Several years ago, back when Gene Siskel was still alive, he and Roger Ebert
did a theme show entitled “You Blew It!,” in which they razzed each
other about particularly egregious cheers and jeers. For example, Siskel got
on Ebert for hating David Lynch’s modern classic Blue Velvet
and liking the Burt Reynolds/annoying moppet comedy Cop And A Half.
The show was basically a funny rehash of old arguments, because the passage
of time had done nothing to shake either one of them from their original opinions,
no matter how untenable they had become. I’ve always felt that a better show would be
“I Blew It!,” in which the critics look back on their decades of
reviewing movies and confess to a few blown calls. And yet I’ve never
once seen a piece in which a critic admits that his/her original opinion was
in any way misguided, which strikes me as completely unnatural, if not downright
bull-headed in its obstinacy. To me, changing your views goes hand-in-hand with
your growth as an human being: If I held fast to every opinion I ever had on
a movie, the 13-year-old in me would still think The Ice Pirates is
hilarious, because it features a break-dancing robot.
It’s a dirty little secret among critics, I think, that we don’t
always feel today what we felt yesterday, yet I think that’s a secret
that we keep as much from ourselves as from our readers. As a critic, you want
your opinions to be authoritative and certain right from your first encounter
with a film, lest you be perceived as a bigger waffler than the last couple
of Democratic Presidential candidates. (Beats the stay-the-catastrophic-course
philosophy of our current leader, but that’s for another forum.) To me,
a review is a record of how a critic feels at that moment in time, not some
stone-chiseled verdict delivered from on high that can never be changed. And
yet my movie critic friends are almost perversely reluctant to concede any ground,
which I think has something to do with their opinions already being registered
in print. If you admit you’re wrong, you’re weak and not to be trusted,
least of all by yourself.
With that in mind, I’m prepared to make a few confessions here that go
against the official record that you find in the archives. I should say first
that outright reversals are extremely rare; it’s not often that I’m
so uncertain about my feelings that I hate something I professed to love or
vice versa. In most cases, opinions are like carry-on bags in the overhead bin:
Items may shift during the flight. This year alone, a few films have settled
in ways that the original reviews don’t quite capture: The dark political
comedy/fable Lord Of War
so wowed me with its urgent and irreverent treatment of the gun-running trade—the
final scene, especially, sends you out on a high—that I was too quick
to overlook the lazily sketched portraits of the main character’s brother
and wife. It was hard to put a finger on why Gus Van Sant’s Last
Days didn’t impress me as much as the other films in his “death
trilogy” (Gerry, Elephant), yet my reservations have melted away a bit
in retrospect, because I feel like Van Sant means for his Cobain character to
be a ghostly half-presence—or, as Keith puts it so well in this week’s
DVD briefs, someone who’s “learned how to haunt the world before
figuring out how to die.” War
Of The Worlds has also improved slightly upon reflection and a second viewing,
but it’s more a matter of emphasis: The ending is still a huge Spielbergian
misstep, but he puts on such a clinic of visual storytelling throughout that
his feats of direction should not be understated.
Of the honking errors I’ve made in my eight years writing for The
A.V. Club, there’s only one review I’d like to take back, which
is my rave for American Beauty.
Obviously, I was not alone in liking the film at the time—it won an award
or two, if I recall—but what first appeared to be an audacious and daring
comedy from a major studio now seems like a Hollywood gloss on well-trodden
indie territory, leavened by “transcendent” moments like that goddamn
floating plastic bag. How could I overlook the leaden irony of iron-fisted dad
Chris Cooper’s suppressed homosexual impulses? Or the overplayed Stepford
Wife brittleness of Annette Bening’s performance? The film makes me wince
with regret whenever it pops up on cable, and all I can say in my defense is
that its surfaces (courtesy of the late, great cinematographer Conrad Hall)
are so seductive that one can be forgiven for overlooking the hollowness inside.
So how rigid are your opinions? Do you find yourself unwilling to budge most
of the time or have there been times when a movie has shrunk or grown dramatically
in your estimation? We’ll take your confessions below…