Celebrating the mundane

This image has been sitting on my coffee table for about a week, and I decided it was finally time to write about it.

It's the back cover of the February/March issue of Written By magazine, which my wife receives as part of her job as executive director of a non-profit screenwriting competition. As you can tell, it's a promotional ad intended to get eligible voters to select The Descendants when voting on a couple prominent screenwriting awards. (It obviously worked, as the movie won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay.)

What interests me about this image is how captivating it is -- even though there's nothing going on. In fact, because there's nothing going on.

During the life of a movie's advertising campaign, we become familiar with about a half-dozen of its prominent images, which pop up regularly in conjunction with the movie. That's because they're part of the press materials. I may be explaining the obvious here, but a number of stills are made available to the press to allow critics to write reviews, and to allow publications to write about the movie (and hopefully promote it) in other ways.

For The Descendants, these half-dozen prominent images include this:

And this:

And this:

And this:


What do these four images have in common? They all remind you of something specific that's happening in the plot. They all serve as a single-image encapsulation of what a certain scene is all about. In each image there is either kinetic or potential energy -- actions either in process or about to be in process. Implied movement, if you will.

The image in the "for your consideration" ad is quite the opposite. It is almost defined by its lack of movement. George Clooney's arms are at his side, and Robert Forster's are crossed. There's definitely a memorable scene between these two characters, but it's not this scene. Their memorable scene takes place at Forster's residence earlier in the movie, whereas this shot seems to be from later in the movie at the hospital.

But why I like it so much is what it says about screenwriting. It gets at the idea that when you strip everything else about a movie away, all the stars and all the glitz, what you have left is its nuts and bolts: the script. A good script is not all about big comedy bits or dramatic twists or explosions or memorable deaths. It may have some of those things. But this image reminds us that at its essence, screenwriting is a blue collar craft. Just like life, a good script contains its share of quiet moments, moments when nothing is really "happening." A good script makes getting from point A to point B as important and as interesting as those big moments.

If you've read my blog consistently, you know that The Descendants was not my favorite film from last year. In fact, I ranked it 66th out of the 121 movies I saw in time for my ranking deadline.

But this ad, and the contemplation on the art of screenwriting it has inspired, makes me like the movie just a little bit more than I did before the latest issue of Written By magazine spent the past week on my coffee table.

Seen but not heard

No spoilers ahead!

Ever get the feeling, when watching a movie, that a character doesn't have any dialogue because the filmmakers didn't want to pay the actor more?

It can be distracting.

Got that feeling yesterday, quite distinctly, during a key climactic scene of The Descendants.

See, one of the rules regarding actors in movies/TV/what have you is that the moment they open their mouth, you have to pay them a considerably higher chunk of change for their appearance. You know how I don't like looking things up -- I just did some quick googling but didn't come up with the exact parameters of the rule. In fact, I found one rule that mentions the actor's status changing to that of "day player" after five lines of dialogue. But I know there's also a big difference between zero and one line.

Anyway, I most often notice this phenomenon in television. It often seems to be the "pretty girl syndrome." Let's say, oh, Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) from How I Met Your Mother has a scene demonstrating his fitness with the ladies. He'll have a beautiful woman on each arm, and they may be in the shot for as long as a minute or two. But you'll never see them open their mouths, because even a throwaway line of dialogue will send those actresses' pay through the roof. Essentially, the show can't afford a "casual" line of dialogue that would contribute to the naturalism of the scene and make their presence seem less awkward. So, the use of these actresses is allowed to be slightly awkward -- and in this case, probably slightly objectifying -- in order to save money.

But why did The Descendants need to save money on Cousin Milo?

To establish what I'm talking about here, I need to give you a brief bit of the plot of The Descendants, though it's not anything that wouldn't be available in any synopsis of the movie. George Clooney plays Matt King, the descendant of Hawaii land barons, who is the trustee on a choice parcel of land that his family could sell in order to make millions for himself and about a dozen cousins. Most of those cousins are played by unknown actors; one is played by Beau Bridges. And one falls somewhere in between, a guy I recognized but couldn't quite place. This guy:

When I first saw him, I thought "Is that Art Garfunkel?" Nope. Too young. I then went on to Willie Aames. Rejected that one too. I determined to wait for the closing credits to see who he was, and I recognized the name right away: Michael Ontkean! As in, the guy who played Sheriff Harry S. Truman on Twin Peaks. He plays Matt's cousin Milo here.

