Remembering a skilled tradesman

Curtis Hanson made two films that I cherish in 1997's L.A. Confidential and 2000's Wonder Boys. But those aren't really the films I think of when I think of Hanson, and they aren't what I'm remembering today, the day after he died at 71 of what was believed to be a heart attack.

L.A. Confidential and Wonder Boys are auteur type projects, projects suggesting a particular vision on the part of their directors. The more interesting proof of his abilities -- to me, anyway -- was his two very above average director-for-hire projects, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and The River Wild.

Conveniently, we adopt and abandon the auteur theory as we see fit, calling certain directors intrinsic parts of certain films while saying they had little to do with the creative spark behind others. In truth, Hanson was credited as at least co-writer on both good movies (L.A. Confidential) and bad ones (Lucky You). But when it comes to Cradle and River, neither of which featured his input on the screenplay, they seem like for-hire projects because they were, very clearly, genre pictures. They were made for comparatively little money to make a tidy profit, and they basically just needed someone to yell "Cut!"

Hanson did a lot more than that. It's been at least 15 years since I've seen either of these movies, and probably closer to 20, but on my last viewing of Cradle in particular, I remembered what a tight little package it was, how it moved smoothly from to scene to scene in producing an intensely satisfying story about a psychotic nanny. Some of that credit likely goes to the lean script by Amanda Silver, but it takes a director with a particular understanding of the fundamentals of filmmaking to deliver a lean script into a lean film. In fact, I use Cradle as an unlikely go-to example of a movie where nary a scene is wasted.

But Cradle alone probably wouldn't have caused me to excessively ponder Hanson's merits as a genre filmmaker without being paired with The River Wild, a truly tense and harrowing spiritual successor to Deliverance in which Meryl Streep and David Straitharn play the parents in a family that gets kidnapped by Kevin Bacon and some of his redneck buddies on a rafting trip. I remember feeling a similar sense of the tightness of this film, the lack of fat, that kept things rolling along toward a satisfying conclusion. Again you might credit the screenwriter (this time Denis O'Neill), but taken in combination with Cradle, it really shows us what Hanson brought to that director's chair.

His very next film was Confidential, probably an unlikely successor, but the reward someone gets for doing a good job as a hired employee. He knocked it out of the park, and many think he should have won the best director Oscar in the year Titanic swept the Oscars. Instead he made another great film in 2000, Wonder Boys, which strayed further from his genre roots. 8 Mile was next, the returns diminishing only slightly.

Unfortunately, that was pretty much it for Hanson's time atop Hollywood. The returns started to noticeably diminish with In Her Shoes and especially Lucky You. It got so I didn't even see his final theatrical release, Chasing Mavericks, a project he had to leave halfway through for health reasons (ultimately being credited as a co-director with Michael Apted). It turns out Hanson also had Alzheimer's, a fact I did not know, and a possible/probable contributor to his death.

It's certainly the case that all directors have only a finite period at the top of their game, and almost anybody who makes five consecutive hits would have to be happy with that (if we are calling the two thrillers from the 1990s "hits"). And in truth, Hanson made some really good films before that, most notably the 1990 film Bad Influence, which I once loved but appreciated a lot less on my last viewing a couple years ago, else I might have featured it more prominently in this remembrance. Even the 1987 Steve Guttenberg film The Bedroom Window is a pretty solid technical achievement, if forgettable. (But let's not talk about the comedy he directed, the Tom Cruise vehicle Losin' It.)

But part of me thinks it's a shame that Hanson stopped making genre pictures. When people are really good at something that is considered less prestigious, they can get graduated out of it at their peril -- at our collective peril. Of course, never would I trade L.A. Confidential and Wonder Boys for more River Wilds. But Hanson may have been a victim of his own success, as those movies basically disqualified him from making another River Wild. The result was some really limp, uninspired "auteur movies" (In Her Shoes and Lucky You).

The loss of Hanson is meaningful enough to me that I may indeed watch something to remember him. But it won't be Wonder Boys (which I watched again only a couple months ago) and it won't be L.A. Confidential (which I do want to see again soon, having most recently caught it in 2012). No, I want to see one of those two for-hire thrillers, to remind myself what a skilled tradesman can do if just given the basic tools of the trade he loves.

Igby Goes Down ... in my Flickchart rankings

In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have expected to have perfect recall of the merits of a movie I watched secretively in the testing lab of my first IT job.

That's right, Igby Goes Down was one of at least three films -- along with The Powerpuff Girls Movie and One Hour Photo -- that I watched ripped digital versions of while passing the hours as a temp in my first IT job. I didn't know at the time that I was going to end up being a key member of that IT department, and was just trying to keep my head down -- while living on the irresponsibly reckless verge of being discovered by my boss, who had already reprimanded me once for minimizing my email when he'd walked up behind me.

