The Review-Reading Double Standard

Reading a review of Matthew Pearl’s new novel The Last Dickens yesterday, my eyes performed their standard leapfrog dance over the newsprint: read the first paragraph or two, scan about one third of the way down to find the tag of information about the author, then skip all the way to the last paragraph for the reviewer’s summation. (In the case of Pearl’s book, I confess that my eye was caught by a series of sentences quoted from the book—clearly fodder for some future Language Rant.)

It’s not that I don’t enjoy reading book reviews. It’s that, when it comes to novels, I can’t abide knowing where the story is going to go before I have a chance to follow it there myself. Sure, I read enough reviews to be able to tell you the author and title of many of the new novels people end up talking about on the sidelines of their children’s games or over an Esperanto-named coffee drink. Like Pierre Bayard, I could probably pretend I’ve read most of these books. Aren’t there only two stories in the world, anyway? (Man goes on a journey. Stranger comes into town. And the latest: Woman discovers family secret.) But when it comes to the specifics of a particular version of those three stories, I absolutely need to be in the dark before I turn each and every page. Even in the most domestic of Quiet Books, I must have my suspense. Contrast this to my daughter whose leapfrog reading dance makes my review-reading habit seem downright demure: first paragraph, last paragraph. Then she decides if the book is worth spending time with. I shudder at this transgression of the Rules of Narrative Escape.

Then there are movie reviews, where all bets are off. I experience not a moment’s hesitation in reading right through every twist and turn of the latest thriller, or learning every detail of the romance. The very concept of a spoiler is, in a way, alien to me. No revelation about a movie’s plot can spoil my enjoyment of its story.

So the question is: why? Why my double standard? What is it about movies that makes them, for me, impervious to reviews that destroy suspense? Are books and movies so fundamentally different?

They used to be. Movies were necessarily communal where the novel was a solitary experience. Movies could only be enjoyed in a particular place, while the novel could be taken anywhere. But these distinctions were blurred years ago. And what the book club phenomenon started, the Kindle and other electronic readers have only accelerated further. Now you can watch a movie in your lap, and books are, once again, agents of a sociable life (just as they were 150 years ago when people gathered to hear someone read the latest installment in a Dickens serial).

For me, though, books and movies continue to exist in different worlds. I am still fairly solitary with my reading—partly because my selections are often driven by a problem I am working on in my own fiction (or by a desire to get entirely away from something in my own work), and partly because I read too slowly to keep up with everybody else’s consumption of new novels. (To wit: I have only now purchased Bel Canto.) Having started a book club years ago, I was the first member to flunk out.

Maybe my slow reading is the source of my movie/book double standard. When I read, I hear the words as if someone is reading them aloud to me (I must have a vestigial Victorian brain, eager for an evening’s recitation). I abhor interruption, and tend to treat the words on the page as if they are streaming by me once and once only; if I stop to answer the phone or the husband, the narrative train will leave me at the station. Thus, knowing ahead of time what is going to happen ruins that sensation of being carried along by the writer’s words. Reading the review is like traveling the distance beforehand with a foggy window and someone’s iPod playing too loudly in the next seat. Then when I do settle in for my actual journey, the trip’s familiarity breeds, if not contempt, then disappointment.

Reading a book will take me anywhere from one week—if the planets align, if the book is more Breakfast at Tiffany’s than War and Peace, and if I am more caffeinated in the evenings than usual—to a month. If I’m going to live with a novel for that long (and what better pleasure is there than an extended sojourn in someone’s imagined world?), then I want to be able to invest myself in it. And that means not knowing more than the vaguest outlines about the book. The production of that story in my own imagination, through reading, depends on my being in suspense.

But if suspense elicits from us a sense of heightened anticipation or even anxiety, even a racing heart, then movies have an advantage over books. For watching a movie is a brief and intense affair during which we are hit through almost all channels of our limbic systems. Our physiological responses to suspense will appear anyway, whether we know the story ahead of time or not. The music, the dark, the camerawork, the acting: faced with all of this, surrounded by it, we can’t help but get carried away by the story whose elements we may have already read about in the paper or on a blog. Consider the situation on a quieter, more finely etched scale. A written account of, say, Emma Thompson’s lovely moment at the end of Last Chance Harvey can’t diminish the experience of watching Thompson produce that emotion—in herself and in us.

