Sydney Pollack: The Interpreter

Sydney Pollack’s final fiction film is appropriately old school. The Interpreter is a thriller that asks the audience to care more about what people say than what they do. I appreciate Pollack’s sentiment here, but it doesn’t work as consistently in the same way that his best thrillers from the ‘70s like Three Days of the Condor do, or even in the same way that his more old school films from the ‘90s like The Firm and Sabrina do. The Interpreter plays more like Havana where I really like some of the particulars, but I just never found myself all that engaged by what was going on. Still, it’s a breath of fresh air for a thriller released post-Jason Bourne to not only have a static camera but also attempt to have a plot with characters that do more than just blow stuff up real good. Here is a film where the characters think and talk and debate instead of chase and shoot.

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Sydney Pollack: Random Hearts

There’s an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” where Larry David – in hopes of winning back his wife Cheryl – agrees to do a reunion show for “Seinfeld.” While filming the show, Michael Richards is waiting to hear back from his doctor on whether or not he has Groats Disease, and he complains to Larry that he just doesn’t think he can be funny with this diagnosis hanging over his head. Larry tells him he knows a guy that has beaten Groats, and he’ll get him to talk to Richards about it. When Larry’s sidekick/moocher-that-won’t-leave Leon does Larry a favor by pretending to be that someone, he convinces Richards that all he needs to do is wear his lucky hat, and the Groats will go away. So, the next scene they rehearse for the reunion show, Richards (as Kramer) is wearing this ridiculous hat. Jerry Seinfeld and Julia Louis-Dreyfus break character and laugh hysterically because of how ridiculous it looks, advising him that he can’t wear the hat because people don’t want to see this version of Kramer, they want to see the guy they remember; the guy with the wacky hair.

Why did I just start a review of Sydney Pollack’s downer (in more ways than one) of a movie Random Hearts with this example from David’s show? Because Harrison Ford has this earring that he wears throughout Random Hearts that is so incredibly distracting that it reminded me of the conversation Seinfeld and Dreyfus have with Richards about his hat. This is not the Harrison Ford I remember. I know a silly little thing like an earring shouldn’t take me out of the movie, but I just couldn’t help myself: scene after scene I found myself paying more attention to Ford’s ear than the other stuff happening on the screen.

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Sydney Pollack: Sabrina

Coming out in the same year as the Rob Reiner/Aaron Sorkin fairy tale The American President, Sydney Pollack released his own fairy tale, Sabrina, a remake of the Billy Wilder classic starring Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, and Audrey Hepburn. Reiner and Pollack’s sought to make films that stood out as a stark contrast in an era of cynicism and conglomerates; they are escapist films about characters that escape themselves into fantasy worlds. They are both great examples of films that elicit the kind of response where one waxes nostalgic about how, “they don’t make ‘em like they used to." But I’m here to talk about Sabrina, and to watch Sabrina is to be absorbed by a film where time simply melts away. To watch Sabrina is also to watch a film where we understand that everything depends upon the performances. The story – an ugly duckling fairy tale with a “once upon a time…” opening narration – is familiar, the results of the story are definitely familiar, and the tone – and how Pollack will visually convey that tone – is also familiar to anyone that’s either seen the original Sabrina, seen a Sydney Pollack movie, or knows of Pollack’s love for ‘40s/’50s cinema. It’s a touch on the long side at 126 minutes, and even though the film feels like its spinning its wheels in the third act, I’m never bored by the film because I just love spending time with these characters and the extravagant milieu they inhabit. It reminds me of Tootsie in that it’s pure cinematic comfort food.

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Sydney Pollack: The Firm

The sins Pollack committed with his previous film Havana, he more than atones for with his adaptation of John Grisham’s massively popular novel The Firm. Oh, sure, the length of the film is still unnecessarily close to the three hour mark, but here, unlike in his previous film, he doesn’t waste opportunities with his large cast of characters (played by great character actors) by making sure that he gives them all more than enough time to showcase their skills in an interesting enough way that I never really ever felt the length of the film. The efficacy in which he unfolds the labyrinthine plot is the sign of an old master in control (again), the way he was with previous paranoid thriller Three Days of the Condor. It’s easy to see why The Firm was Pollack’s biggest hit (hint #1: Tom Cruise at the acme of his popularity), commercially speaking: it’s just a fun summer thriller filled with great performances. Yes, The Firm has a convoluted plot and a lot of flaws when one begins to critically think about it, but it's also damn entertaining if you just let the move play you and go along for the ride. Pollack handles the silly plot like the old pro he is (with help in the writing department of longtime collaborator David Rayfiel and old-pro-himself Robert Towne trying their hardest to cram the massive plot from the novel into movie length). With the aide of those great performances and a wonderful musical score by Dave Grusin, it all adds up to The Firm being one of my favorite Pollack films. 

