Words, Words, Words

I can’t concur with Emily Nussbaum’s negative review of “The Newsroom” in the magazine or David Denby’s endorsement of it on the site, because I haven’t seen the series. I was so bored by the histrionic grinding of gears and the gargling declamation of bulletin-boarded, index-carded plot points that I bailed about fifteen minutes into the first episode. Life is short, especially the evenings—and I didn’t have a lot of time to roll my eyes at the kind of silly nostalgia trumpeted in Will McAvoy’s opening monologue about America’s fallen condition. The line that nailed the coffin shut was, “We acted like men.” Kind of cuts the demographic in half, doesn’t it? If I had any doubt whether Aaron Sorkin shares the sentiment, it was dispelled by the montage of great TV newsmen of the past, including Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. (Sorry, we’re not our own grandfathers; mine were lovely but I’m glad I don’t have their prejudices.)

What surprised me in Denby’s meticulous parsing of Sorkin’s moral and narrative strategies, though, is his aside about the pleasures that Sorkin’s language provides in contrast to that of the dialogue in movies these days:

The ruling gods of movie screenwriting, at least in American movies, are terseness, elision, functional macho, and heartfelt, fumbled semi-articulateness.

It’s simply not so. We’re living in an age of superbly articulate, expressive, even poetic screenwriting—not necessarily in every movie, of course, but then it never was so. The best-written recent American movies offer an astonishing array of verbal invention, ranging from exquisite to exuberant and from high to low. Just for Hollywood starters, that list would include Kenneth Lonergan’s “Margaret,” the films of Wes Anderson, Whit Stillman (“Damsels in Distress” is a particular marvel of stylization), and Judd Apatow—along with “Superbad,” “Mean Girls,” Peyton Reed’s “Down with Love,” and “The Break-Up.” Among independent filmmakers, there is Miranda July’s “The Future,” Alex Ross Perry’s “The Color Wheel”, Andrew Bujalski’s films (such as “Beeswax”), and, of course, Lena Dunham’s “Tiny Furniture” (again, just for starters and off the top of my head). And Aaron Sorkin himself, when his work passes over to the hands of a strong director such as David Fincher (“The Social Network”) or even just a determined one (Bennett Miller, “Moneyball”), is one of the very best screenwriters around, one who can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the classics—as can those who wrote the films mentioned here.

But there’s another side to the story. It could be that the best American screenwriters of the sixties and seventies, of the generation between the studio titans and our contemporaries in fiction, were documentary filmmakers: Frederick Wiseman, Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, Shirley Clarke, and Albert and David Maysles. That would suggest that the question of how people speak was irrelevant to the golden age of Hollywood, because nobody really knew. It wasn’t until candidates and constituents, lawyers and convicts, salesmen and hustlers and high-school students could be heard on film that screenwriters had any basis of comparison; and it took a long time for them to recover. It wasn’t until the nineties, with Quentin Tarantino, Anderson, Stillman, and Noah Baumbach (among others), that a new style and stylization—one not utterly dependent upon miming a version of the ostensible real—came to the fore. The era they ushered in is actually a new golden age of screenwriting. But who, in the heyday of Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks, considered that age to be golden in any way?

P.S. A little game, one played like a kind of automatic writing: the best-written of all Hollywood films? My vote: “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” Followed closely by “Johnny Guitar,” “The Lady from Shanghai,” “A Letter to Three Wives,” and, of course, “Bringing Up Baby.” This postscript was written in the time it took to type it.

Photograph courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.