The Ideal Film Critic

What makes a great film critic? John Simon said he knew. Writing in 1969, he declared that since film is such a complex art, which borrows from so many other media, the critic must be something of a Renaissance man—conversant in everything from cinematography, literature, and acting techniques to painting and sculpture, music, and dance, and, because subtitles are often so shoddily written, as many foreign languages as possible. “I dare say that when T.S. Eliot gave as the requirement for a critic that he be ‘very intelligent,’ he was not thinking of the film critic,” Simon added. “Otherwise, I suspect, he would have had to say ‘very, very intelligent.’” In short, for John Simon the ideal film critic was John Simon.

Self-serving as this description may sound, Simon did fit it. He certainly was the most educated film critic of his generation, and the fact that film was his third—maybe fourth—passion, behind theater, music, and literature, consistently makes him more interesting than any of his rivals. It helped, too, that where others were apt to praise, Simon was more likely to find fault, though not nearly as often as his detractors allege. He is probably most famous for his pan of Star Wars, which he wrote off as a movie “for those lucky enough to be children or unlucky enough never to have grown up.” 

When he debated Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel on that point a few years later, he elaborated, accusing George Lucas of making children “dumber than they need to be” because his franchise does not operate within the bounds of literary realism. That episode is more or less the whole of Simon in miniature. He had a very particular, entirely non-theoretical idea of what made great art, and, to his death five years ago today, he delighted in nothing more than measuring the efforts of his confrères against his standards. 

Most often they failed to match up. To dip into Simon’s film criticism at any point from the 1960s to the 2010s is to find a man frustrated with second-rate acting, directing, and writing. He was especially severe with directors whom he admired. After walking out of The Trial in 1962 he sighed that “the sad thing about Orson Welles is that he has consistently put his very real talent to the task of glorifying his imaginary genius.” Likewise, he did not believe that Fellini made a great film after I Vitelloni in 1953, and, indeed, that from 8 ½ onward, he devoted his abilities to “totally improvised and almost idiotically idiosyncratic movies.” Simon was even harsh to his hero, Ingmar Bergman, of whose Fanny and Alexander he remarked, “Children are not Bergman’s specialty.” 

Simon had neither religion nor politics. Art alone was sacred. To produce bad art and to condone the production of bad art, he said, were “the two most heinously dangerous sins imaginable.” And for this reason, he was incapable of overlooking—let alone forgiving—failure, even when he tried. His non-review of the King Lear-inspired film Ran, which I have reproduced as it appeared in National Review in 1985, is the most vivid example of his inflexibility:

Readers have written in asking why I didn’t review Akira Kurosawa’s Ran. Because I find it an almost total failure by a genius in his old age, and tearing it apart would be worse than taking candy from a baby—knocking an old man’s crutch out of his hand. Kurosawa has made several masterpieces and a good many outstanding films in his long, productive life despite sad ingratitude from the Japanese film industry in his later years; that, like other major film artists (e.g., Chaplin, Buñuel, Renoir, Bresson, Welles), he should have gone into a decline with age is profoundly sad. Since I am neither a daily reviewer nor a Kurosawa monographer, I can pass over Ran in silence. Besides a gesture of regret for his last few films, let that silence also be one of respect for the many that went before.

With lesser artists, however, Simon adopted a more glib tone. “How nice it is to have David Lean back after 13 years of absence, which was bad enough, and Ryan’s Daughter, which was worse,” runs the opening line to his review of A Passage to India, a film Simon disliked on the grounds that it downplayed the homoeroticism of E.M. Forster’s novel. Still, he preferred Lean’s excursion to the subcontinent over those of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, whom Simon joked “should have been ivory merchants, a field in which fakery thrives.” 

He was similarly withering in his criticism of Robert Altman, whose “bloated ego and remarkably shriveled intelligence” doomed nearly all his films, and of Peter Weir, about whom Simon exclaimed after enduring The Truman Show: “This guy should be stripped of his trade.” He was also unimpressed by Quentin Tarantino, whose surname, he observed, anagrams to “tarnation.” Ditto Whit Stillman, beloved no doubt by at least several readers of this magazine. Simon judged him “a clever upbeat smartass, but hardly an artist,” pointing out that most of the scenes in Barcelona “could have easily been summed up by a New Yorker cartoon.”