In fact, I hadn’t planned to go see Last Chance Harvey at all until I read Ty Burr’s review in the Boston Globe. The movie seemed “small” enough for a DVD viewing later on. Burr writes:

"the scene toward the end, by the banks of the Thames, where Thompson takes her character from certainty to tears in the space of a sentence, and you sigh in gratitude at the emotional whiplash."

Rather than spoil the movie for me by giving away an aspect of the film’s conclusion, Burr’s observation compelled me to go and see for myself. If anything, the review generated more suspense in me than I might have felt had I not read it. I don’t recall ever turning the pages of a book to reach a paragraph I’ve seen quoted in a review. But I knew the moment was coming in Last Chance Harvey, and I was waiting for it.

Duplicity: Second Best

Tony Gilroy’s Duplicity keeps reminding us of its competition and coming in second. Julia Roberts and Clive Owen? We’ve seen them in Closer, where the manipulations of their hate-filled affair were palpable and electric compared to their tepid interactions here. Gilroy’s screenplay? His Bourne movies prove that you don’t have to sacrifice clarity to achieve suspense and complication. Two spies in love and at play? Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman managed both the passion and the deception much better in Notorious.



Perhaps the only area where Duplicity comes out even is in comparison to Gilroy’s own Michael Clayton. Like that earlier film, Duplicity deals with the corporate world—but this time, it’s the light side of corporate corruption. Gilroy wittily paints the competition between rival cosmetics companies as a kind of Cold Cream War, complete with product spies fresh from MI-6 (Owen) and the CIA (Roberts). In keeping with his light approach, he opens the film with two extended sequences that pair its two concerns. The first is a garden-party seduction between Roberts’ Claire Stenwick and Owen’s Roy Koval that ends in a hotel bedroom; the second is a super slow-motion fight between opposing CEO’s Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti, each one backed by his private jet and a posse of trench-coat-clad lackeys. The meaning is clear. Love and business: both are clumsy, no-holds-barred struggles for supremacy.

The best bits of Duplicity are those scenes in which we watch Roberts and Owen engaged in that struggle, sizing each other up like fighters in a ring. We see mistrust and hopefulness flicker across their faces, and we get glimmers—as they do—of the life they might lead if they could simply believe in the words that they say. Appropriately, Duplicity’s neat trick is a scene of repeated dialogue from that opening garden-party sequence. Over the course of the film—and afterwards, as we try to figure out what just happened—we come to realize that Stenwick’s and Koval’s words are always shifting in and out of performance, always swinging back and forth between truth and lies. In a darker movie, this would of course be tragic; the characters would destroy each other with vituperations and pain. Wait: that’s what happens in Closer. Duplicity plays its deception for laughs, and so we leave the theater confident that neither Koval nor Stenwick is terribly torn up about the fact that they can’t trust each other.

Unfortunately, the scenes between Owen and Roberts are also the source of the movie’s unresolved confusions. A significant portion of their scenes together are taken up with one chunk of dialogue that is repeated in different settings. It’s an interesting idea—what is real and what is performed—but for it to work in the movie, we need to be able to figure out the answer, certainly by the time we leave the theater. With a jumbled timeline that Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu would be proud of, Duplicity never makes us completely understand how the pieces fit together. Rather than create suspense from within the plot—as in, say, a Bourne movie—Gilroy does it by simply not showing us things in the right sequence. We enjoy it, but it’s ultimately a kind of cheap trick.

With its double, triple, and quadruple-split screens, and its domino-effect revelations, Duplicity is The Sting for the twenty-first century, a tale of a couple of con artists teaming up against The Man. And interestingly, while it has a couple of stars whose power is almost as great as that of Redford and Newman, Duplicity resists glamour. Not everything in Duplicity is clean and shiny. For every five-star hotel room, Gilroy gives us a drab Cleveland condo or a dark and cluttered office. Not everything works out the way you’d like. In fact, if Wilkinson’s speech early on about his theory of corporate evolution is right, we’re already as good as we’re going to get. It’s up to the corporations now to struggle against each other for the chance to be the fittest and the best.

