Why I Wouldn't Want To Be a Professional Movie Reviewer
“Goods are not to be grabbed; much better if God lets you have them.”
– The Works and Days (Hesiod)
“So long always as joy was not rashly pinned to the happening; so long as you accepted what joys the universe offered and did not seek to compel the universe to offer you joys of your own definition.”
– Descent Into Hell (Charles Williams)
Earlier this summer, I tried to write a review of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Some years ago, when I was Managing Editor of FilmFisher, I was in the habit of seeing new movies when they opened on Thursday night, writing a review on Friday and Saturday, and publishing it by Sunday. I did this with the previous Mission: Impossible, 2018’s Fallout, and figured I could do it again. Dead Reckoning Part One was not what I expected, though, and it ended up taking me over a month to gather my thoughts on it. (You can find some of them here, on Letterboxd.)
The first time I saw Fallout, I liked it more than I liked Dead Reckoning Part One the first time I saw it. Moreover, I was able to articulate why I liked it almost immediately. When I look back at the review of Fallout that I wrote on opening weekend five years ago, it still captures what I admire about the film very accurately. In contrast, in the month and a half since Dead Reckoning Part One came out, my opinion of it has kept shifting, growing, developing. If I had written that review the week it opened, I might already be issuing a retraction. I have also – and I don’t think this is a coincidence – come to like it more than Fallout.
To take another example: my three favorite movies last year were Top Gun: Maverick, Jordan Peele’s Nope, and James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water. I definitely liked my first viewing of Top Gun more than I liked my first viewings of Nope or Avatar. On first impressions, it was the clear winner. But, as the months went on, Nope and Avatar grew on me while my opinion of Top Gun remained the same. Why is this?
Some films are singularly and immediately satisfying. I don’t say this as a knock, per se; I think Mission: Impossible – Fallout and Top Gun: Maverick are very good at what they do. But they are doing, in essence, one thing: they are giving the audience exactly what they want.
Dead Reckoning Part One, Nope, and The Way of Water did not give me exactly what I wanted. I wasn’t sure what to think of them at first because they did not put all their cards on the table. They are complex films, with a number of different layers, and as such, they satisfy more fully – but only over time. There is more to them than can be digested and fully articulated after just one viewing. As such, in the long run, I have had richer and more rewarding relationships with them.
The rhythm of the average professional movie reviewer – seeing a movie and scrambling to say something definitive about it in a matter of days – could rob me of those kinds of relationships with films. It is not a rhythm conducive to the kind of discovery that can only occur through patient attention over time. I love movies and I love writing about them, but I want to resist the temptation to let them become grist for the mill of my eloquence. I want to let them challenge and surprise me.
These thoughts have been greatly influenced by my friends Robert Brown and Joshua Gibbs.