On generosity in story-telling, and the Lubitsch Touch.

H & I watched "Trouble in Paradise" again the other day -- h's second, and my perhaps dozenth or twentieth, viewing. Although I remember all the jokes and can recite them along with the characters still in between viewings I always forget what an uproariously funny movie it is. We were watching it in the theater -- my first time since I first saw it, in 2003; h's first time full stop -- and it does make a difference to have the other people there. In my case it makes me nervous, because I usually start laughing before anyone else and feel foolish. And it is always interesting to hear what gets the biggest laughs (not always what I laugh hardest at, naturally). But the general benefit of having other people there is that it lets you see things through their eyes a bit -- through your knowledge that their eyes are watching, anyhow. That is why watching a favorite film with a respected and admired acquaintance who hasn't seen it is so nerve-wracking: because watching the other person watch verges on overwhelming watching. But with a friendly or anonymous crowd, it lets you see things you might have missed. Sometimes it lets you see a scene or hear a line as new. -- Incidentally, this is one of the underrated pleasures of "MST3K," too -- not just that they notice more details because they have watched the movie six times, but that they remark on different details because different things really are salient to them, because a string of scenes in which people look at hands adds up to something for them in a way it never would have for me on my own. And now -- on occasion -- it points to something outside itself to my eyes, too. This is why people repeat catch phrases; they represent the hollowed-out version of our wonder at the fact of shared, and more miraculous yet -- transferred or transmitted, experience.

Lubitsch never lost this wonder. His films are full of the details people absorb from other people, or details that they share without knowing it made marvelous by our knowledge that they share it. That's the meaning of Lily and Mariette (Miriam Hopkins and Kay Francis) separately waiting till a companion looks the other way to dunk a croissant into coffee. It's the meaning of the montages in which we see first Mariette and then Gaston (Herbert Marshall) responded to by an array of subordinates, and at least a part of the meaning of the (riotous) early scene in which the concierge mediatess between Italian-speaking police and English-only Filiba (Edward Everett Horton, whose absent-mindedly benevolent affect Lubitsch subverts both here and in "Trouble in Paradise"'s near-Siamese twin, "Design for Living"). There's a kind of trust offered the viewer here too: I'll show you their absurdities if you acknowledge how common they are; I'll show you their faults if you promise to forgive them. Even the smallest of characters are bathed in the director's gentleness and wonder and generosity: the butler (Robert Greig, recognizable nine years later as the butler in "The Lady Eve") whose mutters and eye-rolls summarize weeks of Mariette and Gaston's flirtation, the waiter who highlights how comical Gaston's grandiosity is by studiously taking down the order "moon ... in champagne ...," the maid whose single appearance is a five-second blushing "Maybe, M. Lavalle." They say it's because Lubitsch was an actor himself, and not so talented that he got beyond bit parts, that he made sure to distribute the fun a bit more widely than some others. Even the gondolier garbageman whose operatic solo opens the picture is Lubitsch telling us: look at us -- bringing beauty and grandiosity to the most ordinary, sordid tasks! Isn't it touching? But aren't we funny?

I've muddled it up by presenting two distinct kinds of generosity together. One, not so significant except for its link to the second, is formal: the generosity to let other people speak. Not just the camera, not just the script, and certainly not just the lead actors. (Lubitsch never has only one or two lead actors, either, that I can think of. Perhaps in "Bluebeard's Eighth Wife," which I can't remember well beyond the pajama scene at the very beginning? Or "Cluny Brown," which I haven't seen at all?) I always think of this as Chekhovian, because of the way Chekhov uses different perspectives to show that what moves us most can be invisible to others (think of the cut away to the little boys sneaking cigarettes in -- "The Lady with the Dog," perhaps?, and the famous shrinking of the central incident of "The Kiss" in the recounting to others), but also to show how we can learn to find the poignancy in small things. (Time to mention again that I hope to write more about Ozu some time ... )

The second generosity is substantive, and it's Chekhovian too. It's a way of interpreting the formal generosity, really: as a sign that they too are human beings, they are parties to meaning and sorrow beyond ours -- and they are party to ours not because we are so special but because of their own humanity. The idea of "the Lubitsch touch" must go back more than seven decades now. Billy Wilder is known to have kept a sign on his desk reading: "how would Lubitsch have done it?" (A sort of prophetic parody of those "WWJD?" bracelets, I like to think. Wilder was no slouch at empathy himself; forget that he wrote "Ninotchka," and forget the exceptional sensitivity in the face of opacity that defines "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes," and just remember that it is not a coincidence that one of his two best-known movies ends with the line: "Nobody's perfect!" Even a trifling light comedy like "Sabrina" includes the sublime moment when Audrey Hepburn is charmed by Humphrey Bogart's record of "Yes, We Have No Bananas," thinking it a sign of what she missed while away in Paris, rather than what she missed because she was not born yet when he went to college. What is that but an admission of the silliness of the storyline -- one intended to show how to take the story's silliness to the movie's advantage. "The Major and he Minor"'s nutty vista of dozens of teenaged schoolgirls at a dance with Veronica Lake haircuts is along the same lines: the absurdity of the plot can no longer be read as contemptible-pathetic, it has to be seen as touching-pathetic.) Anyway, critics have focussed on sophistication -- or, more crudely -- sex as the essence of the Lubitsch touch, but that's at best partly right. Part of the beauty of "Trouble in Paradise," and "Design for Living," too, comes from the acute awareness that sophistication without generosity and wit is worse than useless -- indeed, contemptible, if it allows us to think better of ourselves than we deserve; and that deChristianized sex is also a moral matter, not per se or because of special metaphysical properties of human genitalia but because of the special properties of human character; and that the proverb is wrong, that folly and forgiveness are both human, that we ought to expect both of the same people, that a fool who can forgive is still a fool, but wiser than one who can't forgive.

