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

Claude Chabrol is often called the French Hitchcock. (Never mind that Hitchcock worked successfully in many different genres and that his true hallmark was absolute mastery of composition, camera movement and editing while Chabrol has no particular visual talent at all and largely sticks to psychological thrillers.) Unfortunately, his work is much more uneven than Hitch’s, and La Ceremonie does nothing to improve his batting average.

The film stars Sandrine Bonnaire as Sophie, a maid with a dreadful secret she’ll do anything to keep, namely that she’s illiterate. What sort of background did she come from that she never learned to read? Why didn’t she try to do something about the problem once she grew up? How has she managed to get by for so long, and what would happen if someone found out? The film leaves these pressing questions unanswered, and devotes no more time to sketching in any other aspects of her character either. She’s a chilly, unexpressive woman with no apparent goals or desires to help move the story forward, so most of the movie is effectively static. Her new employers, the well-to-do Lelievres, want her to cook and clean, so she cooks and cleans. The postal clerk she meets, Jeanne, played by Isabelle Huppert, wants to be her friend, so she hangs out with her and does whatever Jeanne feels like doing. She’s carried along like a leaf in the wind, and neither the leaf nor the wind prove to be particularly interesting.

Chabrol spends some time accumulating details of the comfortable existence the Lelievre family enjoys, but he never makes anything of the class contrast between them and Jeanne and Sophie, and he never connects any of it to the central conceit of the story, Sophie’s illiteracy, so both the class contrast and her illiteracy wind up just hanging in the air doing nothing. (If Sophie’s inability to read had actually posed any real danger to her, she might have at least become a somewhat more sympathetic character despite her aloofness, but as it stands, it’s clear that the Lelievres not only wouldn’t have fired her, they’d have been more than happy to pay for reading lessons.)  And then, at last, Sophie and Jeanne conduct the murderous ceremony of the title, but it means nothing and arouses no feelings whatsoever because it’s completely arbitrary and has no connection whatsoever to either Sophie’s inability to read or any kind of conflict, class or otherwise, between Sophie and the Lelievres.

There’s a very nice ironic plot twist at the very end, but it’s too bad it was wasted on this dud of a movie. There’s a lot of Chabrol I haven’t seen, but if you want a much better introduction to his work, check out The Bridesmaid. That actually has a point.

If for some insane (or maybe inspired) reason I were to kidnap Ben Stiller, I’d immediately ask him, “What the heck was Tropic Thunder about?”

His first response would probably be something along the lines of, “It’s a satire of Hollywood in which a bunch of shallow, self-involved actors who think they’re making a Vietnam war movie get tangled up with a real-life drug gang in the middle of the jungle and wind up having to actually become the heroic characters they’d only been pretending to be before.”  Then of course I’d draw a gun and force him to put on a terrible straw-blond wig and a lot of white makeup and perform a stage show as a mentally handicapped character named “Simple Jack” until he cracked and gave me a real answer.

To backtrack a little, Tropic Thunder starts off pretty decently. There are some good laughs, including an unexpected death and a really vicious and hateful — and extremely funny — performance by Tom Cruise as an evil studio executive named Les Grossman. The problem is that it runs off the rails and mostly stops generating laughs pretty quickly, because Stiller and his co-writers didn’t have a clue what they really wanted the movie to be about, thematically speaking. At first, it seems like they wanted to savagely lampoon the film industry. But then later, out of nowhere some of the actor characters begin to grow up and become better people, and in the end, all the death and misery caused by the aborted and disastrous production of the Vietnam war movie-within-a-movie gets “redeemed” when the footage is turned into a documentary which implausibly makes hundreds of millions of dollars at the global box office! You just can’t have your cake and eat it too, or in this case simultaneously tear down Hollywood and build it up. You have to pick an attitude, a viewpoint, a theme, and stick to it. You need to have the courage of your convictions.

I’m sure some of you will say, “Come on, lighten up, it’s only a comedy,” but theme is just as important in comedy as it is in any other genre. In fact, you could argue it’s even more important, because there’s such a thin line separating a joke that works from one that dies horribly, and because that line is drawn in large part by the theme of the overall piece and the attitude that theme generates in the audience.

For example, take the part of Tropic Thunder in which Stiller’s character, Tugg Speedman, has been kidnapped by the Flaming Dragon drug gang and forced to play Simple Jack, a role from a terrible film he’d done a few years before in the foolish hope of winning an Oscar. Suddenly, Speedman starts losing his grip on sanity and becomes committed to his new “gig” playing Simple Jack and the new relationship he thinks he’s forming with members of the drug gang. This isn’t even slightly amusing because it doesn’t make so much as a shred of sense. Speedman has been set up as a stupid and arrogant Hollywood celebrity who’s desperate to hold onto his wealth and power, not as a delusional fool who has difficulty distinguishing between fantasy and reality. The gag might have worked better if it had been assigned to Robert Downey Jr.’s character, Kirk Lazarus, who is regularly shown to be so absurdly over-committed to the craft of acting that he literally stays in character all the time and even undergoes plastic surgery in order to more convincingly play a black man. It also would have contributed to Lazarus’s ostensible character arc, in which he learns to let go of his pretentious and fundamentally fake dedication to his craft and acknowledge that he pretends to be other people because he doesn’t really know who he is himself underneath all the characters he plays. Speedman’s arc, if he’d even had one to begin with, should have been about getting over his greed and his lust for fame and box office clout, though of course that wouldn’t work as long as the movie’s happy ending was going to be the release of a documentary about a failed movie production somehow magically making staggering amounts of money and massively boosting everyone’s career as a result.

