"Speak as you might to a small child or golden retriever"
Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 3:43PM 
This past week I've become concerned with the awards prospects of Shame (is Carey Mulligan going to win anything?) and Martha Marcy May Marlene (which I loved) on account of its loss of every breakthrough actress and best first film contests thus far (in the admittedly young awards season.)
I began to wonder if the problem wasn't the constant withholding of the comfort food that is exposition. So I put in my screener to Margin Call, which keeps beating MMMM to prizes and while I enjoyed the film, I was immediately struck at the ginormous difference in verbosity. One movie tells you everything through it's play-like dialogue. The other tells you only so much and nearly always through its visuals.
So I wrote about ambiguity vs. directness in my Oscar column for Fandor.
There's even an infographic! Apparently I believe in both showing AND telling.
Reader Comments (15)
very good article, Nathaniel...
Thank you, thank you, thank you! Very well put! Perhaps it's me twitching from a recent viewing of The Descendants, but I feel like over-exposition is going to become my newest cinematic pet-peeve.
You really should be able to mute a film and still have some emotional sense of what's going on. If you don't, there's a problem.
I suppose if there were a list of what defines the often frustrating tastes of The Academy, movies that treat their audiences like small children or dogs may be offender #1.
I don't think it has to do with over-expositon. Although I do agree that it is a problem in most american movies.
As much as I enjoy "Matha..." I find it not a miracle. I felt it was too intellectualized for its own good (and I love smart intellectualizing).
It could have gone far and beyond on its emotional realms like a great Lars Von Trier or Ingmar Bergman does.
For which I mean:
that the whole proposition of using the technique of intellectual intercut between two worlds to compare and contrast ideas/informations is not new and a one bag trick, and in the case of Martha, as much as I love the sensorial aspects of the whole "tribe" sections I feel it gets too shallow and underworked on the whole sister/perfect family side. So the one technique falls apart easily. Those characters have little room to breath under the constant idea pushing hand of the filmmakers about the american world and the individual that wanna break free from it.
And Olsen is indeed a natural beauty, but she is asked little more than to be a sad/confused observer. Anyways... no miracle. But a decent indie movie.
Hope others agree. just wanted to put my opinion out there.
I'm holding out hope that Olsen will see some more nominations or wins next week, but I think she may be out of the big race.
I saw A Separation less than two weeks ago and when I was leaving the cinema, there was a guy behind me who was mildly annoyed by the ending and said that "such a thing demands a sequel". I just gritted my teeth a bit.
Great article.
The 2007 best picture nominees still kind of shock me. No really easy answers found in any of them.
"Speak as you might to a small child or golden retriever" is a direct descendant of Denzel's "Now, explain it to me like I'm a four-year-old" refrain from Philadelphia.
I get your point, but I have some issues with this telling vs showing debate. I think a filmmaker has a lot of weapons to work with since movies are a mix of literature, painting, photography, stage... And sometimes you're really a good writer or knows how to work with the text part of a screenplay but you're not particularly bright on the visual conception of a movie... And your movie still can be great.
But these times are not particularly fond of written culture. Spielberg once said he comes from a visual culture. He didn't read many books as a youth. He read comics. Then, it's easier to find brilliant people who can express their ideas visually.
So, why you can show everything and not to tell? Sometimes telling everything is a very smart choice. People complain about voice-overs, but that's because most directors anrs are not that good. Voice overs can be great.Look what Billy Wilder did, or Scorsese in Goodfellas. Remember the magnificent opening sequence of Magnolia? The guy basically tells everything that we're seeing, and that is devastating.
Have you seen Heartbeat Detector? It's a fucking brilliant movie (starred by Mathieu Amalric, in his performance ever). In the last scene (no spoilers), we discover something heartbreaking, a terrible thing. The director finishes the movie with a black screen and a voice-over, telling us what happened for more than a minute. It's astonishing.
So, I love the visual part of movies like anybody else, but I really wish we didn't underrate other aspects of filmmaking....
Best narration I've ever heard: The restrained and bitter bon mots of Kind Hearts and Coronets. As for telling v. showing: I love quite a few movies that rely mainly on dialogue, but over reliance on dialogue can sometimes come across as breaking the most basic tenet of filmmaking "play solely to the front row." Using a play adaptation as the best example:
The last two scenes of In the Company of Men. End on the second last scene and you have this beautifully cynical sick joke, with Aaron Eckhart with this smug smirk on his face and you can just smell the fact that he's won. Cut right there and it's an A level movie. Then you get the "redundant for the cinema" scene of Matt Molloy's character trying to get the girlfriend who dumped him to notice him again. I acknowledge exactly what the point is for an audience is in a live theatre, but it's mostly to communicate the point of the previous scene to the theatrical BACK ROW. There is no "back row problem" in the movies. This significant gaffe leads me to push it down to A-.
Agreed-- this Martha Marcy "Meh" Marlene reaction by awards groups needs to stop.
It's better to be theatrical than there's no there-there kind of storytelling.
That's a good observation, and I'm sure MMMM's chilly arthouse affect doesn't help it with audiences of critics group voting (which generally seems to favor broadly, blandly acceptable choices versus more iconoclastic options - especially this year), but I really think Margin Call's advantage comes entirely from its subject matter. Timeliness counts big time.
Roark -- i think you're right that Margin Call's timing couldn't be better. two of my best friends who never go to the movies went to it on opening weekend! just because "we wanted to see it" they were so confused that i hadn't seen it yet. "but you see everything!"
That infographic is hilarious!
In which position would you place The Help in that graphic? That movie is anything but subtle!
I do think that "Margin Call" is being helped by being seen as part of the zeitgeist, but that doesn't mean that it's not a worthy movie anyway. I'm sure that it will be well up near the top of my Favourites list for 2011. It's got an amazing cast...probably the best Ensemble cast of the year (or maybe tied with "The Help").
I didn't find the exposition over-boring. After all, who understands all that "high finance" stuff? Irons, the boss, didn't understand it; Spacey had to have it explained it to him, too. It just goes to show you how corrupt the 1% really are.
I certainly preferred "Margin Call" to "MMMM." I found Rafa's comments above quite interesting...the sister and brother-in-law scenes were enough to ruin the film for me.