I’m sorry I stabbed Vann Marsden in the eye. It’s terrible that his wife had to die in the aftermath. The fact that she was already ill and couldn’t take the strain doesn’t alter my sadness over her passing, but when a director takes all the movies you love and remakes them as stark, near silent catalogs of gestures, the critic has to respond.
One of the key roles of the cinema, I’d like you to understand, is to turn the atomized individual into part of a crowd, even while the viewer remains alone in the dark. The couple who comes to the theater seeking an evening entertainment—say they’ve eaten at the Mexican restaurant down the street, talking idly over the chips and guacamole, bundling up their leftovers and shoving the leaking containers into the back seat of the car—now give up sitting across from each other and sit next to each other, separated by an armrest, gazing forward. The monadic he and she, or he and he, or she and she, or whatever vessel the individual has poured their gender into, have dissolved into “audience” the moment the inane trivia questions fill the screen.