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Sydney Pollack: Havana

Sydney Pollack doesn’t instill fervency within one to go back and look at his films with fresh eyes in the way many have recently been passionately singing the praises of damned-upon-released films like Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate (the latter, especially, has seemed to be piquing interest in the blogosphere, thanks to its recent Criterion release, with many claiming that the film is some kind of misunderstood masterpiece). I don’t sense the urgency for bloggers and critics to run out and say, “oooh, I should revisit Havana because, gosh darn it, people were just so unfair to that movie when it was released in 1991.” Now, I’m a bit cynical with all this revisionist criticism stuff (what’s next, Howard the Duck or Hudson Hawk are masterpieces, too?), but I have to admit something: the minute I decided to do a retrospective on Pollack’s career, I was most interested in watching Havana for the very reason that it seemed so unfairly maligned at the time.  I mean the film couldn’t be that bad, right (“Seinfeld” even took a little bit of a jab at)? I was kind of excited to take a recent look at Havana in hopes that it might reveal itself to be one of those forgotten masterpieces – one of those films people like to go back and talk about now as if we were all crazy for thinking the film was bollocks to begin with. Well, I’m here to tell ya’ll: Havana is no such film. The film – everything about it from the performances to the faux Scorsese-esque energy Pollack tries to inject his film with – is inert. A lifeless film filled with lifeless performances and a lifeless romance at the heart of it.

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Sydney Pollack: Out of Africa

Out of Africa is one of those “sweeping epics” the Academy loves so much, so it’s no wonder that it – and not better films like Three Days of the Condor or Tootsie – won Pollack his Oscars for directing and producing. I put "sweeping epic" in scare quotes because Out of Africa, although decent at times, is painfully ordinary in how it tries to win the audience over as a big, 'ol fashioned epic. It wants to be big in scope and sprawling in its love story; however, Out of Africa is not even close to being Pollack’s best film (in fact, of the five films nominated that year, it’s easily the fifth best of the bunch). It’s too satisfied with its “scope” to be anything more than a pandering awards season picture. It has some nice, quiet moments between its two leads (nothing new for a Pollack film), but the episodic nature of the narrative left me feeling cold. In fact, while watching Out of Africa, my mind was drawn to 1995's The English Patient (another film that feels like a false epic): an apt comparison in that it too was just an okay movie with some decent performances that isn’t nearly as romantic or sweeping in its scope as the Academy hype wants us to believe. I certainly didn't have any Elaine Benes outbursts while watching Out of Africa, but it did fill me with a kind of apathy that I've rarely felt while working my way through Pollack's films (the only thing that really comes close is Absence of Malice or Bobby Deerfield).

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Sydney Pollack: Tootsie

When films are usually credited with more than two writers, there’s a consensus that something is fishy. The idea that a script needs three or four or sometimes even five writers usually doesn’t bode well for the quality of the film. Generally it is believed that the more writers the film has to its name, the more troubled the process was of getting it ready to shoot. I mean, just look at something like Armageddon: here is a film that many would agree is one of the absolute worst films of the ‘90s; it had more than five writers. Lethal Weapon 4 supposedly had 12 writers; The Flintstones – rumors have it – had over 60 (!) writers take a stab at the screenplay; and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides – one of the worst films in recent memory – had more than four writers to its name (some simply getting credit for “adapting” due to WGA rules). The point? Well, in 1982 Sydney Pollack would try his hand at making sense of the oft-bounced around script for what would become Tootsie. Everything about the film’s pre-production would point towards it being a failure; however, Pollack – the old pro – would piece together the scraps that were left from all of the previous writers who tried their hand at making the script work. Prior to its release, there was no way of predicting that Tootsie would be the second highest grossing film at the box-office (behind E.T.) and would be one of Pollack’s most popular and successful films.

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Sydney Pollack: Absence of Malice

Pollack described how he came to make Absence of Malice as a “screenplay my agents gave me; it’s as simple as that.” This kind of rare, personal detachment from the project is evident throughout the film and makes for one of the most painful viewing experiences of Pollack’s oeuvre. Oh, not because the movie is bad or even boring, there’s just something missing here (I think it’s primarily conviction and energy in its subject matter) that makes it quite the lacking experience when held up to other famous procedural films. But it’s also lacking in the conviction found in almost all of Pollack’s previous films. In Jeremiah Johnson, The Yakuza, and Bobby Deerfield, that personal attachment is evident as Pollack often stated that those films were a labor of love. Here, Pollack may have thought Absence of Malice was a good film – the commercial success of the film makes a case that something worked in the movie – but there’s also a sense that the film was a stopgap for Pollack before he begin production on his two most critically successful films that rounded out the ‘80s, Tootsie and Out of Africa.

