The last quarter mile

Once you commit yourself to moving forward, you can’t stop. It goes back to the metaphor of the miler going back to rerun the last quarter mile because he didn’t do his best job. You can’t do it! To understand the rhythm of writing a hundred pages you have to write it right through. Feel the pages under you the same way a runner feels the gravel under his feet. He can tell how fast that gravel is moving under his feet as he’s going a mile, the same way you can tell how fast the pages are, how fast the scenes are moving…You have to feel space. If the run is a mile and the script is a hundred and five, a hundred and ten pages, you have to feel that space is tangible. Understand that space. Feel comfortable in that space. Page twenty, page forty, sixty, seventy-five, eighty. My favorite pages are eighty-five to ninety-five. I love those pages. If I don’t feel good from eighty-five to ninety-five, there’s something wrong. If I don’t feel good after page ninety, ninety to ninety-five, the script was a mistake.

—Paul Schrader, to John Brady in The Craft of the Screenwriter

My alternative canon #5: The Last Temptation of Christ

Note: I’ve often discussed my favorite movies on this blog, but I also love films that are relatively overlooked or unappreciated. Over the next week and a half, I’ll be looking at some of the neglected gems, problem pictures, and flawed masterpieces that have shaped my inner life, and which might have become part of the standard cinematic canon if the circumstances had been just a little bit different. You can read the previous installments here. 

With the passage of time, most of the great scandals of film history start to feel positively quaint, but I don’t think there’s any doubt that if The Last Temptation of Christ were released again today, it would be the most controversial movie of its year. Even if you were to subtract its most obviously inflammatory scenes—the early sequence of Jesus as a crossmaker, the fantasy of his marriage to Mary Magdalene—you’d be left with a work of art that commits the ultimate sin of religious cinema: it engages the message of Jesus on its own terms, rather than as a series of sedate picture postcards. As studies like The Five Gospels and The Acts of Jesus make clear, one of the few things we can say for sure about Jesus of Nazareth is that many of those around him believed that he was insane, and when we watch Willem Dafoe in the title role, we can begin to remember why. This isn’t to say that I necessarily regard Scorsese’s, or Kazantzakis’s, vision as historically accurate: the idea of Jesus as a failed revolutionary who finally came to terms with his divinity makes for a nice three-act structure, but I’m not sure if it’s sustained by a close reading of the gospels. But the movie’s agonized effort to reimagine the most familiar story in the western tradition is unbelievably important. It’s the only Biblical movie I’ve ever seen that tries to stage these events as if they were happening for the first time, and the experience of watching it forces us, at every turn, to confront the strangeness of what it might mean to be both fully human and fully divine. The movie never doubts the divinity of Jesus: it’s Jesus himself who does.

And the fact that this film exists at all is something of a miracle. It was Scorsese’s second attempt to adapt Kazantzakis’s novel, and you can tell that it was shot on a shoestring. If it succeeds far more often than we’d have any right to expect, it’s thanks largely to the script by Paul Schrader, which is the best he ever wrote. (Among other things, it’s often genuinely funny, which is incredible in itself.) It’s full of fine performances, including a nice little cameo by Irvin Kershner, but my favorite is Harvey Keitel as Judas Iscariot, a role that is inevitably charged by our knowledge of the actor’s history with his director: in the scene in which the aging Judas accuses Jesus of having abandoned his mission, Keitel asked to deliver the speech to Scorsese, who is lying just out of the frame. It may not be my favorite Scorsese movie—these days, it’s a tossup between Taxi Driver, Casino, and The Departed—but it’s the one that continues to mean the most to me. I’ve watched it many times, and it rarely fails to move me to tears, although never in the same place twice. These days, the moment that haunts me the most comes after a beautiful young angel has taken Jesus down from the cross, inviting him to look at the world with fresh eyes: “Maybe you’ll find this hard to believe, but sometimes we angels look down on men and envy you. Really envy you.” The angel, of course, turns out to be Satan. And the movie’s central accomplishment is that it makes the last temptation, with its vision of an ordinary life, seem very tempting indeed, which only reminds us of the courage required for any man to reject it for something more.

The starlet’s dilemma

Over the past week or so, while spending a lot of quality time with our newborn on the living room couch, my wife has burned through the entire first season of Revenge on Netflix. It’s a great, trashy show that moves swiftly and doles out surprises at a satisfying rate, and it benefits enormously from the presence of Madeleine Stowe. Stowe, as those of us old enough to remember can attest, is talented, charismatic, and still a knockout, and although she was never quite a major star, she was notable enough to be granted an entry in David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film. Then, for close to a decade, she disappeared. And as tempting as it is to wonder where she’s been all this time, her long absence isn’t hard to figure out: it’s simply one of countless illustrations of the fact that an attractive woman’s options for starring roles in Hollywood dry up sometime before she turns forty. Stowe is currently lucky enough to be anchoring a hit series, but she’s a notable exception. As a glance at her fellow cast members in Bad Girls is enough to confirm, it’s far more common for promising young actresses to simply disappear, unless they’re smart or fortunate enough to make good, hard career choices at a time when they’re most vulnerable to being thrown away.

