A modest critic

Remembering Vincent Canby

Vincent Canby, who died October 15 at age 76, lived in the same modest brownstone as my two seamstress aunts on New York’s Upper West Side. But I was always too timid to go hammering at his door. What would I have said if he’d answered it? “Hello, Mr. Canby, I just came by to say how much I’ve admired your New York Times film reviews. I’ve enjoyed their modesty, their steady tone, their unpretentious intelligence. And it’s amazing how, year in and year out, you can keep your standards high and maintain your civility without seeming to get angry about the increasing dumbing-down of cinema.”

So I never met Canby, the senior Times film critic from 1969 to 1993, before he transferred to the drama desk. But I was not surprised at any point by the descriptions of him in Janet Maslin’s leisurely, gracious October 16 obituary. Maslin, who was his second-string critic before inheriting his job, wrote of “a Dartmouth grad who forever dressed the part in tweed jacket, oxford shirt with button-down collar, gray or khaki trousers and striped tie,” and whose writing was “conversational prose that conveyed a bracing disdain for sentiment. . . . His scholarship and cultural perspective were never flaunted but were as solid as his journalism.”

His point of view? He was agreeably disposed to European modernism, with the late German filmmaker Rainer Werner Faßbinder a particular favorite. His critical judgment fled him when it was a picture made by fellow New Yorker Woody Allen: he praised even Woody’s worst. And his character? “His dignity and stature were effortless,” said Maslin.

In his vacation time, Canby wrote several novels and plays, but — that modesty again — he balked at anthologizing a collection his film reviews. “I don’t think they would read very well,” he told Cinéaste magazine. “I’m not a pacesetter as far as critical ideas go. I know that. So there’s not much point in publishing mine.”

NEIL LaBUTE comes on like Jekyll and Hyde these days: as the film director of the benign Hollywood comedy Nurse Betty (still showing at your neighborhood multiplex) and as the playwright of a lurid, monstrous trio of short dramas, Bash: The Latterday Plays (at the Actors Workshop through October 28).

Bash is far more consistent with LaBute’s previous two movies, In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors, both of which were reviled for their alleged misogyny and/or misanthropy. Yet at his Nurse Betty press conference at Cannes last May, he came off as, well, a nice, regular, relaxed guy who joked, “Eleven years ago I was here at Cannes as a journalist for a television station trying to get interviews with pretentious actors.”

Is he really a hale fellow? Or just tired of being thought of as a sexist-prick playwright and filmmaker? And is that why he made the sweet-tempered Nurse Betty?

He answered me with bracing honesty. “There is every chance I am a sexist prick and this is a ruse. Bash, which I wrote and originally directed in New York, consists of three one-act plays of people saying they are one kind of person and then doing dark deeds. It starred Calista Flockhart, who is America’s sweetheart and turns out to be a child murderer. I could have found a film to do much more unlikable than this one. But I enjoy attempting things I hadn’t done, and there’s a personal mandate to surprise people.”

LaBute grew up Mormon in Spokane, Washington, where along with his mother he viewed foreign films on the PBS affiliate. “It was a survey course of the greatest hits of world cinema. I saw La strada early on, The Seven Samurai. The 400 Blows was a favorite. I’m as happy watching La dolce vita as any movie I’ve ever seen. Now, I’m a big fan of Woody Allen and the Coen Brothers. I’ve been a fan a lot longer than I’ve been a filmmaker, and these are people I’d love to meet. And I’m quite intrigued by Philip Roth!”

He met Aaron Eckhart, the actor whom he’s cast in all his movies, while they were students at Brigham Young University. “Aaron was in my class, and I was the grad-school assistant, in a course in ‘Ethics in Film.’ We were actors in a scene about two theater collaborators who are writing a musical comedy based on the assassination of President Lincoln.”

Ethics in film? “I tried to gear the class to the ethics of adaptation. Would you have difficulty making a film which is politically charged and you don’t agree with the politics? I’m a Mormon filmmaker, and it informs my work. But I have some difficulty with the Church for being wary of the idea that showing something negative is fine in order to show something good. I certainly have that view.”

WANT TO TAKE a New England fall trip without running into the bumper-to-bumper foliage freaks? Head to Provincetown and the “Calling All Collectors” show at the Provincetown Museum, where among the snow domes, clay pipes, and German beer steins you’ll find museum director Chuck Turley’s enticing Joan Crawford memorabilia. Mildred Pierce lives! It’s there through November 30.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com

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