As the curtain closed on the era of Hollywood’s self-policing Hayes Commission Codes in the 1960s, a new breed of maverick filmmaker scrambled to topple the remaining taboos standing in the way of “honesty” and “realism.” Explicit violence blasted its way onto the screen in such films as Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch.
Midnight Cowboy, with its frank portrayal of male prostitution, was the first X-rated feature to win an Oscar for best film. Nudity became de rigueur in the most banal situations, and even the young boy in ET swore like a sailor.
But in its quest for realism, Hollywood has gone overboard and created a new unrealism. As cameras follow their subjects into the shower and boudoir with tedious predictability, the private side of life is omitted.
But every trend has its exceptions, and times do change. Two excellent new films break with Hollywood tradition by reprivatizing portions of their characters’ lives.
Waiting for the Moon is a fictionalized slice of life based on the relationship of American writer Gertrude Stein and her companion, Alice B. Toklas, whose home in France was a way station for such twentieth-century luminaries as Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso. Writer/director Jill Godmilow chose to picture the relationship of the two women without focusing on their alleged lesbianism.
“People come out of the film asking, ‘Well, were they or weren’t they?’ ” Godmilow said in an interview, “But my feeling was that visitors to their home would not have been shown some torrid sex scene, and I wanted to give the characters that kind of privacy, to show them as they would have appeared to those who knew them.”
Godmilow’s artistic restraint allows her film to focus on those elements of the relationship that are best suited to public scrutiny: their literary cooperation and mutual support. One of the finest scenes in the film consists of Stein and Toklas, sitting in the garden one balmy afternoon, editing and proofreading a manuscript together.
As a result, the considerable talents of Linda Hunt, who won an Oscar for her riveting portrayal of Billie Kwan in The Year of Living Dangerously, are maximized in a memorable Alice. British actress Linda Bassett is equally rich as Gertrude. Godmilow said ironically, that the search for a Gertrude was fruitless in America precisely because Hollywood does not nurture the talents of matronly, fortyish actresses. Hollywood’s taste in women runs more toward the young, the sensual, and the venal. Hence, an English actress plays the American author.
Movies With Manners
In the same vein, 84 Charing Cross Road is the story of a feisty New York writer who answers an ad for rare and antiquarian books in the Saturday Review. She writes a letter to a stodgy English bookseller, seeking reasonably priced copies of classic books, and a 20-year friendship, based solely on letters, ensues between her and the staff of the bookstore. We delight in each newsy letter, and in the ongoing battle of wits between dry British humor and New York shtick.
As in Waiting for the Moon, the characters are viewed not from the persona of an intruding peeping Tom but from a respectful distance, as Godmilow says, “the way they would appear to actual people who might know and interact with them.” It is polite filmmaking, movies with manners.
There is something refreshingly honest about this approach to filmmaking. People are viewed with dignity. They are examined, but with gentle hands that respect and caress. They are illuminated, but with a soft lamp rather than an interrogator’s floodlight.
By Stefan Ulstein, chairman of the English department, Bellevue (Wash.) Christian School.
