He Lost It at the Movies - The Ideas Letter

A solo audience member at a film festival in Gothenburg, Sweden, on January 30, 2021. © Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty

The film critic A.S. Hamrah came to widespread attention in the late 2000s with a new form, a knockabout variant of the capsule reviews familiar to readers of Cahiers du cinéma and Halliwell’s Film Guide. As he explains in “Remember Me on this Computer,” the introduction to his first collection The Earth Dies Streaming, he was asked by Keith Gessen, an editor at the Brooklyn-based magazine n+1, to write a column on the films nominated for the 2008 Oscars. Hamrah, about forty at the time, declined the commission, explaining that he was too busy with his work as a brand analyst. So Gessen proposed that Hamrah just watch the films and share his thoughts over the phone. “Oscar Preview” started with three sentences on driving in Michael Clayton. The entry devoted to the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, read, in its entirety, “Whenever Javier Bardem took out that pressure hose and put it to someone’s head, I kept waiting for his victim to go, ‘Ouch! Stop it! Why are you doing that? That hurts! Cut it out.’”

It was an exercise in negation, an alternative to film reviewing as practiced in the mainstream press. In Hamrah’s account, a process of dumbing-down had begun around 1990, with the arrival of “the consumer-guide approach” to film criticism invented by publications like Entertainment Weekly, which soon infected traditionally serious outlets. His work for n+1 looked for inspiration to the decades before then, an age receptive to film culture, characterized by vigor and integrity—when Pauline Kael wrote several-thousand-word dispatches for the New Yorker; a compelling newspaper reviewer like Roger Ebert could become a TV star; and cosmopolitan cinephiles such as Andrew Sarris, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and J. Hoberman made their names in film magazines and the alternative press.

Those critics all published capsule versions of their longer reviews, but the presiding spirit of Hamrah’s round-ups was another figure from that brighter day, the wild and inventive Manny Farber, who wrote for the Nation and Artforum, and offered a model of the quick-fire assessment—as a form in its own right—in his reports from the New York Film Festival and his essay “Clutter,” which covered films from 1967 and 1968.

In an essay written soon after his 2008 Oscars round-up, Hamrah praised Farber for the things he refused to do. A decade later, in “Remember Me on this Computer,” he provided more or less the same list when recalling his own ambitions. Film criticism, he wrote, should not provide publicity quotes, extensive plot synopses, or facts about the past credits of directors and stars. It could be argued that a single line about a cattle prod isn’t a replacement for “boring and repetitive” film criticism but something else entirely: an experiment or jeu d’esprit, a sort of comic prose-poetry. When Farber wrote about China is Near in “Clutter,” he may have identified the director, Marco Bellocchio, only once, misspelling the surname and giving no first name. But he was sure to describe the director’s “talent for getting multiple angles on a locale” and the film’s “puzzling staccato manner.” Hamrah never relinquished his idiosyncratic tone nor surrendered his right to ramble. But by around 2010 he relaxed his strictures on conventional habits, as displayed in this passage on Christopher Nolan’s Inception:

‘Always imagine new places,’ Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) instructs, but Inception refuses to do that. It presents instantly recognizable non-places, swanky hotel bars in world capitals, vistas from James Bond movies with skiing in them, postapocalyptic landscapes from comic books. Suffused with an ahistorical sensibility, this insta-remake of Shutter Island combines the washy metaphysics of Nicolas Roeg films with Where Eagles Dare—a range of unsmiling British unfun. Terrible dialogue fights to the death with bombastic music meant to pound a ‘militarized unconscious’ into further submission, which it does.

Almost twenty years after “Oscar Preview,” Hamrah’s round-up pieces, which have appeared in The Baffler as well as n+1, remain his primary outlet as a reviewer. In the nearly one-thousand pages of The Earth Dies Streaming and its recently published follow-up Algorithm of the Night, only six new films are given standalone treatment. But since the retirement of Jonathan Rosenbaum as the film reviewer at the Chicago Reader—around the time of Hamrah’s first Oscars piece—Hamrah has become the go-to critic for Anglophone cinephiles, along with Richard Brody of the New Yorker.

