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, The Animators, The Documentarians, 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.

—————————————————————————

Peter Berg (11 March 1964, United States -)
Ranking: Actors as Directors

Chicago Hope (also writer, various episodes 1994 TV series)
Very Bad Things (also writer, 1998)
Wonderland (also writer, TV series pilot)
The Rundown (2003)
Friday Night Lights (also writer, 2004)
Friday Night Lights (also writer, pilot and TV series, 2006 - )
The Kingdom (2007)
Virtuality (2008 TV movie)
Hancock (also writer, 2008)
Lone Survivor (also writer, 2009)
Bran Mak Morn (2008)
Painfully Rich (2010)
Cocaine Cowboysv (2010)
The Mission (2010);
Dune (2010)
Gone Like the Wind (2010)
Untitled Peter Berg-Mark Wahlberg Project (2010)

Manohla Dargis hit the nail on the head in her New York Times review of Hancock when she mentioned the director in passing, referencing “Mr. Berg’s downbeat tendencies.” In a commercial industry that increasingly emphasizes exhilaration, Mr. Berg is drawn to the muted, the somber, and the morally ambiguous as well as the unexpectedly deflating ending.

Berg’s somber view of the world begins with his big screen writing and directing debut, Very Bad Things. The film might be an incisive critique of masculinity to please the boys in the quarterlies except that as a actors ensemble piece it prefers a tone of unrestrained hysteria within a generally sour view of modern suburban life. In its drive to lay bare the vacuity of modern life, and the weird ethnic confusions of its characters, the team of bachelor party denizens (a popular premise of the time, as seen in Stag and other films) escaping to Las Vegas soon find themselves cutting up body parts for burial in the Nevada desert in a motivational leap lacking both logical plausibility. As an actor directing actors he has a script that indulges them to excesses that may have seemed funny at the time of conception. Christian Slater’s Nicholson-style ringleader, however, anticipates a recurrent character in Berg’s films. In the end, Very Bad Things aspires to the vulgarity of straight-to-video garbage such as Kinky Killers out of a misguided sense of humor.

The critical firestorm over Very Bad Things would have derailed most careers, but Berg bounced back with an effective (if not particularly popular) action film highlighting the persona of The Rock, The Rundown, and then a highly personal project, Friday Night Lights the adaptation of H.G. Bissinger’s non-fiction account of life in a Texas football town, the height of an American way of suburban life, which Berg later turned into a critically acclaimed television series. The show is actually better than the movie, which can’t disguise Berg’s drift toward the downbeat (the movie’s football heroes lose in the end to a superior team). Friday Night Lights the show is more emotional and less distanced than the movie, which is cold and downbeat, and doesn’t benefit from the superiority of TV to explore character. Visually, Berg’s first two films looked like other films in their genres. With Friday Night Lights, Berg introduces the influence of Steven Soderbergh, with a shaky intimate roving handheld camera that he maintains regardless of its inappropriateness to the genre, for example Hancock. Berg’s next film, The Kingdom, was a troubled production that resulted in an incoherent text, a film aspiring to a political statement while offering action to the groundlings, while marrying his newly acquired Sodergerbg look to Tony Scott’s visual style and rhythms.

A central figure in Berg’s films is “the handler,” the one who steps up and tries to rectify a degenerating situation. In Very Bad Things, it is Slater, who even calls himself a “success coach” for the rest of his pals, and there is a literal coach in Friday Night Lights. In Hancock, it is Jason Bateman as Ray Embrey, a public relations consultant who takes on the difficult case of reluctant superhero Hancock (Will Smith). Though a cinematic minter of money, Smith nevertheless, powerful as he is, allows Berg to approach the material as he did in his other films, with a downbeat realistic affect, in something of an anticipation of Watchmen in its consideration of a plausible clash between the idea of superheros and the real world.

What one soon notices throughout Berg’s films is that his “organizer” figures are virtual stand-ins for directors. They do what directors do, organize, boss people around, create a drama. Such chracacters are a likely source of inspiration for Berg, a man with directorial aspirations, because his directors would be the people he would have been most likely to observe on the set. Slater in Very Bad Things treads a thin line between chaos and philosophy, like a Samuel Fuller, holding things together in a panic, or like Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx) in The Kingdom, competing with another definer of actifity, the local contact and investigator. In variation, The Rock shrinks from being in charge in The Rundown, so Walken, who thinks it is his world anyway, steps in as nemesis and antithesis.

Running down a full circle, Hancock links up with Very Bad Things through its dyspeptic view of suburbia and its placement of a statuesque blonde (Cameron Diaz, Charlize Theron) as an eventually revealed dominant force in an otherwise masculine world. While Very Bad Things’s lead actor, Jon Favreau, in his turn to directing, takes the traditional stylistic and narrative route in Iron Man, Berg pursues a parody of middle class life. Before the film descends into another incoherent text, imposed by genre and commercial conventions and derived, sociologically speaking, from the show Heroes, X-Men, Jumper and similarly-themed films, Hancock successfully utilizes the realistic visuals to successfully blend comedy and drama. But in the end, Berg prefers his viewers to be depressed rather than exhilarated, and his impulse ultimately clashes with the commercial end of Hollywood cinema.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 11:50 am and is filed under Reel Politique - Film columnist DK Holm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.