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BOOK REVIEW:
IT DON'T WORRY ME
(Faber and Faber, 262 pp., $24)
by Ryan Gilbey
reviewed by MICHAEL ROWIN
I've had the nagging suspicion that the consensus that the Seventies was a Golden Age of American Cinema is mainly rooted in one overriding sentiment: nostalgia. For over ten years, critics, filmmakers, and filmgoers have looked back on that decade with an unswerving and self-congratulatory devotion not dissimilar to their rock music counterparts' view of the Sixties. As myth would have it, these were eras of unsurpassed creative freedom, during which radical work was created within the mainstream until it all eventually collapsed into hedonistic and overblown fluff-just as the Western world began to distance itself from the political and societal turmoil that originally gave rise to this cultural ferment. The study of the historical and critical complexity of these eras is often abandoned for a simpler, reductive version of cultural evolution, one in which present-day filmmakers can take satisfied comfort in knowing that critics' tastes are on the right side of the Manichean, old guard/new guard dichotomy.
It Don't Worry Me (Faber and Faber, 262 pp., $24), by Ryan Gilbey, is the latest contribution to a burgeoning mini-industry of documentation and criticism of Seventies American filmmaking that has developed recently with books like Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and The Kid Stays in the Picture, and the IFC film A Decade Under the Influence. Fortunately, Gilbey's sensibility is more critical, enabling him to further explore directions opened up by previous efforts to understand this period of work without succumbing to blind romanticization or the reiteration of received views of key cinematic achievements. Devoting a chapter each to ten influential directors (Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg, Malick, De Palma, Altman, Kubrick, Allen, Demme, and Scorsese), Gilbey gives thoughtful appraisals of usually unassailable classics like The Godfather, which he deems a soft and glorifying portrayal of violence in comparison to its more emotionally complex sequel, while bringing into sharper focus forgotten gems like Scorsese's New York, New York, which he points out contains "the thematic struggle between a yearning to uphold the glory of classic Hollywood musicals and an acknowledgement of the pain that rushes through the genre's arteries like a fatal blood clot." Here Gilbey precisely highlights a more subtle and brooding, and thus overlooked, side of Scorsese's career in a film which is undoubtedly rooted in the auteur's complicated relationship to the giants of film history.
Gilbey's readings are, for the most part, fair and democratic, according equal weight to the often disregarded Lucas, and bringing the bloated legend of Kubrick back down to earth. A clear guide helps the reader through the dizzying number and variety of films Altman directed in the Seventies; Demme, now known for the prestige pictures of recent years, is revealed in a different light for his lesser-known early work. It's to Gilbey's credit that he does not take the reader's level of knowledge for granted, but instead draws undistorted portraits that clearly define the cinematic style and thematics of each director.
Still, I can't help but feel that, while it works for him, Gilbey is content to settle for this sort of approach when perhaps a bolder, deeper investigation of the triumphs and failures of the Seventies Golden Age would have further exploded the myths of this era. Because the directors are studied on a film-by-film basis, Gilbey has trouble constructing a general overview of the decade, one that would take a fresh look at the real impacts and lasting legacies of these films while also examining their artistic and ideological compromises. Attempts at giving a sense of the climate of the Seventies are too facile-"Cataclysmic modern events like Vietnam and Watergate had temporarily relieved society of the comfort of good guys and bad guys and happy-ever-afters"-and a final survey of the filmmakers' contributions to cinema, while slightly wary of the blockbusters and macho indies spawned by the next generation of filmmakers, fails to make any convincing argument for a radically divergent assessment of Seventies American cinema. Gilbey takes as a given that the healthy state of present-day American filmmaking embodied by
The Blair Witch Project, Memento, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Mulholland Drive, among others, is owed to the Seventies canon but never properly explains how Mean Streets and Nashville are responsible for these films' existence. Furthermore, the writer glosses over some crucial questions: did Spielberg, Lucas, et al., actually shake up the mainstream film industry, or did they simply prolong its reign by introducing acceptable alternatives that held few challenges for audiences? In that vein, did filmmakers like Coppola and Scorsese dilute experimental and independent aesthetics in order to render them presentable for less discriminating audiences, while simultaneously creating their own visual cliches? Was this group of directors a boys' club, pouring the old patriarchal wine into new stylistic bottles? Gilbey occasionally hints at these issues but ultimately shies away from them, more intent on pursuing a reviewer's impulse to dissect a single film than at looking at the big picture. This might suffice for a director or two, but when the book's subtitle is "The Revolutionary American Films of the Seventies," one can't help but feel disappointed by the lack of critical work done on the reality and myth underpinning this pivotal moment in mainstream American filmmaking.
Furthermore, with only a vague outline to make sense of the economic, cultural, and political forces at work during the Seventies, Gilbey flounders in forming some sort of narrative from the careers of very different directors. Infamous director-producer Roger Corman is acknowledged as the starting point for the careers of Coppola, Demme, and Scorsese (Coppola subsequently was a mentor to Lucas), but these associations fail to account for the philosophically and cinematically isolated environments of Kubrick and Malick (it's no coincidence that these two have the shortest chapters devoted to their work), as well as the divergent approaches of Allen and Altman. It Don't Worry Me is, in effect, ten separate sketches, and the reader never gets any understanding of what united the work of these artists in the Seventies beyond the tenuous concept of "breaking with the status quo."
This isn't to say that Gilbey hasn't put together an enjoyable book. While at times his prose seems forced ("[Altman] felt bashful and tentative in Buffalo Bill and the Indians, like a parent who has arrived too early to collect his daughter from the disco"), he often gets to the heart of a film's emotional and intellectual pull, and has an intuitive grasp of what directors are pursuing in their work. Gilbey is at his best when pointing out the small details that make a picture work for a given director. In this sense, It Don't Worry Me is a welcome addition to the literature detailing the heights of studio freedom in the mythologized Seventies. But we're still waiting for analysis that can fully explicate that period's complexities.
- MICHAEL ROWIN
© 2003 by The Film Society of Lincoln Center
