Ostensibly, a review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Dan North has a good round-up of the critical invective that has been launched against Michael "Awesome" Bay's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Having seen the movie, I have to agree that most of the condemnation is deserved. As much as parts of me -- the part with a youthful attachment to the original Transformers cartoon, in particular (but also the part that prompts me to write things like this, or this) -- really, really wants to launch a spirited defense of the movie, there just isn't much to defend.

Not that a record-breaking movie that earned $200 million in 5-days needs much defense by a lowly graduate student. The phenomenal box office success Transformers 2 has reignited the age-old debate about, as ScriptGirl eloquently puts it in her most recent report, "whether Michael Bay is an accomplished journeyman with impressive technical skills, a unique visual style and a finger firmly on the pulse of youthful moviegoers, or just a total douche."

Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Bay had this to say about the chasm between critical and audience opinion:

"I think they reviewed the wrong movie. They just don't understand the movie and its audience. It's silly fun," Bay said over the weekend of the many "Transformers" critical detractors. "I am convinced that they are born with the anti-fun gene. The reviews are just so vicious. A lot of them are more personal than anything else."

To be fair to Bay, much of the highbrow criticism of Revenge of the Fallen is decidedly over-the-top and hyperbolic -- which is more than a little ironic, given the grounds on which his movie is being criticized.

I think my favorite headline comes from an Associate Press article: "'Transformers': Worst-reviewed $400 million hit?" Cuts right to the heart of the matter, yes?

While much has been made about the critical/commercial divide since the movie premiered, the AP article does point out that the majority of top-grossing movies, including summer blockbusters, are well-liked by critics. Last summer's The Dark Knight being a case in point -- although, interestingly, the resulting controversy there was how the movie was snubbed for award nominations. Even top-grossing movies that garnered mixed reviews like Star Wars: Episode One (1999) and Pirates the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) were still much better liked by critics than the Transformers sequel.

All of which would seem to indicate that, when it comes to Hollywood blockbusters, critics and audiences actually are in step most of the time.

Linda Holmes makes a similar point at NPR in "'Transformers' Opens Big: Does That Mean Critics Are Clueless?" She notes that a number of recent "pure-entertainment" movies has received good reviews, including Up, The Hangover and Drag Me to Hell.

There's a big difference between audiences thinking critics don't know what they're talking about — which goes to whether criticism itself is considered credible — and audiences thinking they simply aren't looking for critical quality — which goes to whether criticism is, as regards a particular movie, relevant....

Criticism is there to comment on the subjective things about the movie; some people are going because of the objective things: what it is, as opposed to how it is. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But it seems like a leap to turn that old, old truth into a new chasm yawning between audiences and critics. In a world where critics gave hugely positive reviews to Borat, it's nonsense to argue that they hated your robot movie because it wasn't Shakespeare.

Fair enough.

Holmes' piece is worth reading in its entirety. Even though some aspects of her argument are questionable -- the idea of the "pure-entertainment" movie, for one -- she makes a number of good points. Yet, lurking beneath her commentary (and the larger issues at hand) there is a thorny question no one seems to be asking.

Jim Emmerson approaches it when he asks, "[W]hat good do reviews of a "Transformers" sequel do, besides providing a few million readers with some pretty energetic and entertaining copy?" Not quite the question I'm thinking of, but a good one nonetheless. The widespread acknowledgment that Revenge of the Fallen was going to be, and is, "critic-proof" might account for the turgid quality of much of the popular criticism -- reviewers know that people will see the picture regardless of what they say, so they take the opportunity to indulge themselves and argue that the vapidity of a nevertheless hot movie somehow portends the apocalypse.

Does it not stand to reason, though, that if certain films are "critic-proof" other are not? Do some films -- those without the benefit of giant robots or superheroes, maybe -- succeed or fail, then, based on critical opinion?

Doubtful.

