I have seen American Graffiti twice on the big screen now (both times since 2013). The film is good—and quietly fatalistic; I like it. However, I hardly consider American Graffiti a great film, and I was actually surprised to see that it received so much acclaim back in 1973-1974 (major Oscar nominations, Golden Globe triumphs, and so forth). Something such as High Plains Drifter or even Charley Varrick, from that same year, was vastly superior in my opinion yet received little critical acclaim and certainly no awards attention. Like some other films from the early 1970s (or most any time period, actually), such as Patton and The French Connection, American Graffiti is a commendable movie yet hardly the great classic that one would imagine based on Academy Award nominations or victories. It is a modest movie—not exactly riveting, bristling with intensity, deeply probing, or wondrously reflective, but nevertheless atmospheric and mildly mesmerizing. American Graffiti's distinguishing attribute is that one does not necessarily recognize the film's fatalism until after it is over and ones sees the postscript, yet one then understands that the movie was fatalistic all along. Director George Lucas achieves a sort of sentimental existentialism and ambiguous innocence, the latter quality perfectly capturing how America (white, at least somewhat bourgeois America, anyway) in 1973 would have looked back at 1962.
To me, American Graffiti is a good film, but one with certain limitations. Yet as with The French Connection (which I deem inferior to Dirty Harry, which did not receive any awards attention) and some other films of that era, American Graffiti's whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Movies from that time period did not feel compelled to explain everything the way that films often do now, and the result was somehow enlarging. A movie should not be analogous to a Wikipedia page.
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Degree7
8 years ago
Huh, I have the exact opposite opinion in Anerican Graffiti and French Connection compared to High Plains Drifter. The former are timeless, near perfect classics, while the latter is a good albeit lesser film.
~ I'm a 21st century man and I don't wanna be here.
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