From October 2002 CentralBooking.com — site is no longer alive.

In Conversation with Anthony Lane

There are people who subscribe to the New Yorker, and then there are New Yorker addicts: people who will strike their roommates should said roommates happen to borrow and spill coffee on the new issue. I'm one of the latter. A while ago, when I moved, I finally consigned roughly 15 years' worth of the magazine to the recycling, acknowledging I was never actually going to go digging for that piece on a Las Vegas whorehouse, or that review of the new Philip Roth. And yet I miss them.

New Yorker addicts in turn can be subdivided into several armed camps. There are those who would like to see former editor Tina Brown in chains for "what she did to the magazine" but continue to read it anyway, piously ignoring the photographs, and those who think she rescued it from 8,000-word treatises on the legacy of the Ice Age. The retirement of longtime (1968 to 1991) New Yorker movie critic Pauline Kael inspired another split, between those who felt lost in the darkness of the theatre without her passionate advocacy and those who liked reading her, but wouldn't go so far as to sacrifice small animals to beg for her return.

Kael's eventual full-time replacements, Anthony Lane and David Denby, whose reviews now appear on alternate weeks, likewise have their own bitter advocates. Denby is the serious one. He analyzes movie themes with an academic attention to every nuance, gently chastises films strangled by their lack of ambition, and writes sentences like "perhaps some moviegoers will be startled by so lyrical and meditative an approach to what seems like a commonplace subject" (plucked at random from the April 15 review of the French film Time Out.) He makes jokes occasionally, but they're not very funny, because Art isn't meant to be funny, except when it tries to be; Denby sometimes appreciates comedy but usually with a touch of guilt and condescension.

And then we have Anthony Lane, Mozart to Denby's Salieri, whose movie reviews evoke the breathless joys of rollercoaster rides or Mark Morris choreography. They shamelessly celebrate the idea that movies—and movie reviews—are, first and foremost, entertainment. Sometimes that entertainment turns out to be moving, or educational, or even—heavens—inspiring, but Lane never forgets that a) his job is not solely to motivate or dissuade readers from coughing up $9 and b) his job is among the most fun to be had in journalism.

Open Lane's 752-page doorstop, Nobody's Perfect, which collects his movie reviews and numerous other New Yorker writings from April 1993 to October 2001, anywhere. From the review of The Mummy: "Among the inventive tortures devised by Imhotep, none is quite so excruciating as being forced to speak Stephen Sommers's lines." Or the first sentence from The Phantom Menace piece: "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, people made movies with people in them, and some of those movies made sense."

If neither of those didn't make you laugh as you nodded in recognition, then stop reading now. The readers who prefer to get their criticism from Denby do so because most intellectual Americans are comedically challenged. We think politically correct language can actually affect the issues it censures; we cannot simultaneously admire something and riff on its flaws.

But Lane is a man unafraid of the semicolon, willing to pin every blasé performance to the page with a spray of em-dashes. If Pauline Kael was applauded for trying to write as she would talk, then Lane should be worshiped for writing as we wish we all talked: with wit, erudition, compassionate skepticism, even insight. His writing does have an Achilles' heel: he'll stalk a really bad pun, wrestle it to the ground, and then hold it up proudly for our groans. Yet he mixes high and low cultural references without seeming to stretch for either of them, and almost always nails the landings for his feats of syntactic acrobaticism. As he writes of his hero Vladimir Nabokov, he has "perfect verbal pitch."

For these reasons, I was quite nervous as I waited for Lane in the lobby of San Francisco's Prescott Hotel. If we New Yorker addicts read the magazine as avidly as other, more socialized Americans watch sports, then I was about to play Horse with the Michael Jordan of journalism.

Then Lane walked into the room and introduced himself. He is English, which I had guessed before he outed himself in the introduction to his book. Aside from his occasional slips like "rings" for "calls," there's a cheekiness, a deadpan playfulness to his tone that I associate with Martin Amis or Nick Hornby, and not American writers. Lane is also, judging strictly by appearances, about 12 years old, although the book jacket gives his birth year as 1962 and he has two young children. Slight, of average height and typical English mayonnaise coloring, he was wearing what was probably a nice suit but one that had had a tough trip in his suitcase. His fair hair had been flattened on one side and he was rubbing his eyes. He looked like Owen Wilson impersonating Wes Anderson.

