Jonathan Rosenbaum
How we evaluate films obviously depends on how we watch them. Some viewers identify with one or more characters, and others identify with one or more artists who made the film. Recalling three recent Chicago moviegoing experiences — Erich von Stroheim’s silent Queen Kelly (1929) at the Siskel, Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly at Webster Place, and The Enchanted Cottage (1945) on TCM — I realize that they all depended on my selected vantage points.
Stroheim, a Viennese middle-class Jew and army deserter, became a Jew in hiding once he entered the U.S., persuaded almost everybody that he had an aristocratic background, and became a devout Catholic. Because “Kelly” signifies “Irish”—another non-aristocratic outsider identity –the very title Queen Kelly points to Stroheim’s secret self as a writer-director and sometimes as a lead actor. In his Foolish Wives (1922), he hid in plain sight by playing a swindler pretending to be an aristocrat, and in Greed (1924), where he didn’t appear as an actor, he was again praised for his fanatically detailed Naturalism, this time related to working-class Americans. Yet by the time he wrote and directed Queen Kelly — a delirious fantasy set in a mythical kingdom about a convent student named Kitty Kelly (Gloria Swanson) abducted by a playboy prince (Walter Byron) the night before he’s been ordered to marry an insanely jealous queen (Seena Owen) — Stroheim has abandoned Naturalism for a kind of crazed Catholic pornography that seems to double as a nightmarish personal psychodrama in which he identifies obsessively with all his characters, victims and predators alike.
The film was never completed because Swanson and her lover and producer, Joseph Kennedy (JFK’s dad), halted the shoot once the film’s transgressiveness became even more extreme. The new restoration fills in most of the story’s missing pieces with stills and intertitles (unlike the most recent and less user-friendly restoration of Foolish Wives). Indeed, what makes Stroheim arguably a greater filmmaker than today’s crazed and ambitious Catholics such as Francis Coppola, Brian De Palma, and Martin Scorsese, are his understanding of people and his sheer intensity, so that, as with the movies of Luis Buñuel, I wind up identifying with both him and all his characters.
In the case of Jay Kelly, a movie about a movie star played by George Clooney, I identified mainly with its cowriter and director Noah Baumbach and secondarily with the eponymous hero’s manager and best friend, played by Adam Sandler. Like Stroheim, Baumbach is often concerned with crazed, dysfunctional individuals, but his style as a director is more detached and less obsessive. This movie struck me as a companion piece to Barbie, which Baumbach also cowrote, similarly reflecting on manufactured/ stereotyped identity versus personal selfhood. Clooney plays “movie star” as a type and concept, much as “Barbie” was and is, thereby ensuring his instability as a human being. The plot of this movie named after his character follows both our uncertainty and his uncertainty as he travels from the U.S. to accept an award at an Italian film festival because one of his two neglected daughters also plans to attend the event. But the clips shown at the awards ceremony come from real movies starring George Clooney, not imaginary movies starring Jay Kelly, and the confusion this instills in us is Baumbach’s true subject. What’s captivating about his directorial style is the probing of this mystery, most evident in the dazzling opening sequence that shows Jay Kelly being filmed on a soundstage. And what’s most touching about Sandler’s performance is the emotional uncertainty deriving from this mystery about his boss.
The best evaluation of The Enchanted Cottage may have been Manny Farber’s in 1945—”not very good, but it is likable.” I returned to it over seven decades after having seen a revival as a child during the early 50s, this time re-experiencing some of the same ambivalence and confusion.
The diverse artists associated with the movie –- director John Cromwell, playwright Arthur Wing Pinero, screenwriters DeWitt Bodeen and Herman J. Mankiewicz (who updated a WW1 story to WW2) –- matter far less to me than the five lead characters: a “homely” housemaid (Dorothy McGuire) and a former pilot with a disfigured face (Robert Young) who fall deeply in love and thus seemingly lose their facial imperfections inside the eponymous cottage (an enchanted character in its own right, a former haven for honeymooners) with the guidance of another housemaid (a luminous Mildred Natwick) and a blind pianist and friend (Herbert Marshall) who lives next door. Individually and collectively, they’re a sweet bunch.
Nevertheless, as a child I couldn’t understand why the movie described Dorothy McGuire as “homely” even though she looked like a glamorous movie star and so did Robert Young, whose disfigurement (a scar and a slightly twisted mouth) seemed less ugly than it was supposed to be. This was clearly a matter of cross-purposes: scrambling and confusing Hollywood signals to keep us identifying with the couple’s euphoric mutual love (the “likable” part), meanwhile keeping them in semidarkness to make sure our own sensitivities, like theirs, weren’t being too seriously tested. Yet my recent disbelief carried as many beguiling lessons as my faltering belief. Why must we pretend that everyone experiences these discrepancies in the same way? To assign a single ultimate value to many possible readings is to commit a criminal act, yet that’s what the marketers usually expect from us. Only the insultingly inaccurate postulate that we all go to movies for the same reasons, and even wind up with identical experiences and understandings, could justify such a slander.
I saw the first two movies in sparsely attended auditoriums, the third at home and alone, and because the generative theme of The Enchanted Cottage is loneliness, this felt appropriate. But as with both Kellys, it might have been an even richer experience if I could have joined a group discussion about it afterwards.