Why would Stiller & Co. make such an obvious mistake — and dozens upon dozens of others which I won’t bother going into here? Because they didn’t have the first clue about what they were trying to say.

Here’s what Netflix says about The Asphalt Jungle.

Nominated for four Academy Awards and long considered a noir classic, John Huston’s heist film follows a band of criminal masterminds (Sam Jaffe, Sterling Hayden and Louis Calhern) as they carry out a million-dollar jewelry-store burglary that will have them set for life. Snatching the loot is easy, but their greed soon leads to double crosses and murder. The film features an early appearance by Marilyn Monroe as a sexy moll.

Sounds pretty awesome, huh? Gritty and intense and with some sex appeal, too, courtesy of Marilyn Monroe, right? Sadly, not so much. There’s really not a whole lot of double-crossing or back-stabbing, or chasing or law-breaking either, and in the end the movie winds up feeling more like a sluggish morality play in which everything that happens happens because the filmmakers or the studio thought they ought to be sending the correct social message rather than because of the dictates of the story and the characters.

I wonder if they realized that at the time, though. It’s all too easy to incorporate unexamined assumptions into your writing, because those assumptions just plain feel right and even inevitable. It’s something everyone should be careful of.

Last night I watched an interesting little Italian thriller called The Backwoods.  (Well, actually, it’s called Bosque de Sombras, but it stars Gary Oldman and Paddy Considine along with actors of various other nationalities, so I’m going to stick with the English title.)  Anyway, it’s not bad, though it also has some pretty serious flaws, but one scene in the latter half of the story got me thinking about a common problem in movies: Mexican standoffs in which one character just arbitrarily gives up.

Without spoiling anything significant about the movie (which isn’t good enough to recommend, but also isn’t bad enough to recommend against) there’s a scene in which a character, we’ll call him Arygay Oldmanay, has a gun drawn on another character.  He’s got the other guy dead to rights, no question about it, but then a third guy sneaks up behind Arygay and points a gun at him.  Now, in the broader sense of the term, this is a Mexican standoff, because neither side has an advantage, so the situation is deadlocked.  Yes, the third guy can shoot Arygay, but only if he doesn’t mind Arygagy shooting and killing his friend.  (OK, screw this “Arygagy” stuff; he’s just Gary from now on.)  So you’d figure that Gary would realize that the gun in his hand, which he has pointed right at the third guy’s friend, is his only piece of leverage, the one thing keeping him alive, right?

If so, you’d be wrong.  As in a really startling number of other movies, Gary lays down his weapon and gives up.  Why?  I can only guess that he’d seen too many movies, and he just thought that this was what he was supposed to do in situations like this, because it sure doesn’t make a damn bit of sense to me.  Now, if I were in Gary’s position and some kind of expert marksman had a high-powered sniper rifle with a laser sight trained right on my skull and the marksman assured me that he could turn out my lights the instant he saw me even think about pulling the trigger and long before I actually did it, meaning that the deterrence value of my weapon was genuinely neutralized, then maybe I would lay down my gun.  Otherwise, not on your life.  I’d threaten, I’d bluster, I’d bluff, I’d bargain — I’d do whatever I could to stay alive, but the one thing I wouldn’t ever do is conclude that surrender is the only option.  So when Gary gave up, it yanked me right out of the movie, which up to that point had at least created a pretty effectively creepy atmosphere.

I realize it’s hard to come up with a creative solution to a problem that’s already been put up on screen a million and a half times, but at least don’t just punk out on the problem — do something that makes sense, both narratively speaking and for the characters in the situation you’ve created.  Otherwise poor saps like me will continue to waste valuable rental dollars on disappointing movies, and then we won’t watch anything else you do in the future!

So you’re hanging out with your buddies on a Friday night and you decide you’re all going to see a movie.  Now imagine you have two choices: a movie about people doing things, and a movie in which people sit around and then maybe a few things happen in the end because other people were busy doing things offscreen.  That wouldn’t be a very hard choice, would it?  But believe it or not, the new Narnia movie, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, winds up being the latter kind of movie, not the former.  Oh, it sounds plenty exciting — the Pevensie kids are summoned back to Narnia, where they have to defeat an evil king who’s about to invade and kill all the talking animals, and they also have to restore the rightful king to his throne in the invading kingdom so there can be peace between the two nations — but in the end, it turns out that every last thing the Pevensies did or even thought about doing was pointless, and in fact they shouldn’t have even tried, because the whole mess was just a test of their faith in Aslan, and all they were supposed to do was to go meet him, whereupon Aslan would take care of everything.

That doesn’t exactly give the audience a vicarious feeling of triumph and accomplishment, does it?  So no wonder the movie underperformed pretty significantly at the box office, casting doubt on whether the next installment in the series will even be made.

Movies have to be about characters doing things — doing the things ordinary people are afraid to do, or wish they could do, or know they have to do but fear doing… whatever, just as long as they’re doing something, anything, making choices that result in actions.  Writing passive characters who just drift through life while things happen around them is a classic newbie mistake.  In this particular case, the filmmakers were adapting the widely-beloved novel by C. S. Lewis, so their options were probably limited (maybe the best choice would’ve been to not make the movie in the first place, because it sure was expensive) but Lewis was writing a Christian parable more than he was writing a story, and unfortunately, it shows.