8 August 2003: Mel Gibson's new movie, which he has produced and directed, but doesn't star in, will be released sometime 'soon' - but it is already much in the news, because a group of interdenominational Biblical scholars fear that it will arouse anti-Semitic outbursts when it is shown in Europe. Their anxiety is based on the evidence of a shooting script that, according to a spokesman for Mr Gibson, was not actually used. The spokesman also alleges that the script was stolen from Mr Gibson's production company, Icon. For their part, the scholars insist that the script was provided to them by a Jesuit professor on Mr Gibson's team, Rev William Fulco. Meanwhile, Mr Gibson has declined to preview the film for any persons or groups likely to contest his claim that The Passion is an historically accurate account of the death of Jesus.
Whether or not The Passion is an anti-Semitic movie may be safely left to the critics who will vociferously pounce on it when it is distributed throughout the nation's cinemas. What gets me is the nonsense about historical accuracy. As best I can make out in this smoky skirmish, Icon informed a reporter for The Wall Street Journal that the script was based not only on the Gospels but also on the writings of two visionary nuns, writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. So much for historical accuracy. (These later writings, luridly painting Jews as 'Christ-killers,' are what most trouble the scholars.) There is also the small problem of inconsistency among the evangelical accounts of Christ's passion and death: Mr Gibson will necessarily have had to choose to follow one of the Gospels, and to ignore the others, with regard to each of many details. Finally, there is the nonsense of casting the dialogue in Aramaic - which was indeed the ligua franca of Palestine in Jesus's lifetime, and probably his native language - and in Latin, which nobody, not even the Roman occupiers, spoke in that part of the Empire.
What cosmopolitan people spoke in the eastern part of the Roman Empire was Greek. The Gospels themselves were composed in Greek. I can imagine the meeting at which people who knew better chose instead to defer to Mr Gibson's announcement that his new movie would be shot in 'authentic' Aramaic and Latin. Mr Gibson is a rich, major movie star who has contributed heavily to a breakaway church that, while claiming to be Catholic, recognizes neither the authority of Vatican II nor that of the popes since Pius XII - a church, in short, for which the revival of Latin is a touchstone.
Only a knucklehead, then, could conceive of an historically accurate Passion based on all the Gospels and the wholly extra-Scriptural visions of much later writers, and filmed, moreover, partly in Latin. The urge to snort derisively is irresistible. But the misconceptions that apparently underlie The Passion highlight the peculiar relation of Catholics generally to the Bible.
I do not believe that the Church encourages Catholics to read the Bible even now; certainly it was all but forbidden when I was a boy. Catholic liturgy incorporates 'readings' from the Bible, predominantly from the New Testament, but also from the Prophets (particularly Isaiah) and the Psalms, into the texture of the Mass and the Church's many other services. Thanks to this judicious selection, Catholics are likely to be completely unaware of the problematic nature of Biblical interpretation. On the contrary, they're likely to regard the Bible as the coherent word of God. Most of all, Catholics are unconsciously inclined to subordinate the importance of the Bible to that of the many prayers and devotions that the Church has produced in the past two thousand years. Because the Church claims to be the divinely ordered 'bride of Christ,' its liturgy has at least the authority of Scripture, if not more. Working through the rosary, for example, a Catholic will say the 'Hail Mary' - a prayer that is only partially Scriptural - ten times for every 'Our Father,' a prayer laid down by Jesus himself. Catholics are probably the only Christians capable of believing that Christ's passion could be dramatized in an 'historically accurate' way. Mr Gibson's movie, anti-Semitic or not, will almost certainly reinforce this infantile outlook.
But it's not the controversy surrounding The Passion that has convinced me that it's time to sit down and read through the New Testament from Matthew to Jude. (Revelations, I've always thought, is a scandal, so much tinder for bigotry.) No, I've been driven to that conclusion by the Episcopalian brouhaha over the Rev Canon V. Gene Robinson, gay bishop-elect of New Hampshire. Conservatives argue that Christians cannot pick and choose among the Scriptural precepts. I have a hunch that a careful reading of the New Testament will throw up a small handful (at least) of proscriptions that few modern Christians feel called upon to observe. Stay tuned.
28 March 2003: This will be brief. I'm still recovering from watching (a) the Academy Award show last Sunday and (b) The Hours, a few hours ago. About the movie, I'll just say that it crackles with intelligence; more than any other film that I can think of, even A Beautiful Mind, this is a picture about smart people. It is also about abandonment. One woman runs away in order to stay alive; another takes her life in order to die sane. A third loses the love of her life to the ravages of AIDS. Why would anyone want to see such a movie? Because intelligence articulates all the choices, alleviating pain even as it lays it out, like a bridal dress about to be stepped into.
