David Thomson has written about film for decades, although he’s probably best known for “The New Biographical Dictionary of Film,” one of those reference books that you can browse for hours. As one might expect, he’s seen everything. Throughout “How to Watch a Movie,” he often speaks of his latest or most recent screening of, say, “The Godfather,” “Citizen Kane” or “Psycho.” In fact, Thomson’s critical advice can be reduced to a single dictum: Watch serious films more than once. To this, one might add two corollaries: Always pay close attention and, even as you surrender to the screen action, keep a part of your brain thinking about and judging what’s happening.
Thomson, in short, values the movies as art. He doesn’t utterly disparage the big franchise spectaculars, but they are, in his view, mere entertainments and distinctly simple ones at that. You “get” everything from them in a single viewing. In contrast, the movies that matter are those that explore messy human relationships (Lubitsch’s “Trouble in Paradise,” Kechiche’s “Blue is the Warmest Color”), or probe the complexities of life without settling for easy or clear-cut answers (Resnais’ “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”). Praising Bergman’s masterpiece “Persona,” Thomson declares that “it will teach you that film is an adventure in which you are meant to see more than the things before your eyes. The things seen are not just the view; they are windows that open it up.”
For Thomson, “clarity is death if you like to see films again and again.” He explains, “I don’t want to see ‘The Usual Suspects’ again now that I know who Keyser Soze is. Instead, I see that movie as a mass of mannered implausibilities, and witty character acting, that bets all its chips on the thing we don’t know. The eventual revelation destroys the film’s fragile mood.” He then lists other “good, pleasing films that deserve no more than a single viewing,” even if they have won Oscars: “The Artist,” “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Million Dollar Baby,” “The King’s Speech,” “Gravity.”
At another point, discussing film noir classics such as “Crossfire,” “In a Lonely Place” and “Kiss Me Deadly,” Thomson compares their severe beauty and blistering social criticism with the innocuous “blancmange” of popular films of the same period, including “An American in Paris” and “Roman Holiday” or those “epitomes of rational, liberal optimism” “Twelve Angry Men” and “Ben-Hur.” You can hear the disdain in his voice. These movies are bland, dated, shallow. Of all Steven Spielberg’s films, the only one that comes “close to greatness,” says the fearless Thomson, is “Empire of the Sun,” derived from J.G. Ballard’s harrowing novel of wartime Shanghai.
While “How to Watch a Movie” considers technical matters — editing, cutting, music, montage — as well as the organization of time and the importance of beauty in actors, it always does so in an easygoing, essayistic way. Thomson frequently draws on his boyhood memories of movie-going in Britain, relates anecdotes about script writers and directors, deftly summarizes various films, and generally circles around his subjects rather than zeroing in on them. This isn’t an academic manual or “Movies for Dummies.” You read Thomson for contact with an urbane and provocative intelligence. “Michael Corleone,” he observes, “is the master of his world and maybe the most effective leader in modern American film.” “To hear Rudy Vallee talk in ‘The Palm Beach Story’ is to be close to heaven. To hear the chill politeness of Catherine Deneuve in ‘Belle de Jour’ is to be there.”
And which of us would disagree with Thomson when he writes, “Often enough in life we stand in bad light and do not know what to say”?
As a critic, Thomson doesn’t just talk about The Industry. He regularly refers to books, paintings, our common experiences. He casually throws out the brilliant aperçu that being read to as a child “is the template of every intimacy in life.”
