Try again. Fail again. Fail interestingly.
Trapped in sad-sack mode
Recently, in my never-ending battle to catch up with every movie I’ve missed, I made my way to Charlie Kaufman’s 2008 directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York. Kaufman, as you may already know, wrote the screenplays for Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation (in which Nic Cage played him—and his fictional twin brother), and the criminally-underrated Chuck Barris faux-biopic Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.
The point being that the guy can write. But Synecdoche reaffirms that just because you can do something well, that doesn’t mean you can do everything well. Without Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry to act as a balance, Kaufman gets to do whatever he wants—and what he wants is everything. The movie is stuffed full of characters and conceits and ideas—no, Ideas, with a capital-goddamn-I—and it can’t handle them all. It collapses. It bursts. It doesn’t work.
But I don’t want to be too dismissive. Because it’s been a long time since I’ve seen an interesting failure on this scale. Because I’d rather see a movie with too many ideas than a movie with none, and I’d rather watch talented people try to do too much than Transformers 2.
An interesting failure, it should be noted, is not the same as a flawed masterpiece. A flawed masterpiece has a problem or two that you ignore in retrospect. With an interesting failure, you’re just as likely to remember the nonsense as the brilliance. BUT: you keep remembering it. It’s doing something, by god, even if it’s not doing a lot of it well.
For instance: Hitchcock’s Psycho, with its irritating epilogue in which Dr. Headshrinker Explains It All, is a flawed masterpiece. Marnie, which explores all of Hitch’s pet obsessions, but does so handicapped by Tippi Hedren in the lead, is an interesting failure. Torn Curtain, which miscasts Paul Newman and Julie Andrews, and which feels 84 days long, is an uninteresting failure.
L to R: The good, the bad, the ugly
I suppose IFs (that’s not going to catch on) depend upon a certain level of investment in an artist’s work. Marnie is interesting to me because I’m interested in watching Hitchcock play variations on his favorite themes, even when those variations aren’t up to scratch. Orson Welles has a lot of interesting failures—chief among them Mr. Arkadin, which has so much great stuff in it that I ignore what a mess it is. People who don’t care about Welles may not have the patience to do that.
When Brett opened the door for some Dickens-bashing a couple weeks ago, it occurred to me that many of Dickens’s books might be called interesting failures, but now I don’t think I could say that about any book, because the media are too different. If you sit still long enough, the bad parts of a movie will pass; but the bad parts of a book still need to be read. Is it worth the effort, the concentration, the time you could be using to read something else, just to pan for the tiny nuggets of gold that might be there?
But a movie can be worth it, as Pauline Kael says in her seminal essay, “Trash, Art, and the Movies”:
The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense.
Sometimes a failure is interesting because its ambitions are insane (see Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales), or because its ideas are kind of repugnant (see Norman Mailer’s misogyny-as-thriller Tough Guys Don’t Dance), or because people with a lot of talent still make something watchable when they’re just screwing around (see the Coens’ Burn After Reading).
Other fascinating misfires: Shadows and Fog, Woody Allen’s exercise in German Expressionism; John Boorman’s Zardoz, in which Sean Connery plays a savage in the far future, hobnobbing with the more-civilized Immortals; Steven Soderbergh emptying his head of all its strange ideas in Schizopolis; and Eyes Wide Shut, which is more interesting than Kubrick’s other failure, The Shining. (And incidentally, Spielberg’s Kubrick-haunted A.I. is a flawed masterpiece. Come get me.)
Roger Ebert called Synecdoche, New York the best film of the decade. Entertainment Weekly gave it a D+. They’re both wrong.
What’s the last thing you watched that flew too high, or crashed and burned, but you couldn’t look away?
Hurt Locker was an uninteresting failure for me. Every major scene seemed to contain the exact same tension — will it or he or them blow up or not? Will it or he or them be defused or not? There seemed to be no character development whatsoever. Then there was a kind of explanation near the end a la Michael Herr’s Dispatches for how war creates hunger only for itself. But the characters were so flat that even that idea felt merely tagged on. And even with all the surface tension (Will it or he or them blow up?) I found myself bored because the characters felt like props.
i thought “the hurt locker” got so much love, and i couldn’t figure out why. it wasn’t terrible like i assume “transformers 2″ is. but the characters, especially, the lead role, felt like stereotypes to me (though i blame the writing more than the acting). one of the characters even calls out the lead as being a cowboy. to which i said, “um, yeah.”
the biggest disappointment was at the end. the audience finally glimpses a side of this character that isn’t completely consumed with war, then we cut to the soldier walking down a war-torn street to a heavy metal soundtrack, fade to black. i think that’s what we call “bailing on the story.”
I really liked The Hurt Locker, but then I could sit and watch Jeremy Renner sort peas and think it brilliant. Other things I liked about the movie was how each character seemed to live in his own bubble and be isolated because of the war. It made a nice change from other movies which seem to say “sure war is hard, but at least I have my buddies here and we are bonding for life.”
Call me atypical, but Torn Curtain is one of my favorite Hitchcock movies. I can’t really place why, but it is.
You know, even disliking it as I do, I have to say that murder scene in the farmhouse, with the oven, is great.
That description totally sounded like Clue.