On the Rod Blagojevich of movies.

H & I watched "Troll 2" the other night. (We'd heard of it but not rented until receiving some inspiration.) "Troll 2" is not the worst movie I have ever seen. It's not the best bad movie or the most bad-good movie I've ever seen. (One wonders whether all those acolytes have also seen "Final Sacrifice?") But it was good. Enjoyed.

General spoiler alert, as if that really mattered.

The thing is that on a lot of counts it isn't bad at all. It was edited competently and (assuming that the weird decisions about where to put the camera and when to do close-ups were made by the director) filmed well enough, as well. It doesn't feature a terrifyingly perky, ambiguously-gendered corporate shill or a truck painted black, given teeth, and labelled "Megaweapon" [N.B.: Megaweapon is by FAR the best part of that movie] or sex scenes more upsetting than you'll find in Pasolini. It doesn't suddenly switch genres between, say, racing film, teen cool-crowd film, musical, murder mystery, and teen romance or even shift main characters between greedy questing truckers, in-feuding rock-and-rollers, and a boy and his E.T. knock-off. It wasn't ridiculously boring when it attempted to titillate or frighten. It doesn't abuse the authority of science. It has enough classic lines ("you don't piss on hospitality!") and utterly unexplained moments (the boys waking up in bed together shirtless??) to be enjoyable. But really what I liked was its undeniable auteurist provenance.

Let me explain my tastes and standards a little more clearly -- if only by way of further example.

I don't care about the silly goblin costumes. Better that than CGI that doesn't look like it's actually in the same space as the actors, or animation that flirts with the uncanny valley. Old high-tech special effects can be beautiful or poignant even when they look kind of amateur now. Sometimes they're even still extremely effective, or at least cool.

I don't care about the near-uniformly terrible acting. (Exception: the creepy general store owner who tells one of the boys that coffee is the devil's drink is pretty compelling. The actor says in "Best Worst Movie" that he doesn't remember any of the filming because he was in a bad, messed-up, drugged-out place at that point and had just been released from a mental hospital. "I wasn't acting.") Valentino wasn't a brilliant actor, but he lights up the screen; the children in "Good Morning" aren't necessarily even acting, yet they are the center of one of the more emotionally delicate movies I've seen. (Someday I'll do a post on Nicole Holofcener's inheritance from Ozu, maybe.) I'm not a connoisseur of acting anyway.

I do care about tonal issues and weird inconsistencies.

"Troll 2" moralizes to no end and little more purpose. (Cf.) That isn't necessarily a mark of an auteur at work (again cf. "Reefer Madness," which has rather the feel of a bad-movie-by-committee), but it can be. The scary creatures -- by the way, they're referred to throughout as "goblins," not "trolls." In other non sequitur news, "Troll 2" has nothing whatsoever to do with the earlier horror film "Troll" -- hector and lecture the humans constantly. (We'll come back to this.) They present their way of life as superior, and find the humans' behaviors tacky as well as immoral. They even all attend goblin church together every Sunday to nod solemnly at their goblin pastor's lectures.

It also provides just about no explanation of any of the relevant background. I mean, any. (Cf.) How and why did they decide to house-swap with a family in Nilbog (yes, Nilbog)? Why can't the sister's boyfriend ever leave his friends behind for more than one second? Why does the (dead) grandfather know so much about the goblins and why does he materialize just when and where he does? Why do the family want to eat and drink the nauseatingly bright green goblin-food? Why do some people turn immediately into green goop upon eating goblin food and others petrify over the course of days into still-human plants? What on Earth is the connection between the goblins and Stonehenge (!)? And most centrally of all: WHAT KIND OF A VEGETARIAN TURNS HUMAN BEINGS INTO PLANTS SO HE CAN EAT THEM?

In "BWM," the screenwriter tells us that at the time she wrote the film a lot of her friends had become preachy vegetarians, so she decided to write a horror movie in which the bad guys were vegetarians. Hectoring vegetarians, who brag about the "organic additives" in their chlorophyll goop, seduce a teenaged boy with corn on the cob, and can be warded off with a baloney sandwich. She and her husband -- the director -- and the actress who played the mother of the family are all still arguing that "Troll 2" is a good movie. Not bad-good. Normal-good. The screenwriter thinks it's sophisticated satire. The director thinks he captured the live speech of American teenagers masterfully. (This despite the fact that he barely spoke any English at the time -- he and his wife are Italian -- and the actual American teenagers who acted in the film kept begging to be allowed to change the lines.) He's appalled, upon attending latter-day screenings in America, to find that "they laughed at the funny parts. But they also laughed at the parts that were not supposed to be funny." The actress thinks it's a movie with important things to say about relationships and family. She compares it to "the old movies like they don't make anymore, with Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart." (Because "The African Queen" isn't a boring, six-ways-saccharine film remembered more for the difficult circumstances of its filming than for its merit.)

"Troll 2" really believes in itself, despite all the evidence against it. (Cf., or rather cf..) While you're watching, it puts on a pretty good show. Before you've seen it and afterwards, you have a headache just thinking about whatever convoluted message it's trying to put out. But it is trying, desperately, to put out a message. It thinks of itself as a plucky outsider come to fix the system, to teach us a little something about life, and love, and hope. Maybe it doesn't quote stilted classic poetry (ahem), but "Troll 2" is definitely the Rod Blagojevich of movies.