The House Next Door

Great job on the article, Matt, and the entire series as well. I'm glad Salon.com had the good sense to partner with you on it. Speaking as someone whose followed that site since it started, they need more quality material like yours.

The "Director-as-God" theme is a concept I'm still working through as a film fan. I think one big difference between directors like the Andersons (Wes and Paul Thomas) of today and the Hitchcoks and Kubricks of yesterday is efficiency. The Old Masters were obviously every bit as obsessive as today's auteurs, but it seems to me they also made final products that are leaner and less self-indulgent than the 2 1/2 - 3 hour "art" movies made today.

I feel like many of today's best directors could use producers and editors with more power, people who can at least give them some perspective on practical things like length ("Do we REALLY need that 10-minute tracking shot of the sunset?") or even have the authority to force changes a star director might not like but will result in a better product more people would want to see.

Thanks. The reader response at Salon has been disheartening, mostly, so it's always nice to have a response from somebody who's read the piece and decided to engage with it on its own terms. Much appreciated.

An excellent entry in an excellent series, Matt. I hadn't thought of Anderson as so attuned to powerlessness and lack of control--as you say, his control-freak reputation colors some of his reputation, and part of my ongoing preference for Bottle Rocket among all his films is that lovely, unexpected interlude with the maid, which drifts in and out of the story like the camera lazily bobs in the hotel pool--but it's obvious once you mention it.

One nit to pick, however, regarding What Lies Beneath:

"[T]he most astonishing [digitally assisted camera move] of which starts very low, looking up through a seemingly transparent or nonexistent floor, then slowly rises to an overhead view that shows the floor fully intact."

In fact it starts at floor level, scurries forward to the mask of paralyzed horror on Pfeiffer's face, then sinks below the floor to stare up at Ford looming above her prone figure. As it should, this being the moment of revelation, and of Pfeiffer's delayed realization that the foundation she stands upon has been nonexistent, no more solid than water in the tub.

Zemeckis is one of my favorites because his technical wizardry is always put to making the film look like what it is saying. The long, unbroken series of mad, rushing flight and still rapture that compose the Ghost of Christmas Past sequence in A Christmas Carol, like so many memories flitting unintelligibly by before halting on unexpected reveries; or the indifferent, Antonioni-esque beauty of the outsized objects--Leviathan, tanker, FedEx planes--viewed in Cast Away's final moments, somewhere between and past both awe and menace as they drift by a hero who's learned his vulnerable smallness in this world. So yes, the naked young warrior Beowulf, facing down Grendel, hops about like he lacks all "density"; but the aged king, needing to rectify the monstrosity his transgression created, can only hang there like meat in a butcher's shop, severing his own shoulder to get the reach he needs.

Anderson has this quality no less--the train sequence from The Darjeeling Limited you highlight is one of the lovelier moments in the last few years of cinema. It might be the greatest blasphemy of the Directors-as-Gods, that despite all the pitfalls of communication, the near inevitability of misunderstandings and obfuscations and personal filters garbling the message, they will craft image and sound in such a way as to not be misunderstood. In the beginning, after all, was the Word; and I doubt anybody missed the point of that one.