OUCH: Dolorous Denunciation

David Denby, "Living in America," New Yorker (Jan. 12) Last fall, Denby, a film critic for the New Yorker, published "My Life As a Paulette," as in an acolyte of the late New Yorker movie critic Pauline Kael. It was his exorcism of the spell the witch cast on him even in death: an account of how Kael befriended him, encouraged him, praised him, and one day called to tell him he wasn't really a writer and that he ought to do something else with his life. Well, he showed her--he got her job!--but as a critic Denby remains dead weight. His style is the equivalent of someone clearing his throat. On those rare occasions when he assays an argument, it's indisputable that nothing will ever rescue him from mediocrity.

In "Living in America," pumped by his liberation from Kael and at the same time helplessly but perversely imitating Kael's sense of herself as an American writer, Denby takes on Vadim Perelman, the Russian/Canadian director of House of Sand and Fog, Jane Campion, the New Zealander director of In the Cut, and Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Mexican director of 21 Grams. These people should not be making movies for American audiences, Denby says: "They don't really get America right...they miss the colloquial ease and humor, the ruffled surfaces of American life." They insist on the ugliness, horror, obsessiveness, and vengeance in American life (like Denby's hero, the Clint Eastwood of Mystic River, which apparently also pulses with the ruffled potato chips of American life, though I must have slept through those parts), but they "may be complacent in their own ways. Perhaps they accept tragedy too easily... Dolorousness"--yes, Denby is free; that's not a word Kael would have used at gunpoint--"is becoming a curse in the more ambitious movies made in America by foreign-born directors." "We don't need other people's despair," Denby concludes; plainly, foreigners can get down with it like John Woo or they can shut up. Kael didn't know the half of it.