Millennial filmmakers reduce the past to cynicism.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar acceptance speech made a weird pivot when he called out titles of the five best-picture nominees from 1975: Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, Nashville, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It was bizarre because the least of those is superior to the movie for which Anderson won (One Battle After Another). Anderson had learned nothing from film history yet evoked it in a mean-spirited jest typical of his perverse idiosyncrasy. He belittled the past as well as the present — by strategy.
The strategy to erase movies of the past shows up in the Netflix documentary Breakdown: 1975, in which fellow Oscar-winner Morgan Neville beat Anderson’s nutty nostalgia by claiming to find the essence of America’s collapse in the film releases of that pre-Bicentennial year. (One Battle is nothing if not a celebration of America’s collapse.)
Breakdown: 1975 is an anti-American project rooted in the cynicism that Neville finds in movies made during the “New Hollywood” period when the studio system permitted filmmakers to express counterculture worldviews.
Neville’s haphazard, imprecise, non-scholarly approach never uses the term “counterculture.” He trusts the Hollywood mainstream without understanding how it co-opted Vietnam-Watergate-civil rights–era unrest — plus the sex-and-drugs revolution. Neville pretends to provide context for that cultural moment yet misreads the simplest terms of that context, jumping backward and forward anachronistically, highlighting films outside its 1975 premise.
Breakdown: 1975 exemplifies the faults of Netflix filmmaking, traceable perhaps to the streaming company’s corporate policy and the known ideologies of its board of directors, whose members — such as former National Security Adviser Susan Rice (since 2018) — are more well-known for their political influence. Netflix is also known for the lucrative production deals given to Meghan Markle and the former Prince Harry and the Obamas, all representing a liberal perspective.
Neville reflects this political bias in his selected talking heads — from narrator Jodie Foster to Patton Oswalt, Seth Rogen, Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, Naomi Fry, Rick Perlstein, Frank Rich, and Jefferson Cowie — a motley liberal crew with varying and at times questionable cinematic expertise.
“Tensions were higher, paranoia was rampant, there were gurus and good times,” Jodie Foster narrates. “America was having a nervous breakdown.” What we’ve got here, in this failure to illuminate, is a hive-mind perspective incapable of appreciating ’70s American cinema for its exploratory qualities, its variety of moods, and its aesthetic innovations. Instead, Neville’s trickster doc proposes a contemporary problem and attempts to resolve it in a cynical way. His offensively glib introduction is played against Donna Summer’s salacious debut recording “Love to Love You Baby” with clips from The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, and The Towering Inferno. It’s a cultural mismatch that smacks of sheer opportunism.
But 1975 marked the arc of the Seventies American Renaissance (the plethora of 1974 releases by every major filmmaker of the time was arguably at its peak), heading toward its decline in 1983. Neville’s retrospective accepts the liberal banality that film culture was exhausted as a result of political turmoil. “We had taken all these body blows,” the imbecilic Patton Oswalt observes. “Movies were able to embrace this stuff.” That viewpoint is no different from praising Anderson’s One Battle nihilism.
Breakdown: 1975 overlooks the exhilaration of Seventies film culture — mixed-genre innovations of The Long Goodbye and The Godfather; the European aesthetic influence on The Conformist, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Images, Sounder, Deliverance, Cries & Whispers, Last Tango in Paris, and Mean Streets; and the elevated populism of Robert Altman’s Nashville, the era’s magnum opus. “And it’s a slow movie,” Josh Brolin opines. “Would that movie be made today? Probably not.” (Brolin also refers to the most startling ’70s films as “visual trauma.”) Neville favors such Millennial obtuseness without explaining why it prevails.
Only Peter Bart, former Paramount executive and Variety editor, scrutinizes that bygone halcyon era: “It was the most important moment in the history of the film business, and it will never happen again.” Neville responds with TV clips from All in the Family, Saturday Night Live, Wonder Woman, and PBS-style montages of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, and Werner Ehrhard, plus an inexcusable gloss on the Boston school-busing protests, shamelessly intercut with violent images from the miners’ strike doc Harlan County U.S.A. from ’76.
The closest Neville gets to real social-cultural analysis is when he uses clips from 1976 films (Taxi Driver, Carrie, Rocky, and the overrated, dull All the President’s Men). Martin Scorsese’s summation evades the era’s racial tension: “All the old conventions were wiped away, and we were creating a new world. It was a perfect time. I felt it was the underground man. The underground man is going to seep up now. We’ve been holding him or her back and it’s going to be war.” Then Neville ruins that confession by patching in Talking Head’s “Psycho Killer” from 1977.
Neville’s strategy distorts and erases film history through inapposite clips and some of the dumbest comments ever — very #FilmTwitter, very Millennial. It’s as if Neville wanted to ambush the upcoming America 250 celebrations. Would Netflix, Susan Rice, the Obamas, and the Sussexes not want to bend history their way like this? Neville promotes that bent by erasing the truth.
