We are treated to a lot of quirky cinema these days. There are directors who go out of their way to be peculiar, unpredictable, unconventional… And with good reason too, probably. "What," they probably ask themselves, "is the point in being a filmmaker if I do not bring something new to the world of cinema?" All the stories have been told before, so the only scope for originality lies in the way you tell them. You can’t escape the confines of your love story, your conflict story, your chase story, your trial story or your journey story, so instead you differentiate with weird images and weird actors behaving weirdly.
There is something not quite right about some of the quirky films churned out by the indie studios (excuse the oxymoron). The bone I have to pick is not with mainstream comedy; I can vent my frustration with Mike Myers and/or the Frat Pack another time. No – right now I have a problem with student-friendly quirkmongers Wes Anderson, Zach Braff (who wrote and directed himself in the lead role of Garden State), and David O Russell (who made I ♥ Huckabees).
Some pioneers of weird have entertained us wonderfully. Some of the most memorable moments in cinema are memorable because they are quirky. The frog storm in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999) is a prime example. Other good quirk includes Napoleon’s day at the chicken farm in Napoleon Dynamite (Jared Hess, 2004) and pretty much the whole of Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971).
But, while some films use choice moments of quirkiness to sublime effect, others are saturated with quirk and serve only to confuse and irritate. Very little of the Huckabees script contributes to character or to story. As a political film, it doesn’t make (or even seem to try to make) a coherent argument, and as a philosophical piece it has very little to offer, barely scratching the surface of existentialism, which is supposedly the central topic of the film. In fact, most of Huckabees is redundant unless viewed as an exercise in redundancy.
It is quite amusing that, in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Anderson, 2004), the crew all wear the same bright red hats and blue uniform, but it strikes me that Wes Anderson is more interested in the concept of matching clothes (see also Bottle Rocket’s yellow overalls and The Royal Tenenbaums’ red tracksuits) than he is interested in telling us a story. Too much attention is paid to the micro and not enough to the macro. While I enjoyed the weird imagery in his latest film, that’s practically all that I can remember about it. The audience doesn’t take away anything substantial – just some interesting shots and some peculiar dialogue. You get the feeling that the Portuguese-singing David Bowie-playing acoustic guitarist is a gimmick to distract you from the realisation that the whole movie is empty of truth or meaning.
Please don’t get me wrong… While I think meaning is important, I don’t need it spoon-fed to me. Every filmgoer can bring and take away something to and from a movie that is different to what another filmgoer brings and takes away. There is a difference between ambiguity, where there are different interpretations of meaning, and empty quirk, where there is no meaning at all.
It’s difficult to criticise quirkiness without seeming like a conservative bore, but I genuinely feel that a lot of the quirkiness in modern film is misplaced, and displaces the creative thinking that the filmmaker could otherwise have conceived. In some ways, the ambition to make something quirky stifles the creative process, rather than stimulating it.
Is creativity the process of unleashing the imagination to present a montage of randomness? Or is it the process of viewing situations from different perspectives and connecting ideas to make them whole? I think the argument for the latter is stronger. Creativity needs a framework. It needs to be harnessed, and the results of creative thinking need to be relevant to something. If you let your imagination run loose, it is possible that you will explore some interesting ideas, and maybe even some absurd ones, and while that’s probably good for your brain, and might lead somewhere, it’s easy to lose sight of what you were trying to achieve in the first place.
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1 comment:
Are you going to write somethin else? It's been a while I wait for tou to write something... gave up on been a blogger boy? I dont agree with some of the stuff you write but I do like the way you write it. Keep on... See ya.
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