Not all of his zingers landed. Simon had a tendency to take shots at those whom he considered unserious with a double-barreled blast of uncomplimentary adjectives—and all too often the same adjectives. Thus, the “obnoxious and untalented” Paul Schrader, the “untalented and unprepossessive” Gwyneth Paltrow, and the “asinine and insufferable” Coen Brothers. But when he took the time to demonstrate exactly why something was so horrid, his explanations were as amusing as they were devastating. (His dismantling of Dead Poets Society, for instance, is the final word on that particular sub-genre of criticism.) My favorite example comes from his review of Hannah and Her Sisters, in which Simon deconstructs the pattering dialogue that fills out so many of Woody Allen’s movies, and, until fairly recently (for reasons unrelated to Allen’s films), was considered some of the wittiest banter on screen:

Take this exchange: “Do you like Caravaggio?” “Oh, yes. Who doesn’t?” Is that answer informed, snide, or foolish? Or a bluff to cover up ignorance? Nothing about the speaker or the situation provides a clue. A highbrow moviegoer can laugh at the character; a middlebrow, empathize; a lowbrow, gape, awestruck. But the statement has no artistic value. One more example: Holly, the middle sister, a would-be actress and dabbler in cocaine—actually, an all-round dabbler—has met an interesting architect, but April, an actress friend with whom she just started a catering business, steals him from her. Holly fumes: “Where did April come up with that stuff about Adolf Loos and organic space? Well, naturally: She went to Brandeis.” People laugh at this, but why? Is mentioning Loos to an architect automatically clever and funny? Or does it label one an intellectual phony? Or is Brandeis a school that breeds phonies, and so the butt of the joke? Or is the word “Brandeis” an immediate laugh-getter among anti-Semitic snobs? Or is the joke on Holly, for blaming April’s education instead of her own ignorance? All are possible, but none is really funny: I think people laugh nervously and defensively, lest anyone suspect them of not getting some learned reference—which, for the most part, they don’t.

It is an interesting exercise to ferret out the movies that Simon did like. He came of age as a filmgoer shortly after the Second World War, around the time when Italian Neorealism was in vogue, and, for better or worse, it was the standards of that movement which loosely shaped Simon’s attitude toward the form as a whole. The influence comes through most clearly in his lifelong preoccupation with Fellini. (Simon wrote an essay at least once a decade attempting to pinpoint the precise moment when the director betrayed Neorealism.) But a preference for depictions of “real life” pervades every positive review he wrote, and, I think, is constant factor among the movies he liked—Big, Boyz n the Hood, The Fugitive, Quiz Show, Schindler’s List, Brassed Off, to list a few. 

And he believed realism would ultimately save film. “There is one quality that more than any other could help revitalize the cinema: believableness,” he wrote as he looked around disapprovingly at the blockbusters in 1990. “Characters in films must re-establish contact with social, economic, and political realities even where film style is non- or anti-realistic.”

When Simon found a movie that achieved “believableness,” he would gush about it just as much as Roger Ebert or Pauline Kael would go on about their own hobby-horses. One such film, oddly, was Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, which Simon praised because, unlike Allen’s earlier efforts, it was a serious affair which dared to present a world that Simon seemed to believe was true: “There is no justice, no rhyme or reason in the universe, no God.” The review is the best essay ever written on Allen, made all the better by the enmity between director and critic.

Toward the end of his career Simon was dogged by a perception that he was a racist, a sexist, and a homophobe. (He lost nearly every gig he held by the end of his life, except for at The New Criterion, where he turned out some of his finest work.) But it is true that Simon had a mean streak where women were concerned. The stories about Barbra Streisand’s nose and the “gate-crashing” Sylvia Miles are well-known, so I would like to add two more anecdotes from the archives. The first is only a phrase: In his more or less favorable review of Moonstruck, Simon refers to Cher’s “equine visage,” a characterization that is as cruel as it is unforgettable. The second comes from his pan of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert, in which he wrote that Monica Vitti looked like “Tony Perkins in a wig in Psycho—no fate at all for a woman.”

There doesn’t seem to be much critical value in these statements. Why make them at all? The answer is unsatisfying, but I think it is the only one that makes sense. Simon was a radical individualist, and he would do anything to stand out in a crowd. And on top of that, he reflexively denigrated anyone who preferred the safety of the group. “I don’t like people abdicating their identity to become part of some group and then becoming obsessed with this and making capital of it,” he told the Paris Review. “Anything that is a uniform rather than an individuality I find reprehensible.” 

His was a lonely position, but it may well have been required of the critic who served only Art. Under that rule, any imperfection is inadmissible. Sometime in the late 1960s, Simon recalled the assessment of a Polish filmmaker that “there have been in the whole history of the cinema thus far no more than, at best, two works of indubitable art.” To which Simon added, “I think that the number is higher, though not very much higher; I must also, in principle, agree.”

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