I’ve recently been on a ‘70s kick for some reason, first musically (Talking Heads mostly) and now cinematically. I suppose I have an abiding interest in the origins of things, and while the ‘70s can hardly be said to be the origins of cinema or music, the decade strikes me as the first to cast off that certain idealistic sheen that characterizes many of the media from earlier decades, and I’m so shot through with cynicism and irony that I find a certain appeal in stuff that does away with the sap. That’s not to say I don’t like the Beatles or Steve McQueen, or that all the earlier stuff was strictly roses and rainbows – I’m familiar with the Velvet Underground and Rosemary’s Baby. It just means that I’ve generally found material from the ‘70s to possess a certain grit and/or rawness that I haven’t found in other decades. It just means I’m watching movies from the ‘70s.
Anyway two of those movies are Kramer vs. Kramer and The French Connection, both of which I streamed, and let me actually just get a quick rant out on that point: somebody needs to figure out the audio mixing on old movies when they convert them to streaming platforms. It’s so bad that some older movies are simply unwatchable via stream without subtitles. And I get that some people swear by the subtitles, and that’s all well and good, but I don’t like them, and I’d like to have the option not to use them if I so choose. They distract from the mise en scene (go ahead and unsub now that I’ve dropped that one), and when I watch movies I like to pretend I’m a sophisticated viewer who notices all that stuff and says things like “that’s a great shot” or “incredible attention to detail here” and then pats himself on the back when the movie ends because he watched it so much better than his fellow viewers and therefore cannot quite be said to have languished slobbishly in blue light for the past two hours, so yeah, the subtitles knock out half the fun for me. Also bad audio mixing generally just makes movies less pleasant to watch, because the music is almost always deafeningly loud, so you have to turn it down when the score is dominating the scene, but then the dialogue is vanishingly quiet, so you have to turn it way back up to hear anything relevant, but then there’s an unexpected sound or escalation that nearly blows your eardrums to smithereens, so you have to turn it down again, and so on and so forth in this infuriating cat and mouse chase for the entire movie where you are the cat and the mouse is the correct volume, except you’re like one of those cartoon cats who’s alway stepping on a loose floorboard and catching a wood panel to the face or tripping on a wire and getting smushed by an anvil, and the correct volume is the shifty little mouse that only ever enters the grasp of the cat (you) for like five seconds tops before slipping away again, and so on and so forth ad infinitum, and it just sucks, OK? It sucks. It’s so annoying. And it’s frankly unacceptable that nobody has figured this problem out given how much time we as a society spend on these streaming services. If we are going to pay for this stuff, it should meet a minimum of respectability. Shame on you, Netflix/Amazon/HBO/Apple/etc. End rant.
First up is Kramer vs. Kramer. This one has been on my list for a while, and it didn’t disappoint. The movie opens up with a sad-looking Joanna Kramer (Meryl Streep) sitting on the edge of her son’s bed and kissing him goodnight before going to pack a suitcase, which, we are soon to learn, she won’t even have a chance to bring with her when she walks out on her husband and son. At this point, we are not totally sure why she’s walking out, but we are given hints: it’s late at night, and her husband, Ted, still is not home. Cut to Ted, a charismatic Dustin Hoffman, who’s still at the office after just having closed the biggest deal of his career. Ted is an Ad Man, and like any good Ad Man, he is drinking whisky while his wife puts the kid to bed.
When Ted comes home, he is first none the wiser to his wife’s discontent, then disbelieving of it, and finally astonished by it. She gets in the elevator and is gone; it’s a two man show now. The bulk of the remainder of the movie chronicles Ted’s attempt to balance his career with his obligations as a father and his evolving relationship with his son, Billy. Hoffman, who won the Oscar for the role, plays Ted, who is alternatingly hard-nosed and tender, with a restraint that almost borders on flatness, but the execution is subtle and detailed enough as to render the character both totally believable and heart-wrenchingly sympathetic. On the morning after Joanna’s departure, Ted fumbles through the foreign project of cooking breakfast, and he does so while trying to maintain a facade of normalcy for the understandably confused Billy, who sits on the counter and watches along with concern. The scene plays out like a crescendo: the egg shells in the scramble, the spilled orange juice, the uncombed hair, the boiling kettle, the questioning child, the burning French Toast – Hoffman’s Ted clumsily dodges catastrophe about half a dozen times, his initially cheery tone growing ever more strained with each obstacle, until finally he grabs the scorching handle of the cast iron pan and drops it, blowing the whole act apart. “God damn her!” he screams as he kicks the pan. In this scene, which establishes the tone for the remainder of the movie, Hoffman simply could not have been better.
Streep, for her part, takes the opposite tack. Her character calls for melodrama, and she delivers it beautifully. And it’s a good thing, too, because her task is a tall one: she must make sympathetic not only her character – who has done a terrible thing – but also the entire women’s liberation movement, which eventually finds itself in the crosshairs of this story. Joanna, we learn, left her husband and child not out of any particular malice, but because she felt as though she were suffocating under the weight of the homemaker’s obligation. It occurs to her only after the birth of her son that she is more than merely a caretaker; she is a full human being in her own right, with desires and ambitions as powerful as those of men, and she cannot stomach the thought of suppressing them unto death. Moreover, in her crisis, she’s convinced herself that she’s a terrible mother, and that the best thing for her child would be for her to exit the picture altogether. Only later, after much therapy and self-reflection, does she realize that she erred – she wants her son back.
