What I mean is that the great films were so great that they almost obscured how good the good films were. "3:10 to Yuma" was the first western since before "Unforgiven" to feel less like an anti-western and more like a genuine pulp western (the former deconstructs the genre; the latter uses the genre to deconstruct humanity.) "Gone, Baby, Gone" was a topdown exploration of modern American class, masquerading as a mystery. Comedies that could have been shrill quirkfests – "Juno" and "Dan in Real Life," both filled with eccentric families and twisted romance – were simultaneously funnier than we thought and wiser than anyone expected.
The ringmaster of this whole spontaneous circus - call it the return of the B-movies, films perpetually at 4 or 5 on your Netflix queue - was Tony Gilroy, who used the international espionage thriller and the Grisham-ish courtroom drama to tell basically the same story about demented bureaucracy, corrosive all-American power, and one man's desperate, simple urge to find himself - the first was called "The Bourne Ultimatum," the second was called "Michael Clayton."
A western, a Boston noir-fest, a pregnant-teen sensation, a family-reunion romance, a threequel blockbuster, and a corporate thriller - what's the common link? More to the point, what is it that makes these very good movies just a little bit more powerful than the best television? Why isn't "3:10 to Yuma" just warmed-over "Deadwood"; what makes "Gone, Baby, Gone" feel different from a couple "Wire" hours; how come one "Bourne" chater has more thrills than four seasons of "Alias"? "Eli Stone" is similar in outline to "Michael Clayton" - a formerly heartless corporate lawyer starts standing up for the little guy (just like in "Shark" and "The Guardian.")
In a sense, this question is simple - why are movies different than TV - but I think it's more complex than it used to be. With bigger budgets and HD, television essentially looks as good as movies do (Michael Mann, ever the subtle innovator, was the first filmmaker to make a movie with a modern TV aesthetic - "Collateral," shot in burnished digital video, feels more like sequel to Mann's TV show "Robbery Homicide Division" than his earlier LA noir "Heat" - making him the spiritual successor to Alfred Hitchcock, who shot "Psycho" with a TV crew and made movie history.) But television still has to be fast - even HBO shows film episodes in under two weeks, about six post-edit minutes per day versus movie's general ratio of 2.5 minutes per day.
That's why TV shows have so many writers - and why the cast size of TV shows keeps on swelling. (When you're out of ideas, pull one lever and the pregnant chick goes into labor; if that's not enough, pull the other lever and Mom's cancer relapses.) And that's also, really, what still separates a great film scene from a great television scene. Each of the very good films mentioned above turn, in one way or another, on one long back-and-forth dialogue scene between two people, in which every line is laced with meaning, without any time for window dressing. (The great films are full of these scenes - is there a line wasted in "No Country for Old Men?")
In "3:10 To Yuma," it's Christian Bale and Russell Crowe's last scene together before the final run for the train - in a way, the whole movie is about paring itself down to these two men, very different characters played by very different actors (Bale tends to play calculating characters - he has secret identities, in one form or another, in "Batman," "The Prestige," "American Psycho"; Crowe plays simple characters helplessly addicted to their own fate, which is why he's so good at playing losers and even better at playing heroes.) In "Gone, Baby, Gone," it's the scene between Amy Ryan and Casey Affleck, when she, the most neglectful drug-addict mother Boston has ever seen, begs him to save her child.
It's the scene in "Bourne" where Matt Damon talks to Julia Stiles, over a table in quiet little European bar. Its maybe the only time in the movie Bourne has a real conversation. He thinks they're talking about his lost love, but they're actually talking about hers. And it's that last scene in "Michael Clayton" between Tilda Swinton and George Clooney, where all of her lies finally catch up with her - its like that penultimate scene from "The Maltese Falcon" between Bogart and the Dame, the moment when a film built on secrets finally runs into brutal truth (except not even Tony Gilroy could write a line like "I hope they don't hang you, precious, by that sweet neck.")
These are scenes of deep connection between two people. They all seem to run just a little long, and they are all built on decisive twists, not of plot but of character. It doesn't really matter how Bale's farmer lost his leg; we learn that Stiles' character was in love with Bourne right before she departs the series; Amy Ryan's mama is a bitch before this scene and a bitch after this scene. The characters don't really develop in scenes like this, so much as, for one quick second, come into sharp microscopic Blu-Ray focus. In this way, these scenes don't just change our mind about characters we thought we knew - they seem to carry the entire hidden meaning of their entire film, hovering in the silence between words.
