Getting Artsy with Hollywood Storytelling

After viewing the recent crop of movies (specifically, The Master, Cloud Atlas, Anna Karenina, Life of Pi, Silver Linings Playbook, and Holy Motors), film critics, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott discuss the recent trend of these movies and others like it that dispense with traditional Hollywood narrative conventions of familiar plots and established genres to attempt a more interesting and personal kind of storytelling.

Each year we review movies that teasingly or didactically, successfully or not, dispatch with either the whole or part of the mainstream storytelling playbook: they don’t seem to have three (or four) well-defined acts or characters who seem particularly motivated. They (movies and characters both) drift along rather than shift into drive; in other words, they look a lot or a little bit like art films. This fall, though, within a couple of months, there have been more than a few such movies — some released by small companies like IFC Films and others by big studios like Warner Brothers — that, in different ways, appear to aspire more to the art house than the multiplex. I don’t think we are witnessing the emergence of a lasting break with the old, durable Hollywood ways, but we are seeing an exciting level of playfulness.

The critics are happy to see this kind of "playfulness" happening in Hollywood even if it isn't always successful.

I wonder where the line is — for audiences, and therefore for commercially calculating filmmakers — between excessively enigmatic and just enigmatic enough. “Cloud Atlas” is not what you’d call a mysterious movie, though it is a puzzle, in that you spend a certain amount of time working out the connections among the six stories and wondering about the significance of having certain actors reappear. But it is pretty well explained for you — much more overtly in the film than in David Mitchell’s book, which feels more elusive — and what you encounter isn’t difficulty but density, the sense (either pleasurable or annoying) of packed and layered meaning. The problem with the movie isn’t that there’s too much going on but that the abundance is often clumsily handled, so that it feels crowded and hectic rather than rich and fascinating. I wasn’t the biggest fan of “Inception,” partly because I wanted even more enigmatic excess, but it did achieve the kind of layering of action, theme and emotion that Andy and Lana Wachowski (along with Tom Tykwer) strive for in “Cloud Atlas” (and that the Wachowskis managed with greater success in “The Matrix”). 

The trend can be due in large part to filmmakers' willingness to acknowledge and pay homage to filmmakers of yore, even if audiences might not get it or care.

 Yet what all these new movies share — and what seems another component of the “mind-game film” — is that they are made by directors who have a self-aware relationship with film history and their status as auteurs. Being an auteur is essential to their identity (and, blech, brand) and to their relationship with their audiences, that have been taught to recognize that even the latest Batman movie carries a director’s credit, his stylistic signature and meanings that the dedicated can take to with pickaxes and endless blog postings.

In the old Hollywood system the movie machinery was supposed to be as invisible as the director, notwithstanding an Alfred Hitchcock cameo. There’s still a system in American cinema, however decentralized, and there are still anonymous hacks churning out artificially flavored studio sausages. Yet directors like Mr. Nolan, Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher, Spike Jonze and others are not just creating entertainments (although they do that), they are also working through layers of cinematic influence and history, having absorbed the examples of Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese and all who came before: Howard Hawks, Roger Corman, Jean-Luc Godard, Stan Brakhage, Frederick Wiseman. In this sense movies by directors like Mr. Nolan and the Wachowskis are also compendiums of film history, repositories of knowledge that can be shared with fans. When you watch a movie like “Inception,” you can either just enjoy the show or enter a portal leading to endless board discussions, blog entries, fan obsessiveness and tribal affinities.