What Do We Mean When We Talk About Greatness?: 'The Stunt Man'
There may be nothing in terms of movies that people are more fond of than comparison. You can't swing a stuffed cat on the internet without running into a list of the "greatest" films of all time, or the "greatest" directors, or the "most important" genres, or the "hardest" kinds of films to make, or the "greatest" shots in Hollywood history.
Almost entirely absent from these lists, of course, are any criteria. When someone argues that The Godfather is the greatest film ever made, for example, what they usually do is employ sumptuous language to describe the visuals, or the acting, or the influence it had on other movies, or the way its ideas and quotes infiltrated culture, or some other such things.
But what they almost never talk about is what it means for a movie to be "the greatest" or what it means for a movie to be "great" or even "good." This is because any discussion of these things is really only a discussion of criteria.
If I happen to think that what makes a movie great is the number of times it makes me laugh, then, unfortunately, The Godfather (or Citizen Kane, or Casablanca, or Vertigo or any of the others that tend to populate the top of the traditional lists) are all out of the running. As they are if I think that what makes a movie great are the number of discussions about academic philosophy engaged in by the characters, or the number of large-scale action sequences that show space ships exploding.
So when we talk about greatness, or, in fact, make any comparisons between films, what we're really talking about is what we value in films, or the attributes of them that we think constitute greatness. Now, these things can be (and have been) debated at length. Maybe what's valuable is the degree to which they make people happy for the space of a couple of hours. Maybe what's valuable is the amount of influence they exert on broader society. Maybe what's valuable is their adherence to our moral codes. Or maybe, perish the thought, for a lot of people what's valuable is the degree to which other people haven't seen them; which is to say that being able to reel off a list of films that most other people aren't familiar with and declare them to be "the greatest" is simply a way of claiming status, of asserting authority through snobbery.
But one thing seems clear to me: it's worth spending more time than we do talking about what makes movies good.
In order to do this, I think it's often useful to think about liminal examples, movies that are in part really great, and in part not great, the ones that are perplexing in their unevenness, the almost-but-not-quites – because it's in the contrasts that these films present, their variances between success and failure, that we can sometimes start to understand what we value in them.
So I present to you Richard Rush's The Stunt Man, from 1980, one of the greatest almost-great, nearly fantastic but perplexingly flawed, funny, ingenious, but-something-is-still-missing movies in Hollywood history. And since running through a complete list of its successes and failings would be a book-length endeavor, I'm just going to concentrate on two things in it that help me understand what I mean when I say something's great: acting, and the ability to put onto the screen things we have felt but don't have language for.
The story of the film goes like this. There's a disturbed Vietnam vet named Cameron (Steve Railsback) who's running from the cops. He stumbles onto a bridge and is almost run down by a man driving an antique car, which veers off the bridge into the water. At first, Cameron thinks he might have caused the accident, but then a helicopter appears carrying a crazy film director named Eli Cross (Peter O'Toole), and Cameron realizes that he has stumbled into the middle of a stunt being filmed for a movie.
Pretty quickly, Cameron and Eli figure out that they need each other: the cops are still looking for Cameron, and the driver in the stunt he interrupted was killed. So, to keep his movie on track and avoid an investigation, Eli convinces Cameron to pretend that he's the dead stunt man and to come work on the film (an epic anti-war World War One period piece), which will have the benefit of hiding him from the cops.
Cameron accepts the offer, and finds himself caught up in the somewhat magical, somewhat absurdist, and definitely dangerous world of making a movie. He falls in love with the lead actress Nina (Barbara Hershey) and is mentored by the stunt coordinator Chuck (famed stuntman Charles Bail). The movie shoot proceeds, now with Cameron doing a lot of the stunts. But soon, he's enveloped by the suspicion that Eli is a deranged maniac who's going to try to kill him in a stunt, to ensure the "realism" of the film.