Let's face it, the Academy Awards show is the ultimate reality television. Wave after wave of suspense swells, crests, and finally breaks the seal of an envelope. The handing out of Oscars is America's most prestigious celebration of popular culture (even though its electorate is limited to members of 'the Industry'), a meta-spectacle that would be meaningless without the dozens of movies that stir dreams and imaginations. It is also a television show, and that was the problem for me. Because I never watch television, and am totallym unaccustomed to its jumpy, noisy self-importance, it hits me like an unholy blend of caffeine and alcohol. It took two full days to recover from the three-hour adrenaline surge. Having a war on in the background intensified the onslaught.
The only tonic was to get back to work on rereading The Corrections, and to pull down a copy of Pride and Prejudice. Last week, it struck me that I'd gone about three years without reading Jane Austen, possibly four. So I vowed that I would put a stop to this disgrace by rereading the novel that I would like a lot better if it weren't so popular. I really do believe that Emma and Mansfield Park are better novels, but there's no doubt that Elizabeth Bennet vibrates with an almost frisky liveliness. It's good to be in her company again.
What amazed me, when The Hours was released, was the fuss that everyone made about Nicole Kidman's topnotch acting ability. Where have people been? To see her play another smart cookie, go back to 1988 and one of the most breathlessly scary movies ever made, Dead Calm, with Sam Neill and Billy Zane. Even so, I was even more amazed by Kidman's Virginia Woolf. Was that really she behind that nose? And was that really her voice? Now I really can't wait for the next big literary adaptation: Cold Mountain.
14 February 2003: For much of this week, our floors were carpeted with china and crystal, while the cabinets in which they're normally kept were refinished. By yesterday afternoon, I had had it with domestic disarray, so I skedaddled across the street for a late-afternoon showing of About Schmidt. When she got home from a firm dinner, Kathleen asked me if it's true, what they say, that Jack Nicholson plays a kind of role that he has never played before. I had to waffle: yes and no. Yes, it is true that Jack Nicholson has never played an actuary before. Nor has he played a totally stifled Midwesterner, almost clueless about his drives and feelings. But this very stifling makes Warren Schmidt the ultimate Jack Nicholson character, because Mr Nicholson has always represented the human volcano, liable to explode at any moment and wreak totally unpredictable destruction. As it happens, Warren Schmidt never explodes - not during About Schmidt, anyway - possibly because he simply doesn't know how. He is the sort of man who would have a heart attack before throwing a tantrum. This isn't to say that he's never angry. He's almost always angry. But it's a low-flame anger, queasily compatible with the plastered niceness that life beyond the Hudson seems to require. Mr Nicholson will hold viewers spellbound as Schmidt works his way through a speech at his daughter's wedding reception, mouthing lie after friendly lie but always menacing a collapse into breakdown and truth.
When Jack Nicholson was young, his acting verged on emotional extravagance; when one said of his performances that they were over the top, one meant that the actor seemed to be begging for a bigger fight than anyone would give him. In a man so handsome and charming, this edgy bellicosity seemed gratuitous, although it gave his performances a sheen of existential angst that endeared him to sophisticated fans of European film. Now that Jack Nicholson is almost an old man, and certainly no longer in the prime of his allure, his dissatisfaction with the human condition seems more reasonable. What's the use of having been a matinee idol once upon a time if right now your skin is sagging and your ankles are abloom with varicose veins? What's it like to deliver lines stating that for a man of your age and marital status the odds are that you've got nine years to live?
The fact is, it's not even any use being a matinee idol right now if you don't feel like one inside, and Jack Nicholson has always had too many doubts and questions to be a complacent star. In About Schmidt, he uses these doubts and questions, perhaps for the first time, to animate a thoroughly humdrum man.
So much for a stellar performance. About Schmidt lives up to its title, or down to it: it presents a character to us, painting an arresting portrait, but it does not tell a story. In terms of Hollywood narrative, the movie ends in the first act; the story that About Schmidt might have told seems on the point of beginning in the last scene, when what hit me as the Mona Lisa of juvenile art brings Warren Schmidt to tears. The drawing, made by Ngudu, a Tanzanian child whom Schmidt has pledged to foster, has just arrived in the mail, in response not only to Schmidt's checks but to the letters, loaded with unintended irony, that Schmidt has been writing to him, and that Jack Nicholson has been reading to us in brilliantly poised voice-overs. Schmidt's tears foretell a new life. In most movies, perhaps, we'd be content to read in the promise - hardly certain here - of an impending redemption, but Mr Nicholson has made Warren Schmidt's pain so vivid that it's frustrating not to know where the breakthrough will take him.
