400 Screens, 400 Blows - Cult of the Director

As a kid I fell in love with movies mainly for the stories and characters, and every once in a while, maybe some special effects. As I got older, my love affair was renewed when I discovered the Cult of the Director. The Cult of the Director allows one to look at movies in a far more personal way. It's an ongoing game; one can discover long-forgotten works, or piece together old puzzles, but one can also look ahead and guess how a director's career arc will come together. Basically, there are roughly four kinds of directors. The most common is the kind with no personality, and perhaps very little skill, someone like Brian Robbins, the director of Meet Dave (58 screens). Many of these folks eventually disappear without ever making much of a mark. After that, we get the craftsman, someone with lots of skill and talent but still no personality. These guys are the most interesting to talk to; they're unpretentious and tell the best stories. Brad Anderson, the director of Transsiberian (81 screens), is a good example.

Then there's a weird category of directors who have somehow come to popular attention, despite a lack of skill and/or a lack of personality. These can range from moneymakers like Brett Ratner to Oscar winners like Ron Howard. But of course, since we're talking about live human beings here, there's a lot of wiggle room in these categories, and I could probably establish several sub-categories. Not to mention that any director's career can suddenly change course at any point. Yes, even Brett Ratner could suddenly make a good film. (I'm not saying he will, just that he could.) These people manage to stay on top through a lucky combination of subject matter and promotion. Even though films like Brick Lane (31 screens) and Mongol (16 screens) have no skill or personality, they seem like great films because of their stories and packaging.

Finally, we have the actual top of the heap, the directors with skill and personality whose works congeal into a cohesive whole, and who ultimately make it worth going to the movies (Hitchcock, Hawks, Welles, Chaplin, Keaton, Bunuel, Bresson, Ozu, Cronenberg, Lynch... the list goes on). Some critics have argued that there's no such thing as an "auteur theory" or a "cult of the director" since many, many people contribute to the making of each film. That's certainly a fact, but why, then, do Hitchcock's films always feel like Hitchcock's films, regardless of the screenwriter, cinematographer, editor, actors, or crafts service? Three very interesting directors, Christopher Nolan, David Gordon Green and Woody Allen, are in the "more-than-400-screen-realm," so I'll talk about them later. Instead I'll start with Guillermo Del Toro.

Currently out with Hellboy II: The Golden Army (204 screens), Del Toro is an honest-to-goodness auteur with only seven feature films to his name. He sticks to similar imagery and themes from film to film, with a particular obsession with underground tunnels, clocks and clockwork. A Freudian could read all kinds of stuff into this (Wombs? Mortality?) but let's suffice to say that we can easily recognize a Del Toro movie when we see it, and that it always brings us great pleasure. But this is also a good example of what a director cultist is up against. I loved Hellboy II, and I maintain that, on a level of pure artistic execution, it's the equal of Pan's Labyrinth. But most people don't like it as much, merely because Pan's Labyrinth goes a little deeper in the story department. Yet the director cultist must maintain his ground; I'll take both movies, with the expectation that sometimes I'll be more in the mood for one than for the other.

Here's where it gets a bit shadowy: M. Night Shyamalan is an interesting case. He has a definite style and personality, but he has fallen out of favor with both critics and audiences in a major way; it didn't help that he took an obvious bash at critics in his last film, Lady in the Water. But, oddly, he's currently a critical darling in France! As aimless as his new film The Happening (25 screens) is, it still has some worthwhile things in it, and I wouldn't be surprised to see French critics hail it at the end of the year. Another odd case is the return of the 70 year-old Czech director Jiri Menzel, with a new film, I Served the King of England (8 screens). Most critics acknowledge Menzel's amazing, Oscar-winning Closely Watched Trains (1966) as a masterpiece, but nothing he has done since has registered even a blip (admittedly, most of it has never been released here). His new film is wildly uneven, an awkward balance of comedy and war, yet most critics have praised it. Is this because they think Menzel is a great director, or because he made yet another movie about the horrors of war?

Claude Chabrol, the director of A Girl Cut in Two (7 screens) is one of the best causes for being a director cultist. Only a few of us come to his rescue each year when he pumps out yet another intelligent, French, Hitchcockian suspense film. Though he comes cut from the same cloth as Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, he's rarely viewed as a master. Few can agree on a single masterpiece from among his overwhelming spate of consistently good films (he's made around 60 features). But I think the real problem is that he has made mostly "entertainments" of the suspense genre, rather than anything "important." If he were to turn around and make something about the miserable state of the world, rather than the miserable state of men's souls, he'd probably win an Oscar.