But the layout of our floor meant that I'd have pretty good warning if he was going to be walking our way ... even though I had to have headphones plugged in to watch these movies. Fortunately, I was also around a corner.

Well, I didn't get caught, and thank goodness, because that boss would ultimately hire me away from that job to the one I held for nearly seven years after it.

I got back to Igby Goes Down for the first time since 2002 on Wednesday night. As I've already hinted, it really did not hold up well.

In fact, as it was going especially not-well in the first 25 minutes or so, I decided to check where exactly I had it ranked in my Flickchart, knowing it was pretty high.

Pretty high indeed: 392 out of 4314, good for the 91st percentile of my chart. Looking back on my rankings of films in 2002, I also see I ranked it 10th among all the films I saw in time for my deadline that year. Even 14 years later I still had it ranked on my Flickchart as the 11th best film I'd seen in 2002 -- and that's after adding a whole mess of other 2002 movies I hadn't seen at the time I did my rankings, two of which had ended up ahead of it.

Well, this could not stand.

So even though I don't usually re-rank a movie on Flickchart after re-watching it, I decided the risk of future misplacement was too great if I didn't bust Igby down to where he truly belonged.

And that ended up being ... 1616/4314. So from the 91st percentile all the way down to the 63rd.

So what did Igby do to go so far down in my estimation?

The better question may be to try to figure out what drew me to the movie in the first place.

I'd say in late 2002 I was probably still basking in the glow of one of my favorite movies of 2000, Wonder Boys, which I had occasion to write about on this blog just last month. Kieran Culkin likely struck me as a near-perfect stand-in for Tobey Maguire in that movie, and I remember making note of the acting chops I was surprised Macaulay's little brother had.

I now think of the movie as owing more to another movie from that time, Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums, which I still haven't watched again since then -- though do still carry around a bias toward it. I have been meaning to give Tenenbaums another chance, because I think it's likely I was only disappointed in it by the lofty standards of a Wes Anderson movie, not in its own right. I feel pretty certain, for example, that Tenenbaums is better than Igby -- even though Tenenbaums still lies in the ghetto of my mid-2000s on Flickchart. So when I do finally get around to that, there could be another re-ranking in the offing.

The problem I had with The Royal Tenenbaums is one I now have with Igby, which is that it's so self-indulgent that it's almost insufferable. I suspect at the time I had not seen as many movies about excessively intellectual high school dropouts wearing scarves as I have today. In fact, I don't think I'd even read The Catcher in the Rye yet, which obviously served as an inspiration for Burr Steers in writing Igby, though I did read it within a year or two of that (for some reason it was never assigned at my high school). The Igby character now strikes me as a totally artificial construct representing someone's wish fulfillment about the type of character they imagined themselves being -- Steers, maybe. He speaks in what sound like thesis statements and he pals around with adults as intellectual peers and he sleeps with two different desirable women and he even gets beat up. He's just shy of being a noir hero in his own solipsistic story of angst and pretty suffering.

That the film still ranks comfortably in the top half of my chart means I certainly did not hate it. I still recognize the success of its basic craft and there are still some highly effective moments. Overall though, it was more broad than I remembered, and not nearly as distinctive. Then again, as I said before, that could be because the type of navel gazing it is is something that has since been done repeatedly and far worse, tainting what once may have seemed like a true original.

Igby Goes Down stands as a good reminder of the fact that our thoughts on films are not fixed -- an obvious statement, perhaps, but one worth testing by revisiting these one-time sacred cows whenever we get the chance. I am sure there are plenty of other movies I'm ranking excessively high on my Flickchart based only on dim memories. Off the top of my head, Matt Reeves' 1996 movie The Pallbearer -- which I liked way more than anyone else I've ever spoken to about it, and ranked ninth for that year -- is probably one of those.

One at a time, though. My ego can't take too many reminders of its own fallibility.

I'm probably like Igby in that way.

Edited for which content, exactly?

It was with a bit of dread that I saw this message upon finally poping in the copy of Wonder Boys I've owned for ten years:

"This film has been formatted from its original version. It has been edited for content."

Edited for content?

What the fuck?

"Formatted to fit this screen" would have been better. I mean, I hate pan-and-scan as much as the next guy, but at least that would have been better than, you know, censorship.

And how does a DVD made available for sale become "edited for content," anyway? It's not like this was the version they were playing on airlines sometime circa March of 2001.

I couldn't recall the circumstances of buying Wonder Boys, but I immediately cursed them as too lackadaisical. No, I hadn't made the mistake of buying a movie that wasn't in its proper aspect ratio, but I'd somehow missed the warning sticker that must have needed to appear on any version that wasn't the original.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I watched the movie and could detect nary a difference from the Wonder Boys I've seen about three times before.