Random note: There’s a mansion up north in MN where the lady of the house was actually was killed by the maid with a candlestick. Now they hold big haunted house parties there.
I’ve recently been getting into Nicholas Roeg movies, and I think he’s a good one to bring into this, because of the three I’ve seen so far, Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, and Bad Timing, I’d rate them as masterpiece, flawed masterpiece, and interesting failure. I really can’t even remember what happens in Bad Timing — but I do remember both thinking, Uh, what? and being completely mesmerized by certain moments. And those moments weren’t just visual, either. It was partly visual, but it was also the way his characters interacted with one another. It’s totally all Roeg’s thing. I’ve never seen anyone else do something similar. And I agree–it’s always worthwhile when a director can do that, whether the movie works as a whole or not.
Oh, man, I loved Don’t Look Now. It probably is flawed. But I think that creeping sense of terror, which never lets up, is great.
I’d say I (Heart) Huckabees was an fascinating failure. Sometimes infuriating, but interesting, and in certain places, really good. And I didn’t mind the way the film overtly, directly engaged its ideas — like a Kundera novel or something, it addressed them at the surface level, without trying to hide them behind something else. Usually i hate that.
I’d also argue Eyes Wide Shut was not a failure — for some reason I hesitate to say it was a complete success, but i liked it a lot. Tense and strange, everything has a staged, slightly off feel — everything but the scenes that have a wildly off feel. But that seems like a style, an artistic choice more than a failure, though i’d be hard-pressed to say more about why that is. But it was compelling to me, it pulled me along, and not just because i knew there was a big silly orgy coming up…
I agree with you about A.I. — not perfect, but pretty great.
Finally, the opposite: having extremely low expectations can have a positive impact on watching a movie as well. That’s what happened last night when i saw Hot Tub Time Machine. Ridiculous, in a good way. Flawed masterpiece? You decide.
The title itself — Hot Tub Time Machine — automatically means masterpiece to me.
Huckabee’s is a perfect example.
I liked Eyes Wide Shut a lot when I was 21 and saw it opening night, and as time has gone on I think lesser of it. But sometimes I think I need to see it again. Maybe it’s great. The Shining still fails, unfortunately.
Part of what makes A.I. great is that it’s so messy. And no movie with a cameo by Robin Williams can be perfect.
I so hope that IF catches on (and UF too)!
I thought The Informant was an IF and it was mostly Damon’s acting that contributed the interesting part for me. It was so far off from what he normally does that it kept my interest. A movie that almost everyone thought brilliant that was a complete UF in my book is The Departed. I’d seen the story before in numerous movies and I think Scorsese rode on his reputation and the big name actors.
[...] with this video series, ira’s addressing people who want to produce stories for broadcasting, but i think this interview—particularly part 2 (above) and part 3—are equally applicable to writers not interested in the radio & tv fields. and it’s also a nice follow-up that excellent post about interesting failures. [...]
The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus was one of those movies I rented knowing it was going to be an interesting failure but I probably respond more to interesting failure than I do to success.
There is something certain in failure, something that clears the air of the notion of judgement and just allows me to enjoy. It is also in a movie that is failing where my full attention gets turned toward the cinematography or the costumes or whatever is happening beside the narrative that I don’t always get to wrap my full attention around. It’s refreshing.
In Parnassus Heth Ledger, Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law all get cracks at the same character and that was enough for me to enjoy the movie throughout, to contrast and compare even though I didn’t give a damn about what was happening. (Christoper Plummer is always great too.)
Also I think Jazz, the music, is an interesting failure, every time.
Great post by the way. This will consume my thoughts for the rest of the day.
And you love jammy, meandering live music, which shares that quality—it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t work, and then suddenly there’s something brilliant in it.
I think the notion of rescue has something to do with this. The fact that someone or something is being called by the impending failure to rescue art is riveting. With Synecdoche you have to cling to what you can and hope for heroes (an actor, a set design, etc) to hold you up through out and that sets the stage to watch someone or something play toward the divine rather than among it and that should resonate with all our daily attempts. Man, to rescue art, its the last battle we get to have with the gods.
(There is nothing better than watching the Dead struggle through a song and watching Jerry Garcia suddenly smile to himself because he knows no one should be hearing this, ever.)
If you don’t write a craft book someday, I will be very disappointed.
My girlfriend brought the Synedoche DVD to my house and I picked it up and read the back and thought, “This looks interesting,” but by the time I finished reading the description on the back, I thought, “All that in one movie? That sounds kind of exhausting.”
One of the things I like about Henry Miller is that he is usually trying to do way too much, has no regard for structure, but is so passionate about creation and has such a nimble, impulsive mind that his books are often gorgeous messes packed with barely related moments of brilliance. The wrong editor could have driven him to homicide.
Yes, and Miller makes that work to varying degrees. Tropic of Cancer feels like a genuine success to me, whereas Capricorn is a real mess with some beautiful stuff in it.
[...] pathetic that I haven’t submitted any manuscripts in four years, but whatever – Samuel Beckett. I probably should have been inspired to write/revise after such an awesome Get Lit! a few weekends [...]
[...] The Swimmer, while not watchable enough to be an IF, is still an unusual case, in that so much has been added to make it a movie, unlike with a novel [...]