Jim wrote me a Facebook comment that he is reading Roger Ebert's autobiography, Life Itself, and Jim encouraged me to keep writing about my experiences with movies.
Over the years of listening to Roger Ebert on television and reading selected reviews of his, I often responded by thinking, "That's sure not what's important to me in a movie."
Coincidentally, I just watched Take This Waltz and Roger Ebert's review of the movie illustrates perfectly how Roger Ebert writes about things in movies that I'd never think of and that I don't care about.
First, he can't believe that these characters with their jobs would be living in the flats they live in in the neighborhood they do.
Second, he's snarky about the movie's coincidences regarding the way Margot and Daniel meet.
Third, because a "shameful woman" like Margot is played by Michelle Williams, whom Ebert describes as an "angelic presence", he remarks that the casting threatens to undermine the movie. Ebert even takes pause to recast the movie for Sarah Polley, suggesting for a moment that Sarah Silverman and Michelle Williams switch roles. That way the less angelic Sarah Silverman would play the "shameful woman", Margot.
For me, these three comments, and ones I read people make about movies that are like them, sound, to me, a lot smarter than they are.
When I go to movies, I am a believer: I didn't think about the flats these characters lived in because I believed these were the places they rented. Likewise, I believed that a man and a woman could be seated on a flight to Toronto in the same row and turn out to be, unbeknownst to each other, across the street neighbors. I believe.
Can a sweet angelic likeable madly skilled actor like Michelle Williams play a character whose life feels unfulfilled and empty, embodies ennui, has longings, fears fear, loves her husband, betrays her husband, and is deeply divided within herself? I thought her sweet angelic presence and the sympathy her goofiness roused in me made her self-division and betrayal all the more poignant.
I read Ebert's review after I saw the movie and it did nothing to enrich my experience with the film. In fact, it cluttered my experience of the movie with stuff I just don't care about. I've experienced this in Roger Ebert reviews before. Sometimes I just don't understand why he brings certain stuff up, and, to be honest, this way of seeing a movie doesn't stop with Ebert. I hear people I know do the same thing all the time.
It's why I try to stay as ignorant as I can about a movie before I see it.
So, had I read Ebert's review first and said to myself, "You know. Roger Ebert's right. It's just too weird when I can't believe characters in a movie could live in the neighborhood the movie places them in and I just can't enjoy a movie with coincidences that set an examination of marriage, desire, ennui, longing, and betrayal into motion, and, man, if a shameful woman is going to be a character I like and find sweet, well, then I'm not watching it", what would I have missed?
Well, along with missing the experience of having my 25-30 year old self come knocking at the door of my mind, as I wrote about here (under #3), I would have missed out on being transported by the Buggles and Leonard Cohen and missed out on experiencing some of my happiest memories from thirty-two and seventeen years ago.
You see, I almost never write or say whether I thought a movie was good or not. It's hard for me to answer the question, "Did you like it?"
I experience things when I watch movies and while the movie is unfolding, I'm often of several minds, with a variety of experiences happening inside me at once.
Had I let Roger Ebert's review deter me from seeing this movie, I would have missed out on the dizzying ride Daniel and Margot took on the Scrambler while the movie's soundtrack played, "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles. Part of my mind was tracking the song and how this amusement park ride was adding dizzying fun and thrills to Daniel and Margot's affair while the song commented on the state of their affair. The Buggles sing what Daniel and Margot know:
"In my mind and in my car, we can't rewind we've gone too far."
I beamed as one of my favorite pop songs ever suddenly became not just a song about one technology replacing another, but about a moment in life when two people cannot rewind, cannot go back. They are the song's metaphor. They are video now.
I was pounding my fist in the air to the disco beat of the Buggles and suddenly it was 1982 and I was newly single and I had my own apartment in Spokane and with some help from Mom and Dad I bought a Zenith color television and a Betamax at the Crescent in Northtown and had them delivered and I subscribed to Cox Cable and now I could watch MTV. It's hard to recapture the way I loved MTV in 1982 and for about a year and half afterwards.
Of course, I wasn't tuned in on August 1, 1981 when MTV began its broadcast life with "Video Killed the Radio Star", but it was during that fall, in November, of 1982 when I came to love that song and while Daniel and Margot were riding the Scrambler, I was reliving what it was like to be 28 years old, sharing my MTV and cable television with students from Whitworth College, glued to MTV, hoping that the next video would be Phil Collins or "Come On, Eileen" or that Tom Petty had a new song or that we could dance and laugh to Men at Work.
I'm not a music expert. A lot goes right by me. I didn't know as I started watching Take This Waltz that the movie title was also a Leonard Cohen song. Late in the movie, we are taken into Margot's passionate fantasies, and a fantasia, a montage unfolds showing Margot and Daniel having sex in exciting positions and with other lovers joining in. The montage is accompanied by Leonard Cohen singing, "Take This Waltz" and while my mind was fixed on Margot's fantasies and her inherent longing that such fun and unbridled ecstasy would fill her inward emptiness, at the same time, my mind once again went back to 1982.
Once I set up my Betamax, I signed up at a video rental store on N. Division and the first movie I rented was McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Hearing Leonard Cohen singing "Take This Waltz" took me back, not only to the elation of being able to watch movies in my own living room, but to the way Leonard Cohen's voice seemed to come out of a dark place beneath the Alaskan frontier as he sang "The Stranger Song" over the opening titles of McCabe and Mrs. Miller and then I remembered feeling similarly thrilled and haunted by him singing, "Sisters of Mercy" and "Winter Lady"during the movie.
So there they were, together, Leonard Cohen and The Buggles, in my Spokane apartment and in Take This Waltz, together in my mind, bringing back memories of when the gap between my former wife and me had gone too far and we couldn't rewind, couldn't start over, and now I was filling the emptiness inside me with movies and MTV and students thrilled to be a part of impromptu living room film festivals and more Boy George.
Then, fourteen years later, here in Eugene, a girl friend and I discovered we both had a thing for McCabe and Mrs. Miller and one night we sat side by side and pulled the covers up to our shoulders, drank pinot noir and watched McCabe and Mrs. Miller and listened to Leonard Cohen and while the movie was bleak, seeing it together wasn't and Take This Waltz took me back to that quiet evening as well.
So, do I think Take This Waltz is a good movie? Did I like it?
I dunno.
I sure enjoyed the experience I had watching it, although I would have slept better last night if my 25-30 year old self would have quit knocking.
The movie has lived with me all day today.
This is what happens when I watch movies. When I write about movies, this is what I want to write about.
I guess Take This Waltz would have been a better movie for Roger Ebert if the characters had lived in a less leafy neighborhood. And if a less angelic presence had played Margot.
That just wasn't on my mind.
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