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Sydney Pollack: The Electric Horseman

If you follow this blog at all, then you probably know that I am not someone who favors plot or story over other elements in film. I don’t need a mind-bender to keep me interested; in fact, I have no use for movies like The Usual Suspects, Inception, and films of their ilk. Mostly it’s because I feel like a lot of those kinds of films (with the exception of Inception which had great stunts) use their twisty storylines as a way to mask their film’s deficiencies. Sometimes the actors can make it work, and sometimes the film just falls completely flat because I’m spending the entirety of the movie trying to figure out just what the hell is going on instead of getting invested in the characters. There are countless filmmakers that I don’t need to waste your time by listing their names that can balance this, but I generally don’t look for films with “interesting” storylines” to draw me in.

So what am I getting at? Well, by selecting Sydney Pollack as my director for this retrospective I have dug myself into a bit of a hole compared to the other two filmmakers I’ve previously covered in this projected (truncated retrospectives on Oliver Stone and Ken Russell) because of the fact that I love the simplicity of Pollack’s films so much (there really is nothing “twisty” about his plots; they’re simple, classic storylines) I often find myself lacking for content beyond the general plot synopsis. The Electric Horseman is no different: a film with all of Pollack’s favorite themes, two great lead performances, a storyline that is nothing new, and a small chase scene to break up the monotony. It’s not that it’s a bad movie (just like Bobby Deerfield wasn’t a bad movie), but it lacks the elegiac tone of something akin to it like Junior Bonner. Where Peckinpah’s film was an elegy to the Old West as the New West pervaded it, The Electric Horseman is similar in tone (Las Vegas artifice/corporate exploitation of an old cowboy’s morals is similar to the ever-changing rodeo circuit and quickly evolving New West Junior confronts in Junior Bonner)  but acts more as an adventure/buddy picture; a little more light-hearted than previous Pollack/Redford collaboration, Jeremiah Johnson, but very similar in tone (both films were shot at Zion National Park in Utah, so there is a similar feel in setting).

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Sydney Pollack: Bobby Deerfield

We last left this retrospective with one of Pollack’s best and most popular films, Three Days of the Condor, and we now come to one of his least popular and most maligned: Bobby Deerfield. Oh, there is so much to say here, but I suppose I should just get this out of the way right now: I don’t hate this movie. It’s nothing special, contains no memorable moment, has little of Pollack in it other than his languid pacing – and yet I can’t help but admire the film at arm’s length for its earnestness. This is one of the ones that Sydney Pollack loved the most, and it actually shows through quite plainly: Here, behind the camera, is a man that genuinely loves the film he’s making.  It left me with a feeling that is something akin to Jeremiah Johnson, another film I didn’t care all that much for but also appreciated for Pollack’s earnestness behind the camera.

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Sydney Pollack: Three Days of the Condor

Note #1: Throughout this retrospective I’ve referenced this interview with Pollack. I couldn’t find a place to reference it in this piece, so I figured I would put it up at the beginning. 

Note #2: Many, many thanks to Odie, whose fresh look at this piece helped trim a lot of the fat. This was one of the first pieces I actually started working on when I decided to do a retrospective on Pollack, and I was dreading the due date because I knew I was nowhere close to finishing it since I found myself adding more and more every week. If I were rich, I would hire an editor for this blog because god knows I often need one. Thanks, Odie!

In 1975, Sydney Pollack released two movies that were polar opposites in tone and style. His first release that year was the Paul Schrader-penned The Yakuza – a violent tale of a begrudging partnership that was new territory for Pollack – and the second release was yet another vehicle with his favorite star (to that point) Robert Redford that tackled a popular theme of the mid-‘70s (paranoia), Three Days of the Condor. The former is something of a cult classic now and thought fondly by those that like the divergence in style and tone Pollack took in directing that film; however, the latter is the more popular (and one of the most popular of Pollack’s oeuvre) and the film that stays with me much more so than the former. Three Days of the Condor is not Pollack’s best film, but it’s one of my favorites  in the way it sets up themes and tropes he would later tackle in films like The Firm (and in the films he acted in like Michael Clayton and Changing Lanes) and for what is probably my favorite performance that Redford gave Pollack.

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Sydney Pollack: The Yakuza

Before I get started with The Yakuza, I should point out that two things have been very clear in the three films – They Shoot Horses Don’t They?, Jeremiah Johnson, and The Way We Were – I’ve covered in this retrospective so far: one is that more than anything else, Sydney Pollack is a director that makes no bones about the fact that he is more interested in the performance of the actor than the art of the director; the second thing is that no matter what kind of story he is telling – be it Depression-era drama about dance marathons or Transcendentalist westerns or political thrillers (more on that next week) – he’ll always make time in his films for human relationships, specifically the relationships between men and women.