In the end, Cameron survives. He realizes that Eli really is deranged, but only in that he wants to make a great movie. He has also taken an almost fatherly interest in Cameron, and wants to help him out of his troubles by introducing him into the movie business. In the film's wonderful closing scene, Eli ensures that Cameron will stay in the business by underpaying him for the movie's final stunt – a re-do of the car-driving-off-the-bridge gag from the opening – which so infuriates Cameron that he swears he'll stay with the production as it moves on to its next location, if only to get the money he's owed.
The Stunt Man is an absolutely unique film. It bears the imprint of the energy and enthusiasm of the '70s New Hollywood moment, and in its best moments achieves the kind of live-wire intensity and emotional authenticity that mark those films. And yet it matches this with has distinct traces of what we might think of as European sensibilities. The way it embodies the pure romance of the filmmaking endeavor brings to mind Truffaut's Day for Night, and its flights into fantasy and whimsy recall Fellini's 8½, both of which are among the most joyous movies about making movies ever made.
It also stages a number of thrilling stunts, the crown jewel of which is a long sequence in which Cameron clambers over a series of gabled roofs while being shot at and pursued by actors playing German soldiers, and then falls through a skylight into a brothel.
In all of this, we get glimmerings of makes movies great (for me at least). And at the same time, we get a clear look at what can make movies not great (again, for me). Let's start with the acting.
To my way of thinking, O'Toole gives a stunning performance in the film – he was nominated for an Academy Award – and Railsback does not. But what does this mean? In other words, what does it mean when we say that acting is "great"?
In some ways, this is out of the actor's control. O'Toole has the "bigger" part. His character is flamboyant and boisterous, at times charismatic and at times cruel, and for a stretch of the movie we, along with Cameron, believe that he may indeed be intent on murder. Railsback's character, in contrast, is written in a way that doesn't give him as much room to move, as it were: he's suffering from the trauma of his war experiences, which have made him a bit crazy. This is the main focus of the character, which means that Railsback is asked to portray a different, and narrower, range of behaviors than O'Toole; these mostly fall along the lines of paranoia, anger, and the occasional moment (as when he's with Nina) in which he manages to escape these things. Because Railsback's character has less emotional kinetic energy we're naturally not as interested in him; and because O'Toole gets to play a wild man, we're naturally more interested in him. (This is why, incidentally, we often speak of film villains – think Hannibal Lecter – as providing such juicy acting opportunities.)
Beyond this, though, O'Toole is simply more convincing as a human being. I wrote about the new Predator movie Prey recently, and the more I think about that film, the more I'm convinced that one of the main reasons it didn't work for me was that, other than the really well portrayed lead character, it never really convinced me that what I was watching were real people, as opposed to plot functions.
The best way I've come up with to articulate this is the idea of relationships. The signal fact about other human beings is that we have relationships with them, which are, by their nature, complicated. Sometimes we love them and sometimes we hate them or are angry at them; sometimes we're fascinated with them and want them to like us; sometimes we're terrified of them, and feel as though we won't be safe until they're out of our lives. And this feeling of relationship has a dimensionality to it. It feels nuanced and textured.
Good actors give us this same experience. They make us relate to them in a nuanced, textured way; they give us the visceral feeling that the characters on the screen not only might, but in some sense do exist out here in the real world as well. There is a realism in good acting, in other words, which doesn't have anything to do with the reality of what's happening on the screen, which is very obviously not real. It's the realism of the relationship between us and them, the sense that we relate to them as we would a real person.
In The Stunt Man, this comes through clearly. O'Toole feels larger than life, and yet he draws out of us an emotional response that is three-dimensional, both complicated and stirring in us the same set of feelings and reactions that we have towards actual human beings in the actual world. Railsback, in contrast, remains on the screen. His character feels more inert. We are less drawn to him, we maintain our emotional distance from him, we do not feel the intricacies of a relationship with him.
