The Rise of Anthony Lane
Andy and Pauline get laid
by John Powers
September 13 - 19, 2002

John Powers is angry and won't take it anymore: film critics have become commercial pap peddlers and are unwilling to struggle with art. At least, that's the impression he gives surveying the reception of Jean-Luc Godard's latest, In Praise of Love.

...In Praise of Love, one of Jean-Luc Godard's finest films in the last 35 years -- an exquisitely photographed meditation on love, memory, history, narcissism, Hollywood and the importance of resisting a culture that prefers lucrative images to life itself. Although this difficult film did get some positive notices, it was neglected by Time and Newsweek, chastised for being anti-American by The New York Times, dismissed by New York (wearily) and The New Yorker (suavely) for having no interest in characters, and given a "C" grade in Entertainment Weekly by a critic who wrote it off with the cocksure philistinism of Bill O'Reilly passing judgment on Finnegans Wake.

Mr. Powers complains about film critics who, finding themselves pushed into irrelevance by "articles on digital media or no-carb diets," have decided to lower their expectations and become the moviegoing equivalent of Consumer Reports.

...[Film critics] only want to review the big movies that are put in front of them. Terrified of appearing to care too much (which can get you fired), most critics have been cowed into aiming low.

A few weeks ago, a group of them showed up on Charlie Rose to anatomize the summer films. They spent their time serving up the sort of consumer-guide pap (The Bourne Identity is worth seeing! Attack of the Clones sucks!) that one associates with Roger Ebert's pudgy thumbs. Although I personally know them to be intelligent people, their discussion was so shockingly bereft of ideas that even Minority Report -- a film by the most popular artist in history -- couldn't provoke any discussion about, say, Spielberg's style or the meaning of his career. The show was mortifying...

And where does Anthony Lane fit in all this? Mr. Powers names him "our dominant film critic... Nobody says Lane is the best or most knowledgeable, but he's clearly the biggest star." Mr. Powers describes Mr. Lane's prowess is being "the critic that every magazine editor covets, the critic that Hollywood most enjoys reading, because even when he pans its films, he does it so divertingly that what he's actually saying barely registers." And therein lies the rub. "Caught up in the dazzling virtuosity of his leaps and twirls, he rarely breaks through the ice to see what might be swimming around in the chilly deep below; he never forces us to see a director in a brand-new way... very little is at stake in his work beyond the splendors of his own performance. Delight he always does, but can you imagine Anthony Lane ever getting anyone angry?"

...[Lane's] airy detachment from the medium makes him less the heir to [Pauline] Kael or [Andrew] Sarris (or the young Kenneth Tynan) than the fair-haired offspring of Clive James, whose supremely amusing TV columns for London's The Observer in the 1970s became the gold standard for writing entertainingly about pop-culture events that nobody gave a damn about. Like James, Lane is far more deeply engaged by books, but he's canny enough to know there's more glory and dough in writing about movies. Funnily enough, it says all you need to know about the state of film criticism, if not of filmmaking, that its hottest critic would probably be happier writing about Martin Chuzzlewit than about Martin Scorsese.

And who could blame him? When film critics have been cowed into submission by an angry letters-to-the-editor-writing readership complaining about reviews with "spoilers" (which are necessary to engage a whole movie's scope), it shines upon them no-one is reading them to find out anything but whether a movie is worth the price of admission.

Perhaps film critics should give up the whole gig and do their real criticism in obscure, quarterly journals, the kind that's directed to the academy as opposed to a general audience. Spanish songwriter Joaquín Sabina has said that he writes songs instead of poetry because these days "only poets read poetry." And it may well be that only film critics read film criticism.