As Holmes notes, the "pure-entertainment" horror picture Drag Me to Hell got great notices. But those notices weren't enough to save the picture from disappointing box-office. Was it critical opinion that put The Hangover over the top, financially? Or was it a good marketing campaign and very funny trailer? Certainly, critical opinion may -- may -- have something to do with whether a particular film is nominated for an award, but it doesn't seem to drive attendance. Likewise, top film critics may travel the globe seeing and extolling the most wonderful and original movies the world has to offer, but that doesn't mean those movies will ever play in a cinema near you.

Could it be, then, that all movies are "critic-proof"? If that's the case -- even to a degree -- the question to ask is: what is the point of popular film criticism? What does it do?

In a post last year, on year-end "best" and "top" lists, I wrote:

More so than in film scholarship or analysis, perhaps unfortunately, there appears to be an expectation in film criticism that the personality of the reviewer will come through in his or her writing -- which would imply that, as much as the reviewer's solemn duty is to help you decide whether or not to fork over your hard earned cash to see a particular movie, a degree of their personal taste is part of the equation.

Could it be that I got that middle part wrong? That popular film criticism is not about, even in part, helping moviegoers make informed decisions? Some critics seem to see it that way. The critic Dann Gire responds to Michael Bay et al:

If film critics were designed to be mere consumer advisers, then we really screwed up by kicking the lug nuts out of Michael Bay's screechy, populist piece of pandering pablum "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen." But we didn't screw up, because we're not consumer advisers. Our job is not to say if a movie will be a big box office hit and everyone should go see it because it's a big box office hit. Our job is simple and direct: to assess the quality of a motion picture.

Gire goes on to stress that entertainment value is but one criteria that a critic will use in assessing a movie's quality, concluding:

What business people like Rob Moore [VP at Paramount] don't get is that critics consider a great many more elements to a movie than how diverting it might be and how much money it makes.

There's nothing wrong with the American public supporting a motion picture that the critics have taken to the firing squad. The two camps are not bound by the same criteria for what makes a successful movie. As it should be.

So, like Holmes above, Gire arrives at an "it's okay that audiences and critics disagree" conclusion. Film criticism only expresses an opinion -- an informed one, mind you, but still an opinion, with which anyone is free to disagree on their own subjective grounds.

To which I really want to ask: is that the best you can do? Millions of people the world over have just thrown your reviews back in your faces, and this is your reply?

Neither acknowledging that movie is "critic-proof" nor an after-the-fact "we're all free to disagree" alibi do much to strengthen or legitimize the field of film criticism. Is either not admitting, basically, that what you say doesn't matter? Of course, if you've appraised Revenge of the Fallen as nothing less than the harbinger of Satan -- or, for argument's sake, just a really bad movie -- what does that say, implicitly, about the millions of people who go to see it? Not an issue I foresee many critics willing to wade into!

So what about that there Transformers movie, then?

I suppose there isn't much to say that hasn't already been said. What I personally find most frustrating is that a franchise with such a rich mythology has twice yielded such poor cinematic results. A parallel could be drawn here to J.J. Abram's Star Trek reboot, which effectively drew upon an even larger, more complex mythology to fashion an exciting, new narrative out of familiar characters and conventions. Oddly enough, the screenwriters for Star Trek, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, contributed to the screenplay for Revenge of the Fallen. Talk about uneven results. Of course, the Transformers sequel was conceived during the recent WGA strike, which may account for why the movie feels like a series of pre-conceived special effects sequences loosely strung together by a weak, largely incoherent narrative.

"...the way it should have been"

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (John Huston, 1972) begins with an overhead shot of a map of Texas -- a map presumably from around the turn of the last century -- which promptly zooms in on the Pecos River. The Pecos, as the ensuring title crawl informs us, "marked the boundaries of civilization in western Texas. West of the Pecos there was no law, no order, and only bad men and rattlesnakes lived there."

Unto this, the infamous Judge Roy Bean (played by Paul Newman), self-appointed "law west of the Pecos."

