The Mellowing Of Angry Young Men

True Spielberg started as an optimistic populist, then made Munich when he was 59, and I'd argue that's one of the most classically indie 70's styled films to be made in the modern era - especially one bank-rolled by a major studio.

Honestly though regarding your broader question, it depends on the film-maker we're talking about. Some guys end up being Lou Reed and happily rest on their legacies, leaving their strongest work behind them, while some guys end up Tom Waits and just get more interesting as they go along.

Scorsese seems to have found a whole new level of confidence, like he's just happy doing exactly what he wants without having to prove anything to anyone. Coppola seems e\to be in a same creative space but is creating work of a completely different nature in his small arthouse type work.

Then look at someone like Jim Jarmusch or Peter Wier, who just consistently makes good if not incredible work but only make a film once every five years or more these days.

Staying in Australia, George Millers another great example, being a man whose career has taken serious turnes from genre to childrens films and possibly back again - it will be fascinating seeing his new Mad Max without Mel, Byron Kennedy and post-Babe and Happy Feet.

Over here we have a saying that I'm guessing has counterparts everywhere in the world. I'm paraphrasing because you won't recognize the party names but it kind of goes: Anarchist in your teens, communist in your twenties, socialist in your thirties, democrat in your forties.

It is true about every walk of life, I don't see why it shouldn't apply to art. Either "the system" beats you into submission or you get tired of raging or you honestly change your mind, keeping the same verve and momentum over decades is something only a statistically insignificant number of people are able to achieve. I really think that the only to do so would be to follow what Soderberg wants to do. Say "OK, I did all the stuff I think I can with movies. Time to start painting." 

Yeah I think Tarantino will retire young to avoid this, in a way. 

I always saw Tarantino's mayhem stemming from a general excitement about movies rather than any kind of anger.

Let's not forget that Scorsese's next film is a fantastical children's movie that's being filmed in 3D. Something I never thought would happen if I was just familiar with the Scorsese that made Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas. I don't know what that says about the man today, but the choice of particular film he chose to film in 3D might speak volumes of what he has to say about the subject(3D movies) all together. Which isn't the dicussion at hand, I know, but that's something that's on my mind when it comes to Hugo Cabret. Also: not intended to be a burn, either.

Age and experience undoubtedly have a lot to play in this, I think. I mean, it's a given. What's interesting to see in this pattern is how a filmmaker tries to articulate this wisdom, yet still doesn't try to divorce the earlier voice that made whatever filmmaker successful in the first place--all the while not being a parody of themselves. Don't know if I explained that clearly, but an example of what I'm talking about is David Lynch's The Straight Story.

But I do agree that a gradual mellowing out does seem to be the norm so it's kind of fun to see what goes against the grain. Munich was already mentioned, and I think that's an outstanding example. The only two that I can think of that strays from this logic is Sidney Lumet's ...Before The Devil Knows You're Dead and Huston's Prizzi's Honor.

I think the Coen brothers most recent output (not so much True Grit, but definitely the one-two-three punch of No Country, Burn After Reading, and A Serious Man) has been the angriest and most vicious portion of their filmography.  Granted, they haven't been at it as long as guys like Scorcese and Spielberg, but I don't really see them mellowing out any time soon.      

With the Coens, it's worth noting that they had a 3 year break between Ladykillers and No Country For Old Men. I'm sure after the former, they had some things to be pissed about.

The thing about Scorsese circa all his seething films of the '70s and early '80s: cocaine is a hell of a drug.

Folks generally mellow out. Spielberg is an interesting case, though. He got darker and weirder as he got older. Maybe it was all the research he did into the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II.

To what extent has the reality of the studio system influenced the arc of a lot of filmographies? If you want millions of dollars to make a big film, you're not going to be able to go to the same place you did thirty years ago. Individual quality aside, I'd say Scorsese's last true art film — in terms of "Here's your budget, we don't really expect to make diddly back on this thing, but we believe in you and your vision" — was Kundun fourteen years ago, and even that didn't come from the same dude who made Taxi Driver.

Would you say Spike Lee has mellowed, or is it just that he hasn't been getting the chance to make angry films any more? It does seem to me, though, that a lot of anger (and, some would say, a lot of vitality) left him after he finished Malcolm X. Not to knock 25th Hour or Inside Man, but those are more like excellent work-for-hire I-love-New-York gigs. Come to think of it, Bamboozled was angry, but Bamboozled was also an unholy mess. So maybe that burned him out, or maybe its failure at the box office meant less studio indulgence. You could say When the Levees Broke was an angry work, but it seems like so much more than that. Basically it seems he's been spending a lot of the past decade drifting into docs and concert films.

