The year filmmakers got away with bloat

I've just finished my 2018 series looking at the works of auteurs I had previously been unfamiliar with. But I feel like I was watching the work of auteurs throughout 2018, even when I didn't specifically select to do so.

We tend to think of "auteur" as a term from the past, reflecting a time when studio notes did not apply to certain directors, who could muscle through any eccentric vision they wanted. Of course, the past was also the era of the studio system, when directors were largely just hired guns under contract and were often not meaningfully described as the authors of their own movies. But in the years following the studio system, particularly the 1970s, a large number of directors achieved final cut on their films, as the studios appeared to entrust them with the best judgment on when their films should end and what they should contain.

I'd argue that another correction has occurred in the recent few decades, when studios became more risk averse on things that were not considered established properties, and feared the judgment of audiences in test screenings. Although you don't want a truly great artist to be shackled, I think you also don't want there to be no checks and balances on their most indulgent impulses. I feel like I saw a lot of films in the 1990s that were a really tight 95 minutes, and all the better for it.

Well, something has changed again in 2018. Especially as the year wore on, I couldn't help notice how many really loooong movies I was seeing.

To determine if there was some truth behind this, I took the 127 movies I've watched so far from 2018 that I've considered eligible for year-end ranking and recorded their running times. I then added and divided by 127 to get an average.

The average length of the 2018 movies I've seen is 109 minutes, or 109.4724 minutes if you want to carry it out four decimal places as my Excel does by default.

That seems pretty long to me. I don't have data from any other year to compare it to, and though I could probably accumulate that for a truly scientific comparison, it took long enough to record these 127 movies as it was. That's only ten minutes shy of two hours. And though we often describe movies as being "two hours long," most of them truly are not -- or should not be, anyway.

But this year, many were. Many were well over two hours long. In fact, I've seen 31 2018 films that have been at least 120 minutes long, 16 of which were over 130 minutes. That's compared to only six that were 90 minutes or less. Only six.

If you change your cutoff to 100 minutes -- triple digit minutes -- a full 89 of those 127 films were at least 100 minutes. Leaving only 38 that were shorter than that.

At one point this year I also saw 14 straight 2018 movies that were at least 100 minutes long.

Have filmmakers been allowed to slouch into a self-indulgent kind of inefficiency? Have they not been "killing their darlings"? It would seem so.

The poster child for this phenomenon -- quite literally as I've chosen it as the poster for this post -- was Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria. Guadagnino made the longest film I saw this year at 152 minutes. It was a remake of a 1977 film that was only 98 minutes. Now, I certainly understand that Guadagnino did not want to make a shot-by-shot remake of Dario Argento's original, and I appreciate that. But there are a lot of unchecked indulgences in 54 extra minutes of footage. That film was going in six different directions in once, and as a result, it didn't go in any of them in a way that felt truly satisfying.

Steve McQueen's Widows was another example, though a lot shorter and more successful. McQueen had a lot of movie he wanted to bit off and chew, and to his credit, he managed to bite and chew it in a comparatively economical 128 minutes. But in the past, he would have been required to bite off less, and spit out some things he'd already started chewing at the editing stage.

Directors who have had about two to three well-received movies prior to this one seemed especially susceptible. Did Jeremy Saulnier's follow-up to Blue Ruin and Green Room really need to be 126 minutes? And yet Hold the Dark did run for that long, slow and agonizing duration.

However, it wasn't just moody genre mashups that were bloated. Movies that traditionally come in much shorter were pushing the two-hour mark, like the Amy Schumer comedy I Feel Pretty at 111 minutes. At this point it's no surprise that the shortest of the superhero movies I saw this year, Venom, was still 112 minutes, but a bit more of a surprise was that the two animated superhero movies I saw, Incredibles 2 and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, were 118 and 117 minutes, respectively.

So it wasn't just directors with an inflated sense of their own genius who were making long movies. It was a bloat that crept through the industry.

And not every person we would think of as an auteur had to make long movies. In a demonstration of economy that's highly endangered these days, Lynne Ramsay (You Were Never Really Here) and Pawel Pawlikowski (Cold War) made two of the four movies I saw that were under 90 minutes. I wasn't in love with either of those films, but they demonstrated that you can execute your vision tightly by focusing on a single compelling story, rather than veering off into more subplots than you can ever properly resolve.

From the studio's perspective, the logic would seem to be that shorter would be better, to compete with shorter form content on the internet and to appeal to shorter attention spans. Then again, the reverse could be true, if the idea is to provide a clear alternative to peak TV by giving audiences longer content that draws them out to the theater. Maybe the more you have to pay, the longer you want the movie to be -- although MoviePass-style subscription packages were also being tested out by a lot of theater chains, deemphasizing the payment for an individual viewing experience and perhaps shifting the bias to shorter films again.

In short, I don't know.

I do, however, think that every filmmaker should kill his or her darlings, just as every writer should do that. Easier said than done, though. I probably go on at excessive length on this blog, because I have no one telling me to shave off 300 words. If no one's doing that for the excessive subplots for these directors, they'll be inclined to leave them in.

Maybe in 2019 we can at least get that 109-minute average down to 105.