Anthony Lane would not relish the comparison, perhaps, but reading the fat collection of his movie reviews, pieces on books and profiles from the New Yorker feels rather like eating a box of chocolates. These witty, learned, masterly written criticisms and essays are too rich to devour in long sittings.
The superbly erudite, but never obscure, Englishman calls his first volume “Nobody’s Perfect,” a line from “Some Like It Hot” by Billy Wilder, whose profile ends the collection. Lane precedes his writings with a snippet from Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” featuring the butler, conveniently named Lane.
The strands of American movies and British writing intertwine in “Nobody’s Perfect,” but Lane ranges far and wide. He illuminates European films by Jan Svankmajer, Robert Bresson, Jacques Tati and Luis Bunuel, the works and life of Andre Gide and W.G. Sebald, the images of the Paris photographer Eugene Atget and the American expatriate William Klein. Many subjects are familiar — he quickly dismissed the movie about the “choc-lits” man “Forrest Gump” as “at once mazy and tight-assed” — but he also delves into the less well-known.
That fragment demonstrates an element of his style, the juxtaposition of an invented adjective and the American vulgate. Lane is also fond of citing favorite writers, such as Evelyn Waugh (who wins an essay) and P.G. Wodehouse (who does not). He gives us a long treatise on the sad life of Edward Lear, the multitalented, much-traveled artist, cartoonist, composer and limerick spinner, best known for “The Owl and the Pussycat.”
Whenever he can, Lane visits his subjects, dropping in on Svankmajer, the maker of surreal, disturbing stop-motion films such as “Alice.” He pays a visit to Buster Keaton’s widow, Eleanor Norris Keaton, then “spry and immaculate at 77,” in a North Hollywood condo, part of his homage to the greatest and most astonishing and moving of the silent clowns.
Most of his profiles and exegeses on writers and photographers, including Walker Evans, unfold in relatively serious tones. But as New Yorker readers know, he can also be laugh-out-loud hilarious. Of “Indecent Proposal,” he writes: “The whole thing needs a leading man with snap and vim, instead of which it gets Woody Harrelson. Admittedly, it’s an awful part, which calls for little more than unfocused emoting, but then Woody trying to emote looks like anyone else trying to go to sleep.”
That first review ran in April 1993, shortly after Lane had been dragooned into coming to New York by Tina Brown, the legendary editor. The book’s final film review, of the Swedish film “Together,” was printed in The New Yorker’s Aug. 20, 2002, issue.
In the movie review section, which takes up nearly half the book, Lane finds time to instruct us in the art of the horror picture. In reviewing “Halloween: H2O,” he confesses to having seen the original John Carpenter film “12 or 13 times.” This piece takes in Freud’s 1913 essay “The Uncanny” as well as the films “Nightmare on Elm Street Part Four,” “Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter,” Murnau’s “Nosferatu,” Dreyer’s “Vampyr” and the Karloff “Frankenstein” pictures. He writes of attending a sneak preview of the return of Michael Myers: “I bought my gallon pail of Coke, took my seat, and stared around.”
Lane presents himself as just a working print journalist, settling in to do his job, but one who seems to bring an informed curiosity to whatever comes his way.
Read, enjoy, savor. But in small doses.
