CULTURE SHOCKFrom 'Wall-E' to 'There Will Be Blood', it seems that at the leading edge of American cinema, dialogue is becoming dispensable, writes Fintan O'Toole
THE FILM Wall-E is over-rated. After the first 20 minutes or so, the Pixar animation is essentially a standard Disney cartoon. It is technically brilliant, slick and witty, but it follows the well-worn formula of cute anthropomorphic creatures (albeit robots instead of animals) struggling against overwhelming odds, finding love, winning through and delivering the anticipated charge of sentimental uplift.
But those first 20 minutes are really something. It is not just the relative courage of the dystopian vision of an uninhabitable earth or the visual richness of the imagery. It is the fact that a company as mainstream as Disney has returned to wordless story-telling. The fascination of Wall-E is that it is stunning up to the point when dialogue is introduced, after which it becomes clever but familiar entertainment.
In itself, the very long dialogue-free opening section of Wall-E might not mean very much. What's interesting is that the same technique is used in There Will Be Blood, in which the audience has to grasp the situation, background and character of Daniel Day-Lewis's oilman without the aid of dialogue, which is entirely absent in the long opening sequence and strikingly sparse thereafter. Paul Thomas Anderson's film actually centres on silence, not just in the nature of its storytelling, but in the taciturnity of Day-Lewis's character and the deafness of his son.
Another of the more ambitious American films of recent times, the Coen Brothers' No Country For Old Men also introduces one of its central characters, played by Josh Brolin, through a long wordless sequence in which he first hunts deer and then stumbles across the carnage of a drug war in the empty desert. Given that the Coen Brothers are US cinema's great verbal tricksters, the film's minimal reliance on dialogue, and preference for monologue and voice-over, seems to suggest that something larger is going on here. At the leading edge of mainstream American cinema, dialogue is becoming dispensable.
What's happening, perhaps, is a changing relationship between cinema and television. It may be that commercial movies are now experiencing something similar to the effect that cinema itself had on theatre around 80 years ago. The vast majority of those movies are entirely unconscious of any change, just as, in the middle decades of the 20th century, most of the theatre carried on as if nothing was happening. But at the more ambitious edge of the form, practitioners were aware that the ground was shifting and responded by going back to the basics of their own medium.
Talking about the impact of television on cinema now may seem as anachronistic as discussing the effect of the motor car on the use of horses. The shock seems to have happened a long time ago, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the rise of television ended the mass practice of "going to the pictures", as opposed to going to see a particular film. Cinema ceased to be the default mass entertainment, audiences declined rapidly and irreversibly, and the economics of cinema changed for good.
But these changes arguably had little effect on the self-confidence of cinema as a form. Put simply, good films remained better than good TV drama. They had vastly more resources, bigger stars, higher production values and a wider scope. TV drama serials were better at nitty-gritty social realism, and some of them were artistically as significant as even the best movies - but none of these were American. And when American TV drama did start to become more significant, it did so by paying Hollywood the ultimate compliment of imitation, importing cinematic pace, editing techniques and, where possible, star actors. Instead of posing a formal challenge, even the best TV drama aspired to be like the movies.
This has changed. In recent years, the commanding heights of American audio-visual art have been occupied, not by movies, but by TV series such as The Sopranos, Mad Men, Curb Your Enthusiasm and, especially, The Wire.
The acting, camera work, editing and pacing of a show such as The Wire are as good as the best that the movies have to offer. And the writing is much, much, better. At the leading edge (and it is well to remember that most American TV drama is still rubbish), writers and directors are finally exploiting the potential of the serial format to allow characters to unfold over time, to focus, not so much on a protagonist as on a tribe, and to create extended metaphors for the political and social state of the nation. And in doing so, they have revolutionised dialogue-based dramatic narrative in ways that leave traditional cinema trailing.
The best American TV, in other words, is now doing to cinematic dialogue what cinema did to theatrical realism in the decades after the 1920s, or what photography did to painting a little earlier. And the best American movie directors are responding in the ways that the best theatrical brains did back then.
At the leading edge of theatre, people realised that it was hopeless trying to compete in verisimilitude with the movies. At the leading edge of painting, it became clear that the camera had stolen the march for the reproduction of external reality. Theatre had to return to its own basic and distinctive condition - the co-presence of actors and audience. Painting had to go back to being marks on a surface.
Maybe what we're now seeing is the beginning of a return by cinema to its own distinctive essence - moving pictures. Silent movies were never really silent, since live music was crucial. Equally, the long sequences in these recent movies depend on sound and music. But the silent movies showed that mass audiences could relish visual narratives without dialogue and the first part of Wall-E returns us to that experience. The era of the talkies is far from over, but cinema may just be re-examining the connection between showing and telling.