I know no profounder epigraph for a work of art than the one Odön von Horvath affixed to his play Tales from the Vienna Woods (1930): “Nothing gives us such a sense of infinity as does stupidity.” In German, this reads: “Nichts gibt so sehr das Gefühl der Unendlichkeit als wie die Dummheit.” Als wie, however, is a solecism; wie by itself is sufficient and correct. Itisasif, like those Renaissance artists who painted themselves in a corner of their large group canvases, the Austrian playwright had wished to inscribe himself on the passenger list of his ship of fools. Those, bear in mind, were the days when speaking your own language badly was still considered a sign of folly.
This melancholy truth was brought home to me again upon viewing two very different but equally praised movies: the American Raising Arizona and the British The Good Father. The former is a farce by two young brothers, Joel and Ethan Coen, whose previous acclaimed film, Blood Simple, I found inept and detestable, though probably better than this, their second one; the latter is a serious, almost tragic film, directed by Mike Newell (who gave us the highly lauded, but to me greatly unsatisfactory, Dance with a Stranger), from a screenplay by Christopher Hampton, one of England’s most gifted and civilized younger playwrights. Yet though incomparably superior to Raising Arizona, the English film also makes foolish mistakes, ascribable either to the incompetence of the director, or to the inadequacies of the novel by Peter Prince on which it is based —or just possibly to the assumption that a film must talk down to its audience. This, alas, may be true, but it is stultifying all the same.
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