This, in a word, is the starlet’s dilemma—the complicated series of obstacles that an actress needs to navigate if she wants to have a career past her early thirties. And although it may not seem to hold many lessons for the rest of us, it fascinates me largely because it’s only the most visible example of a predicament that every artist faces sooner or later. Even the most successful and prolific career in the arts boils down to a finite number of choices: you can’t take more than one starring part or write more than one novel at a time. We make these decisions using all the information available to us at the moment, but it’s often not until after years have passed and we look back at our body of work that we start to see what the real shape of our lives has been. Throughout it all, we’re haunted by the fact that our work may cease to be marketable overnight, and that there are plenty of bright young things eager to take our place. Making the kinds of choices that result in a sustainable career requires a maturity and tactical intelligence that few of us have at twenty, thirty, or even forty. And as Stephen Rodrick’s wonderful New York Times piece on Lindsay Lohan and Paul Schrader reminds us, even beauty, talent, and early luck can’t prevent a promising career from being derailed beyond hope of return.

Which brings us to Jennifer Lawrence. At first glance, Lawrence is in an enviable position: she occupies the center of one enormous franchise, serves a valued supporting player in another, and has the talent to take on a wide range of projects. At twenty-two, she’s made all the right choices. Yet her career over the next ten years is likely to resemble a sort of Hunger Games in itself, as she accepts or turns down roles while fending off the incursions of the next wave of talented newcomers. Personally, I can’t help but wonder how she felt watching Jodie Foster at the Golden Globes on Sunday, shortly after claiming an award of her own. Foster’s speech—the most riveting I’ve ever seen at an awards ceremony—stands as a reminder of the tremendous odds against any actress, Lawrence included, having the chance to occupy such a podium under similar circumstances. A few have carped at the fact that Foster, at fifty, seems too young to be receiving a lifetime achievement award, which ignores the fact that any actress who is still bankable at such an age deserves a prize. Actresses face the same pressures that all creative professionals do, except at a drastically accelerated rate, and in public, and the fact that so few make it this far only underlines the impossibility of the task. And even for someone as talented as Lawrence, the clock is already ticking.

Faced with this situation, young actresses have three possible options. They can trust in their talent and continue to seek out challenging lead and supporting parts, potentially in smaller movies or television; they can move into producing or directing; or they can extend their viability for a few years by engaging in various forms of cosmetic enhancement. Given the daunting odds against the first two courses of action, it isn’t surprising that most choose the third. It’s the same choice any artist makes when he or she decides to stick with the safe and familiar—the only difference is that starlets wear their decisions on their faces. And while trading away their looks in the long term for a few extra seasons of bankability may seem shortsighted, it takes an exceptionally resourceful personality to take the harder road. Which is part of the reason why our best actresses tend to age more gracefully. You can say that Meryl Streep has continued to look great well into her sixties because it was clear that she had the talent to remain a commanding actress without resorting to desperate cosmetic measures, but I’d like to think that the causal arrow runs in the other direction: a woman so smart in her acting is likely to be wise enough to avoid plastic surgery, or at least intelligent enough to be subtle about it. In any case, I don’t think it’s an accident that Hollywood’s smartest women tend to age almost preternaturally well—call it the Kathryn Bigelow effect. And it’s a reminder to the rest of us, as if we needed it, that in the long run, smart is the only kind of sexy that counts.

A word of caution from Paul Schrader

Occasionally people ask me about whether they should get involved in screenwriting or filmmaking. I usually say, “If you can find any happiness or satisfaction in another field of endeavor, you should do so, because the real reason to get involved in the arts is because you have no choice—you have issues that you need to address through fantasy and fiction.” That said, there is also a very commercial incentive for being in the arts, but I’ve never really given that too much thought, because that was never my intent. I got involved as a form of self-therapy, and I stay in it that way.

—Paul Schrader, in Tales From the Script

Paul Schrader on writing dialogue

Occasionally you hear something, some conversation, that you steal. But very rarely. The way I write dialogue is, I have an idea of how long the dialogue should be—a page, two pages, three pages—how much the scene will support, and how many points I have to make in that dialogue, either expository points or character development points. Then I just start working it out, the conversation—using what seems natural to get from one point to another. If you gave me a situation with certain points that would have to be made in a scene, I would sit here and give you the dialogue. Within five, ten minutes you would have the dialogue. All paced out. Dialogue is the easiest thing in the world.

—Paul Schrader, in John Brady’s The Craft of the Screenwriter