NR’s longtime film critic belonged to a more cultivated, discerning age.
NR’s longtime film critic belonged to a more cultivated, discerning age.
F ilm and theater critic John Simon happens to share a centennial with William F. Buckley Jr., whose legacy has been honored in these pages all year. But Simon, who once served as National Review’s film critic, made his own contributions that are worthy of reflection.
Today, it is understandable why we would miss the erudition and judgment that Simon brought to bear in his reviews of Hollywood’s often wildly overrated cinematic output. Hollywood’s current existential crises are well known. “Tilly Norwood,” an AI-generated simulacrum of a young woman, lands deals for dozens of film roles, with more AI “actors” on the way. The use of CGI for most visuals in superhero movies is routine. One of the most beloved cinematic classics of all time, The Wizard of Oz, has just undergone AI “enhancement.”
But in missing Simon, some of us — consciously or not — may also pine for a bygone time when films were likelier to stand or fall on the merits of the human talent that went into them. As the assault on the industry, and the humans who make their livelihood in it, grows, Simon (who was born in Serbia in 1925 and died in a Westchester hospital in 2019) stands out for having held real actors, writers, and directors to the highest critical standards and for brooking no shortcuts from any studio that expected to be taken seriously.
The 1990s brought a steady stream of hits that entered the cultural vocabulary and spawned countless imitators of variable quality. Simon’s incisive writing about the iconic movies of this period dispensed praise where merited, reminding us of the potential of cinema, while deriding the films that gullible reviewers and members of the public overpraised or gave a pass to before they moved on to the next diversion.
While acknowledging the talent and energy that went into many of these films, Simon was unafraid to point out flaws in what others took to be era-defining masterpieces. He asked, for example, whether Pulp Fiction’s obsession with the movies and TV shows on which its legendary director, Quentin Tarantino, had weaned himself, and which had partly inspired the film, devolved into self-referential narcissism.
In Simon’s view, Tarantino did not always give proper credit to his influences and, with all his explicit references to corny sitcoms like Green Acres, frequently gave credit where it was not due. After calling out the largely unacknowledged debt that Samuel L. Jackson’s Bible-quoting hitman in Pulp Fiction owed to a similar character in 1955’s The Night of the Hunter, Simon wrote, of Tarantino: “A fledgling filmmaker hatched in a video store presents another problem: old movies strike me as a poor substitute for life in the real world. If you catch Mr. Tarantino on the talk shows he is currently camping out on, you’ll encounter a compulsive tongue-wagger who, like his characters, rattles on without substance or discernment, to say nothing of taste.”
With a couple of lines, Simon captured the dynamic that fueled Pulp Fiction’s rise to iconic status: borrowings from a distinguished classic, coupled with wallowing in the lowbrow pop-culture junk that teens and others who idolized Pulp Fiction and its director were not discerning enough to reject, but that, if cited relentlessly, could foster the illusion of having an auteur’s mastery of a certain cinematic vocabulary. “From Mr. Tarantino’s anything-goes filmmaking to true art is still quite a distance,” Simon’s review concluded.
Aware that shocking people was a modest achievement at best, and a gimmick at worst, Simon wrote a dismissive review of 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, a film that became a household name largely through aggressive online marketing. Simon asked why the three student filmmakers lost in the Maryland woods keep doing things whose idiocy defies belief: fighting among themselves during an emergency, throwing away a map, and not following a stream that would lead sooner or later to human settlement. He alluded, also, to the unlikelihood that people fleeing for their lives would have the fortitude to aim a camera with enough precision and skill to record lengthy footage with anything even approaching narrative coherence.
Some might cite such reviews as marks of Simon’s snobbery and hostility to the suspension of disbelief that movies ask of people who just want a good story to entertain them. But Simon expected movies to justify the grandiose claims made for them, and when they did, he could be generous, if not lavish, in his praise.
A case in point is Simon’s firm but fair review of 1997’s Academy Award winner for Best Picture and Best Director, Titanic. Simon thought that Billy Zane, as the arrogant, domineering fiancé of Kate Winslet’s troubled ingenue, and Frances Fisher, as her stuck-up mother, did a better job than either Winslet or the other lead, Leonardo DiCaprio, as the raffish Jack Dawson. Winslet and DiCaprio were the leads largely because they were so pleasing to the eye — and Simon had the honesty to say so. At the same time, Simon recognized the attention and care that went into other aspects of Titanic — both the movie itself and the ship as presented to us in the film. “Throughout, whatever pertains to the historical aspects of the ship’s life and death is absolutely splendid, and direction, production design, and cinematography (Russell Carpenter) deserve highest praise,” he wrote.
Reviewing another film from the same period, 1998’s Saving Private Ryan, Simon acknowledged the massive expenditures and preparations for the D-Day landing portrayed at the start of the movie — a feat of planning to rival that of the June 1944 invasion itself, as Simon put it — but avoided excessive praise of a film he thought suffered from trite dialogue and an awkward framing device. As Simon pointed out in his review, the whole story turns out to be a flashback on the part of a character who was not present for most of the events we see unfold.