In the last decade, television has grown up in a lot of ways, but making a scene like this is still relatively elusive - it takes rehearsal time, and writing time, and an understanding by the creators of just what, exactly, is the central idea of their narrative. Really, most great television nowadays is great because it's so good at keeping the viewer's attention away from this kind of scene - at creating endless tangents from the main point. "24," "Lost," "Battlestar Galactica," "Rome," the underrated "The Nine" - these are all shows whose plots would have once been considered better fodder for movies than for television shows, because they are based on immediacy - terrorists are attacking and the clock is ticking, we have to get off the island, we have to find Earth, we're battling for control of Rome, the bank is being robbed, etc. The joy of these shows is that they can stretch out the immediacy, shade in the characters and the detail, discover new rhythms and even create an entirely new self-realized thesis (can you imagine "Lost" without Benjamin Linus?)
Yet with this stretching out, there is also an endless symphony of distraction. Probably the main complaint that dogs any serial drama is that the characters never talk about what we want them to talk about. Take "Battlestar Galactica." Secretly, we've all been waiting for a conversation like this since the first episode of the series:
(Main cast sit around a table. Baltar smokes a cigarillo. Tigh sips from his flask.)
Baltar: I've got a confession to make. You know how sometimes I'll kind of stare into space when you're talking to me and then respond to what you say awkwardly, as if I was following instructions from someone you can't see? Well, ever since the hot blonde Cylon - the one without the accent - seduced me into accidentally helping destroy humanity, I've been seeing her in my head. For awhile there I thought she was a holographic projection of a chip in my head. Then I thought I was crazy. Now I think she's an angel.
Caprica Six: That's so funny! Ever since I seduced you into destroying humanity, I've been seeing and talking to an invisible version of YOU. Except that the you in my head has a slightly different accent from the you in reality.
Starbuck: Speaking of invisible people, I kept seeing visions of Leoben, right before I blew up, disappeared for two months, and then somehow found earth, maybe. He made me talk to my dead mother. It was dramatic.
Roslin: Visions? Sometimes I'll have visions about being in an opera house.
Baltar: Wait, an opera house? I've been to that opera house! I had a dream about Boomer's child being there! Back then, the Six in my head was saying it was our child, but hey, she was vague about it.
Boomer: Maybe this has something to do with the hybrid. She's the human/cylon creature who always talks nonsensically, except in a way that seems secretly full of meaning. She lives in a neon futuristicky pool.
Adama: Wait, a pool, you say? I remember seeing one of those pools when I was just a young lad fighting in the war! Damn, I hate those Cylons.
Chief: Hey, I'm a Cylon!
Tigh: Me too!
Anders/Tory: Yeah, and us!
Lee: (reacting to everyone at once) Wait, what?
(Curtain falls, applause rings out, curtain rises. Cast takes a bow and points to the orchestra pit. Bear McCreary bows and then murders a Taiko drum)
"Lost" fans can imagine something similar to the above - all the main characters (including dead people, with Miles as a medium) hang out and figure out all the strange ways their lives intersected before they reached the island. ("That's so funny, I met your father when I was in Iraq right after I tortured my superior officer!" "Wait, YOUR dad was in that car accident that almost paralyzed my later ex-wife?") Yet for so much of modern television, the central thesis seems to be that such moments never occur - that no one person can ever know everything there is to know about the show. Think about "The Wire" - which single character could ever fathom the entirety of that show's portrayal of Baltimore? Isn't it strange, but totally natural, that Tommy Carcetti and Jimmy McNulty never actually meet?
Yet there are moments when serial dramas tap into the spirit of the imaginary scene above. It's Locke asking Ben, point blank, "What is the monster?" But it's also little moments, like AJ Soprano, in the final moments of his series, reminding his father that he once said "Try to remember the times that were good." Tony doesn't remember this, but we do - he said it in the first season finale. Moments like these - you might call them fan service, but really it's just explicit continuity - work so well, because, for brief little moments, characters on TV shows seem to know exactly as much about their own lives as we do.
All of which is a roundabout way of getting around to a scene from last week's "Battlestar Galactica" which was simultaneously the least mythological scene in the whole episode (and on the Cylon plot side, this episode had more going on than any episode since season 2's brainfuck gamechanger "Downloaded") and just about the best scene that the show has ever produced.
Roslin is sitting at Adama's desk. Adama, still wearing last night's uniform and looking for all the world like an old man waking up from a bad fraternity flashback, pours himself a glass of space whiskey. "Enjoying that more than usual," says the President of the Human Race. "Hair a the dog. Lee's party," explain the Commanding Officer and Savior of Humanity. There's a deep undercurrent here - her concern masked by sarcasm, his casual air masking a slight embarassment.
