- The Observer,
- Sunday November 24, 2002
Nobody's Perfect: Writing's from the New Yorker
by Anthony Lane
Picador £15.99, pp400
In 1993, Anthony Lane left the 'squalling pit' of British journalism to become a film critic for the New Yorker. He was offered this job - a berth so dizzyingly elevated it must have taken him many moons to get over his vertigo - by the magazine's then editor, terrifying Tina Brown. 'I was sitting in London when the call came through from Tina's office,' he writes in the introduction to Nobody's Perfect. 'I think I actually stood up to receive it, much as I would if a letter had come from the Vatican. It transpired that Tina had dispatched her scouts and spies - her roving monsignors - on a mission to find a film reviewer and that some hapless soul, presumably under torture, had croaked the name of Lane.'
And so it began. In the nine years since he and Brown struck a deal over a breakfastless Manhattan breakfast (he was too intimidated to crunch bacon in front of his prospective new boss - and, like a lioness at a dusty watering hole, she merely sipped coffee), Lane has built up a reputation for being the best critic in the business, his wit, verve and (mostly) excellent good taste an effervescent tonic - a kind of Lucozade for the grey matter - imbibed by all who despair at the tinny void of popular culture.
His prose - agile yet muscular, seriously funny - floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee. He arches an eyebrow, marshals one of his oh-so-neat verbal left hooks and - ooph! - before you know it, muddle-headed thinkers everywhere are well and truly on the ropes.
This thumping great collection of his work - 'a hunk of old journalism', he calls it - is divided into three sections: movies, books and profiles. The first should be read in bed on a dark winter's afternoon when all your local cinema has to offer is Scream 10 or American Pie 8. Take a bowl of popcorn with you or, better still, a box of violet creams (the author has a patrician tone that demands chocolates of Mitford-esque vintage).
It begins with a review of Indecent Proposal, that monstrous oil slick of a movie starring Robert Redford and Demi Moore, and ends with one of Together, a film by the Swedish director Lukas Moodysson. In between, Lane tap dances his way through Pulp Fiction and Persuasion, Notting Hill and The Nutty Professor, Speed and Sleepless in Seattle. What's that? You want Kieslowski? Stay calm: he's in here, too.
If you have never read a Lane review before, then you are in for a treat. If you have, well, lucky you: they sure survive re-reading. I would rather dine on woodlice than see Pearl Harbor again, but I have ingested Lane's verdict on it no less than three times, and his opening paragraph always results in hot tea shooting uncomfortably, deliriously, down my nose: 'The last Michael Bay film, Armageddon, was a handy guide to what you should do when an asteroid bumps into your planet,' he writes. 'His new picture, Pearl Harbor, maintains the mood, pulsing with fervour as it tells a tale familiar to every child in America: how a great nation was attacked and humbled by the imperious pride of Ben Affleck.' I'd love to see that line looming over Sunset Boulevard.
Lane, you see, has a way of pinning a movie down. He can shake out stupidity; he can unwrap beauty; he can spot a fake. In this sense, he is all you could ever want from a critic. Inevitably, one's vanity comes into play - it is so fortifying to engage with someone who knows what you think about a film before you know yourself.
I could never love a man who did not love Together ('Just when I was starting to despair of ever finding a decent movie about life in a Swedish hippie colony in the mid-1970s, along comes a perfect example'), I would not let such a creature so much as put his hand on my thigh. But even when I do disagree - why is it that only I can see that the wonderful Mr Wonderful is Anthony Minghella's best movie and that The English Patient is pure hogwash? - still, I cannot fault his effortless precision.
You could quote him forever. 'What is most thrilling about Braveheart remains inextricable from all that is most ridiculous,' he writes of Mel Gibson's sprawling William Wallace epic. 'When you hear the battlefield cry of "Take out their archers!" you start to laugh. Then you think, go on guys, take 'em out. Faster, Pussycat! Kilt! Kilt!'
And here he is on Wes Anderson's Rushmore: 'If you want to pick one shot from this year's movies, try the look on Bill Murray's face as he shakes hands with Fischer senior: puzzlement, disbelief, a speck of outrage, the quiet rush of truth, and, last of all, a gentle settling of kindness. The entire thing takes maybe four seconds: this is known as acting.' Good jokes and a surfeit of understanding; Lane is so much more than a one-trick pony.
At the back of the book, the 'authentic reek of the concession stand' is usurped by a dustier mood. Lane writes brilliantly on André Gide, Cyril Connolly and Evelyn Waugh. But he is best of all on TS Eliot, a poet whose reputation, in 1997, was in the process of being 'Larkinised' (by which he means destroyed). 'Once we begin to chastise poets for what they believed, what they cried in public declarations or murmured in idle moments, who should 'scape whipping? Having surveyed the sins of the leading poets in the language, I have come to the unlikely conclusion that the only one who can be honoured with impunity is George Herbert.' Flick from here to Lane's blissful ode to Lego and you'll wonder where this guy has been all your life.
If I have a criticism at all - and I had better think of one quickly so as not to sound like a total creep - it is this: in his introduction, Lane is just a mite snotty about what he left behind him in grimy old low-rise London - the 'squalling pit' - a world of unchecked facts and sickly picture bylines.
I say this not just because I myself am still bobbing around in this blustery abyss, holding on to my sou'wester for dear life; personally, I think Lane is the most entertaining writer in the New Yorker because he carries deep within him a peculiarly demotic, even camp sensibility he could not have honed anywhere else but these shores. But perhaps I am too churlish. The truth is, he's the ant's pants, the bee's knees, the king of the hill. Some people can just do it; the rest of us only wish we could.