Given his eye for such things, it is mildly disappointing that Simon, in an otherwise astute review, did not call out what makes M. Night Shyamalan’s 1999 hit The Sixth Sense utterly nonsensical. That beloved film, too, makes use of a framing device, opening with a home invasion that, we learn only in the movie’s final moments, had fatal consequences for Bruce Willis’s Malcolm Crowe. Learning that he is a ghost, and has been for almost the entire runtime, is as much of a jolt for Crowe as for the audience. There are moments throughout that fool Crowe and viewers into thinking that he is alive. During their anniversary dinner at a restaurant, for example, Crowe thinks his wife is talking to him, while in fact she is grief-stricken and talking to herself. And, of course, the boy Cole Sear, who sees dead people, adds to the deception by freely interacting with Crowe. But the coincidences that foster the appearance of the living interacting with Crowe would, of course, not be at all characteristic of Crowe’s many attempts to interact with people in the months following his fatal shooting. He would quickly realize that, except for the boy, others cannot see or hear him.
Simon’s review of The Sixth Sense is a bit of a fluke, because he had a yen for calling out lazy writing and narrative illogic. More than that, he was unafraid to disparage films that others gushed over for having supposedly revolutionized the art of cinema. Nowhere is this more on display than in his review of 1986’s Blue Velvet, which nearly everyone raved about upon its release and once again following the death of its director, David Lynch, in January. The story of a young man, played by Kyle MacLachlan, who comes home from college, discovers a severed ear in a field, spies on a woman he suspects of involvement in a ghastly crime, and gets caught up in a criminal underworld behind the sedate façades of his charming small town, Blue Velvet was for the 1980s what any of the films discussed above were for the 1990s, and more: a pop cultural landmark that pushed the envelope and transfixed audiences in sold-out cinemas for months on end. But was it good? Simon panned the film’s “primitive dialogue, jokes that in most cases are not intentional but are pathetic either way, poor staging of individual scenes, and garish cinematography.” Simon also called Blue Velvet’s famous director “a naif from Montana who wants to be deep, but whose depth consists of drawing huge sexual organs on a Norman Rockwell painting.” Blue Velvet, he concluded, was “trash.”
Clearly, Simon was brutally honest and pulled no punches when critiquing work that fell short of his standards. Not surprisingly, his candidness did not always make him friends. In a February 1988 New York magazine review of an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s play The Cherry Orchard, Simon wrote, “The one rotten performance is the Dunyasha of Kate Mailer (Norman’s daughter), who mugs and simpers and seems forever on the verge of petit, or even grand, mal.” Mailer could not contain his outrage, which spilled into the New York Times’s books section in November 1991. In a letter to the Times, Mailer communicated a fairly explicit message to Simon, one he had already given to mutual acquaintances after that review’s appearance: “Tell him, went the message, not to get into the same room with me.”
Mailer went on to recount having approached Simon while the critic sat “with two women” on a boat that George Plimpton had chartered for the Paris Review’s 1991 annual party. He asked Simon for his number so they could settle a matter, and in Mailer’s telling, Simon initially tried to fool Mailer by providing an old number, and then, when called out by one of the women, grudgingly provided his current one. The implication was clear: that Simon was a coward who, when challenged, would not stand behind what he had written. In his letter, Mailer went on to quote from a number of other savage and caustic descriptions Simon had put in reviews of the physical flaws of female performers such as Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow, Barbra Streisand, Cybill Shepherd, and Liza Minnelli (examples: “Having gained weight, most notably in the face, she looks like Mussolini in drag.” “Were she to collide with a Mack truck, it is the truck that would drop dead.”).
In his reply, Simon did a canny enough job of responding to the slanders in Mailer’s letter, pointing out, for example, that he was not sitting “with two women” but with his fiancée and another couple. (“So much for Mailer’s vaunted powers of observation.”) And he gently defended himself from charges of being a vicious critic by noting supportive reviews he had written of books by Thomas Bernhard and Martin Walser, to whom critical opinion is, to say the least, not uniformly kind.
A more substantive criticism, unrefuted by Simon, has to do with his blunt remarks about performers’ physical attributes. Hollywood has a way of unfairly favoring the beautiful over the rest of us mortals, and given his high standards for merit and talent on the screen and stage, Simon may have reacted with annoyance, deciding to throw that snobbery right back in Hollywood’s face and critique the supposedly superhumanly beautiful. While this aspect of his legacy has not aged as well, his restless savvy and sharp discernment still deserve our fond remembrance.
Now, Hollywood thinks it can insult our taste and intelligence with impunity, releasing products that require even less attention and effort from real, living humans. If only we still had John Simon.