I bring this up because in 1975, Pollack released two genre films that seem like departures for the director and the very thing he values most in film; however, if you look closely at both The Yakuza and Three Days of the Condor, you’ll see that even amidst the action and chases and confusing screenplays, there’s always a languid moment here and there – despite what the film is really after – to connect lonely, singular individuals. There’s always a goal to connect the protagonist with something – women/men, nature, vocation – of meaning (so I guess it’s safe to call Pollack an Existential filmmaker of sorts). The reason for this is simple: Pollack claimed once in an interview that the relationship between humans (men and women especially) interests him more than anything else because “it’s a metaphor for everything else in life.” So even The Yakuza, a Sydney Pollack film that doesn’t really feel all that much like a Sydney Pollack film (it’s more of a genre film), there are quiet moments where the characters are allowed to talk and exist, however briefly, in a less chaotic world than the one they normally inhabit. 

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Sydney Pollack: The Way We Were

The Way We Were is everything its title song suggests: capital “d” dramatic and capital “r” romantic. In other words, it’s not subtle at all. It’s not even close to my favorite of Pollack’s films (Pollack himself didn’t seem to care all that much for the film, stating that his biggest accomplishment was merely, “getting the thing made”), but there’s something classically deliberate and endearing about the tone of the first half of the film: an hour that knows exactly the kind of film it is and executes the romantic melodrama perfectly. It’s in the second half of the film that story becomes problematic as Pollack and his screenwriter Arthur Laurents try to cram too many topical, political subplots into the film. The effect is a film that starts off earnest in its romantic schmaltziness but devolves into a film totally unable to shift tones.

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Sydney Pollack: Jeremiah Johnson

“I was never what I would call a great shooter or visual stylist.”

That quote is from Sydney Pollack, referenced in Roger Ebert’s obituary for the director, and it’s an apt description of the director's style that he would more or less stick to throughout his career. We’re a ways from the end-point in this retrospective, and I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself; however, I couldn’t help but think of that quote as I watched Jeremiah Johnson, a film that so badly wants to be an epic western. The film is good, even great in certain moments, but it’s a little too strained in its approach to be an epic (the movie is not even two hours and it contains overture and an intermission complete with “entr’acte” title card) in the same vein as other anti-establishment, Vietnam era westerns like Little Big Man and McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Each film is different in tone, sure, but they all share something similar in that modern society does not allow for man to peacefully enter into nature and try and not only understand it but become one with it – to get away from all of the violence and self-imposition; society is always seeping in to corrupt and impose its own will. Those are the moments that are brilliantly effective and play to Pollack’s strengths as a director. When Pollack isn’t meandering from one scenic view to another (struggling to make the film visually poetic), Jeremiah Johnson is a beautiful, introspective western akin to something felt while reading Thoreau (there’s even a line where the character says, “the Rockies are the marrow of the world,” echoing the famous line from Walden). It is in those small, and often quiet, moments that Jeremiah Johnson works. 

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Sydney Pollack: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

Sydney Pollack’s adaptation of Horace McCoy’s Depression-era novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is as engrossing and affecting as I’m sure it was when it was released in 1969. The existential look at the celebrity machine and the producers (here in the form of a dance competition coordinator) that exploit the hopeful masses of one day “making it” differs from the source material (the film is definitely a little more frenetic than the book), but what film doesn’t take liberties with its source material? The fact the film is a little noisier and busier and kinetic than the sparse prose of McCoy’s novel doesn’t equate to it being a bad, ineffective, film; no, the film is still able to resonate and acts as an easy marker in Pollack’s career for one to point to and say, “this is where Sydney Pollack arrived as a filmmaker.” 

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Director Retrospective #3 – Sydney Pollack

When I first decided to do director retrospectives for this blog, my mind immediately went towards the polarizing auteur ilk (which explain my first two choices for this series being Oliver Stone and Ken Russell) because it seemed like would be easiest since – no matter how bad the film – there would most likely always be something to talk about. Yes, I’ve been selective so far (covering more of a certain era than all of a filmmakers oeuvre – in the case of Oliver Stone it was for my own sanity as I wasn’t sure I could make it through U-Turn and Any Given Sunday a second time) in the sense that I’m really just cherry-picking the films I want to talk about. I knew that if I wanted to do another retrospective, I wanted to go in the complete opposite direction as my first two choices which led me to my decision to cover the films (in some cases watching them for the first time) of Sydney Pollack. More info after the jump...

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