Reel Politique: Directors Project: Gregory Hoblit
Introduction
As a fan and disciple of The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929 - 1968, Andrew Sarris’s standard anatomization of Hollywood directors, I return to it again and again for insight and succor. Unfortunately, the book has a cut off date of 1968, consequently containing no rankings and summaries for Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Terrence Malick, and scores of other directors who emerged since Sarris’s book came out.
Modestly, I hope to rectify that situation. Over the next several months, I propose to issue forth brand new director summaries and evaluations, geared for adaptability into Sarris’s template. With a slight refiguring of Sarris’s categories, these new director filmographies and summaries should slip easily into Sarris’s book, physically, though perhaps not aesthetically. In Sarris’s book, the titles were in plain text, with key films of a director’s oeuvre in italics; here all titles are in italics, with key films also in bold; I’m sure that Sarris would do it that way, too, if he were writing the book today. My slightly refined categories will be, in ranking order, Future Pantheon, The Near Side of Paradise, Lightly Likable, Working Stiffs, Cable Ready, Send in the Clowns, Foreign Trade, Producers as Auteurs, Actors Turned Directors, Strained Seriousness, More Less Than Meets the Eye, The Writers, Flashes in the Pan, and finally, Subjects for Further Research. Rankings are tentative, for the most part, because these are living directors whose full careers may eventually modify their final rankings. Fellow fans of American Cinema are encouraged to print out this dispatches and paste them into a scrapbook that can sit on the shelf next to Sarris’s book.
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Gregory Hoblit (1944 -)
Ranking: Cable Ready
Bay City Blues (1983 TV series one episode); Hill Street Blues (1981 - 1984 TV series eight episodes); Hooperman (1987 TV series); Law and Order (1986 - 1987 TV series three episodes); Roe vs. Wade (1989 TV movie); Equal Justice (1990, TV series one episode); Cop Rock (1990 TV series various episodes); Class of ‘61 (1993 TV movie); NYPD Blue (TV series nine episodes 1993 - 1994); Primal Fear (1996); Fallen (1998); Frequency (2000); Hart’s War (2002); NYPD 2096 (2004 TV movie); Fracture (2007); Untraceable (2008)
Gregory Hoblitt comes from the world of television, which is no longer the opprobrious status it used to be back in the 1960s, when one prestigious directors from the classical period went to die and young upstarts learned poor technique. Television slowly began to improve visually and dramatically back in the late 1970s and the two shows most closely with him, Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue were innovative both in look and how they unfurled traditional cop melodramas. But Mr. Hoblit has not brought that spirit of innovation to the big screen, where his movies tend to resemble all the other mid-range Hollywood movies around them, techniques elucidated by David Bordwell in recent essays and blog entries, that include meaningless camera movements meant to enliven otherwise conventional or static scenes (compare the opening shots of Hart’s War to, oh, say, anything by Alain Resnais) .
Which isn’t to say that Mr. Hoblit isn’t attracted to the same theme from film to film. From his first true feature film, Primal Fear to the recent Fracture Hoblit’s tales, regardless of the writers, focus on the power struggle between a seemingly ordinary man and a malevolent if not superhuman force. The two legal mysteries pit Richard Gere against a young Edward Norton, and a youngish Ryan Gossling against a crafty Anthony Hopkins. In Fallen cop Denzel Washington confronts an executed serial killer with supernatural staying power (in a story that somewhat resembles Wes Craven’s Shock).
The lugubriously paced Hart’s War, based on a novel but something of a Night of the Generals knockoff, is a legal drama set in a WWII prisoner of war camp, which, after 17 minutes of back story, finally settles into a war of nerves between a bully (Cole Hauser) and an African-American pilot (Terrence Howard) that results in an apparent murder, and then between Bruce Willis as the unofficial camp leader and his attempts to dominate Colin Farrell as an ad hoc defense attorney, while Willis is at the same time jostling for power with the camp commandant, Marcel Lures (the film ends crazily with a series of extreme sacrifices all within five minutes). In this way the film is the apotheosis of Hoblit’s fascination with power struggles.
His most recent film, Untraceable highlights another dominating figure who effortlessly controls those around him, in this case a serial killer with mixed beliefs about the Internet and the media. Diane Lane plays Hoblit’s first female protagonist, an FBI agent in the cyber-crimes division. A derivative script and a reliance on standard issue visual techniques of the day unduly flattens out the suspense and helps render the film ideologically confusing. Nevertheless, Hoblit is that unusual entity, a metteur-en-scene with an identifiable thematic consistency.