The Lucky Ones: the Iraq War in a Road Movie?

Six years after the start of the Iraq War, no movie with the war as its subject has drawn much of an audience. In one weekend alone, more people saw Bride Wars than saw Rendition, Stop-Loss, and Lions for Lambs put together. Then there’s The Lucky Ones, whose audience in theaters was truly miniscule. And that is a shame. For though The Lucky Ones is not a great movie, it has a few things going for it—chief among them, the three strong performances of its mini-ensemble cast.

The movie (out on DVD since January) follows three soldiers returning to the US who band together after landing in New York in the middle of a blackout. They are a demographer’s dream: Tim Robbins’ older white guy, Michael Peña’s young Hispanic man, and Rachel McAdams’ southern naïf. Robbins’ Cheaver is done with his soldiering—and, like Odysseus, he is the one returning, in theory, to a wife—while the other two are on leave, Peña’s T.K. to see if his “upper thigh” wound will matter to his fiancée, and McAdams’ Colee to see if the family of her dead war buddy will accept her as their own.


Before we know even this much about the three soldiers, we get a nifty sequence of scenes that seem designed to remind us of the innocence of Stateside life now that the war has taken the fighting Over There. An airport packed with stranded passengers; LED screens announcing a full slate of cancelled flights; rental-car desks mobbed by grounded passengers. But it’s nothing to worry about: the only emergency that has caused this chaos is a blackout in New York. Later on, these soldiers from a conflict known for its roadside bombs (one of which has caused T.K.’s injury) drive around in a rental mini-van like a new-formed family. And when they lock themselves out of the van, they bushwhack through marshy grass to a Hummer dealership and get driven back to the van in the civilian version of their Iraq ride. An accident in the van a few miles later is just that: an accident. Again, these are the innocent iterations of the facts of war. The marsh grass isn’t in Baghdad, the Hummer is high-viz yellow, not camo, and the accident has nothing to do with an IED.

But Burger’s message here is unclear. Is he saying that by taking the fighting out of the United States, the Iraq War allows us to drive our Hummers without worrying about armor plating and to face a grounded fleet of planes with only the normal amount of aggravation? I’d be surprised if Robbins would sign on for a movie with a message like this. So then, what? Is Burger (who wrote the screenplay with Dirk Wittenborn) trying to suggest that in fact the war is always present in our lives now? Viewers of The Lucky Ones can’t help but notice the dangerous versions that lurk in every innocent scene, every military echo in a civilian moment. But again, the movie’s altogether jovial tone undermines this darker view. We can’t be too gloomy about what is, in so many ways, just a road movie. In the end, The Lucky Ones can’t decide what kind of story it wants to tell: an innocent adventure or a tale of cynicism and sorrow.

Fortunately, there is more to the movie than a policy paper about the Iraq War. The connecting lives of T.K., Cheaver, and Colee are full of stories and lies—benevolent lies that each one tells to him or her self, and that they tell to each other. As they drive from New York to St. Louis and eventually to Las Vegas, they form shifting pairs whose job it is to sustain the lie the third soldier insists on telling. It’s a kindness they perform for each other, and to watch it over the course of two hours is quite moving.

McAdams doesn’t quite get the Southern accent to shade beyond stereotype, but her performance as the gullible but at times insightful Colee is nicely nuanced (there’s a fine moment on an airport sidewalk towards the end of the film that’s what DVD scan buttons are for). Robbins has a harder task, with a character whose motivations aren’t always clear, but he conveys those mysteriously-motivated emotions with subtlety. Then there is Michael Peña, whose storyline in Crash was the only one not burdened with self-righteous obviousness. Robbins and McAdams have had plenty of exposure, but it’s a particular shame that The Lucky Ones’ tiny audience and its fleeting moment in theaters will keep Peña from getting more praise.

In the interview that is part of the DVD package, Burger says that, with The Lucky Ones, he wanted to create a portrait of the country as it is at this particular moment in history. I’m not at all sure that this is what he’s done. But where he fails to provide a large, realistic picture of the states his three soldiers travel through, he succeeds in illuminating the tiny world of their momentarily intersecting lives inside a maroon minivan. Not a bad accomplishment at all.