LOOK past the award-season hype and the current bounty of decent, good, great movies, and one thing becomes clear: We live in interesting narrative times, cinematically. In “Cloud Atlas” characters jump across centuries, space and six separate stories into a larger tale about human interconnectedness. In “Anna Karenina” Tolstoy’s doomed heroine suffers against visibly artificial sets, a doll within an elaborate dollhouse, while in “Life of Pi” a boy and a tiger share a small boat in a very big sea amid long silences, hallucinatory visuals and no obvious story arc. In movies like these, as well as in “The Master” and “Holy Motors,” filmmakers are pushing hard against, and sometimes dispensing with, storytelling conventions, and audiences seem willing to follow them. The chief film critics of The New York Times, Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, consider this experimental turn.
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MANOHLA DARGIS Each year we review movies that teasingly or didactically, successfully or not, dispatch with either the whole or part of the mainstream storytelling playbook: they don’t seem to have three (or four) well-defined acts or characters who seem particularly motivated. They (movies and characters both) drift along rather than shift into drive; in other words, they look a lot or a little bit like art films. This fall, though, within a couple of months, there have been more than a few such movies — some released by small companies like IFC Films and others by big studios like Warner Brothers — that, in different ways, appear to aspire more to the art house than the multiplex. I don’t think we are witnessing the emergence of a lasting break with the old, durable Hollywood ways, but we are seeing an exciting level of playfulness.
A. O. SCOTT It’s funny how much people complain about spoilers, when so many plots are the same. This is partly because so many movies fit comfortably into established genres, and much of the time moviegoers seek out the comforts of familiarity. You know which rom-com characters are going to end up together, just as you know that the franchise hero — whether it’s Harry Potter, James Bond or Spider-Man — is going to withstand the dastardly attention of the villain, and that foreknowledge anchors the thrills and surprises you encounter along the way. Following genre conventions is not necessarily a sign of failure — some of the best movies ever are perfectly orthodox westerns, detective stories, melodramas and marriage comedies — and flouting them is not in itself a virtue. But it can be thrilling to see something that feels new, risky or unusual, and even to venture into the realm of the confounding.
For the past few months I’ve been collecting reactions to “The Master,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie about (in the sense in which “about” can mean both “having nothing at all to do with” and “obsessively concerned with”) the early days of Scientology. This may be the great polarizing puzzle-film of 2012, in no small part because it unfolds with what seems to be a total disregard for the audience’s expectations. The movie does not explain its characters, or offer any of them up for us to like or identify with. Instead of building to a dramatic climax it seems to taper off, to let go of the strange emotional intensity that had built up over more than two hours. The divide seems to be not between people who “get it” and those who don’t, but rather between those who are frustrated by not getting it and those (like me) who enjoyed it even though we didn’t get it.
DARGIS Unlike, say, David Lynch in “Mulholland Drive,” Mr. Anderson tells a story that’s easy to grasp with one viewing: Two men meet and one, Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), tries to influence or seduce or break the other, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix). The mystery is in characters that Mr. Anderson refuses to explain; instead he presents their actions, reactions, rituals and conversations and perhaps clues. Quell means to silence, pacify. But is Freddie quelling Lancaster or the reverse? Deciding is part of the film’s pleasure and one reason I look forward to seeing it a third time. Its mysteries seem more in line with those in Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Avventura” as exemplified by his observation that “eros is sick; man is uneasy, something is bothering him.”
At least some of the movies we’re talking about, though — certainly “Cloud Atlas,” maybe “Holy Motors,” a surreal and episodic fantasy from the French director Leos Carax — are what one theorist, Thomas Elsaesser, calls “the mind-game film.” Once upon a movie time you went to a film, and after it played on the circuit, it disappeared, perhaps showing up later on television. Home video changed our relationship with movies — suddenly we could watch a title when we wanted as many times as we wanted — a relationship that shifted further with the introduction of DVD, which gave viewers even more and possibly deeper ways into a film with special features, directors’ cuts and hidden jokes and clues called Easter eggs. This new film-audience relationship may help account for the emergence of these new, complex narratives.
“What once was ‘excessively obvious,’ “ Mr. Elsaesser writes, “must now be ‘excessively enigmatic,’ but in ways that still teach (as Hollywood has always done) its audiences the ‘rules of the game’ of how a Hollywood film wants to be understood, except that now, it seems, at least as far as the mind-game film is concerned, the rules of the game are what the films are also ‘about,’ even more overtly than before.” On its release Christopher Nolan’s “Memento,” for instance, both confounded and rewarded audiences with its narrative puzzle, and it helped create intense fan engagement, which sustained the film’s theatrical afterlife. It also paved Mr. Nolan’s way to Warner Brothers and, eventually, to “Inception,” a blockbuster phenomenon that proves that the mind-game film is no longer merely a cult item.