She snorts. Not even a laugh. And she changes the subject. She's always so direct. "What do we do now? Put her on trial? Find (her voice turns) Romo Lampkin? Take a show of hands?" Stephen Jenkins, a media creator, often discuss how, in modern superhero comics, the heroes talk to each other the way that kids used to playact them in backyards - a bit more sarcastic, more self-aware. The sneering way she says "Romo Lampkin" is exactly in that spirit - as much a comment on the show itself as on previous events.
"I don't know," he says.
"Follow her into an ambush?" She's not asking it like it's a question.
"She's driven," he tries. He's pacing, trying to get away.
"You gonna keep waltzing or you gonna sit down and talk?" She's angry at him, in a way that's both maternal and something more romantic. "What's going on. Sit." Like a cowed child he comes back.
"What if she's telling the truth?" he says. "She was supposed to die out there. She didn't. I can't explain it. What if she was meant to help us. And this is, um..." he trails off, realizing how completely the two of them have reversed themselves, over the course of their sad little life together. (Because "Battlestar Galactica" is about sad little lives, with group bathrooms and bad food and no sun and reprocessed air.)
"A what?" she says, and she smiles. "A Miracle?" She knows that she has won a point, but in the wrong place, at the wrong time. "Is that what you want to call this? Go ahead, say it. Grab your piece of the golden arrow. I want to hear Admiral Atheist say that a miracle happened." What a marvelously subtle actress Mary McDonnell is! Look at all the emotion she can pack into a line like "Go ahead, say it." Excitement, and teasing sarcasm, but also hope, and disbelief.
"You shot at her and you missed at close range." There's a look on Edward James Olmos' face here that he wears very often - that tough, squinty-eyed, almost Eastwoodian growl. Like Eastwood, Olmos' greatest skill as an actor is the mesmerizing quietude of his voice - like a purr from a grizzly bear. But there's something different in his bearing, now, than when the show started. Maybe it's because he wears his glasses less. Maybe it's because he finds himself more willing to believe in people. Maybe he's in love.
"Duloxin fracks with your aim," she says.
"So does doubt."
This is the point in a bad show where the characters might begin to back away. But she won't. "I pulled the trigger and I'd do it again. She put her life in front of a bullet as if it had no meaning. You drop an egg, you reach for another."
"Maybe convincing you meant more to her than her own life." He's struggling, and he knows it. It's hard to argue with a sober, intelligent, powerful, well-rested dying woman when you're half-drunk, barely conscious, unshowered and starting the weekend early.
"Is that your miracle?" she asks. "You want to talk about miracles? On the very same day that a very pale doctor informed me that I had terminal cancer, most of humanity was annihilated, and I survived. And by some mathematical absurdity, I became president." This is a conversation with more on its mind than just the latest plot twist. This is, we're starting to realize, somehow about the entirety of the show. He wants to believe; she can't allow herself to.
"And then," she continues, "my cancer disappeared, long enough for us to find a way to earth. You can call it whatever you want. And now, I'm dying."
"Don't talk that way," he says. Is there anything sadder than when a manly man tries to confront cancer? It reminds one of Tony Soprano way back in season 1, talking about how his best friend was gonna beat the cancer, same way he could beat up a kid and steal his lunch money.
"Bill, you gotta face this," she says. Roslin has always been a fierce realist, but only because she has so much faith. "My life is coming to an end soon enough, and I am not gonna apologize to you for not trusting her, and I am not, I am not gonna trust her with the fate of this fleet."
And here, something interesting happens - she moves from matters cosmic to matters deeply personal. "You are so buckled up inside. You can't take anymore loss. Your son's leaving, this, me, I know it."
"No one's going anywhere," he says.
"Okay. Here's the truth. This is what's going on. You want to believe Kara. you would rather be wrong about her and face your own demise than risk losing her again." She knows him.
He knows it. "You can say in the room, but get out of my head." He stands up for a refill. It's a good last line for a good scene.
But it's not over. "You're so afraid to live alone," she says.
"And you're afraid to die that way." It's an amazing line. It's tough. It's passive aggressive. But it's also true. She smiles, but there's nothing funny about it.
"You're afraid," he continues, "that you may not be the dying leader you thought you were. Or that your death may be as meaningless as everyone else's." She deconstructed him, but he deconstructed her right back. And it hurt both of them. You have to really love someone to hurt them this bad.
He walks away. She smiles even wider - maybe laughing at the joke of existence, maybe laughing at this funny little man she's inextricably linked to, maybe holding back tears - and puts her glasses back on. She pulls aimlessly at her hair, and finds that it's coming out. She smiles even wider, and cries.
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