As our 2nd Critic on the Spot, we welcome Carrie Rickey, film critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer for 21 years. Her reviews are syndicated nationwide and she is a regular contributor
to Entertainment Weekly, MSNBC and NPR. Rickey’s essays appear in
numerous anthologies, including “The Rolling Stone History of Rock
& Roll,” “The American Century,” and the Library of America’s
“American Movie Critics.” Carrie also hosts a spirited blog, Flickgrrl.
Every few days, we'll post a new Q&A between Carrie and one of us. Here's #5, this one from Robert David Sullivan.
Q:
Has American film learned anything from American television over the past decade?
A:
Provocative question, Robert. And unanswerable, unless I concede that there are more movies that have forensic-medicine in them these days, thanks to “Law and Order.” And that the average-shot duration of a movie has gone from 6 seconds to 2 ½ seconds, courtesy of music video and Tv editing. But you have something more serious in mind, I think, as to whether screenwriters and filmmakers have learned from TV how to deepen character and contextual development.
I see this influence on the films of Michael Mann, particularly “The Insider,” but not elsewhere. Episodic television enables viewers to see characters like Tony Soprano and Carrie Bradshaw in different contexts and over time, an advantage that movies ordinarily cannot compete with, unless we count the adventures of Jason Bourne, James Bond and Michael Corleone. For reasons I don’t fully comprehend, TV lends itself to ensemble workplace dramas – “The Wire” and “Mad Men” come to mind – where the star is the workplace, not the high-priced actor.
As early as the 1950s, the social-problem drama was no longer the province of movies but migrated to television while movies increasingly became the province of widescreen spectacle, i.e. “Gigi” and “Spartacus” We see this pattern of segregation between spectacle and character repeating itself over the last decade, as movies have become increasingly spectacle-driven and TV increasingly character-driven. It need not be thus, especially as the size of the multiplex screen and home screen are growing closer in scale. Few things are more powerful than a closeup of the human face on the big screen (think Eliz Taylor and Montgomery Clift kissing in “A Place in the Sun.”
