Brainy Young Filmmakers Making Fresh, Brainy Motion Pictures

David Chute
Mirror contributing writer

Why would you want to go to the movies when you can go to the beach instead?"

Somebody asked me that question soon after I moved to Los Angeles from Boston in 1981, to take a job reviewing films at the old Herald-Examiner. I don't recall how I responded. Probably I just rolled my eyes and walked away. Rude of me, but it seemed to be a false issue. Obviously there was plenty of time for everything, for both works of art and the splendors of nature. I was living in Venice at the time and could practically wade in the surf barefoot on my way to the movies.

The big catch here is that we're talking about movies, which are hardly ever works of art. I love them just the same, and I still spend an inordinate amount of time watching and thinking about them, but clearly a lot of them are junk food for the human spirit. Most of them probably take more out of us than they put in. They are a waste of time and energy and inner resources and, twenty years after I first wiggled my toes in the wet sand on Venice Beach, I can see clearly that we don't have an infinite supply of any of these things.

And if art occasionally seems to be a worthwhile substitute for "real life," not many other things do, anymore. Not a lot of movies, in other words, are worth staying indoors for.One exception is "Election," which is not new but it is still my favorite American movie of the year to date, with the possible exception of "The Matrix." These are two very different beasts, of course. "The Matrix" is gourmet junk food (one of those weird oxymoronic hybrids) while "Election" is, if not exactly high art, at least the next best thing: a social satire with razor-sharp filed teeth that bites deep and hangs on like a pit bull.

At this point you've probably either seen "Election" or read a lot about it, so we'll elide the plot synopsis. The set-up is a hard-fought campaign for the meaningless post of president of the "student government" at a drab Mid-western high school. Running uopposed for the position is a tightly-wound over-achiever named Tracy Flick (Reese Whitherspoon), who reminds some people of Pat Nixon but looks a lot more like Tricia. Tracy's nemesis is a rumpled but still weirdly boyish civics teacher, Jim McAllister, played by Matthew Broderick. For a complicated slew of reasons, only a few of which are high-minded, McAllister decides to nip Tracy's alarming political ambitions in the bud, prinarily by encouraging the most popular jock on campus (an affable rich lunkhead sidelined with a broken leg) to run against her. Exposed in the process is a venomous student sub-culture of cliques and climbers, jocks and debs and stoners, that would put Columbine to shame. There is an implied parallel, no less persuasive for being crystal clear, with the shark-infested dark waters of American political culture as a whole. All you have to do is read the papers to know that the film is on to something, metaphorically speaking.

The most encouraging thing about "Election" is that it is not an isolated phenomenon. The writer-director, Alexander Payne (who made "Citizen Ruth" last year), seems to have a lot in common with brainy young turks like Paul Thomas Anderson ("Boogie Nights"), Wes Anderson ("Rushmore") and Darren Aronovksy ("("). What sets their films apart, and links them in my mind despite their huge differences of style and subject matter, is that they use a precocious arsenal of movie tricks primarily to convey ideas or information rather than emotions or sensations. None of these movies is especially pretty looking, but on the narrative level they are dauntingly complex. The emphasis is not on the emotive properties of individual images but on the possible connections between images. As a group these films could be said to represent a new school of visual prose, as opposed to old school "visual poetry."

A telling current example is the breakneck German crime thriller "Run Lola Run," in which the most extreme post-MTV editing techniques are employed to cram in tons of layered plot information—to compress, for instance, the entire history of an accidental romantic encounter, followed by a whirlwind courtship and marriage, into a few seconds of screen time with a strobosocpic volley of images. It helps that the material is all conventional genre-movie stuff, so that a staccato shorthand style tells us pretty much everything we need to know. We can fill in the rest from our experience of a dozen other ticking-clock chase movies. The director, Tom Tykwer, may not have a thought in his head beyond seeing how much fun he can have rearranging scraps of celluloid, but more thematically ambitious artists will be stealing tricks from him for years to come.

Movies like "Election" and "Run Lola Run" may be the first significant aesthetic fruit of the new digital-video editing techniques, which are so fast and flexible that they given rise to something like (pace Bill Gates) filmmaking at the speed of thought. Directors who have grown up using computers and surfing the Internet are finally getting a chance to put their mental juggling skills to work in movies. Racing to keep up with their ideas, they construct purely visual sequences to represent trains of thought operating at full throttle. They might actually be quick-witted and nimble-fingered enough to adapt some of the most ambitious recent egghead fiction, like Neal Stephenson's meta-cyber-epic "Cryptonomicon." The new hardware may also partly account for the characteristic tone of these films, which are blazingly, even exhaustingly fast-paced, but also a bit chilly and cerebral.

As a professional Boring Old Fart I have an annoying tendency to think that most people under 40 are not very well educated and in any case have watched too much television to be able to think straight. As Stephenson says, "The ability to think rationally is pretty rare, even in prestigious universities. We're in the TV age now and people think by linking images in their brains." It can be shockingly easy to sell lame-brained ideas to people like this, and movie directors can be particularly susceptible, especially when they have the chops and the technology to jam a lot of images together very quickly. If you figure a way to fit two pictures seamlessly together, the conjunction has to mean something—and if it doesn't we have ten more coming up.

Of all the hyperactive new directors, however, Payne seems to be the most sober and the most consistantly level-headed. He is very good at diagramming his characters' elaborate processes of self-deception. (There is a lot of first-person voice over narration in "Election," almost all of it unreliable.) He obviously wants to understand this stuff, not just to point at it and hurl insults. There is an impressive precision, an almost analytical rigor, in his depictions of one small cowardly evasion leading to another and another, until the roof caves in. In an earlier century he might have made a good Jesuit, patiently demonstrating that it only takes one insignificant venial sin to get the ball rolling. He could be a worthwhile fellow to have around. He could help us stay honest.