I disagree. There is still something interesting here.
Because all art is artifice, it is each audience member's individual duty to fill a movie with meaning. Maybe someday someone will unveil two hours worth of a black screen and declare it art, and maybe a few days later someone else will call it a masterpiece. I won't join in though. How do we validate the worth of something when its value depends on subjective interpretation? Both of us can view the same identical five minutes worth of film, as we did here, and come away with two separate interpretations. We have reached an impasse.
Now I can only appeal a different film featuring a similarly duplicitous character and attempt to illuminate this character's expressed complexity in comparison to Walter's unsophisticated delineation.
So I'm gonna compare Jackie Brown to The Piano Teacher.
So, this is why I think Jackie Brown is better than The Piano Teacher:
Jackie Brown is a duplicitous character. She plays everybody and wins. But Tarantino is real *beep* smart, you see, so he lets the audience believe in Jackie, because, after all, she is fighting for her life, right? Who wouldn't cheer for the forty-something woman who has had to scratch and claw for everything in her life, all of which adds up to very little: a low income job and a small apartment throttled by the LAX's jet engines every two or three minutes (if you listen closely you can hear them, cause Tarantino is really *beep* smart). I believe in Jackie, but she's a fox, no doubt, she plays everybody, including her love interest, Max Cherry (Robert Forster). If you watch the movie one time, you probably won't notice, cause Tarantio's real *beep* smart, but if you watch it multiple times you might notice that Pam Grier's performance hits a few false notes. Or that's sometimes the complaint. But the truth is that Tarantino is real *beep* smart, ya see, and so he had Pam Grier leave a few traces of insincerity throughout her performance. Now sometimes you get blustering characters, like Ordell (Samuel L. Jackson), and no one is ever surprised to see the slime revealed. But Jackie comes off as genuine, and this allows her to acquire our sympathies. It is only by careful inspection that we can unlock her disingenuous tendencies. There's the scene when she yells at Ordell on the balcony. It's overacted. There's the scene where she runs through the mall in a panicky search for Ray (Michael Keaton). It's overacted. There's the scene in the interrogation room in which she convinces Ray that Melanie (Bridget Fonda) burst in her dressing room and stole all the money. It's overacted. During each of these scenes featuring Pam Grier's overacting Jackie Brown is engaged in perfidy. She's a liar! And then there's the scene where she's convincing Max Cherry over the phone to help her steal the money. It's not overacted, but you can almost taste the honeyed drip of seduction in her voice. The woman is false! A perfect charlatan! Hollywood usually fails to draw such subtle lines, and my claim is that Haneke fails as well. As a result, Walter's character in not credible.
reply
share