A look at what's right (and what's wrong) with today's screenplays

It’s a cliche by now to observe that once you notice or remark upon something, suddenly you see it everywhere and it practically seems to be stalking you, but in this case, I think it actually may be true.

OK, not really, but it is pretty strange to blog about the awful and heavy-handed symbolism of the rat in The Departed and then to see the same damn thing just a few weeks later in an otherwise stupendously good BBC production from seventeen years ago. And when I say “the same damn thing”, I mean that literally. In The Departed, Scorcese put up a huge neon sign saying “CORRUPTION HERE!” with a big blinking arrow pointing right at the government by having a rat run up and across a railing with the Massachusetts State House in the background, and in House of Cards, Paul Seed did the same thing about a dozen times over by repeatedly cutting to rats cavorting through London, generally against the backdrop of one august and historic government structure or another. In fact, I have a very strong suspicion that Scorcese got the idea from House of Cards; he’s certainly very literate in film, and I’m sure he’s seen plenty of TV too.

(On a side note, isn’t it interesting (and depressing) that we have a variety of expressions for people who are conversant with literature — “well-read” and “literate” being just two of many — but none for people who have a great deal of knowledge about film? I was tempted to roll my own and call Scorcese “well-viewed”, but I thought people might think I was saying his films have been seen by a lot of people. We movie people need more respect!)

For those of you who don’t know what the heck House of Cards is, it’s a fantastic miniseries about a consummate back-room politician who decides one day that he wants to become Prime Minister of England (the ultimate front-room position) and goes after the job with every last bit of guile and venom he can muster. He regularly confides in us, the audience, but he keeps his hand carefully hidden from all the other characters in the story, and as his schemes unfold, we can only marvel at their ever-greater audacity — and, at least for awhile, at their continuing success.

Obviously, House has some clear similarities to Shakespeare’s Richard III, and also to the stellar but unfortunately short-lived TV show Profit, both of which I highly recommend. The beauty of Profit and Richard III — and of the vast majority of House of Cards, for that matter — is that they’re stuffed with magnificently-executed subtext, and understanding all the layers of meaning that unspool before us is tremendously rewarding, because we feel like we’ve accomplished something by figuring them out and putting them together. Furthermore, because we’ve drawn our conclusions ourselves, we take a sort of emotional ownership of them, accepting them as our own. That’s why preaching and overt messages rarely work; they’re finished conclusions people are trying to force on us, not deductions we’re allowed to partake in.

The rats, unfortunately, are the worst sort of preaching, completely free of subtext, and as such they stand in stark and unfortunate contrast to the rest of The Departed and House of Cards, both of which are otherwise written with great subtlety and skill.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled rodent-free browsing.

Near the end of The Counterfeit Traitor there’s a beautiful scene in which William Holden’s Allied spy and a couple members of the Danish resistance who are helping smuggle him back to the neutral country of Sweden are spotted by a group of Nazis and have to flee through the streets of Copenhagen. The Nazis pile into trucks and take off after them, and it looks like all is lost until a flash mob of ordinary Danish citizens on bicycles forms and blocks the Nazis’ way, allowing Holden and his compatriots to escape. What’s beautiful about the scene, though, isn’t the idea of the flash mob, the tension of civil disobedience under Nazi rule, or even anything about the way the scene is shot; it’s actually the sound design. At first there are just a few bicycle bells ringing in the background, an almost unnoticeable part of the acoustic environment. Our attention, after all, is on William Holden and the developing situation with the Nazis, not on the extras riding their bikes around behind them. But then, before we even fully realize what’s going to happen, more and more Danes ring their bells and converge until suddenly the noise is overwhelming and suspense has reached almost unbearable levels.

The bells are so effective for two reasons. They form an unusual counterpoint to what is otherwise a pretty standard chase-and-escape scene, transforming it into something different and memorable. And they heighten the emotional stakes of the scene by bringing home just how defenseless everyone is against the Nazis and their guns — all they have to fight with are bicycle bells, for god’s sake!

Most people would probably think of this scene as an example of great directing, but to me, it’s great writing. I haven’t read the screenplay, but I’m willing to bet that the swelling symphony of bicycle bells was right there on the page. This actually happens pretty often; the all-time greatest example may be the magnificent and justly-famous transition in Lawrence of Arabia from Lawrence blowing out a match to an angry red sun low in the desert sky. That too was on the page. Robert Bolt wrote it; David Lean just filmed it. So while we as screenwriters are rightly warned not to “direct on paper” in the sense of a lot of almost unreadable jargon along the lines of “TELEPHOTO SHOT OF X” and “CAMERA PANS LEFT TO REVEAL Y” and “So-and-so crosses CAMERA-RIGHT in front of Z,” we should remember that there’s another kind of “directing on paper” that’s actually one of the highest and most effective forms of writing there is. It’s unobtrusive, but it’s what real writing for the screen is all about.

Last night I watched my second Claude Sautet movie, Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud. I guess I had unreasonably high expectations, since my first Sautet, Un Coeur en Hiver, was tremendous. (It’s sort of like an apolitical French riff on The Remains of the Day — they both concern men who simply can’t bring themselves to open their hearts to the women they either love or could love, and who are ready to love them.) Though Nelly was consistently gripping and boasts superb performances all around, I felt slightly let down as the credits rolled, and after a few minutes’ thought, I figured out why.