SCOTT I wonder where the line is — for audiences, and therefore for commercially calculating filmmakers — between excessively enigmatic and just enigmatic enough. “Cloud Atlas” is not what you’d call a mysterious movie, though it is a puzzle, in that you spend a certain amount of time working out the connections among the six stories and wondering about the significance of having certain actors reappear. But it is pretty well explained for you — much more overtly in the film than in David Mitchell’s book, which feels more elusive — and what you encounter isn’t difficulty but density, the sense (either pleasurable or annoying) of packed and layered meaning. The problem with the movie isn’t that there’s too much going on but that the abundance is often clumsily handled, so that it feels crowded and hectic rather than rich and fascinating. I wasn’t the biggest fan of “Inception,” partly because I wanted even more enigmatic excess, but it did achieve the kind of layering of action, theme and emotion that Andy and Lana Wachowski (along with Tom Tykwer) strive for in “Cloud Atlas” (and that the Wachowskis managed with greater success in “The Matrix”).
Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi,” also adapted from a beloved, slightly culty book, is at first glance the opposite of “Cloud Atlas.” It tells a single, apparently simple story in linear fashion: a young man, the sole human survivor of a shipwreck, spends many months in a lifeboat in the company of a Bengal tiger. But this tale is both a reminiscence — told by the young man himself, many years later, to a wide-eyed writer who has come to visit him — and a fable. The preshipwreck part of the story puts a lot of vaguely religious ideas into play about God and fate and the universe, and these hover in the gauzy digital air. Part of absorbing the story is wondering what it means, and also about its place on the reality-fantasy continuum. The whole thing turns out to be, in part, a rumination on the nature of storytelling itself. The narrator, at the end, proposes two versions of a series of events and asks, “Which do you prefer?”
The movie, however, has made the choice for us. (I’m being deliberately vague to avoid spoilers). But I think part of the appeal of this kind of movie — of a zigzagging, boisterously confusing comedy like “Silver Linings Playbook” and also of a wildly inventive anti-narrative like “Holy Motors” — is that the audience can share in the imaginative freedom. The director is still calling the shots and controlling the meaning, but we are allowed at least the illusion of playing along.
DARGIS I see “Silver Linings Playbook” more as a descendant of the classic screwball comedy, and it doesn’t pose the same kind of brain-bending challenges of either “Holy Motors” or “The Master” (and that “Cloud Atlas” tries and fails to do). Yet what all these new movies share — and what seems another component of the “mind-game film” — is that they are made by directors who have a self-aware relationship with film history and their status as auteurs. Being an auteur is essential to their identity (and, blech, brand) and to their relationship with their audiences, that have been taught to recognize that even the latest Batman movie carries a director’s credit, his stylistic signature and meanings that the dedicated can take to with pickaxes and endless blog postings.
In the old Hollywood system the movie machinery was supposed to be as invisible as the director, notwithstanding an Alfred Hitchcock cameo. There’s still a system in American cinema, however decentralized, and there are still anonymous hacks churning out artificially flavored studio sausages. Yet directors like Mr. Nolan, Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher, Spike Jonze and others are not just creating entertainments (although they do that), they are also working through layers of cinematic influence and history, having absorbed the examples of Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese and all who came before: Howard Hawks, Roger Corman, Jean-Luc Godard, Stan Brakhage, Frederick Wiseman. In this sense movies by directors like Mr. Nolan and the Wachowskis are also compendiums of film history, repositories of knowledge that can be shared with fans. When you watch a movie like “Inception,” you can either just enjoy the show or enter a portal leading to endless board discussions, blog entries, fan obsessiveness and tribal affinities.
SCOTT The question, always, is which tribes will receive the message. One of the most encouraging aspects of this tendency (or whatever it is) we’re talking about is the commercial risk taking involved. These movies are not cheap, and most of them do not come with the sure-sell pop-cultural preawareness that supposedly governs our franchise-heavy, bottom-line-obsessed entertainment culture. “Cloud Atlas” is an adaptation of a literary novel that, however popular, was never going to deliver “Twilight” or “Harry Potter” numbers of committed fans. “The Master” is an uncompromisingly strange take on a controversial religion. And there is always a worry that movies like this won’t be made anymore if the public doesn’t show up in large enough numbers. But I’m not so sure of that. I don’t think ambition and curiosity — among filmmakers and moviegoers alike — is so easily discouraged. Or at least I find reasons to be hopeful, and also grateful.
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