepted as the intelligent reaction to the collapse of a culture. 2. The Death of the Family It's not that big a jump, in today's world, from the alienated cowboy to the alienated family. Margot at the Wedding and Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, are, respectively, a family comedy at which it's impossible to laugh and a family melodrama that verges, by its close, on the horror movie. …
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