"Form follows function" is not just a principle that applies to architecture but something that makes everything legitimate and well-designed. The shape or tone of something should be mainly anchored in its idea or meaning, for the most part, right? Well, The Man Who Came to Dinner is an account of one of surely countless similar episodes in the life of the biggest douchebag in the history of cinema, actually probably in the history of all vaginal cleaning agents. Whatever they were using before douche, he still outranks it. That's fine. If you have a character you fully develop, give presence and make a movie about, I'm there! Many of my favorite films center around less than sympathetic characters, but none of them work via the presumption that I must like him. This remarkably snooty romp seeks to lionize a character so vain and contemptible, and spend all of its energies on surefire formulas for farce, so that we don't stop to think about anything the script doesn't want us to.
Everything accelerates with one contrivance after another, what with a boys' choir, an Egyptian mummy, a flock of penguins. The cast relishes the incisive, brightly sneering dialogue with delight, but it's only Bette Davis, in the sole straight part, who manages to overcome the common air of laugh-begging despair. The movie grovels for laughs while striving for the wittiest way to say any and everything that's said. And Davis and the rest of the cast don't serve the story so much as anchor it in our associations with the familiar faces and names, as well as graceful comportment and transatlantic accents. The film strains itself over impeccable form to compensate for its flimsy, snooty, cloying function.
The pacing is not as rhythmic as it would like to think it is. This whole movie likes to think, and would especially like us to think, that it's a quick-witted, razor-sharp farce in the classic Hawksian or Capra-esquire sense. It doesn't really want us to care about elements and characters it's just placed to add bulk around what it has truly designed for us to care about, which is Bette Davis' love interest and how her controlling boss prevents her marriage to the Ohio newspaperman. Nearly every other character, no matter how significant the conflict is that they're presented with, is forcibly marginalized for the remainder only to be resolved in a hurry at the end. But it's OK because we're effectively engaged in the quandary between Davis and her giant douche of a boss. The trick is that we're not supposed to think about much outside of that.
My earliest ventures in thinking about movies, not just watching them, not just putting them on and looking at them, showed me that thinking has much to do with keeping experiences alive long enough to take something away from them, making them valuable ones. Thinking may bring to light distressing realities or produce dead ends, but its real purpose is to strengthen an idea, to increase our connection to a subject by strengthening its value in our minds. In this way, thinking gives life some character and linkage, a narrative characteristic, as if our ideas, prompted by unembarrassed interest, were running through our minds like movies! A light-hearted movie is one thing, but a movie that disregards the expectation that its audience would like to actually sink its teeth into it is another.
Everything accelerates with one contrivance after another, what with a boys' choir, an Egyptian mummy, a flock of penguins. The cast relishes the incisive, brightly sneering dialogue with delight, but it's only Bette Davis, in the sole straight part, who manages to overcome the common air of laugh-begging despair. The movie grovels for laughs while striving for the wittiest way to say any and everything that's said. And Davis and the rest of the cast don't serve the story so much as anchor it in our associations with the familiar faces and names, as well as graceful comportment and transatlantic accents. The film strains itself over impeccable form to compensate for its flimsy, snooty, cloying function.
The pacing is not as rhythmic as it would like to think it is. This whole movie likes to think, and would especially like us to think, that it's a quick-witted, razor-sharp farce in the classic Hawksian or Capra-esquire sense. It doesn't really want us to care about elements and characters it's just placed to add bulk around what it has truly designed for us to care about, which is Bette Davis' love interest and how her controlling boss prevents her marriage to the Ohio newspaperman. Nearly every other character, no matter how significant the conflict is that they're presented with, is forcibly marginalized for the remainder only to be resolved in a hurry at the end. But it's OK because we're effectively engaged in the quandary between Davis and her giant douche of a boss. The trick is that we're not supposed to think about much outside of that.
My earliest ventures in thinking about movies, not just watching them, not just putting them on and looking at them, showed me that thinking has much to do with keeping experiences alive long enough to take something away from them, making them valuable ones. Thinking may bring to light distressing realities or produce dead ends, but its real purpose is to strengthen an idea, to increase our connection to a subject by strengthening its value in our minds. In this way, thinking gives life some character and linkage, a narrative characteristic, as if our ideas, prompted by unembarrassed interest, were running through our minds like movies! A light-hearted movie is one thing, but a movie that disregards the expectation that its audience would like to actually sink its teeth into it is another.