Read November 2005
When Anthony Lane says ``Nobody's Perfect'', he means, of course, with the exception of himself. He doesn't actually say so, but that's because he doesn't need to. It helps to be blessed with such comic sense, such control of language, indeed such damnable confidence, that a few sentences into his writing, his line of thought is amply clear. (This is a line of reasoning that dismisses mere effort: ``the best intentions have a nasty habit of breeding the worst art'' (pg. 394).) Anthony Lane is what happens when Stanely Kaufmann meets the 1990s: cynicism becomes a substitute for learning. Many people will hate this kind of alpha-male writing, for Lane is frequently intolerable and rarely tolerant, but will hopefully still pause to admire its execution.
Whether or not one likes Lane may have something to do with one's taste in the arts. I've always been a Wodehouse-and-Prufrock sort of person, and so, clearly, is Lane, whom he frequently cites (and like whom he is a transplanted Brit with no great love for the Old Country). I've always tended to let my mind wander a little in western art museums, wondering why the people in the pictures look nothing like people around today, despite the obvious genetic influences. So, perhaps, have you. But when Lane describes Julie Delpy (pg. 103) by ``her pallid, thin-armed Cranach looks'', you immediately realize that Lane has cut through five centuries of genetic, sartorial and cosmetic growth and mutation; tell me in all honesty that that phrase does not, instantaneously and searingly, call to mind Cranach's Eve.
Lane fancies himself a bit of a critic, too, a man broadly about town.
He pulls this off with some conviction, though in the disaffected tone
(and some of the ambit) of a Gatsby. Of cookbooks he says ``the great
cookbooks are more like novels than like home-improvement manuals''
(pg. 416), and how can this not immediately remind you of its mirror
image, John Lanchester's
The Debt To Pleasure?
To
say Lane probably adores Lanchester is probably false on two levels:
first, Lane lives in a post-adoration society, and second, Lane
probably
But never mind the bollocks: Lane is a movie critic and, if you like
reading about movies more than watching them (as I do), this is a book
for you. Having watched (I lapse, sometimes)
The Talented Mr. Ripley something kept tearing away at
me, and Lane's review nailed it: he felt the Jude Law and Matt Damon
characters should have swapped actors. Beneath the verbal jousting,
then, Lane is a great critic: he identified a problem I didn't even
know existed, and proposed the perfect solution. His review of
The Prince of Egypt is a hit-and-run job by someone who
knows the rules well enough to know precisely when and how to break
them. And just to prove how bloody unpredictable he can be, he
refrains from panning Titanic.