Or like someone at 11 a.m. of the sixth day of a six-city book tour, which is what he was. I asked him if he wanted coffee or tea, and he laughed and said, "Why? Because I seem like I've just risen from my coffin and been consecrated?" He then proceeded to recount the humiliating ritual he had observed earlier that morning, of walking into Borders unannounced and offering to sign their copies of his book. "It's a highly unnatural thing for any Englishman to have to do. But, as my publisher explained, that way they put the book out, on a display table. More importantly, then they can't return it to the publisher."

This self-deprecating tale was followed by another about the about-to-be-a-bestseller first novel that his wife, Allison Pearson, had just written. Miramax had snapped up the film rights to I Don't Know How She Does It: The Life of Kate Reddy, Working Mother and Knopf—also Lane's publisher—had ordered a massive first printing of 150,000 copies. "It's going to sell even more than that, while mine is selling in the tens, I think," said Lane proudly and mournfully at the same time.

He has no aspirations to follow his wife into fiction. "I had this sort of epiphany about three years ago, when I realized I had absolutely no creative gifts," he said with a straight face. "Once you know that, it sort of clears things right up. You get to the end of the day and instead of saying, 'Ooh, now I'll go work on my poetry,' you get to play Lego with your children. Or drink, which makes life much easier."

By this point in the interview I had realized that while Anthony Lane may write like we all wish we spoke, his speech patterns include the same verbal misfires as the next person and more than a few "likes" and "ums." So I could relax: even Michael Jordan gets charley horses.

Nobody's Perfect is divided into three parts: movies, books, and profiles, a catch-all category that includes Lane's hilarious account of the Oscars, a look at Walker Evans, and a discourse on the joys of Lego. In Books, he includes two round-up reviews of popular fiction, but his allegiances—his wife's success notwithstanding—clearly lie elsewhere. He explains in his introduction how he chooses what books and authors to write about. "The criterion for entry into the literary canon that operates in this volume is, therefore, embarrassingly simple: unless you are lonely, sexually self-locking, artistically unswayable, and born before 1910, forget it."

I asked him how he could be so passionate about contemporary film yet scorn all living writers. Lane squirmed wildly on the lobby's leather sofa. "Well you know, I worked on a books page in London for four years," he said, crossing and uncrossing his legs. "Publicists would ring up and say"—his voice dropped to a theatrical whisper—"‘This is the new voice of independent English fiction.' And you go, it can't be another new voice! We had a new voice last week! I can't hear myself for the new voices!"

Books have a lower temperature than movies, he continued, which is what made the frenetic marketing of a book "a slight necessary absurdity, because the contract of understanding between writer and reader is so private. I wrote this sitting with a cat and a cup of tea, and you're probably going to read it much the same way. There's a sense that which novelists and poets are both to be envied and pitied for this." Movies, he argued, are created differently, they are "conceived and shot and marketed with heat. And that's why I say that movies are like journalism, and they deserve journalism."

Not that Lane thinks that he's much of a journalist, compared to other New Yorker writers who do more hardcore investigative pieces. That could be because, as he said twice in the interview, he never studied journalism, or because he is the first writer in his family. His father was in the Royal Army; his grandfather, the navy. "I'm always scared of people at the New Yorker who had enormously scholarly, cultivated families," Lane shuddered. "It reminds me of that bit in Parenthood when Rick Moranis is being read to by his daughter, and she's going"—he slipped into a perfect five-year-old's high-pitched whine—'"In the Penal Colony, by Franz Kafka.' I love that!"

Lane's family moved quite a lot throughout his childhood, including to Germany and Ireland (he still does a wicked Irish accent, in addition to the American-cowboy one that makes frequent appearances). He emphasizes that everyone in his family "did things," as opposed to thinking and writing about them. "There are an awful lot of writers and performers to come out of that literary lack of background. It's to do with homelessness, and if you're lucky enough to be in a happy family, then the homelessness becomes rather exciting," he said. "All those strange, intense, pervy English actresses like Charlotte Rampling and Tilda Swinton, they're all daughters of brigadier generals."

The camp who prefers David Denby has two main criticisms about Lane's pieces. One, they think his writing is show-offy, that he is all style and no substance. I asked Lane if such complaints could be considered a kind of backhanded compliment. He flinched, and said that Martin Amis, a friend of his, often gets the same treatment, which seemed to him particularly unfair given that Amis's latest book ambitiously took on Stalin—no one's idea of a neutral backdrop against which dramatic sentences can shine.

"Let's suppose there is a history of ideas, where there's this great set of important issues just sitting there dumbly in front of us, and that language is the scrim through which you go and get at these things," he said slowly. "So you could think that fussing about the means of getting at them is a kind of prissiness. Or, you could think that how you get at them is as important as the things themselves, because these are things that alter by the way you watch them or read them. There are many people who will accuse Martin or myself of not seeing the trees for the wood… or have I got that backwards?"