If rank in the pantheon of American frontier heroes is to be judged by appearances in theatrical Westerns, Bean, despite being a colorful character, falls somewhere towards the bottom. Aside from the film in question, the notorious hanging judge of Vinegaroon features in two other movies of note: The Westerner (William Wyler, 1940), where the Judge, played by Walter Brennan, matches wits with Gary Cooper, and A Time for Dying (Budd Boetticher, 1969), played by Victor Jory. In both films, Bean is played mostly for laughs -- although the character's unrequited love for the actress Lillie Langtry lends a particularly tragic note to Brennan's performance.

Perhaps the best-remembered aspect of The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean is this bit of text, from the opening credits:

"The way it should have been."

At the site of these words, viewers even vaguely familiar with the Western are likely to think of newsman Maxwell Scott's famous refusal in Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) to print "the truth" about hero-turned-politician Ransom Stoddard: "This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

The sentiment is similar, only now the semantics are clearer.

It's admittedly tempting to make a giant rhetorical leap to claiming that this sentiment should be appropriately applied to the genre as a whole; that Westerns -- despite the countless claims to veracity made over the years -- have in fact always been in the business of presenting an (honestly) idealized representation of the past, nay-saying historians and their inaccuracies be damned.

Tempting, but not that tempting, if only because the consideration of the "the way it should have been" sentiment in light of both the specific movie it precedes and that movie's historical context is more productive than any rhetorical gloss that might be applied to the genre as a whole. Consider, first, that this statement introduces a movie produced during a period of the Western's development popularly referred to as "revisionist." At the time when the Western was -- supposedly -- self-consciously criticizing its own conventions (and their ideological implications), here we have a movie that is openly embracing an idealized (and, on balance, comic) presentation of history. Not only does the movie play fast and loose with history, it grafts the story of its protagonist onto a conventional plot seen countless times before in earlier Westerns.

As he was not a gunman of any renown -- in contrast to most top-flight Western heroes -- it is perhaps understandable that Bean did not find himself the subject of more Westerns. As far as heroics goes, the judicial branch isn't particularly exciting. The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean attempts to strike a balance between earlier comedic portrayals and a more conventional frontier narrative. Here Bean is presented as an agent of change: the man who brings law to the wilderness, but whose brand of justice quickly places him at odds with emerging civilization around him. This is a common scenario in the later Western, with variations used in True Grit (Henry Hathaway, 1969), Death of a Gunfighter (Alan Smithee, 1969), The Good Guys and the Bad Guys (Burt Kennedy, 1969), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971) and other pictures.

In a way, then, this is the way it was -- or at least the way it has been.

As evidenced by the number of Westerns that draw on it, the story of the the unwanted gunfighter is clearly a productive and versatile narrative. Moreover, in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean the plot -- as with the majority of the other conventions drawn upon -- is used in earnest, often played for comedy, but without a hint of self-consciousness. This calls into question Ted Sennett's remark, quoted on the back of the DVD case, that the movie is "playful and wickedly irreverent." Playful? Yes. Irreverent? Not so much.

Ersatz Earps

Countless Westerns are based upon the lives and legends of a select list of American historical figures associated with the annexation, migration and expansion west of the Mississippi River that followed the conclusion of the American Civil War in 1865. Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, Jesse James, "Wild Bill" Hickok, "Buffalo Bill" Cody and General George Armstrong Custer are among the men in this group. Yet the exact number of films each figure has appeared in is harder to gauge than you might think, owing to a number of factors. These include the less than perfect record of movies made during cinema’s early and transitional periods, as well as the contentious issue of movies that feature fictional characters based on historical personages. “Based on” is a slippery conception, as it can encompass “obviously based on,” “loosely based on,” “arguably based on,” and so on. Henry Fonda’s character in Fort Apache (1948), an arrogant Lt. Col. from the east with a blind hatred for Indians who leads his men on a suicidal charge that wipes out him and his entire force, is clearly modeled on Custer. The movie’s displacement of both the historical figure and his last charge onto an ostensibly fictional scenario is understood as the filmmakers not wanting to outright villainize a man still regarded by many as a national hero. Yet for every Custer-by-another-name, there are at least a half-dozen ersatz Wyatt Earps: "town tamers" who ride into gunplay-ridden towns and only don the sheriff or marshal’s badge as a means of avenging a personal loss.