This quality of acting – its ability to make us feel as though what's happening on the screen is a human actuality – is related to the second element of movie greatness that The Stunt Man touches on: the ability to put onto the screen things we have felt but don't have language for. This sounds like a complicated idea, but I don't think it is: it's simply a matter of the way movies can make us see things that we have strongly felt, but only dimly understood. The force of this is the reason that we so often feel the urge to quote them, and why they so often come to mind when we think about an abstract topic like love, or excitement: they provide a (visual) language for us. They explain ourselves to us.
In The Stunt Man is comes out in the differences between the way it treats the romance of filmmaking and the way it treats romance itself.
Maybe the finest thing about the film, for me, at least, is that it so clearly envisions so many of the elements that make movies, and the making of movies, feel magical. This is an allure that many of us feel, and it's in part the reason that film is such a powerful and popular medium. In The Stunt Man, we get to watch a movie being made, and we get to watch the stunts that go into creating some of the most exciting moments in movies, from war scenes to chases, airplane stunts to car crashes. And we also see behind the scenes: the director controlling the action, the viewing of dailies (the film that has been shot that day or in the previous days) by the cast and crew, the behind-the-scenes social interaction, etc.
But in the movie, this is all heightened. The stunts that Cameron finds himself doing are both accurate to filmmaking – the way the camera is installed in the car he has to wreck in the end, for instance – and at the same time surreal. In the scene when he's running across the rooftops being chased by German soldiers, for example, everything happens in one long, continuous sweep of action; on a real set, virtually every piece of the action would be set up and shot separately, so that cameras could be moved and lighting adjusted, etc.
The behind-the-scenes stuff is handled similarly. One of the film's most delightful tropes is that O'Toole's director zooms around the set in a kind of sling dangling from a crane. This allows him to float down into sequences, or pull an actor into the seat next to him and raise them up above the action. But we never actually see the crane arm above him, and soon realize that this sling defies all physical logic: there is no way that a crane could move him all over the place in this way.
Which is to say that, like the stunts in the film, this combines reality and magic. And when we watch it, our reaction is something akin to: "Yes! What's up there on the screen is precisely what the magic of movies feels like inside me. It's embodying what I feel, this combination of actual people in real situations making things that are larger and more enrapturing than life!" It puts images and sound to a sensation we have experienced – that magical feeling that movies create – which is a sensation that, on its own, can be hard for us to articulate. And it does this in a way that's supremely satisfying, supremely enjoyable. It resonates with something we've felt but not perhaps known before watching.
The way the film handles romance itself is the opposite. The love story between Railsback's character and Hershey's character feels flat; the scenes between them do not crackle. In one moment, they're in bed and an alarm clock goes off; Railsback's character wants to make love with the alarm still going, ignoring it the way he thinks they should ignore the other distractions of the world, and Hershey's character protests. In another, Railsback explains to her what he did to get the cops after him while raging around in a prop room; he upsets a pile of paint cans and the both of them end up slipping and falling in the mess.
Both scenes come off as forced, not up to the standard of the rest. This is not simply because of a problem with the chemistry between the actors (a vague phrase we all use but which could bear a lot of examination) or that the scenes aren't well written or well imagined. Instead, the primary reason for the flat, lifelessness of these sequences is that they don't resonate with the sensations of love or romance that we ourselves have experienced; they don't resonate with the feelings already inside us.
They don't light up anything that has heretofore been dark, don't put sound and images to things we haven't been able to articulate ourselves. They feel as if the story, and the people in it, are performing love, instead of inhabiting it; they feel as if they expect us to recognize that "this is love" and yet do not actually stir that sensation inside us. They fail, that is, precisely because they don't do what the moviemaking sequences accomplish so spectacularly.
Different viewers will have different reactions to all of this, of course. But these are mine. And beneath them, if you look closely, you can see the glimmerings of a larger idea about what makes movies great. It's an idea that is in some ways about making us feel real, recognizable things, and in some ways about giving us ways to understand the world, and in some ways, perhaps, about the nature of magic itself. When I find out how to explain it more fully, I'll be sure to let you know.
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