He explained that he had first begun to pay attention to such things thanks to Christopher Ricks, Lane's professor at Oxford and now at Boston University, who had taught him literary criticism was a skill that could be applied equally well to Dylan songs and current events. Ricks once spent an entire English class on the famous court case that later became the basis for the 1991 film Let Him Have It. One of the last capital punishment cases in England, it involved two boys; the younger one shot and killed a policeman. "The older one was charged because he said to the other boy, 'Let him have it.'" Lane's voice was deliberately neutral as he delivered the line. "And the whole case revolved around what he meant. Was he imitating American movie speech? Or was he saying, ‘Give him the gun.' There was certainly room for doubt, but unbelievably, he was hanged—on the nicety of tone. He hadn't shot anyone. So Ricks talked about how strangely enough, phraseology can be a matter of life and death."

I asked Lane if he ever felt that the necessity of critiquing movies or books prevented him from experiencing them viscerally—not as life or death, exactly, but as galvanizing.

After a minute of thought, he answered, "I don't think you can split the two. I don't sit down and think, How can I write beautifully about this—even if I could. I have things I want to say, and it isn't that I have to find the right, most just way of saying them. It's that for me, the act of writing is a way of finding out what I actually think. I genuinely don't know what I think of a movie before I start. I'm always in like, nine minds. It's mucked me up for most of my years, because most people seem utterly convinced of their point of view. My great predecessor, Pauline Kael was very violently opinionated."

If this were a movie, the soundtrack would have featured an ominous thunderclap at the mention of Kael's name. I said that I hadn't planned to bring her up unless he did, figuring that he must be tired of being asked the inevitable question about following the first household name in film criticism.

"Yes, well…In New York it has been a pain, and I'd say I've been asked that question first in every interview on this tour," he said. "The true answer is that it was easier for me coming from abroad, because while I absolutely worship Pauline, I just read her, you know? In the collections, not even in the magazine. People were like, ‘How dare you!' But you just have to do your own thing."

The other main criticism of Lane is one leveled even more often at Kael: the New Yorker rarely "likes" a movie. And in Lane's case, it's true that out of the 100 films reviewed in Nobody's Perfect, there's probably about 10 raves. But raves they are, despite his irresistible impulse to mock select bits of them.

The best-reviewed films in the collection include The English Patient, which he actually calls a masterpiece; The Dreamlife of Angels, a little-seen French film that I sought out and fell for based solely on his recommendation; Wes Anderson's Rushmore; L.A. Confidential; Together, a Swedish film about a 1970s commune; Mike Leigh's Naked; and Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy.

American films would seem to receive a disproportionately small share of that praise, I observed. Lane reeled back as if I had slapped him. "Those are just the movies that I happened to have reviewed!" He explained that he and Denby simply see whatever's out (as long as it's widely distributed) on their deadline weeks.

"If I'd reviewed Groundhog Day, which I think was fabulous—the best comedy in the last 20 years and provoking in a way that good comedy is…" he sputtered. "They actually took a conceit and worked it through to the end, and just like he goes through his day again and again, you can watch it again and again, and I have. I love it in the way that I love Bringing Up Baby." He paused to take a deep, exasperated breath. "And The Right Stuff, I love The Right Stuff too! It's epic and mock-epic, it's heroic and mock-heroic. It failed because people thought it was a campaign piece for Glenn, which is pretty bad luck."

The Lane-Denby rotation schedule to some extent explains why The Nutty Professor and Con Air made their way into Lane's book, although it's hard to imagine he required much persuasion to stretch such execrable dreck on his comic rack. But surely there must be some movies that he has to drag himself to see, or complains about having to waste time writing about?

Lane didn't hesitate for a second before shaking his head. "No, I see every movie with high hopes. I never go into it thinking, Ick, here we go"—he flared his nostrils and made his lips a prim line—"otherwise I wouldn't do the job."

I pretended to gag. "Come on, there has to be something coming up that makes you want to take a Valium first!"

He thinks, then said slowly, "Well…I am sort of dreading that Virginia Woolf one. The Hours, with Nicole Kidman? Everyone keeps saying how much they made her look like Woolf, but she looks like plain old Nicole Kidman to me. But truthfully, every day I await the best movie that's ever made."

And suddenly, the two paired quotes that form the book's epigraph—"Lane, you are a perfect pessimist" (from The Importance of Being Earnest) and "Nobody's perfect" (Some Like It Hot)—made perfect sense.