My boy Herzog will never mellow.

Never.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Martin Blank 

 

Would you say Spike Lee has mellowed, or is it just that he hasn't been getting the chance to make angry films any more? It does seem to me, though, that a lot of anger (and, some would say, a lot of vitality) left him after he finished Malcolm X. Not to knock 25th Hour or Inside Man, but those are more like excellent work-for-hire I-love-New-York gigs.

There are days watching 25th Hour where I imagine Norton's Fuck You speech in front of the mirror is Spikes answer to the racial insult montage in Do The Right Thing. I think that was the moment he put his anger on film to bed, and just does what floats his boat. Levees aside, though. He was fucking PISSED there.

Little-known fact, though: the Norton speech comes pretty much verbatim out of David Benioff's novel.

Not that it lessens the anger of the moment in Spike's film (after all, Spike chose to include it). I had initially assumed it was purely a Spike moment before I read the book.

Especially since it seems to break the fourth wall. That really seems like it would be a Spike Lee flourish.

Scorsese: Maybe it's just because it's such a favorite of mine (if a minor accomplishment critically), but Bringing Out The Dead has Scorsese's signature's all over it. It may not be in the top tier of his oeuvre, it still feels like a work of passion from him.

Spike: She Hate Me still fits the mold of agitator (if not angry) Spike, in my opinion. It's a very Bamboozled-esqe mess, narrative speaking, but more appealing to me if only because of the less obvious blend (in comparison to Bamboozled) of sexual and corporate politics. I think Spike still has a fire inside of him. It may flare less frequently than in his early years, but I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he has at least another one or two strong personal statements left to inflict on cinema (said with all admiration).

Quote:

Originally Posted by weakfingers 

 

Spike: She Hate Me still fits the mold of agitator (if not angry) Spike, in my opinion. It's a very Bamboozled-esqe mess, narrative speaking, but more appealing to me if only because of the less obvious blend (in comparison to Bamboozled) of sexual and corporate politics. I think Spike still has a fire inside of him. It may flare less frequently than in his early years, but I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he has at least another one or two strong personal statements left to inflict on cinema (said with all admiration).

 

Oh, definitely. I think She Hate Me might be his angriest film, in that it's one big pessimistic OH MY GOD FUCK EVERYTHING kind of movie. Seriously, there are about eleventy billion targets he takes on in that movie, and he maybe hits half of them.

Interesting topic. I don't know enough about documentary filmmakers, but does it seem like they follow a similar trajectory? Michael Moore has become far more pissed (and, unfortunately, unfocused) in his later years, while Errol Morris has gotten bouncier and more playful - Standard Operating Procedures is damn near a black comedy instead of the horror show I expected from the man behind The Thin Blue Line.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gabe T 

Interesting topic. I don't know enough about documentary filmmakers, but does it seem like they follow a similar trajectory? Michael Moore has become far more pissed (and, unfortunately, unfocused) in his later years, while Errol Morris has gotten bouncier and more playful - Standard Operating Procedures is damn near a black comedy instead of the horror show I expected from the man behind The Thin Blue Line.

Morris has always struck me to have a quirky side, though(Vernon, Florida and Fast, Cheap & Out of Control rest my case). Even the morbid Dr. Death is eccentric. Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War are kind of the odd ducks in his filmography.

I can't wait to see Tabloid.

Bucho mentioned Herzog. Who's never really struck me as "angry." Passionate, yeah. Uncompromising, definitely. I mean, if you look at his Kinski films, Kinski was a tornado of rage and lust and god knows what else. Outside of that I don't really get much of an anger vibe from Herzog. Though he does have a pessimistic/realistic streak. That said, the man certainly hasn't mellowed. He continues to squint at people's private manias and chase mystical phantasms all over the planet and generally be great.

Veering into the acting side of the house, I'd say Robert De Niro is a good example of this phenomenon. He had such an intensity that often manifested in anger in his early to mid years but now seems more than content to coast on his past glory, while mocking his earlier roles in countless subpar comedies. Though he has taken the occasional "real" role in the past 15 or so years, it seems that Heat was the last gasp for him to flex his chops.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Martin Blank 

Bucho mentioned Herzog. Who's never really struck me as "angry." Passionate, yeah. Uncompromising, definitely. I mean, if you look at his Kinski films, Kinski was a tornado of rage and lust and god knows what else. Outside of that I don't really get much of an anger vibe from Herzog. Though he does have a pessimistic/realistic streak. That said, the man certainly hasn't mellowed. He continues to squint at people's private manias and chase mystical phantasms all over the planet and generally be great.

