Caveat Film Fans

Wise movie fans must read between the lines of reviews in order to discern whether a new film is worth their time and money. Given the perverse, not to say perverted, state of much of our present culture, a film praised as a "gritty, unflinching look at the dark pockets of corruption beneath the shining surface of society" is liable to be a tub of nihilistic drivel that any mentally healthy person should eschew. On the other hand, a movie condescendingly ridiculed as "a prepackaged fantasy that refuses to examine the contradictions and ambiguities in our changing moral codes" might well be worth our while.

My personalKronshtadt movie experience?the moment I learned a radical mistrust of movies and movie critics?occurred when I saw the disgusting Pulp Fiction (1994). Before the arrival of this ecstatically praised film, I was a relatively trusting moviegoer. If a new release was greeted with universal joy, I would blithely take myself to see it, and even unthinkingly invite along a companion or two. So it was with this film by Quentin Tarantino. Dazzled by the acclaim, I suggested Pulp Fiction for an afternoon outing to a close friend and his mother.

Well, I was soon frozen in embarrassment as a hideous effusion of filth spewed from the screen. I forget which scene drove my friend's normally liberal-minded mother from her seat, perhaps the one in which a large black man is aggressively sodomized, an act that I doubt she had so much as conceived of in her almost 80 years of happy family life. For his part, my friend decamped at the sight of a young woman with a face full of metal piercings. Yes, I held out; I wanted to take in the full measure of perversion, so that I would never forget.

Thereafter, I stopped going regularly to the movies, but kept up with movie reviews. The reviews eventually became as noxious as the movies, so I pretty much stopped reading them as well. How awful that our once vibrant Hollywood film industry, which had helped keep America's spirits afloat through depression and war, through recessions, riots and cultural revolutions, has now turned so poisonous that many of its products should be made to bear a warning label with a skull-and-crossbones.

Given my increasingly jaundiced view of the current movie culture and its standards, I was not surprised when I recently came across a movie from 1995 of which I had never heard despite the fact that it starred two of the most renowned American actors of our time, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro: Michael Mann's Heat. After viewing it on video, I realized why this remarkable film had disappeared without a trace at the time of its original release: it goes against too much of what today's politically correct movie reviewers expect and demand. For one thing, Heat doesn't sound the usual fulsome praise for the superiority of women, nor does it indulge in the formulaic idolatry of minorities common in film today. On the contrary, as a mature and probing exploration of what sustains civilization, Heat glorifies the male?specifically, in this instance, the white male, or, to be more precise, the white man. Even more unusual is that in Heat these archetypal white men are played by Italian-Americans, the one ethnic group in recent years that the movies have found it acceptable to deride.

Pacino is a top-level police detective on the trail of De Niro, chief of a band of high-tech crooks who pull off one extraordinary armed robbery after another. As the story unfolds, the obsessed detective and the criminal mastermind become mirror images of each other, the Pacino character emerging as the jealous guardian of normal life, the De Niro character as his dark, doomed, oddly heroic alter-ego, both of them stringently faithful to their respective codes, both embodying the intelligence, dedication and drivenness of men in pursuit of their identity-defining missions.

Pacino's marriage?his third?is in trouble. Though he is a worthy husband and assiduous lover to his wife, as well as a caring father to her teenage daughter from a previous marriage (to an obviously worthless postmodern architect), the detective's work prevents him from showering his wife with the attention she desires. Self-centeredly fretful about this supposed neglect, she fails even to notice that her troubled daughter desperately needs her involvement. When the girl makes an attention-getting suicide attempt, she deliberately performs the deed in a location where Pacino will find and save her, which indeed he does. Her self-involved mother, meanwhile, is unable even to help her find her barrettes.

In the tradition of John Ford's classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Heat acknowledges the rough-hewn, unappreciated men who make civilization possible, often at great cost to themselves. Their potency, drive, even obsessiveness, are the forces that sustain society, even if these same qualities at times lead to trouble. (A wildly excessive shootout with machine guns in a downtown Los Angeles street is Heat's metaphor for this over-the-top aspect of the male psyche.) The Xenas and Buffys of contemporary entertainment aside, it is the male principle, whatever its flaws, that gives us the Law and the Prophets. Occasionally even our misguided film culture can produce a movie that dramatizes such basic truths about life, but we have to be on the alert for these rare films when they come our way.