The timing here is of note: in December of 1979, when the movie came out, the sun was setting on a decade that saw the most profound shift in women’s social roles since enfranchisement in the ‘20s, and many people were apprehensive about this change, to say the least. The move of women from the home to the workplace, paired with expanded access to contraception and abortion, proposed a then-radical idea: women were not bound by their reproductive organs to motherhood or caretaking or homemaking or anything at all. They could simply be who they wanted to be.
In many ways, Kramer vs. Kramer is a referendum on this issue, and though it was praised at the time for presenting the topic with equanimity, I’m not so sure the same can be said in retrospect. Yes, Joanna delivers a powerful justification of her decision, and yes, Hoffman shows that it’s important for men to play a role in their childrens’ lives, even if that comes at the sacrifice of career advancement. But the film’s central conceit skews the debate irreparably: this is not a woman who chose not to have children, but a woman who has left her child. If Robert Benton, the director, wanted to give women’s liberation a fair shake, he surely could have made a few tweaks here; there’s just no way anyone is going to come out in favor of a runaway mother, and moreover, it’s a misconstrual to suppose that the women’s liberation movement might provide justification for abandoning one’s child. I’m pretty sure nobody ever said that was ok, feminist or otherwise.
Nonetheless, the movie succeeds – just not for its politics. It succeeds because Hoffman makes you want to cry like three or four times, and sometimes that’s all it takes. For what it’s worth, I do think the pacing could have been better – someone in the editing room probably got trigger happy – but this review is getting too long, and this particular flaw doesn’t quite rise to the level of sin, so why waste the breath? Good movie, thumbs up.
Next up is The French Connection, which I can hopefully tackle in fewer words. It’s pretty good. This 1971 thriller is widely considered one of the greatest movies of all time (Pauline Kael is a notable exception here), and while I wouldn’t go quite that far, I certainly enjoyed it mightily.
What makes The French Connection great is not that it is a particularly smart or thought-provoking movie, but that it is utterly frill-less. In some ways this is the filmmaking equivalent of a Hemingway novel. The subject matter is intriguing but straightforward, the dialogue is witty but never self-obsessed, the chase scenes are calculated but never overindulgent, and the acting is excellent. Gene Hackman plays the salty, hungry detective Popeye Doyle with a playful color that dovetails seamlessly into the reserved pensiveness of his partner, Roy Scheider’s Cloudy, and it is the nervous dance between these two and the decaying landscape of 1971’s crime- and drug- ridden New York City – brilliantly captured by cinematographer Owen Roizman – that ultimately animates the movie and presses it along.
In their quest to score a big case, Popeye and Cloudy find themselves enmeshed in a major drug trafficking scheme involving a transfer of 60kg of heroin between small-time criminal Sal Boca (Tony Lo Bianco) and big-time criminal Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey). Their hunt sees them engaging in some less-than-virtuous behavior to get leads – think roughing up minorities – that undermines the image of cop-as-savior in favor of the more gripping (and maybe more believable, as far as 1971 New York City goes) picture of cop-as-criminal-with-a-badge, and as a result we find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of rooting for a protagonist who is clearly not a good guy – indeed, his only truly redeeming quality is that he’s pretty clever. Popeye is no hero; sans badge, he’d just be a guy looking for some action. The movie dwells very little on this point, and it’s all the more compelling for that reason.
There’s almost no downtime here. Much of the film – probably over half – follows Popeye and Cloudy as they follow someone else. They spend their days trailing Sal as he slithers in and out of the boroughs, Alain as he saunters evasively through the streets of Manhattan, and, notably, Alain’s henchman Pierre as he speeds over Brooklyn on the B train. This last scene ranks among the first and greatest car chases in cinema history; in particular, the low angle POV shot from the front bumper of the car Popeye has commandeered to tail Pierre marks a cinematic innovation that would go on to revolutionize action scenes for time immemorial. Thus, the movie is constantly in motion, but this quality is not, as in so many other action-thrillers, a substitute for substance. Rather, these scenes are inflected with the personalities of their subjects: the frazzled Popeye’s world is shaky, partial, suggestive, fleeting, and dark, whereas Alain’s copacetic scheming is met with smooth, continuous, bright, and uncluttered camerawork. No shot is without flavor.
The French Connection is not so much a movie about virtue and vice as one about the thrill of competition. Here you will find neither high-minded moralizing nor, as the ending makes eminently clear, a lesson to be learned. The takeaway is that chaos cannot be tamed, but it can be harnessed for pleasure. Popeye and Cloudy are not motivated by the pursuit of the good, but by the buzz of a good chase, and so, by extension, are we. Whatever forces conspired to place them on the law’s side of the fight have no real estate in the film’s mind. More than anything else – more, even, than the car chase – this tenor is what separates The French Connection from its peers. It claims no God, sells no pretensions; it is nihilistic down to the cufflinks – and it's a good time the whole way through.
Well done!!