I couldn't have put it better.

Which is probably why I didn't put it better. I knew somebody smarter would chime in.

Surprised nobody's mentioned Clint.

Laid-back as he is, a lot of his early films as director have an undercurrent of anger — I'm thinking of Play Misty for Me and High Plains Drifter and to some extent The Outlaw Josey Wales and The Eiger Sanction. Into the '80s you have Sudden Impact and Heartbreak Ridge. (I'm omitting obvious stuff he didn't direct; Tightrope marked the beginning of some insight into self-destructive behavior.) Then Bird in '88 was kind of a turning point. White Hunter, Black Heart wrestled with his own demons as well as Huston's. Unforgiven was all about where anger really gets you, as was A Perfect World. Since then, even when his flicks have high-pitched emotions in them, like Mystic River and Gran Torino, they're more meditations on anger than wallowing in it.

Getting back to Scorsese, Raging Bull I think was a turning point. The whole movie punches everybody, punches itself. Since then most of the movies themselves haven't been angry. They partition anger off to the side, usually embodied by Joe Pesci. Cape Fear brings back some of the Raging Bull relentlessly-punching brutality, but there it's supposed to evoke horror; it feels pissed-off, I've always imagined, because it's Scorsese saying "You want a mainstream violent thriller?? I'll give you a fucking mainstream violent thriller," and cinematically stabs us in the throat ten times with a pen. That goddamn film is full of disgust — at itself, at its characters, at the audience, at the studio system that readily gave him the money for this but gave him such a hard time with Last Temptation. So of course it was his biggest hit up to that time.

I'd say Kurosawa got more angry and bitter as he grew older...maybe in large part because he had trouble getting funding for his films, and also because Japanese critics dismissed  him in the 70's. It's really heartbreaking to watch an early film like No Regrets for our Youth, up through his "Samurai Westerns" in the 60's , then watch Ran. The optimism and Humanism have been replaced by bitterness and pessimism.

Yeah. Not to speak ill of the great revered dead, but if Akira Kurosawa's Dreams had anyone else's name in front of it...

Beautifully shot, but man, what a trudge, with at least three segments devoted to how much we suck because we're fucking up the planet. (Not that it's an irrelevant message. But it's not art, it's a lecture. You want a great Kurosawa film about making the most of your time here, look to Ikiru.) Again, evidence of the later-period bitterness.

Billy Wilder and Sam Fuller stayed pretty sharp and acerbic up to the end of their careers. Of course, they spent much of their final years not directing.

As far as the mellowing of not-particularly-angry-to-begin-with directors, I always say that John Waters didn't go mainstream — the mainstream went John Waters.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Suitably Ironic Moniker 

Veering into the acting side of the house, I'd say Robert De Niro is a good example of this phenomenon. He had such an intensity that often manifested in anger in his early to mid years but now seems more than content to coast on his past glory, while mocking his earlier roles in countless subpar comedies. Though he has taken the occasional "real" role in the past 15 or so years, it seems that Heat was the last gasp for him to flex his chops.

And to play off this example I look at Eddie Murphy. Not as much "anger" as "Puckish rebellion". He started earlier in his career playing the outsider, the subversive fish out of water, the black man struggling in the white world. TRADING PLACES, BEVERLY HILLS COP, even COMING TO AMERICA to a degree. Very similar to Pryor's solo stuff like BREWSTER'S MILLIONS and THE TOY. When Murphy's success built to its zenith, he was no longer that outsider. No more struggle. He was a bankable star. His choices then became safe and lazy. And so were his characters. His characters weren't hungry anymore (there's a Klump joke in there somewhere). Because neither was Eddie. Compare BEVERLY HILLS COP with DADDY DAYCARE, and I don't just mean in quality or comedy. There's a taming and assimilation that took place with Murphy's career. That "dangerous" comedy of his that aped Pryor's also wasn't as dangerous as many new young black and white alike comedians rose to recognition using a similar "uncensored" schtick. Some are able to make a name (Chris Rock), but that raw hunger becomes diluted in some cases, especially when success drops you right into the suburban territory of those you poked fun. You can take the cop out of Detroit... and apparently... the Detroit out of the cop. Sorry, Axel F.
 

Nothing to add yet (and probably won't have anything new to add).  Just wanted to say that I'm loving this thread.