The contributions of three of Mr Nicholson's co-stars go far to compensate for the film's narrative withholding. Hope Davis plays Schmidt's daughter, Jeannie, about whom told even less of what we want to know than we're told about her Schmidt, but Ms Davis makes it clear that Jeannie has put what a social critic might call her father's petit bourgeois concerns behind her. Her ambivalence about her apparently distant parent plays over Ms Davis's face like the light on the bottom of a pool, both soothing and unresolved. Dermot Mulroney plays Jeannie's fiancé, Randall, a bright-eyed air-head who will never understand why he doesn't get ahead; one wonders how long he'll stay fresh. He bounces through the film like a moving target for Schmidt's unexpressed wrath, and I was always afraid that he was about to be decked. Kathy Bates, as Randall's mother, Roberta, reminded me a lot of her performance as one of the prostitutes in Shadows and Fog, Woody Allen's homage to Kafka. She brought the same imperturbable folksiness to bear on Warren Schmidt's shrinking, almost rude attempts at politeness - and her appearance as the mother of the groom is sure to be an indelible moment in the history of Hollywood fashion. (That hat!)
The Foley artists - do I have this right? - clearly had a field day rigging up the sound of Jack Nicholson's naval engagement with a waterbed. The ten or fifteen people in the audience yesterday afternoon all seemed to find this as funny as I did. When was the last time Jack Nicholson made you weep with laughter?
19 December 2001: In the current issue of Granta, which is devoted to Music, Nick Hornbyhas a short piece about falling in love with a Nelly Furtado song.
Sure, it will seem thin and stale soon enough. Before very long, I will have ‘solved’ ‘I’m Like a Bird,’ and I won’t want to hear it very much anymore – a three-minute pop song can only withhold its mysteries for so long, after all. So, yes, it’s disposable, as if that makes any difference to anyone’s perceptions of the value of pop music. But then, shouldn’t we be sick of the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata by now? Or the Mona Lisa? Or The Importance of Being Earnest? They’re empty! Nothing left! We’ve sucked ‘em dry! That’s what gets me: the very people who are snotty about the disposability of pop will go over and over again to see Lady Bracknell say ‘A handbag?’ in a funny voice. You don’t think that joke’s exhausted itself? Maybe disposability is a sign of pop music’s maturity, a recognition of its own limitations, rather than the converse.
I take almost religious issue with these remarks. Sure, you can overexpose yourself to the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, or to any other sensation. But you cannot suck it dry. If you could, then the music would still be flat when you came back to it after leaving it alone for a while. What distinguishes art from pop isn’t disposability so much as the former's bottomless resourcefulness. Art changes as you grow. Pop, on the other hand, freezes like a snapshot; that’s why golden oldies are such powerful reminders of youth. Structurally, the difference is one of inner complexity; our knack for recognizing and relating the elements of a work of art shifts over time, so that a masterpiece is never the quite the same twice.
But what to do about the Hornbys in the world who appear to believe, sincerely, that art is no more durable than pop? Are they as intractable as the deaf man who denies the beauty of music, or the color-blind man who sees red and green as tones of grey? Or might they be taught? Perhaps not. There is, unfortunately, an awful lot of starch in arts presentation, and it turns kids off in droves. Nick Hornby has probably prided himself on retaining an adolescent resistance to ‘pretension’ throughout his rise to literary eminence. How many men are there out there, boldly and courageously (so they fancy) maintaining adolescent habits of mind? It doesn’t bear thinking about, not, at least, before lunch.
I've given myself a handy opportunity to put this art/pop distinction of mind to the test. Largely because the packaging was irresistible, I picked up a copy of a new Billy Joel CD that I found in HMV's classical department. Entitled "Billy Joel: Fantasies & Delusions," the CD apes the design of a book of piano music (pros call them 'scores') published by G. Schirmer; no halfway-serious amateur pianist can be unfamiliar with this look. Although he wrote the music, Mr Joel ('William' on the inside credits) doesn't play it. The playing is Richard Joo's, recorded last summer in Vienna. On first impression, the music turns out to be quite agreeable, and not all that light. There are a few too-obvious references to Chopin, but on the whole the collection makes an original contribution to the post-Romantic French tradition. There may be little none of the brittle modernism of Debussy and Ravel here, but there's plenty of their sophisticated charm. Time will tell whether there's more to these pieces than meets the ear at first hearing. I'll let you know. The CD is certainly a design must-have for anyone who has slogged through Hanon.
Copyright (c) 2004 Pourover Press