And it wasn't just that the movie seem unsullied by the fascist hand of a censor. It actually was uncensored, as far as I could tell.

When trying to imagine what might be objectionable enough to cut from Wonder Boys, I focused on three things: 1) profanity, the most likely aspect to cause difficulty for whatever these prospective squeamish audiences might be; 2) drug use, as Michael Douglas' Grady Tripp regularly puffs on joints; 3) and possibly sexual content, as two of the characters (those played by Tobey Maguire and Robert Downey Jr.) are gay, and Downey's character even shows up with a transvestite on his arm.

Yet all of these things were intact. The characters drop the f-bomb at least ten times, including one as a recurring joke ("fit as a fucking fiddle"). Grady puffs on his full contingent of scraggly joints. And the movie is as gay as it ever was.

So what the hell? What was actually cut out of it?

The internet might be able to tell me, but I won't bother to find out. I'm just glad that the Wonder Boys I know and love was there for me to know and love once more.

And that I did. I was struck again by one of the things I love most about this movie, which is that it's so damn comfortable. It feels like pulling on an old sweater that's been perfectly worn in for all your curves and grooves. It feels lived in, and it has the sense of starting up in full swing in the lives of characters it seems like we've always known. This is how you do character development, prospective screenwriters. Steve Kloves could give a class on it.

I think what makes the narrative flow so nicely is that it's novelistic. Sure, it's adapted from a book, the one written by Michael Chabon (which I've read and which I don't like as much as this movie). But so are hundreds of other movies, not all of which retain their novelistic quality so nicely -- and in a way that's not actually detrimental to it being a good movie. On this viewing, I noticed for the first time a wink at this hoped-for ease of translation, as we overhear two characters at the chancellor's party talking about an unnamed film. "How did you feel about the adaptation?" one says to the other. "I thought it was more literary than cinematic," the other responds. Congratulations, Curtis Hanson -- you've managed to have it both ways.

An interesting thing about the timing of this rewatch was that the movie has two things in common with Hollywoodland, the movie I rewatched just the day before. One is profound while the other is more incidental.

1) Both films make mention of George Reeves. Hollywoodland is of course about Reeves, but he gets a quick mention in Wonder Boys too, when James (Maguire) is rattling off famous celebrity suicides in a savant-like manner. Naturally he lists Reeves, and curiously, chooses to make no mention of the fact that some people contest the finding that it was a suicide.

2) Both films feature a character unwittingly holding another character at gunpoint, only the first character doesn't realize the gun he or she is holding is loaded. That makes the situation all the more dangerous, because many people wouldn't hesitate to casually pull the trigger on an unloaded gun.

A couple other isolated thoughts:

1) Alan Tudyk is in this! He plays Traxler, the pothead janitor.

2) I love Vernon Hardapple, the character not actually named Vernon Hardapple, played by Richard Knox. "Vernon Hardapple" is the name Grady and his editor give the character, with his James Brown bouffant, while spotting him across the bar and spitballing a backstory for him. Little do they know that Vernon will actually turn up in their lives as they are leaving the bar, as he believes Grady is driving his stolen car and doesn't give up easy in the pursuit. Vernon finally seems to "win" by stopping the car dead in its tracks. In a moment that's delightfully absurd and ultimately never explained, he uses his upper hand by running up, jumping on the hood of the car, leaving an ass print in it, performing a whimsical bow, and then walking away. "What the hell was that?" Rip Torn's character, the aptly named Q, rightly asks.

3) I love this line of dialogue to describe the house Grady's wife grew up in: "It's the kind of house you like to wake up in on Christmas morning." Indeed.

After I'd written this draft but before I'd posted it, I learned what the edited content actually is. Putting the query out to my Flickcharters Facebook group (instead of googling it myself like I should have done), I discovered that the family of Alan Ladd had objected to him being listed by James among the people who committed suicide. Indeed, Ladd's death was ruled as an accidental drug overdose rather than a suicide. So Paramount agreed to scrap all reference to Ladd in all future incarnations of the film, on video and any potential future theatrical screenings.

What I don't understand is why they didn't just silently excise the reference to Ladd and be done with it. It seems to only draw attention to the issue, since people like me will google it (or, in my case, should have googled it) to find out what was edited out. You'd hardly think your duty to the original is such that you have to post a disclaimer like his out of a sense of full disclosure. I mean, did George Lucas warn us that the special edition of Star Wars had been "edited for content"?

But if it made the Ladds happy -- even 36 years after his death when the film came out -- then I guess that's a good thing.