THROUGH KAEL'S EYES : 'The Deep End,' 'Ghost World' & 'Fighter' - Review

Commonweal, Sept 28, 2001 by Rand Richards Cooper

Pauline Kael, New Yorker film critic from 1969 to 1991, died in September at the age of eighty-two. The day of her death I rented Nashville, a film she ardently boosted, and imagined her sitting in the theater, as she wrote in 1975, "smiling at the screen in complete happiness." Kael was famously opinionated--her reviews, charged Renata Adler in the New York Review of Books, contained "a protracted, obsessional invective"--but fans knew that her judgments issued from a delirious love of movies and movie-watching. "Without playfulness and the pleasure we take from it, art isn't art at all," Kael wrote in her famous 1969 Harper's essay, "Trash, Art, and the Movies." Her bad-girl vision of movie reviewing betrayed a mid-century notion that taking forthright pleasure in something was a challenge, while being "false to what we enjoy," either through morals or manners, was a constant temptation--especially for other critics.

Kael confounded highbrow/lowbrow distinctions (she loved Bergman and Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and changed American film criticism by making it much more personal. A movie was not a set of ideas, she insisted, but an experience, something that works on us. She blasted the kind of big Hollywood production, like A Man for All Seasons or Dances with Wolves, that makes "a genuflection to importance"; anything that smacked of high-minded solemnity--of teaching or preaching--aroused her scorn. "At the movies we want a different kind of truth," she wrote, "something that surprises us."

Here, then, a summer's-end trio of surprises that Kael, I think, would have liked.

The Deep End stars Tilda Swinton as a woman who mistakenly believes her teenage son has committed murder, and Goran Visnjic--Dr. Kovacs from NBC's "ER"--as the handsome blackmailer who thinks likewise. Directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel have given this classic noir setup (Max Ophuls's 1949 adaptation of the same Elizabeth Holding novel, The Reckless Moment, starred James Mason) an unlikely setting, amid the austere loveliness of a lakefront in the northern Nevada woods. This is daylight noir, and domestic too: even as Swinton calls her banker in a frantic attempt to raise $50,000, she's sorting laundry, and her frightened meeting with the blackmailer is interrupted by her daughter asking to be driven to ballet class.

The Deep End is full of beautifully composed shots, such as a time-lapse sequence of nightfall overtaking the upper window where Swinton's character sits smoking and worrying. The film is a study in blue: the water of the lake where a body is found; the neon of the bar where the son gets into trouble; a blue Corvette parked where it shouldn't be. It's hard to be this self-consciously lovely without seeming arty, but The Deep End pulls it off, thanks in large part to Tilda Swinton's bravura performance--her pinched, bug-eyed face conveys intelligence and a trapped desperation. This smart genre variation draws an immensely sympathetic performance from its star, and converts a sunny day into menace that comes, as it were, out of the blue.

Ghost World polishes another familiar genre, the coming-of-age movie, to a fine gleam of wit. Director Terry Zwigoff made the brilliant 1995 documentary study of the comic artist R. Crumb, and his new film is adapted from a comic-book novel by Daniel Clowes. Zwigoff is interested in how far eccentricity can inhabit the real world. In the case of Crumb, the answer was, barely; but Ghost World's Enid (Thora Birch, who played Kevin Spacey's daughter in American Beauty) is no genius, just an alienated seventeen-year-old who's graduating from high school with no clue about what comes next. She and her best friend, Rebecca, spend their days trading deadpan quips and sarcastic put-downs of classmates. In her room Enid has a backlit faux stained-glass panorama of waterfalls and woods, gaudy, like something in a bad restaurant. Zwigoff pegs the precocious adolescent's cult of irony, revealing, behind the retro and kitsch, a fantasy of authenticity, as well as a Holden Caulfield-like fear of the messy compromises of adult life.

Into this mix trips Seymour (Steve Buscemi), a fortyish nerd with one great obsession: record collecting. Seymour sells Enid a blues LP, and when she listens to the plaintive wail of "Devil Got My Woman" and observes Seymour's total absorption in the arcana of records, she begins a worshipful friendship. Ghost World confronts a teenager's dream of heroic outsiderdom with the reality of a loner for whom being different is not irony, but isolation. What Enid sees as Seymour's purity is to Seymour himself his tragedy--his habit of collapsing, for instance, into scholarly nattering when a sexy woman in a bar asks what music he likes. "I can't relate to 99 percent of humanity," he says to Enid in despair. "You think it's healthy to obsessively collect things?" And when Enid recommends finding someone who shares his interests, he bursts out: "I don't want to meet someone who shares my interests. I hate my interests!" The movie is worth that line alone.