Some of Anthony Lane's pieces are more rewarding than the movies they discuss, just as John Hurt played Quentin Crisp far better than Crisp ever played himself, says Terry Eagleton reviewing Nobody's Perfect.
Nobody's Perfect. By Anthony Lane. Picador, 752pp. £15.99
Good critics, like good cooks or master criminals, must be more than merely talented. They must conform to what counts as being adept at their trade at a particular time. There is no point in being lushly sensuous and sweetly lyrical if you are supposed to be an English 1930s poet. A Private Eye reviewer with the virtues of Samuel Johnson should cling on to his day job.
Just as starlets with retroussé noses make it en masse into the movies when this happens to be what counts as sexiness, so, by a similar Darwinist sifting, reviewers with a naturally ironic, streetwise vein of wit will prosper in a postmodern age.
Good reviewers in postmodernist times must be funny but not flippant, sceptical but not cynical, witty but not wacky. It helps if they hold reach-me-down middle-class liberal values and are free from unfashionable opinions, such as believing in alien abductions or Arthur Scargill. They should be strongly anti-racist, mildly pro-feminist and vaguely social democratic, without being too embarrassingly engagé. They must be intelligent without being dauntingly intellectual, and moderately but not savagely iconoclastic. Technically clued-up but not anorakish, the off-the-peg postmodern reviewer is suave but not overbred, broad-minded but discriminating. This Platonically perfect creature combines erudition with lightness of touch, the milk of humanity with a faintly acidic backwash.
If Anthony Lane is such a superlative exponent of the craft, it is because he has all these qualities to the second power. Lane is to film reviewing what Naomi Campbell is to narcissism. Nobody's Perfect, a bumper selection of his film reviews for the New Yorker, betrays no opinions which might nettle Tony Blair, and unrolls acre after acre of coruscating, shimmeringly perceptive prose. If Hamlet is one long quotation, so is this collection.
It is not that Lane writes so well about what he sees, but that he sees what he does because he writes so well. It is his prodigious verbal imagination which unpacks these visual phenomena so resourcefully, as when he writes of how the "cold pedantry" of Stanley Kubrick's manner is offset in Spartacus by all that sweat and sand, or how at one point the camera in Con Air goggles crassly at the villains of the piece.
Gwyneth Paltrow, in Emma (a movie "decked to the hilt" like an over-decorated cake-tin lid), has "both bite and languor in her, a finesse that can turn scruffy at will. She can convey anything, in fact, except the moral bossiness of Emma Woodhouse". Lane goes on to comment with typically exact insight that Jane Austen herself "is not vicious and manipulative towards her creations, but she almost is - and so is Emma . . ." This is more William Empson than Philip French, as Lane raises film criticism to a fine art without the least detriment to its demotic lowliness. Some of his pieces are far more rewarding than the movies they discuss, just as John Hurt played Quentin Crisp far better than Crisp ever played himself.
Lane's film criticism is for the most part displaced literary criticism: it's not surprising that the volume also carries pieces on Ruskin, Housman, Waugh, Gide and T.S. Eliot. But it also has a canny eye for the way a camera conducts itself - passionately, clinically, archly, pryingly, nudge-nudgingly, officiously. Anthony Minghella, in The English Patient, "burrows into his heat-struck characters, where the lordly David Lean (of Lawrence of Arabia) stood back and stared". The camera becomes a moral organ, not least when it refuses to moralise. Lane has a stunning way of translating the feel and texture of a movie, its emotional climate and narrative tempo, into effortlessly exact speech. He spots where a cinematic style is to be admired for fending off cheap temptations, or where a movie self-righteously fits up one of its characters. Films are rapped over the knuckles for trying too hard or nagging their viewers, for losing interest in themselves halfway through or (like The World is Not Enough) serving up "an hour and a half of anti-climax".
But Lane is just as lavish in his commendations. The English Patient ("When did you last see a movie that offered two great roles for women?") is "awfully close to a masterpiece". That "awfully" intensifies the praise while simultaneously making for a very English piece of understatement, marking off generosity from gush. We also learn that he adores Where Eagles Dare. The book is as stuffed with bon mots as a Best of Oscar booklet. As Gladiator would suggest, "all plots lead to Rome". Richard Linklater doesn't so much direct Dazed and Confused as "host" it, orchestrating a delightfully dysfunctional movie in which "the characters yearn for significant events that never quite arrive". Forrest Gump, a film resonant with Tom Hanks's "slow, yodelling Alabama vowels", "is so insistently heartwarming that it chilled me to the marrow". Lukas Moodysson's Show Me Love "managed the near-impossible task of dramatising a crush between two Swedish schoolgirls without getting itself steamed up".
Further shafts of insight abound. Nobody in a movie can just drive; they have to be on a voyage of self-discovery. In L.A. Confidential, "even [Kevin Spacey's] jackets play a supporting role". The title Pulp Fiction sounds like a description of its hero John Travolta's "luscious but squashy, easily bruised" features, while Nicholas Hytner's mad King George III, who murmurs "I have remembered how to seem", is in Lane's view a man who "should be in the pictures". (He spoils the joke a bit by repeating it in a review of Rushmore, but reviewers can get away with repetition as poets cannot.)
Lane is an Englishman writing mostly for the New Yorker, and his literary style is an intriguing mixture of sardonic English wit and the elliptical American wisecrack. He writes in a packed, intricately energetic, value-for-money East Coast style, but blends it with an unmistakably English low-keyedness and laid-backness. The wisecracks are occasionally a touch too voulu, and the wit a shade too knowing; but this man should be in a picture house.
Terry Eagleton's latest book, Sweet Violence, a study of tragedy, was published this autumn by Blackwell