Cute as a Button

Movie critics participate in two conversations, endlessly. One begins with the assertion by an interlocutor that it must be so much fun to be a critic because what could be more wonderful than seeing movies and writing about them for a living? When I was a young whippersnapper movie critic, I replied acidly there could be few things in life less wonderful than having to spend even three seconds watching anything with Robby Benson in it.

Now that I am a decrepit middle-aged critic, I can no longer use the Robby Benson example, as no one knows who Robby Benson is anymore. Now, in Robby’s place, I mention Scarlett Johanssen, an oddly acclaimed actress who speaks every line as though she is a foghorn in human form, albeit one suffering from laryngitis.

The second conversation is all about how they just don’t make movies the way they used to. Once upon a time, I hear again and again, Hollywood made great films, and now Hollywood makes nothing but trash. To which I reply: It is true that Hollywood makes trash; it is not true that Hollywood used to make great films as a rule. Great or even good films have always been the exception.

During the so-called Golden Age (1930-48) somewhere between 450 and 600 movies were produced by Hollywood studios every year. In total, there were about 5,000 films made in Hollywood before 1950, and probably another 4,000 or so in the 25 years following the advent of television. Of these 9,000 movies, it is impossible to come up with a list of 100 great ones, never mind 500 good ones, never mind a thousand watchable ones.

The point is that most movies are terrible. Most movies have always been terrible.

Which means they do make them like they used to. The problem is, when they make them now, they spend a lot more money and try much harder than they did back then, and the excessive labor shows, to painful effect.

Such is the case with a trifle entitled Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, adapted from a little-known British novel about an unemployed governess in 1939 London who cons her way into a job as the social secretary of a ditzy would-be stage actress juggling three men. One is the young producer who has the star part she covets. One is the sleazy nightclub manager whose apartment she lives in. And the third is a penniless piano player who owns her heart. In the course of a single day, Miss Pettigrew will somehow manage to help the ditzy actress get everything she wants and needs–and find her own happiness in the bargain.

In the thirties and forties, there were dozens of movies made of this sort, screwball piffles in which a featherhead shows unexpected depth when she is given a choice between money and love. One of them–one of them–is great. That would be It Happened One Night (1934). Some of its progenitors are good, but most are dully formulaic at best, like any product made by an assembly line (in this case, the Hollywood studio system). Today’s Hollywood assembly line makes television shows, not motion pictures. Motion pictures are now made by hand, one by one. There is an enormously long time period from the moment they are conceived to the moment they are finally shown to the public, and along the way each project starts and stops, dies and is reborn, is cast and recast. (To take one example, the recent George Clooney flop Leatherheads has been kicking around Hollywood for 16 years.)

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is intended to be fizzy and frolicsome, a glass of champagne on celluloid, with a dash of melancholy to heighten the bubbliness. But it’s been sitting out too long, and what might once have been fizzy comes across as flat. Miss Pettigrew will find an enthusiastic audience with people who are desperate to see an old-fashioned movie that has cars with running boards, bad women with long cigarette holders, and a Bertie Wooster type who says things like, “It’s a jolly old show, what?” Good costumes and terrific set decoration can make a difference–for about 20 minutes. Then the story and the characters have to take center stage. And here the story is so sketchy and the characters so broad that you begin longing for a glimpse of another perfectly preserved vintage Rolls Royce to stem the tide of boredom.

Playing the ditzy actress, Amy Adams, wonderful as both a working-class Southern girl in Junebug and a cartoon princess come to life in Enchanted, works far too hard trying to come across as cute as a button. Frances McDormand, an American actress playing an Englishwoman, seems far more focused on maintaining her accent at all times than she is at constructing a character. These two people supposedly love each other, but if you told me that, off-camera, Adams and McDormand actually went at each other with machetes it would come as no surprise, given how uncomfortable they seem to be when they’re in a shot together.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day does have one inestimable virtue, however. Scarlett Johanssen isn’t in it.

John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.