EDIT: Just wanted to add the effect that raising children has on a filmmaker.  Gary Oldman basically said that he takes big jobs that don't take him away from his responsibilities of raising his sons.  Paul Greengrass says he enjoyed Shrek 3 because his daughter loved it so much.  ... good thing it doesn't affect the quality of his filmmaking.  Heheheh

Quote:

Originally Posted by mcnooj82 

Nothing to add yet (and probably won't have anything new to add).  Just wanted to say that I'm loving this thread.

 

EDIT: Just wanted to add the effect that raising children has on a filmmaker.  Gary Oldman basically said that he takes big jobs that don't take him away from his responsibilities of raising his sons.  Paul Greengrass says he enjoyed Shrek 3 because his daughter loved it so much.  ... good thing it doesn't affect the quality of his filmmaking.  Heheheh

Johnny Depp having a kid is pretty much why we're talking about a fourth Pirates movie. Family usually changes things.

Yeah, damn good thread, chaps.

And mcnooj is kind of echoing the thing that came to my mind reading the first post. People sometimes get an idea that 'mellowing out' is somehow synonymous with becoming more bland, or somehow 'givng up' on one's original artistic vision. But the truth is, life's about more than careers or artistic identities, and the experience of life is ultimately what drives one's art - not the other way round.

Most young filmmakers' output is extreme in their early careers, because at that stage of their life their careers are probably the whole OF their life (Or at least the only aspect of it they take seriously) Then, after they get their success and establish themselves, that's when the other aspects of life inevitably come into the frame; relationships, marriage, parenthood and all the emotional highs and lows one goes through just in the process of life. Naturally, this stuff affects the art or they wouldn't be doing their job as an artist.

Now, whether this new material is good or not is a relative thing, but even if it's not quite on par with the early works it's still relevant as a document of where that artist was at that time of their life. Artistic talent never goes away; it just gets filtered through one's own life experiences, and just because a filmmaker's output seems mellower/less weighty than their early stuff doesn't mean it'll never redevelop some of that intensity, or even develop a level of intensity never before seen (Spielberg's a great example of this)

40-year-old and still rocking, the only thing slowing down him is money/studio system.

You could probably make a case for William Friedkin being an angry young man back in the day. I would've said he'd mellowed, but then he came back with Bug, which is not the work of a fat happy old director. Which suggests that post-Cruising he did a lot of time in movie jail, taking whatever crap landed on his desk. Though some would definitely counter with To Live and Die in L.A. and even Rampage (it's been too long since I've seen either).

Oliver Stone, anyone? Seems to me he worked off a lot of his demons with Nixon. After that the portfolio gets a lot calmer. And frequently duller.

It's a little too soon to declare that PTA hasn't mellowed, since he's only 40 and has only made five films. We'll see what kind of films he makes in twenty years.

One thing about Spielberg, who I think has not mellowed so much as become a completely different filmmaker from the one he was in the '70s: he has always had a streak of sadism. Going back to Duel and Jaws. Even E.T. has that gut-wrenching shot of the raccoon climbing off E.T.'s apparently lifeless body; that's always fucking bothered me. When he started making historical films, that gave him a blank check to depict horribly realistic brutality. I don't like A.I., but it has some genuinely frightening and bizarre moments. Not every one of his films has traumatic moments — Catch Me If You Can and The Terminal were pretty light. But if he ever gets around to that Lincoln movie, expect the most hideous Civil War casualty scenes ever. Point: these days he does entertainments like CMIYC and Crystal Skull as palate-cleansers in between the most upsetting history movies money can buy. The War Horse is going to be a very hard PG-13, I suspect.

By all accounts it was the personal meltdown he suffered during a particularly nasty divorce (that NBK was apparently one long scream of rage about) followed by the epic trouble he had making Nixon complete with the punchline that one of his most passionate projects became one of his biggest flops that broke Stone.

If there's anyone I'd love to see have a Coen brothers-styled revival of passion after a major artistic setback, it's him, but I'm pretty convinced that ship has sailed.

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Rain Dog 

By all accounts it was the personal meltdown he suffered during a particularly nasty divorce (that NBK was apparently one long scream of rage about) followed by the epic trouble he had making Nixon complete with the punchline that one of his most passionate projects became one of his biggest flops that broke Stone.

 

If there's anyone I'd love to see have a Coen brothers-styled revival of passion after a major artistic setback, it's him, but I'm pretty convinced that ship has sailed.

I'm hoping Savages fixes that.
 

Even though I would have loved for Stone to ride the zeitgeist wacked out of his fucking mind ala his mid 90s phase, but I do appreciate his "aw shucks" Twain like approach to W.