Excellent review, Nate. We need more hard-nosed criticism like this online, criticism that expects more from the film world. I just saw Jindabyne and was thoroughly disappointed--it was at least as big a let down as last year's Little Children. A sign of the times. Most every "serious" film seems to feel the need to put across some sort of message, but when the director has only a muddied sense of cultural and societal values... well, the film just becomes painful.
But I thought Little Children struck a difficult mean between the flippantly "ironic" tone of Desperate Housewives and the smothering preachiness of American Beauty. Perhaps 8 years from now it will have aged as poorly as Beauty has, but I thought it refreshingly defied the expectations of snotty satire evoked by the opening scene.
Instead I found it surprisingly compassionate towards its targets and I found myself both sympathizing with and pitying each character. Admittedly it's been a year since I saw it but this is what I remember thinking at the time.
My trouble with films like Little Children is that the storytelling suffers from what John Gardner identifies as 1 of 3 authorial "faults of soul": frigidity. Gardner says this fault shows itself in storytelling when:
"...the author reveals by some slip or self-regarding intrusion that he is less concerned about his characters than he ought to be--less concerned, that is, than any decent human being observing the situation would naturally be."
That is to say that the storyteller is, in a way, emotionally stunted and unable to "enter deeply into the feelings" of his characters. When such a storyteller gets too close to uncomfortable emotional territory, instead of dealing honestly with it, he cuts up... he tells fart jokes, turns his cast of characters into a freak show, and he takes, say, the character addicted to internet porn and sticks a g-string over his face while he indulges the sin of Onan. Etc.
6 comments:
Wow, a well written review!
It took me a week to realize that your caption was also a link!
Thanks for your review, I was curious about this but I think I'll pass now as it sounds exploitative rather than an exposé sympathetic to victims.
Excellent review, Nate. We need more hard-nosed criticism like this online, criticism that expects more from the film world. I just saw Jindabyne and was thoroughly disappointed--it was at least as big a let down as last year's Little Children. A sign of the times. Most every "serious" film seems to feel the need to put across some sort of message, but when the director has only a muddied sense of cultural and societal values... well, the film just becomes painful.
Thanks to Mr. Walter for letting me know
But I thought Little Children struck a difficult mean between the flippantly "ironic" tone of Desperate Housewives and the smothering preachiness of American Beauty. Perhaps 8 years from now it will have aged as poorly as Beauty has, but I thought it refreshingly defied the expectations of snotty satire evoked by the opening scene.
Instead I found it surprisingly compassionate towards its targets and I found myself both sympathizing with and pitying each character. Admittedly it's been a year since I saw it but this is what I remember thinking at the time.
Whoops, my first sentence got cut off. I was just saying I'm glad I don't have to feel guilty for missing Jindabyne!
My trouble with films like Little Children is that the storytelling suffers from what John Gardner identifies as 1 of 3 authorial "faults of soul": frigidity. Gardner says this fault shows itself in storytelling when:
"...the author reveals by some slip or self-regarding intrusion that he is less concerned about his characters than he ought to be--less concerned, that is, than any decent human being observing the situation would naturally be."
That is to say that the storyteller is, in a way, emotionally stunted and unable to "enter deeply into the feelings" of his characters. When such a storyteller gets too close to uncomfortable emotional territory, instead of dealing honestly with it, he cuts up... he tells fart jokes, turns his cast of characters into a freak show, and he takes, say, the character addicted to internet porn and sticks a g-string over his face while he indulges the sin of Onan. Etc.
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