Nobody’s Perfect: Writings From ‘The New Yorker’
by Anthony LaneKnopf, 752 pp., $35 Pauline Kael left The New Yorker in 1991; British import Anthony Lane arrived two years later to take up the torch (alongside the already-in-place David Denby). Now, nearly a decade later, Lane has compiled a sort of greatest hits from his tenure at The New Yorker and scrunched it all into 752 pages of wall-to-wall pleasantry. Nobody’s Perfect is split into three courses — “Movies,” “Books,” and “Profiles.” The “Books” section ably demonstrates Lane’s familiarity with both contemporary and classic literature, while “Profiles,” perhaps the strongest of the lot, chronicles the lives of artists, authors, and filmmakers in pieces that not so much take a stand as tell a story. Although the reviews that make up “Movies” are fine examples of Lane’s deft hand, the nearness of them makes one wonder if it is perhaps too soon to revisit the likes of The Truman Show and Dancer in the Dark, initially impressive works that haven’t yet had the shelf life to issue a final verdict. (In the case of trifles such as Sgt. Bilko, one could argue that never is soon enough for revisiting.) The most frequent complaint of Lane is that he is too amiable, too nonconfrontational; even when he is deriding a film, he still sounds like some well-groomed scamp in a Noel Coward play. Lane himself admits as much in his introduction: “The primary task of the critic (and nobody has surpassed the late Ms. Kael in this regard), is the re-creation of texture — not telling moviegoers what they should see, which is entirely their prerogative, but filming a sensory report on the kind of experience into which they will be wading, or plunging, should they decide to risk a ticket.” It’s interesting he should compare his methods with Kael’s (of whom Lane is an enthusiast rather than an acolyte). Kael never shied from polemics; Lane, in turn, reviews the Farrelly Brothers’ Kingpin in the manner of a conversation between Jane Austen’s Emma coterie: “‘I own that the Picture is less diverting than I had hitherto heard tell,’ concluded Mr. Elton. … Emma could not resist. ‘And I declare it as common as anything I ever saw!'” Lane’s Austen experiment is actually a darling of a read, and the same applies to the rest of Lane’s collection: The pieces here are darling, two polite sneezes shy of preciousness. What saves them, more often than not, is Lane’s almost Wildean snarkiness (he declares novelist Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient “so finely written that I found it, to all intents and purposes, unreadable”). The same charge may have been leveled at Lane — that of being too finely written — but he tempers that exquisite prose with a breeziness that makes for an engaging, easy read. The question still stands as to whether film criticism should be easy. Nonfiction
This article appears in October 11 • 2002.