Like Hamrah, Brody, who is roughly ten years his senior, has talked about the importance of early exposure to the French New Wave, especially Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, and both were marked by those directors’ work as critics for Cahiers du cinéma, where they created a canon including Ingmar Bergman and Roberto Rossellini and commercial directors like Alfred Hitchcock. But there is a gulf in outlook. Whereas Brody can identify in Barbie a joyous sensibility akin to what the Cahiers critics loved about Hollywood films, Hamrah views American popular culture not as an enduring impulse but as a story of decline. Brody, though not a soft touch, is an enthusiast. Hamrah tends toward defiance. Coming of age in the early 1980s, he aligned himself with punk rock and “zine” culture and against what he calls “commercial interests” and the “one-size-fits-all mainstream.” Turning to the present day, his attitude to Rotten Tomatoes scores, streaming services, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and movie-watching on iPhones is easy to guess.

Hamrah’s combative posture serves as a rhetorical strength and a source of meaning, especially in his longer ruminative pieces. The specter of decline sharpens his sense of gratitude in two pieces about the movies of the year 2000. In one, about Spike Lee’s satire Bamboozled and Ang Lee’s martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, he writes vividly of “a brief time in mainstream cinema when Black filmmakers were on the rise and American audiences were open to Asian stars and genres.”

In the other, covering thirty-five films and written at a time when his feelings about cinema were exacerbated by COVID, he says that his dive into these twenty-year-old movies “threw the present into stark relief.”

Hamrah is drawn to directors such as Chantal Akerman, Orson Welles, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Stanley Kubrick, who possess a quality he variously characterizes as “hardness,” “recalcitrance,” and “stark confrontational truculence” and whose work can be read—and wielded—as a rebuke to convention, the film industry, and the critical establishment, as well as the human conduct they portray. His perspective is often overtly political. He has exposed the complicity with power and corruption displayed by the cycles of films about the Iraq War and corporations, like BlackBerry, and praised John Sayles’s Matewan and Albert Brooks’s Real Life for their representation of the US’s mistreatments of its workers and embrace of reality television. In “All Consuming Horror,” a searching piece of genre criticism, pulp material becomes a route to historical analysis:

There is no space outside consumerism. That is the principal lesson of a group of American horror and sci-fi films that began to emerge after George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead came out in 1968. This kind of movie, never quite a fully-formed subgenre, peaked in the second half of the 1980s and all but disappeared after 1990. It flourished in the margins of Hollywood production like a Day-Glo mold growing where the wall meets the ceiling, erupting into a splatter of exploding heads, limbs, and organs. It was a kind of polychrome spin-art that accompanied the growth of American retail into shopping centers, and into the television commercials that advertised their stores and products.

But Hamrah’s work also exhibits the drawbacks of accentuating the negative. It isn’t simply that virtue always reminds him of vice, probity of corruption, courage of cowardice, greatness of mediocrity. This is true of many writers who rely on anger as an engine. Contrast is a useful resource, and few great works of art provoke positive feelings about the general state of culture or the world. Equanimity is hardly an indispensable item in the critic’s toolkit.

But Hamrah takes things to the opposite extreme—with damaging repercussions not just for his openness but for the accuracy of his descriptions and the coherence of his judgments. At times, his work ceases to resemble criticism altogether and functions instead as the portrait of a temperament.

In a review of Billy Wilder books, as he defends the director against the charge of meanness, Hamrah quotes a line from Wilder’s Fedora (itself a quotation from the producer Samuel Goldwyn): “In life you have to take the bitter with the sour.” Even in his sunnier moments, things can quickly turn to bile or disappointment, and on spurious pretexts. Asked in a recent interview what films he enjoyed last year, he named, among others, The Secret Agent and One Battle After Another, before adding, “There’s plenty of good commercial films that people can see in theaters, but the media acts like they don’t exist.” Of Farber’s characteristics, the ones that Hamrah has been keenest, or best-equipped, to emulate are a taste for a scrap and what he has called Farber’s “offhand, sometimes bizarre cruelty.” Almost as soon as he declares Greta Gerwig’s Little Women “something of a masterpiece,” he explains that he prefers the Tom Hanks comedy A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood because Chris Cooper, a supporting actor in both films, “gets to do more here” and the cinematography is more “hard-edge.” Across a longer span, “somebody named Yorgos Lanthimos” went from being an exciting new prospect (“I would see anything else by him”) to “our leading auteur of half-baked ideas”—the opening contention of what turns out to be a rave review of Poor Things, in the course of which Hamrah knocks critics who said it looked like a Tim Burton movie and “Puritans” who “will find many opportunities in it to be offended.”

Hamrah’s driving emotion is always clear, his reasoning less so. He writes that he was “confused” by the fact that although Alfonso Cuarón’s film Roma, set in the Mexico City district of that name, shares a title with a color film by Fellini, it actually reminded him of Fellini’s black-and-white films.