Forget The Whole Equation's subtitle: The latest from provocative film historian David Thomson never even attempts to be a comprehensive history of Hollywood. At most, it aspires to be an impressionistic, highly subjective meditation on the complex, contradictory relationship between art and commerce, the American film business, and the company town that serves as its Mecca, a place where merchants peddle big-screen fantasies to a mass of voyeurs sitting in the dark, hungry for waking dreams. At worst, The Whole Equation's ostensible subject seems like little more than marketing spin for a rambling, frustrating, wildly digressive collection of uneven jottings loosely related to American movies.
The Whole Equation's timeline stretches from the pioneering days of the Lumière brothers and Thomas Edison to the multiplex/multimedia mania of the Matrix trilogy and Nicole Kidman's will to power. In between rests anything but a cohesive narrative about film's evolution or devolution. Instead, Thomson concentrates on a handful of filmmakers whose careers embody crucial aspects of Hollywood's crazy gestalt. Among them: MGM boy genius Irving Thalberg (whose short life inspired The Last Tycoon, the unfinished F. Scott Fitzgerald novel that gives Thomson's book its title), Thalberg's boss Louis B. Mayer (MGM's sentimental, emotional, larger-than-life godfather), and obsessive super-producer David O. Selznick. Powered by a curious mixture of cynicism and idealism, sensuality and a cold, unsparing eye for business, Thomson's book is at its strongest when it focuses on these magnetic figures. At its weakest, it strays into abstraction and wanky theorizing, as with Thomson's blanket rejection of psychology and his strange, barely supported contention that it's done irreparable damage to the craft of acting.
One of the many recurring themes in Thomson's book is the tension between creative types' hunger for freedom and autonomy, and their equally strong aversion to shouldering the financial costs and risks such freedom generally entails. Thomson seems to believe, with good cause, that too much freedom can be dangerous or disastrous for artists—and his book inadvertently supports that point. Thomson desperately needs a judicious editor to rein in his tendency to meander. Instead, he's undone by the freedom to chase his fascinating but often half-formed ideas into dead ends and back alleys, as his increasingly wayward muse leads him astray.