First, a little plot summary for those of you who haven’t seen either movie or don’t remember them well. And yes, I’m afraid spoilers will abound in this post; there’s no way around it.

Un Coeur en Hiver (”A Heart In Winter”) follows three characters in a doomed love triangle. Stéphane (played by the great Daniel Autueil) is a brilliant violin maker and repairman. Maxime (played by André Dussollier) is his boss and the closest thing he has to a friend. And Camille (Emmanuelle Béart) is a gorgeous virtuoso violinist who comes into the shop one day in need of their services. Though Stéphane is immediately attracted to Camille, he doesn’t act on his attraction, and Maxime quickly leaves his wife and children and takes up with her. Later, Stéphane reveals how much he appreciates Camille’s playing, and she succumbs to the attraction she’s felt for him, leaves Maxime and enters a relationship with Stéphane. Stéphane, though, having the frozen heart of the title, can’t offer her the emotional engagement and intimacy she craves, and when her frustration and anger grow, he breaks things off with her… perhaps to spare her, perhaps to protect himself. Likely for both reasons. Humiliated, she returns to Maxime, and Stéphane retreats further from all human contact, quitting Maxime’s business and setting up his own secluded violin studio.

Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud is the tragic story of two people who are perfect for each other except for an unfortunate gap in their ages. Arnaud (Michel Serrault) is a retired judge and businessman who hires Nelly (Emmanuelle Béart) to help him type and edit his memoirs. Nelly is initially married to an out-of-work dullard who sits around all day watching TV while she juggles multiple jobs trying to keep them from being evicted, but exposure to the fascinating and courtly Monsieur Arnaud snaps her out of her self-imposed imprisonment in the status quo, and she gets a divorce. An attraction of sorts grows between her and Arnaud, but Arnaud is unwilling to risk rejection and Nelly can’t bring herself to engage in a physical relationship with a much older man. She tries to sublimate the interest she has in Arnaud by attempting a relationship with his publisher, Vincent (Jean-Hugues Anglade) but compared to Arnaud, Vincent is terribly boring, and before long, she breaks it off.

The difference between the two movies, and the reason Un Coeur is so much more satisfying, is that Nelly, the protagonist in Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud, stops pursuing her goals after awhile and becomes passive, while all three principle characters in Un Coeur en Hiver remain active right up to the very end. That doesn’t mean any of the other characters in either film necessarily achieve their goals; these are, after all, movies with essentially unhappy endings. But at least they keep trying.

In Un Coeur, Maxime, having long since left his family, recognizes that he’ll never truly possess Camille’s affections and understands that she may leave him at any time, but resigns himself to taking what he can get for as long as he can get it. Stéphane, having seen the dangers (to himself and to others) of even superficial engagement with other people, retreats even further from the society of his fellow man. And Camille, rebuffed by Stéphane in a way that she’d never before been rebuffed by any man, retreats to an unsatisfying relationship with Maxime as an ineffectual sop to her ego.

In Nelly, Arnaud, realizing at last that he can never have Nelly, takes up with his ex-wife and leaves the country. Nelly’s ex-husband, having been shocked awake by the breakup, finally returns to work, regains his self-respect and finds new love in the bargain. But after breaking up with Vincent, Nelly’s character turns static. She doesn’t try anything new to resolve the conflict between her interest in Arnaud and her unwillingness to become romantically involved with him. She just… exists, and the narrative and thematic momentum shift entirely to Arnaud. Because the movie is so nicely observed and excellently acted, and because the Arnaud sections are so strong, it largely succeeds despite this, but it would have been infinitely stronger if Nelly had remained active. She could have decided that she was actually better off alone, for example, though that would have undermined the tragic nature of the Nelly-Arnaud relationship. She could have tried returning to her unsatisfying affair with Vincent, though the dramatic possibilities of that storyline were already pretty much exhausted, so it wouldn’t have meaningfully moved the story or her character forward. Or, seeing the new man her ex-husband had become (or the restoration of the man he used to be) she could have seized upon him as the solution to all her problems and desperately tried to woo him back, perhaps wrecking his new relationship in the process and definitely failing to find what she really wanted all along — essentially Monsieur Arnaud in a younger body.

The point is that Arnaud knows exactly what he wants (Nelly) but realizes he can’t have it and settles for his ex-wife, and because we like him very much, we feel terribly sad for him. Nelly, by contrast, more or less knows what she wants (Arnaud, but younger) but she gives up entirely on trying to get it or anything else, and because we can only judge how much a character wants something by how hard he or she tries to get it, her apathy and inaction suggest to us that she didn’t really want it that much after all, and that we therefore shouldn’t be so sad that she didn’t get it. That seriously undermines the impact of the ending — Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud parting ways — and even distances us from the heartbreak Arnaud feels upon saying goodbye to her.

Maybe you haven’t seen either of these movies and never will (though I recommend that you do), but the lesson applies universally: stories are about characters trying to get what they think they want and either succeeding or failing, not about characters sitting around doing nothing.