I wrote about why Joachim Trier’s films - Oslo, August 31st and Reprise - are just the best, for The Paris Review Daily. I also get a kick out of how the star of both films, Anders Danielsen Lie, is a doctor in real life, released a concept album about autism, is married to a supermodel, and the couple of films that he’s been in - including one he made as a ten year old that was nominated for an Academy Award - have done wonderfully. Do his friends hate him for being very successful at life?
For those who like to keep score (check Richard Rushfield’s “The Painfully Brief Candle of Modern Auteurs,” a totally fun theory) Trier is now two for two with great films, and I’m really curious as to whether he can keep it up - for two directors that I was very excited about at one point, Wes Anderson and David Gordon Green, their third film was where the seams started showing (Team Rushmore, less The Royal Tenenbaums), and they’ve been up and down ever since, one director sticking to a vision, the other… not. I think it’s different for foreign directors that can get arts funding, however.
I have slight issues with the use of the word “auteur” as an French, chic-sounding catch-all replacement for “film director,” as, contextually, Kael and Sarris-ly, at the least, it referred to seeing a director’s signature even in work-for-hire stuff, when it’s more used willy-nilly these days with relatively visionary directors of any stripe, including writer/directors. Kind of like the evolution of the word “peruse,” which I think means to read thoroughly and carefully in the OED and now is used for indicating that you flipped through something.
“So why is Brody so smitten? The uncharitable view holds that, in his unwavering support for Swanberg, Bujalski, les frères Safdie, et al., he has the air of an elderly uncle trying to appear groovy with the kids, whose music he tries to love despite his better judgment. But I think it goes deeper than that. I believe it’s sincere. Like many of the better American critics, Brody is an auteurist at heart, and is therefore eager to find and consecrate homegrown examples, in order to sustain this worldview.
The problem is, as he well knows, the entire mechanism of US filmmaking, in all but its most handmade manifestations, is inimical to auteurism; rather, it emphasizes the efficiency and superiority of the industrial process. In so hostile a climate, one must take one’s heroes where one can. Hence the rabid over-praising – and not only by Brody, I hasten to add – of every Bright Young Thing that comes alone [sic]. All of whom, amusingly enough, are compared to European models, from Lance Hammer (“an American Dardenne!” we were assured) to Sofia Coppola (“Somewhere” was just like Antonioni, doncha know?). And of course, Swanberg himself, whom Brody regularly likens – not entirely without justification – to Philippe Garrel. But it’s telling, I think, that no one ever compares these guys to, say, an Anthony Mann, or a Frank Tashlin, or indeed any other product of the US studio system, since that would negate the argument being advanced.
(This, incidentally, is why the career trajectory of someone like David Gordon Green, from the exquisite lyricism of “George Washington” to the baked stupor of “Pineapple Express,” is such a bitter pill for his early admirers to swallow, representing as it does not only one very gifted filmmaker’s flight from the salons to the marketplace, but an entire narrative of U.S. indie filmmaking in the last decade.)
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