What About Spanglish?

Pauline Kael wrote that critics should not talk about the Academy Awards. She was right. She correctly understood that the Oscars institution is a cultural distraction. But not even she could have guessed the extent to which annual Awards grubbing would destroy film culture, or that critics would willingly kowtow to it. Behaving like publicists, critics can't wait to enter the Awards Season frenzy, which means that, year after year, as Hollywood itself grovels after prizes, good films get left in the dust. Only the most high-profile, most conventional and excessively promoted films win the year-end vanity contest.

In opposition to that folly, I need to reiterate calling James L. Brooks' Spanglish a "near masterpiece." Since it has been left out of most Awards contention, it is a perfect example of a good movie that is damaged by Awards fever. Spanglish should have opened at any other time of year because it is too intelligent, too sensitive, too unusual to succeed in an atmosphere in which hackneyed sentimentality (represented by Million Dollar Baby), middle-brow self-congratulation (Sideways) and hipster narcissism (Before Sunset) usurp attention. Spanglish is a people's work of art. It deserves a Jean Renoir Award for truthfully capturing and exploring how we live.

The insufferably snide way that many critics dismissed Spanglish as tv-style twaddle only shows how the culture has devolved to the point that critics can no longer discern sensitivity from cliche. With malice aforethought, they condemn James L. Brooks for criticizing the middle class, even though this film is far superior to the class flattery in his critically lauded Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News and As Good as It Gets. The problem is, Spanglish's multi-ethnic story does not pander to the middle-class narcissism of Brooks' previous films. Because they object to Spanglish's bold social critique, bourgeois critics are unable (and unwilling) to see how Brooks' craft has deepened.

Spanglish really does come close to being a masterpiece, because it is Brooks' most complex, least smooth rendering of modern American language and habit (the very observations that made his work on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Simpsons so ingenious). Yet in visual terms, the movie resembles lackluster tv. John Seale's lighting is flat, and almost every dramatic composition is too close and intrusive. Brooks can't establish a proper visual rhythm (the style that makes Marco Bellocchio's My Mother's Smile so esthetically exciting); still, everything else about the movie is delicately and movingly perceptive. I propose that if Jean Renoir made a film about modern Hollywood's upper class interacting with its immigrant working classa Malibu-set The Riverit would be much like Spanglish. And the Renoir-like plangency Brooks achieves in the sensitivity to each character's suffering is preferable to the nihilist fantasies of Michael Mann's L.A.-set Collateral, which only are suited only to the way people live on Mars.

It's obvious that Brooks has studied (and mastered) too much television technique. (Too bad he hasn't been studying The Southerner or The Lower Depths for style.) But critics cannot see that Brooks has actually transcended television's manipulative moralism. Despite his bland visual approach, he breaks through to the political and ethical heart of his drama via fascinatingly conflicted characterssuch as a grandparent teaching a child cabaret tunes ("I was wrong/ Now life is lonely again") as lullabyes to prepare him for the future.

Brooks' critique of middle-class American values is anathema to red-carpet venality. Bourgeois critics object to his suggestion that wealth and privilege are not satisfying, so they hide their distaste by praising false estheticism (the "glamour" of The Aviator). They berate Brooks' lack of visual finesse (the flat imagery of mother, father, daughter and maid sharing a moment of embarrassment) without recognizing that at least there's a humanizing plainness in Brooks' concept not unlike Renoir's exquisitely simple technique. The key to Spanglish's beauty comes at the start, when Brooks zeroes in on his narrator's interest in class advancement (she applies to study at Princeton). He clearly suggests that this struggle might be at the expense of forsaking the class (and the woman) that formed her foundation. That's why social-climbing critics are scared off.

Movie culture has so disastrously acquiesced to the profit motive behind Oscars that every year, critics take less time to properly assess late-season openings for their meaning. Movies like P.J. Hogan's brilliant Peter Pan and the sophisticated Something's Gotta Give and Spanglish are recent examples of terrific movies that get lost in the Oscar shuffle. Critics have failed their duties by going along with the greed parade. They too want to be in on hawking the big releases, so they fall in to giving out their awards and year-end assessments as early as a month before the year is overand before all the films have been seen. (In 2004, critics voted their prizes without seeing Meet the Fockers and Flight of the Phoenix.) That means they wind up praising films that fit a pattern of "significance" and "art" rather than films that wrangle with what matterseven, in the case of Spanglish, when its form looks conventional. But consider every line that Cloris Leachman utters as the alcoholic grandmother, such as "I live my life for myself. You live your life for your daughter. None of it works." Each line buzzes, yet each is true. Brooks reaches depths of experience and understanding that are usually mechanized and falsified. In Spanglish, his awareness of human naturehis touchis more significant than his technique. That's something only honest criticismnot awardscan measure.

Inside Deep Throat

Directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato

Inside Deep Throat, the first NC-17-rated documentary (due to an explicit clip from the 1972 porn film), was not just made for laughs but to push a biased agenda. Directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato pretend an historical overview by starting with footage of the Nixon administration as stuffy villains of free speech. Yet, by the end, after Deep Throat put blowjobs into mainstream parlance (and spiced the Watergate investigation), they ignore its relevance to the Clinton administration's scandal. Bailey-Barbato (who produced an HBO whitewash of Clinton's deep-throater Monica Lewinsky) are not reliable chroniclers, just Michael Moore-style clowns.

A lot of good material is wasted. Norman Mailer, for instance, describes how "porn lived in a midworld between crime and art," but then Bailey-Barbato make fun of director Gerard Damiano and the Florida mobsters who financed Deep Throat. A spat between a Miami Beach theater owner and his wife recalls the Jewish defamation in Capturing the Friedmans. Glossing everything, Bailey-Barbato settle for the Ms. Magazine martyrdom of performer Linda Lovelace and ridicule the long ordeal of her costar Harry Reems, who was prosecuted by the government, taken up by Hollywood liberals (shown partying with Jack Nicholson and Warren Beattyah, the 70s!) then ostracized when the furor subsided. Narrator Dennis Hopper praises Reems' "first amendment triumph" when it was merely a legal technicality. This fails as documentary because it settles for smirky sensationalism.