So Cousin Milo appears in one scene at the beginning, in a board room, where there's no dialogue at all because Clooney narrates over it. He then appears, quite prominently, in a scene near the end, and this is where the problem came up.

Matt and Bridges' character, Cousin Hugh, are together at a family meeting -- the family meeting where the family is scheduled to decide on one of several buyers, and Matt, as trustee, is scheduled to sign the paperwork allowing the sale to go through. The two get into an intense discussion stemming from a difference of opinion on what to do with the land. Yet there is a third man at the table: Ontkean's Cousin Milo.

Who just sits there.

That's right, even though he is as directly impacted by the decision as Cousin Hugh, and appears in every reverse shot alongside the arguing Bridges, Ontkean is not permitted to open his mouth.

And because his other possible reactions would seem like overacting -- you know, pantomiming shock and disbelief without saying anything -- Ontkean really does just sit there, this look of mild bemusement on his face. I likely noticed it more because this was a person who has achieved a limited amount of fame, not just some no-name extra off the street. But I think even a no-name extra would have been distracting to me if used like this.

Now, I can't say for sure that this decision was motivated by financial considerations. But if not, it represents some really poor decision-making by director Alexander Payne. If you're going to include this guy in the scene, give him some dialogue, even just a random line or two of protest -- something to indicate his emotional investment in the proceedings. And if he really can't have dialogue, at least direct him in some way so he doesn't just sit there like a bemused bird.

Remember when I said I wouldn't give any spoilers in this post? Well, that includes telling you what I thought about the film, whether I liked it and if so, to what extent. Not enough of you have seen it yet, and I'd like you to go in unbiased.

If you think you know the answer to that question based on the fact that I'm choosing to poke fun at it in this post, well, you shouldn't jump to that conclusion. I never know where the minutia I write about in The Audient will come from -- I just know that once I think of it, I have to express it.

Unlike certain actors, who are obligated to stay mum.

Whose comeback excites you more?

I knew I was slipping when one of the movies I'm looking forward to most this fall -- The Descendants -- hit theaters without me even knowing it.

Perhaps because it's got Oscar aspirations, I assumed a December release date -- you know, about the time when George Clooney's Up in the Air became available two years ago. (Clooney did not direct Up in the Air or The Descendants, but he appears in both.) But it actually hit theaters here in Los Angeles on Wednesday, a fact I discovered, oh, the previous Sunday. So much for getting myself psyched up for it over the course of a couple weeks. Now I can and will go see it this weekend.

The reason The Descendants excites me and so many other film fans is not that it features Clooney, but rather, that it marks the long-awaited feature return of writer-director Alexander Payne. Payne had the most acclaimed movie of his career (Sideways) and then promptly went into a seven-year period of inactivity.

Oh, Payne has done things since 2004. He's had a bunch of producing credits, and I was shocked to learn just now that he was one of four credited writers on I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. (Which I haven't seen, but can I just assume it's bad and move on?) He even has a directing credit, having contributed the memorable closing piece to the otherwise forgettable collection of short films called Paris Je T'Aime. But a director with Payne's heat after Sideways should have directed at least two features since then, not zero. Woody Allen has directed like eight features since then.

The one time I intended to look into Payne's absence more seriously in order to write about it on The Audient, I didn't get very far in terms of finding a smoking gun. He did divorce from Sandra Oh, who appeared in Sideways, during that time. But that's not exactly unusual territory for Hollywood types, and they usually keep working right through it.

