Karina on SpoutBlog

Something big happened this week, and Ramin Bahrani’s Goodbye Solo — an unassuming, nonthreatening, ultimately uplifting indie drama with no stars and, one would think, no immediate hook for press coverage other than its merits ––  was at the center of it. Solo, which opens today in New York and L.A., motivated A. O. Scott and Richard Brody, two grown-up film critics for venerable New York publications (the New York Times and the New Yorker, respectively), neither of whom are known for engaging in public battle with the online rabble, to get into a blog fight.

It started when Scott published a long story (5 pages online) in the Sunday New York Times Magazine on an emergent genre he called Neo-Neo Realism, which he says unites festival favorites such as Ballast, Wendy and Lucy and Treeless Mountain with the works of Bahrani, as films concerning “fictional characters most often played by nonactors from similar backgrounds… [who are] familiar on a basic human level even if their particular predicaments are not. And if the kind of movie they inhabit is not entirely new — the common ancestor that established their species identity is a well-known Italian bicycle thief — their unassuming arrival on a few screens nonetheless seems vital, urgent and timely.” In other words: a number of filmmakers are making art films about the daily lives of poor people, and also the economy is bad. Coincidence? Scott thinks not.

Brody didn’t buy it, and on March 20 — two days before Scott’s piece was even published in the magazine, and about a day after it was posted online –– he posted an 8-point rebuttal on The Front Row, his New Yorker blog. “These films are made skillfully and sincerely under difficult circumstances; they are, in many ways, admirable,” Brody wrote. “But I think that Scott makes too much of them.” Brody went on to question Scott’s definition of neorealism and its influence on/inroads into American independent cinema prior to this new neo wave; his basic contention is that the films the Scott piece embraced are marked by “the willful rejection of complexity and ambiguity; a sympathy for ciphers based on their social position and reinforced by the downbeat warmth of the performers.”

Three days later, Scott took to The Carpetbagger (the NYT Oscar blog recently repurposed as an off-season online multi-contributor Hollywood column) to respond to Brody’s response. Scott’s blog post seemed to boil Brody’s reaction down to a difference in opinion. “This is Mr. Brody’s way of saying he and I like different movies.” This is a memorable comeback, and an instructive one. On one hand, it’s a new iteration of the old apathetic debate stopper, “Let’s agree to disagree.” On the other hand, it’s an incredibly concise, ordinary language description of what it is that we’re doing –– some of us every day, for recreation or professionally or both; others only when pushed to in self-defense –– here on the internet. Our blogs, our fights, our weekly storms minor and major: this is our way of saying we like different movies. And that is contemporary film culture.

Except when it isn’t — except when, for whatever reason, a film inspires no substantive debate whatsoever. That fragment from Brody’s piece quoted above, regarding willful rejection and sympathy for ciphers, so exactly encapsules my problems with Goodbye, Solo that as soon as I read it, I assumed that this point of view would circulate widely, and any traditional review I could write of the film would be superfluous. But with the help of David Hudson, I realized that, ironically, this film which sparked this notable spat has otherwise been the subject of a discourse uniquely lacking in dynamism. Basically, everyone likes it, and yet the arguments about why it’s so great are remarkable similar, even when coming from iconoclasts.

Here’s what I can offer in terms of praise for Goodbye, Solo: Bahrani has, across his three films, displayed an interest in repetition as both a theme and as a visual language; he tends to focus on worklives which involve doing the same set of tasks over and over again, and he’s not afraid to subject the audience to a reiteration of images describing the sameness of his subjects’ day-to-days. There is a braveness about this which is to be admired, and in Solo, he condenses the key images to be repeated (most memorably, close-up shots of Senegalese immigrant cab driver Solo behind the wheel at night, unprettied stretches of Winston-Salem flattened to abstraction in the window of the taxi to polka dot lights, black and brown and gold) into things of painterly beauty. There is an unwillingness to offer narrative information that elevates the film into a work of mystery beyond the points of its actual narrative, and thus what is a film which seems not terribly dissimilar from what might happen if Driving Miss Daisy were transposed to the millieu of the contemporary working poor is given a tinge of existentialist noir.

But that refusal to offer information has a flip side which, to my mind, does Goodbye Solo in. There’s a common weakness to some of the films mentioned in Scott’s piece, particularly Solo and Wendy and Lucy, which Scott even nods to in the quote above, with the word “familiar”: these stories, so invested in the struggle of the socio-economically disavantaged as to zero in on that struggle’s hourly materialist minutia, are much less interested in the minutia of the characters, to the point where the players going through the motions often correspond to Hollywood types ––  a scared young woman, a grizzled old man, an immigrant absurdly optimistic in the transformational power of America. What I particularly bristle at is the notion that 1 + 1 = realism. Look at the tropes that form the backbone of Solo: A would-be saint in the form of a wage worker? A man who wants to die and yet lets the stranger who he’s paid off to be part of the plan move into his motel room? Structurally, this is an odd couple story that chugs along for long stretches on nothing but one actor’s charisma and the other’s enigma. It’s so dependent on having us watch the clockwork of superficial star power in motion that, if it were German or French or Japanese in origin, one could easily imagine a studio optioning the remake rights, with Jack Nicholson and Will Smith in mind for the leads.

When you watch movies like Solo and Wendy, you realize how rare it is to see the minute-by-minute negotiatons of lower class life seen on screen. But too often these crumbs dropped by engaging screen presences seem to be the point in and of themselves. Not to presuppose the filmmakers’ intended audiences, but thanks to the realities of indie film distribution, Goodbye Solo is no more likely to be viewed by actual Senegalese immigrants in North Carolina than Wendy and Lucy was likely to have been seen by girls with scant savings with no recourse but to drive to Alaska in search of a factory job. If I was in Wendy’s straits, I would not have seen Wendy and Lucy. Neo-neorealism is not a trend destined to be consumed by many people who will see their own lives onscreen. The films thus function, in a way, as travelogues to Poorsville, to be consumed almost chiefly by folks for whom the experiences depicted are totally foreign.

Some of Brody’s 8-point rebuttal may best be filed as throat clearing by way of nit picking, but I think he’s right on to suggest that there’s something suspect about the notion that these films could somehow offer nutritive value or even comfort in these tough times (when Scott wonders if these are the kind of movies “we need now” when “we feel an urge to escape from escapism,” his “we” seems to be in sharp contrast to the “they” who are turning Paul Blart, Knowing and Taken into hits). It’s also enervating to see a sole voice suggest, as Brody does in his response to Scott’s response, that we simply ask for something more interesting than films in which “the decision not to disrupt the urbane conventions of naturalism goes together with an unwillingness to endow characters or stories with elements that may disrupt the programmatic sympathies the filmmakers are arousing,” that we seek out “the work of artists who dare to offer up disturbing ideas, shocking facts, dangerous emotions to reinforce, even expand, my humanism.” This is our way of saying we like different movies:  ironically, my misgivings about Solo are other critics selling points. Take, for example, this closing note from Scott Tobias’ Toronto capsule review of the film:

In [Bahrani’s] last three films alone, he’s introduced us to a Pakistani street coffee vendor (Man Push Cart), a Latino orphan working in a black-market body shop (Chop Shop), and now a Senegalese cabbie. It’s been nice—and certainly novel—to make their acquaintance.

That’s what Bahrani’s films are — nice, novel.  They give film critics and an extremely small segment of presumably educated, monied film goers a glimpse into immigrant pockets they’d otherwise be oblivious to, and that’s both nice and novel. But how long can a filmmaker coast on nice and novel? At what point does nice and novel stop being enough?