Earp has, of course, received countless big screen treatments. My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946) established in the character of Earp the prototypical frontier lawman, while eleven years later the phenomenally successful Gunfight at OK Corral (Sturges, 1957) helped reinvigorate the genre during a brief spell of commercial decline (1). Earp also appears "as Earp" in Frontier Marshal (Dwan, 1939), often neglected in discussions of the genre's flowering in 1939-40; Wichita (Tourneur, 1955), starring Joel McRae; the infamous interlude in Ford's Cheyenne Autumn (1964), with James Stewart playing the white-clad Earp role for laughs; Hour of the Gun (1967), Sturges' attempt at a a more historically-accurate and serious version of the legend, with James Garner in the lead; Doc (Perry, 1971), a dust-caked debunking of the Earp legend with Holliday (played by Stacy Keach) as the main character; and two late entries, the entertaining Tombstone (Cosmatos, 1993) and the lumbering Wyatt Earp (Kasdan, 1994).

On the ersatz side, we find a number of notable examples, including Dodge City (Curtiz, 1939), with Eroll Flynn as an Earp-inspired lawman charged with getting the riffraff outta Dodge; Law and Order (Juran, 1953), a solid programmer featuring Ronald Reagan as a lawman bent on retiring but who finds himself facing the prospect of yet another town to clean up; Man with the Gun (Wilson, 1955), starring Robert Mitchum as notorious "town tamer" Clint Tollinger (a great handle!); Warlock (Dmytryk, 1959), a smart, self-conscious re-working of the Earp myth with Henry Fonda as the gun-for-hire and Anthony Quinn as his gambler right-hand man; Young Billy Young (Kennedy, 1969), with Mitchum again in the law man role; and Lawman (Winner, 1971), starring Burt Lancaster.

It bears emphasizing how even this cursory survey of the various representations of Earp speaks to the heterogeneity of the genre. We need not wait until the 1960s or 70s for narratives that scrutinize or offer an alternative to the representation of valor found in My Darling Clementine (2). While Law and Order and Wichita present comparably noble accounts of the life and times of Earp, both Man with a Gun and Warlock present less flattering views of both the burgeoning frontier community and the gunman that community enlists to eradicate its more undesirable elements. To be sure, uncharitable depictions of Western communities -- cowardly citizenry, in particular -- are a common feature of the genre after High Noon (Zimmerman, 1952), yet we can find many examples in earlier pictures: the town of Tonto in Stagecoach (Ford, 1939), or the wrongheaded collective action in The Ox-Bow Incident (Wellman, 1943)(3).

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Notes

1. The latter movie also placed a greater emphasis on masculine camaraderie, a feature that would be elaborated in Rio Bravo (Hawks, 1959) and continue to feature prominently in Westerns of the 1960s in pictures like The Magnificent Seven (also Sturges, 1960), The Sons of Katie Elder (Hathaway, 1965), The Professionals (Brooks, 1966), El Dorado (also Hawks, 1967) and The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah, 1969). For a number of critics, a focus on frontier fraternity is a defining feature of the 1960s Western. As detailed most notably by Will Wright in his structural study of the genre Sixguns & Society, during this time Western movie narratives increasingly centered on groups of “professionals” who defend society only as a job they accept for pay, for love of fighting or out of friendship. Becoming less common were solitary heroes purely committed to the ideas of law and justice.

2. Tag Gallagher has questioned, rightly, the degree to which that representation of Earp was so upright in the first place. See his article “Shoot-out at the Genre Coral: Problems in the ‘Evolution’ of the Western" in Film Genre Reader, ed. Barry Keith Grant.

3. In Stagecoach, it is the town's leading ladies who most characterize Tonto as inhospitable as they parade Dallas out of town. The "ladies league" as prudish meddlers becomes a recurring convention of the genre, dependably representing the temperate, intolerant aspects of a given town. The Gunfighter (King, 1950) features a notable appearance, as the ladies league is taken aback when the kind gentleman they have been speaking with is revealed as the notorious gunman Ringo.