Kudrow has been Roos's best collaborator because the emotional pressure behind those tiny but unmistakable inflections make him look more than merely clever. He doesn't appear to be an astute judge of his own material and so his movies are more interesting the more things he tries out. When he went for single-strand emotionalism in the Gwyneth Paltrow-Ben Affleck romance Bounce (2000), only the chattery scenes at the airport were as much as clever, conveying what Roos picks up with his open ears and eyes. (Natasha Henstridge, receiving all frequencies, was his surrogate.) By contrast, the movies in which he piles character on character, story on story, gain from the layering and show a distinctively contemporary amusement at the complicated, even tortured routes we take to happy endings. And the obstacles he comes up with feel more "real," more rooted in character and less generic than in most comedies. (The desperate and self-cancelling Wedding Crashers makes for a painful contrast currently.)
This is what gives Roos's comedy its ironic kick and suspense--it's hard to pity people who are shown as plotting their own missteps, or to feel too comfy about what may happen to them--and perhaps explains why Bounce, in which the male and female leads are separated by what is nobody's fault (i.e., who dies in and who survives a plane crash), before inevitably coming together, is so inert. (I really missed Kudrow's snappy precision, too; Paltrow's dog-eyed touchingness made her bitter sadsack character pathetic and finally irritating, and she and Affleck just got slower and tearier as the movie wore on and on.) Moreover, with multiple storylines Roos can circle his dramatic ideas rather than driving up to them and parking in front as with Bounce. (In Affleck's climactic speech, for instance, in that wonderfully healing courtroom where a witness on the stand may take as much time as he needs to speculate about what's been troubling him, for the benefit of that one special person watching the proceedings on TV. Afterwards the plaintiffs' attorney looks at Affleck guiltily--he didn't know.)
Roos gets hung up, however, precisely because as a writer he thinks in terms of content, of changing attitudes and emerging lifestyles, rather than in terms of structure. He's not attempting to subvert conventions but neither has he mastered them in their traditional forms. He's muddling through on structure, and he's far from perfect in his handling of content, as well: he tends to overemphasize the vulnerability of his gay protagonists--Martin Donovan in The Opposite of Sex and Jason Ritter and Steve Coogan (in the third, and best-crafted, arc) in Happy Endings--for instance, and so interest shifts to the more complicated and independent female characters around them, making the movies kind of lumpy.
![Baby Face (1933) [VHS]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/21Q6JH54QFL._SL120_.jpg)
![Red Headed Woman [VHS]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/21N9FAZYKHL._SL120_.jpg)
Article comments
1 - Aaman
Thank you for sharing this with us - quite interesting.
I liked yr reference to the Red Headed Woman - I was about to refer to that film myself in my post on The Thin Man films - pre-Hays Code type film example, but forebore.
Did you see the review? What are your thoughts?
I see you have a new book - it's not on Amazon, though.
2 - Alan Dale
Hey Aaman,
Sorry it took so long to respond. Out of town, work. My book is an on-line creature; there's a link at the right side of my webpage, or you can just go to the first page. No one can call me a whore anymore--I'm giving it away for free.
I read your Thin Man post with interest and have posted a comment there.
3 - Aaman
That's cool - will read the book soon.
4 - Jamal Sledge
Hey Alan
I wanted to tell you that I enjoyed reading "What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies of the 1990s". I just wish you had it published as a book. You’re too talented and knowledgeable of a writer to give it away for free.
Reading “What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies of the 1990s” I get the impression that I’ve discovered a buried treasure chest. And because the chest contains great wealth, I don’t want to share it with anyone else (especially my fellow highbrow film friends who I’m constantly competing with.) I want to be a step ahead of them in terms of literary structure to screenplays. They feel being a visual virtuoso is the most important thing (while they praise filmmakers with inflated styles as Kubrick and Fellini, I’m more incline to naturalists Renoir, De Sica, Visconti and Ray.) Even when we agree that Jean-Luc Godard and Luis Buñuel are two of the greatest filmmakers ever, they brag about the technique without acknowledging the meaning behind the technique. Pauline Kael made a great case for this when she reviewed "Fellini Satyricon":
"Fellini's work has an eerie, spellbinding quality for some people which must be not unlike the powerful effect the first movies were said to have. Perhaps the opulence and the dreamlike movement of his films and the grotesques who populate them are what some people want from the movies -- a return to frightening fairy tales. Following the Kubrick line in selling pictures, Fellini, in an interview, says, "Even the young ones not smoking, not with drugs -- they grasp the picture, they feel the picture eat the picture, breath it, without asking, 'What does it mean?' This film -- I don't want to sound presumptuous, but it is a very good test just to choose friends with, a test if people are free or not. They young kids, they pass the test." I should say that emotionally, his Satyricon is just about the opposite of "free"; emotionally, it's a hip version of The Sign of the Cross. There's a certain amount of confusion in it about what's going on and where, so some people may take it "psychedelically" and swallow it whole, though the audience at Fellini Satyricon is already on to part of the con: there was a big laugh when Encolpius identified himself as a student. But this new selling technique of congratulating youth for not thinking -- which is also a scare selling technique to reviewers who are afraid of being left behind "free" youth -- puts the audience at the mercy of shrewd promotion....When Susan Kohner, sobbing, clutched the flowers on her black mother's casket in Imitation of Life, you might have felt the anguish in your chest even as you laughed at yourself reacting. Maybe if Fellini personally didn't impress people so much as a virtuoso they'd become as conscious of the emotional and intellectual shoddiness they're responding to in his films. The usual refrain is "With Fellini, I'm so captivated by the images I don't ask what it means." But suppose it's not the 'beauty' of the images they're reacting to so much as that step-by-step intuitive linkage between Fellini's emotions and their own almost forgotten ones?"
