Pageantry vs Drama

So I was talking (arguing) with my friend Will yesterday about Sam Mendes's Road to Perdition.

Will said that the film was, in his opinion, the greatest crime movie since The Godfather Part II. I was telling him that he was full of shit. We had a good time.

Anyway, something that came out of our discussion (which we recorded for a future podcast) was my feeling that the problem with Road to Perdition - and the main problem with a lot of pretty good films like it (think about epic films set in the past, say, directed by Ridley Scott) is that no matter how pristinely they might have been put together, they're not dramas. They're pageants.

Imagine being a Victorian kid standing in a crowd as gaudily dressed actors walk by at the head of a parade. You see Saint George. You see a Princess. You see a Dragon. You would be able to go home at this point if you were interested in the story, because you already know exactly how it's going to end. You stay, not for the tale, but the spectacle. And that's how it is in these films, too.

There's an inevitability to the structure and characterisation of a pageant film. You know the good guys and the bad guys instantly. You're not cast adrift in a world where you have no idea what's going to happen next - there are rarely any surprises. You suspect not only how the film is going to end, but every arc and major plot point once the main characters have been established. While our main character may fight and bleed, there's a depressing inevitability to his winning of gun-fights or sword battles. No matter how stylish, or how high the stakes seem to be, conflict is never really dramatic. And people do not act like freezing rain is splashing down their faces in the night, because they're not real characters, they don't feel it. They act and react in cinematic ways that look great rather than belong in any kind of real, believable world. Because in a pageant, the lighting, effects, scoring - all the patina of cinematic credibility - come to the foreground because there's almost nothing behind them.

What was interesting was that when I asked Will who the most interesting characters in Road to Perdition, he replied instantly with exactly the same answer as me: Daniel Craig ("Connor"), and Jude Law ("Maguire").

Not Tom Hanks. Not Paul frickin' Newman, a man with more magnetism than the other three combined. Why is it that Craig and Law - who are meant to be most loathsome characters in the film - who torment and ruin the main characters and destroy their lives - the very people we should be rooting against the most - why are these the characters we most look forwards to seeing?

This question got me thinking about other films that were more pageant than drama. In almost every "good" film that succumbed to this trend, there's an outstanding character who lifts the whole production, and he's almost always the one you're meant to be rooting against.

Think about the most memorable character from Gladiator. You could ask 100 people, and 99 of them would have the same answer. Joachim Phoenix ("Commodius") is more interesting than all of those sword-fights in the Colosseum combined. Ten years on, he's the only thing that makes the movie okay to rewatch. The only startling image from the whole long, boring film is Commodius, lying on top of his own sister, experiencing some kind of unexplainable sexual epiphany. Why on earth is this incestuous rapist more appealing than a good-hearted general who kicks ass to avenge his family?

Before we go into that, let's take a third example. Saving Private Ryan. This film is a more difficult kettle of fish, because the genre-defining beginning and the weird, childish end kick the first act and conclusion out of the classic pageant form. Nevertheless, if you take the film through my pageant criteria, it fits - you instantly know who the good guys and the bad guys are (the Nazis, right?) - you know they're going to get picked off like flies trying to save one soldier - you know that no conflict will stop them from doing this - and you know it's going to take a long-ass time before they get there. It's much more of an ensemble piece than the other films which again makes pulling one character out more difficult. But there's one character I guarantee you'll remember when you start to think about it...

...That fucking German soldier, Joerg Stadler ("Steamboat Willie"). I can't remember him being in more than three scenes. You want to see more of this guy than Tom Hanks. And he's a fucking Nazi.

So why? Why these despicable characters hijacking the high ground of these stories? The answer is simple, really. They're the only dramatic characters in a pageant. As such, they're the only characters in the film who aren't totally predictable. They're the only ones who don't conform to the oppressively formal arcs of the story.

When Steamboat Willie escapes with his life we think - "What the fuck is that guy going to do next?" The same when we see Jude Law get shot in the eye and left for dead in a swanky bridal suite. And the worst thing about end duel in Gladiator is that we know Commodius is going to have to die. We don't just like these reprehensible characters because they exceed our expectations of what subsidiary characters can do in a genre. We actually start to sympathise with these characters, because we see how no-one in their worlds feels their pain. And they don't put up with their pain, either - they have drive and enterprise - I mean, Jude Law really tries to kill Tom Hanks while all the other antagonists just wait around, Commodius wants to be emperor so much he kills his own father, and Steamboat Willie, he digs his own grave like a motherfucker and with virtually no English persuades a bunch of determined executioners to spare him. These characters exhibit a dynamism and an unwillingness to concede to what fate has set out for them in a world otherwise completely controlled by preordained destinies.

In fact, these characters have a deeply-ingrained desire, then actively try to pursue that desire throughout every scene of the film they're in. In other words, they exhibit all the traits of a classic protagonist, when the three films' main characters are passive with no desires that don't come from circumstance.

And doesn't this seem to you to like swapping the main character and  subsidiary characters around?

Anyway, I'd be interested if anyone else has examples of Pageant films and characters that make them worth watching by refusing to conform to the rest of the film.

Welcome

Welcome to Script Suicide. This is a blog written for people like me.

What do I mean by people like me? I mean people who love writing scripts, but hate trying to squeeze every fucking story idea into a thriller/comedy that might appeal to teenage boys. I mean people who try to write spec TV samples and end up writing 200 page epics set in Ancient Carthage instead. I mean people who've never had a real credit, but can't imagine writing a giant, $200 million script that they couldn't also direct. I mean people who spend more time trying to hone their writing skills than their pitching and networking skills. And I mean people who spend years writing scripts better than the ones they read, but feel like no-one will ever read it.

If you're one of those people - half a head-in-the-clouds dreamer, and half a stick-in-the-mud writer, then this might be the place to share a few laughs, a few commiserations, and perhaps share a little inspiration.

And if you're not one of those people, I wish you all the success in the real world - a place that seems to be the equivalent of a Swiss euthanasia clinic for creative hopes and dreams.

After the bounce I'll be talking about some recent things I've been thinking about.