Lawyers and critics worth their salt must share a morbid fear of getting it wrong. The greatest of them plunge forward anyhow, recklessly risking ruin for the sake of their duty. Without too close a comparison to the prosecutor who has imprisoned an innocent man or the defense attorney who has acquitted a murderer, we can surmise that the critic lifts pen to paper or finger to keyboard with a biting sense of agony: did I miss the point? If the critic does get it wrong, after all, it isn't a client or victim who will suffer, but the critic himself. Or herself.
Case in point: 1962, when Mr. and Mrs. Critic, the estimable and ever-feuding Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, agreed on the demerits of
Lawrence of Arabia. What looks today to be the great masterpiece of the year (if not of cinema history) was rather rudely dismissed by Kael as a spectacle with a zero at its centre. Sarris, who went further, looks even more foolish in ever-wise hindsight. Among other bon mots, in escalation of sheer missing-the-point: "dull, overlong, and coldly impersonal"; "In my cultural adolescence I associated the name Lawrence with the initials D.H. rather than T.E."; and "Perhaps I am just plain tired of all these 'serious' moral films with no women in the cast." Sarris, in failing to be moved or even awed by
Lawrence of Arabia while dismissing it as yet another shallow big-budget historical epic, shows himself to be missing the movie for the ad campaign.
And yet, as decades of nobly defeated lawyers (at least of the dramatic/cinematic breed) could tell you, there can be a certain honor in miscalculation. A few months after penning his irritated pan of
Lawrence, Sarris authored a far more thoughtful - and far more devastating - dismissal of
To Kill a Mockingbird, now as then a beloved adaptation of a cherished classic of children's literature. While the film's reputation seems indestructible today, and often for very good reasons, Sarris' arrows more often than not hit their mark. If he's too harsh on the film stylistically ("Before the intellectual confusion of the project is considered, it should be noted that this is not much of a movie even by purely formal standards"), disallowing the quiet poetry of the movie because it is occasionally forced, his observations on the movie's intellectual confusion are withering.
Among others: "I daresay the Maycomb courtroom is still segregated thirty years [later], and so much for Miss Lee's cleverly masked argument for gradualism." "When the Negro is shot (off screen) for attempting to escape, Peck is so upset that, by some inverted logic understood only by liberal southerners, he deplores the Negro's unwarranted impetuosity." "This is a heartwarming resolution of the novel and the film. Yet somehow the moral arithmetic fails to come out even. One innocent Negro and one murderous red-neck hardly cancel each other out." And finally: "It is too early to tell [if the Negro and red-neck are brothers under the skin], but it is too late for the Negro to act as moral litmus paper for the white conscience. The Negro is not a mockingbird."
When I say that Sarris is "wrong" here, it is admittedly in part an ironic assessment - a juxtaposition of his view with what has become the canonical one (at least among middlebrow audiences, but also tacitly by intellectuals, who do not seem to view
Mockingbird's reputation with much resentment.) But I do like
Mockingbird more than he does, think it is a worthier film than he appreciates (not only stylistically), and ultimately, feel that the film may be more ambiguous than he perceives. Nonetheless, or perhaps therefore, Sarris' criticism is a good place to start looking at the movie.
