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A Subtle Complaint About Subtlety Complaints

Criticwire By Matt Singer | Criticwire July 5, 2012 at 9:39AM

Maybe subtlety is a bit overrated.

I have three film criticism pet peeves:

1) Critics who make blanket genre dismissals  -- i.e. "Oh, I hate horror movies."


3) Critics who complain when a metaphor isn't subtle enough.

Number three's the worst because it's most prevalent -- rarely a week goes by that some critic somewhere doesn't take a movie to task for its unsubtle metaphors. It's an epidemic of unsubtle proportions. 

That's not to say there aren't occasionally movie metaphors that are indeed too obvious; the one that opened Sophia Coppola's "Somewhere" -- an emotionally lost movie star literally going in circles in his sports car -- always struck me as a bit too on the nose.  But generally speaking, film critics who write about metaphors turn them into a no-win situation for filmmakers.  If directors make their symbolism clear enough for people to recognize it, they're criticized for being too obvious. If they bury it so deep that viewers don't spot it, they're criticized for making dumb films with no substance. They're damned if they do put in subtext, and damned if they don't.

For example, take the scene a "The Artist" that some critics cited as "unsubtle" -- the moment when Jean Dujardin's fading silent star and Bérénice Bejo's rising ingenue share a chance encounter after some time apart. The site of their meeting is a staircase; he is going down as she is going up, a metaphor for the directions of their respective careers. Is it obvious? Yeah, I guess, if you're paying attention. But it's not as if Dujardin's character says "My, look at you! Climbing these stairs much like you are climbing the ladder of success in Hollywood!" In fact, he doesn't say anything because "The Artist" is a silent film, one that depends on visual storytelling like the characters' positioning on that staircase to speak on its behalf.

On the other hand, my beloved Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor get taken to task all the time for their supposedly superficial films.  But Neveldine/Taylor bury plenty of complex ideas in their work; they just bury them so deep they're almost subliminal. Each of the two "Crank" films, for instance, is structured around a nifty bit of long-form symbolism. In the first movie, Jason Statham's Chev Chelios needs to constantly feed his adrenaline to stay alive; in the sequel, "Crank: High Voltage," he gets an artificial heart that requires constant shocks of electricity. Though both films share one cast and sport similar gimmicks, they come from two totally different genres: "Crank" is an action film while "High Voltage" is a gross-out comedy. In both cases, the gimmick underlines the effect each film and its respective genre has on its audience: "Crank" (adrenaline) keeps the viewer excited and "High Voltage" (shocks) keeps the viewer shocked. The way the form follows function is so subtle most critics, much less most audiences, completely missed it. So what happens? Neveldine/Taylor get called meatheads.


Maybe critics are a bit too hung up on subtlety. Many seem completely oblivious to the possibility that the director knew exactly what they were doing when they deployed blunt symbolism. Maybe it's obvious for a reason. Maybe this was a point too important to leave to vagaries. And maybe subtlety is a little bit overrated. Sometimes it's nice to drive a car in circles for a while -- hey it beats the hell out of the character sitting and talking to someone and saying "God, I feel all washed up. I feel like I'm going in circles." Too often I feel like critics are going in circles -- chasing this impossible romantic ideal of the perfect metaphor: so expressive that it explains everything and yet so hard to spot that they're the only ones who catch it.

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