But Payne is not the only beloved director making a comeback of sorts this fall. The great Cameron Crowe is also directing his first feature since Elizabethtown crashed and burned in 2005. In fact, this will be only Crowe's second feature in the past ten years. I guess 2001's Vanilla Sky, a polarizing film that I happened to love, did more to hurt him professionally than I like to admit. Like Payne, Crowe has not exactly spent the intervening years eating bon bons. In fact, his love of rock n' roll has informed a prolific amount of recent documentary work. Pearl Jam Twenty was a well-liked doco released this fall, and I also see his name associated with a rock documentary called The Union, though I don't know anything about that beyond the fact that a 2011 release year is listed. Oh okay, it's about Elton John and is going to air on HBO starting in January.

So to welcome messieurs Payne and Crowe back to the director's chair, I thought I'd do a little comparison between the two, with the theoretical end result being to determine whether we should be more excited about The Descendants or We Bought a Zoo. (I say "theoretical" because I already know which one I'm more excited about.) On the surface, their careers may not necessarily invite comparison -- many of Crowe's works are informed by nostalgia and popular culture, whereas Payne is much more motivated by the quirkiness of Americana. Still, they are both directors who have made few missteps and have a comparable number of features to their credit. To add to this artificial rivalry I'm creating between them, the two films star buddies George Clooney and Matt Damon, giving the comparison a hint more relevance.

So let's take a look. We'll start with Cameron because he's been around longer.

Cameron Crowe
Age: 54
Total number of features as director (including current): 7
First feature as director: Say Anything ...
Best feature: Say Anything .../Almost Famous (gah, I can't decide)
Worst feature: Elizabethtown
Why we should be excited to have him back: Crowe has a knack for creating a sense of unforced nostalgia in his viewer, even when the subject matter is not overtly nostalgic. For example, when you saw Singles, didn't you kind of think you were already feeling nostalgic for grunge? Certainly this has something to do with his heavy reliance on rock music, which naturally reminds us of the associations we have with that music in our own lives. Crowe's movies are big in a way that doesn't make you feel suffocated by their ambitions. What you might call his most ambitious film -- Vanilla Sky -- likely turned some viewers off because of its dark subject matter, and turned some purists off because it was a remake. Me, I was enthralled by the pastiche of music, memory, states of awakening and existence, joy and melancholy he incorporated into one film. At his best, Crowe has the ability to make films that stay with you for years.

Alexander Payne
Age: 50
Total number of features as director (including current): 5
First feature as director: Citizen Ruth
Best feature: Election
Worst feature: Citizen Ruth (but it's still really good)
Why we should be excited to have him back: Payne is the cinematic equivalent of teflon. Yeah, he's only directed four films that most of us have already seen, and that's a pretty small sample size. But he has yet to make a misstep, and it could be argued that he just keeps getting better and better (if, that is, he didn't make his best film second overall). For awhile I compared him not to Crowe but to David O. Russell, who was making movies in lock-step with Payne and also hadn't make a misstep ... until Russell made I Heart Huckabees and changed all that. Payne's record remains unblemished, and he's got a wicked eye for satire. His career has become increasingly less satirical and increasingly more character-oriented with every film, but each film has a sharp sense of humor as it addresses confused people trying to sort out their lives and relationships. He's also going from more to less rural, as he's traded Nebraska for Santa Barbara and now Hawaii. But with an Alexander Payne film, you know you're getting something that looks deeply into the hearts of human beings while making you laugh, sometimes in spite of yourself.

Conclusion?

Although Crowe has made more films that I hold dear, I think that Payne is poised to please us more with his next feature. This conclusion is somewhat unfair, since it's not made in a vacuum -- the early returns are in on The Descendants, and people seem to be through-the-roof enthusiastic about it. But I think I would have said that even three or four months ago, when not that much was known about either film. And I haven't heard any buzz on We Bought a Zoo, but if you can get a gut feeling from a title and a plot alone, my gut feeling is not particularly hopeful. Besides, Payne has at least had a hit in the past ten years -- in fact, he's had two of them. Not the case for Crowe. As I was going through Crowe's wikipedia page, it mentioned that both Vanilla Sky (which I loved) and Elizabethtown ("hate" is a strong word) had Metascores of only 45. Ouch.

Fortunately, going to the movies is not an either/or proposition. Personally, I welcome both of them back, and look forward to what they have to offer me -- starting as soon as this weekend.