Thank you again, Alan, for working so hard and giving us many reviews in the same spirit of Pauline Kael. Unlike other critics who are influenced by Kael, you don’t copy her candidness just to be bitchy and intellectually hip (i.e. Armond White) but you continue her legacy by critiquing movies with a film historian and literary palpability. I can’t thank you enough for that. I learned more about films from reading you, Kael, Sarris and Bazin than any film professor.
P.S. I enjoyed your review of "Happy Endings" very much. Maybe that great mind of yours can write a review about "Hustle and Flow". I know, I know, I already twisted your arm into writing about "Crash"; another film that focus on race. But I still think you’re the best film critic that analyze films that make race apparent (your review of “Do The Right Thing” is one of the best I’ve read, and it was only two paragraphs!) Usually I read Armond White because he analyzes films from a race perspective. But your “Crash” review put his to shame…big time!
5 - Bob A. Booey
Maybe it's just me, but Maggie Gyllenhaal repulses me every time I see her. She's got the same face as Jake, only rounder and bigger.
Gwyneth repulses me for other reasons, like her boring plainness and air of spoiled entitlement that many mistake for elegance.
That is all.
6 - Duane
Yeah, mostly true about Maggie. But she's fun to hang out with. And she wouldn't mind blowing a Saturday on old movies and pizza and doesn't care if you skip a day shaving.
Gwyneth would feign being a high maintenanace type. She wouldn't want to jump in the car and go for a late afternoon picnic on top of a mountain just to see the stars come out at night. If you're not taking her to snobby pretentious art show openings, she would pretend to be unhappy. She would want to SEEN all the time.
7 - Jewels
Bo Bice woman here; Bobba, I see you & Duane are needing to re-watch that hit flik "Shallow Hal". I happen to like Maggie, Gwyneth, well I think Duane hit that babe on target! Just passing through; been recovering from my BO BICE experience after concert Saturday. :) :) :) :)
8 - Duane
Sorry to hear that the Beau Bryce show was so awful that you actually need time to recover. I knew he would suck, but ... wow! Yeah, those C&W shows can be a bit distressing. My Mom and Dad had an extra ticket for Brooks & Dunn and they wanted me to go so I said I would since I should be polite and all and we pull up into the parking area and I was thinking about having to sit through 90 minutes of that stuff and faking like I wanted to clap and cheer and having to participtae in the obligatory fake standing O and pretend to actually want an encore and just thinking about that I broke out in a cold sweat and barfed all over the parking lot so I know what you mean.
9 - Jewels
BO Bice, & suck in same sentance. (Is that how you spell sentance?) The suck word got me.... :) :) :) Sentence, senatnce. Trance. sent to a trance.
Hey, this has nothing to do with this post! :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :)
10 - Alan Dale
Hey Jamal,
Thanks again for your praise. I am curious to see Hustle & Flow, also Four Brothers, but I never know what I'm going to feel like writing about.
Actually, I feel very lucky to be able to publish my writing about movies without getting paid for it. Market pressures distort the work of all journalist-critics, no matter how successful they are or how much they claim to be above them. They have to turn themselves as writers into branded commodities, have to create and provoke a demand for their writing. This is as much a part of what people call a commercial writer's "voice" as writing talent is.
I'm highly flattered by the fact that you consider my book a treasure chest, but please don't hoard it! Tell anyone you think might be interested.
That is a great passage by Kael. As for Armond White on Crash, he was too angry to be coherent. Maybe I don't expect as much from movies as other critics--my major source of complex aesthetic pleasure will always be books and music and the visual arts. I can listen to the silliest of Rossini operas over and over but I could barely sit through Wedding Crashers. And as much as I love Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn it wasn't that disappointing. It belly-flopped as soon as the wedding-crashing montage ended and that was it.
11 - Alan Dale
Hey Bob,
Thanks for the comment. In Happy Endings, at least, Maggie is supposed to be repellent, and she manages to do it while being very charming.
As for Gwyneth Paltrow, what you wrote--"her ... air of spoiled entitlement that many mistake for elegance"--expresses perfectly a quality I've been trying to find words for for weeks. Thanks for that alone.
12 - Alan Dale
Hey Duane,
Thanks for the comment. I think that once you're fantasizing about what a date with an actress would be like, even if you think it would be a drag, you're already responding to her, accepting her as given, as a movie star. Instead of thinking of her, for instance, as a not-too-bright child of a "classy" theatrical family who had so little sense of irony she named her child Apple.
13 - Bob A. Booey
No problem, Alan. Thanks for the nice words.
The thing that bugs me about Gwyneth is how much she's embraced becoming this privileged Hollywood legacy WASP icon when she's not even a WASP.
That is all.
14 - Alan Dale
Hey Bob,
Thanks for that reply. I've never been a big Grace Kelly fan so I was never really that interested in Paltrow who seemed like an imitator. Hitchcock at least figured out how to make Kelly work by having her characters in Rear Window and To Catch a Thief throw themselves at her older male co-stars. No one has figured out how to use Paltrow effectively and she is sort of disappearing into her publicity. So I never really thought about whether she was a WASP or not, until your post. Click here for an interview in which she discusses the Jewish half of her family. Since she doesn't have talent equal to her mother's this is probably the most interesting thing about her.
15 - maria Dybdal
I love Lisa Kudrow I tjink about her so mush alle the time