CANDID: Naomi Watts with Ben Stiller while filming While We’re Young in Downtown Brooklyn.
By Steven Zeitchik
“The chief enemy of creativity,” Pablo Picasso once said, “is good sense.”
He might have added that it doesn’t get on so well with healthy living or emotional well-being either. The birth pangs of art have been a staple of the examined life since humans began examining it. Vincent van Gogh lost an ear in such a pursuit. Syd Barrett lost his mind. Ernest Hemingway lost his life.
Such torment has been catnip for filmmakers: the Bette Davis Deception, 8½, Amadeus, Black Swan. The idea of artists grappling with the pain and delusions of their fragile psyches has been as encoded in cinematic DNA as clinical madness has been in the real genome.
But film directors seem especially preoccupied with the subject lately. Visit your local movie theatre this fall and you might think you mistakenly walked into the office of the Juilliard psychologist.
Popping up everywhere are movies about people buckling under their own artistic weight — the kind that comes with being a certain type of jazz musician (Whiplash), actor (Birdman), novelist (Listen Up Philip), painter (Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner), concert pianist (the Ethan Hawke-directed, fall-festival documentary smash Seymour), actor again (Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria), rock singer (the Michael Fassbender-starring Frank), documentary filmmaker (Noah Baumbach’s upcoming While We’re Young) and actor once more (Al Pacino’s The Humbling).
The disciplines vary; the personalities run the gamut. Yet all of these movies rest on one key dramatic idea: being a creative person is really, really hard.
In an age when iPhones have created armies of Annie Leibovitzes and anyone with a Typepad account is instantly a writer, stories about artistic struggle are on everyone’s minds a little more, including directors. Or maybe creative people just don’t want to stretch too far.
“The truth is that filmmakers like me can’t always step out of our own lives,” said Listen Up Philip director Alex Ross Perry, not really joking.
Philip, currently in theatres, is about a writer (Jason Schwartzman) at war with himself and the world around him, a man of the belief that normal behaviour is incompatible with great art. It ups the ante by putting him in a relationship with a photographer (Elisabeth Moss) who has her own issues working with other people. Though the film is about a novelist, a photographer and the novelist’s self-centered literary mentor, Perry wrote it as a cloak for his own dilemmas — not out of laziness or solipsism but because he found something compelling in the idea that for him, as for his characters, the collaborative stage of the artistic process can be a challenge.
“As I’m writing a script I think, Writing is fun,” Perry said. “And wouldn’t it be easier if the creative output was entirely about me sitting here working by myself.”
Of course, plenty of artists can go mad that way too.
For the purveyors of screen entertainment, creative achievement is a juicy, hanging fastball. We tend to romanticise it even as we privately believe we could pull it off too, if only inspiration would be kind enough to strike or time and circumstance generous enough to allow.
That gives artist characters an appealing on-screen tension. Movies about creative sorts simultaneously hold a kind of romance and relatability. Watching Michael Keaton’s Hollywood actor Riggan Thomson struggle in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Birdman to mount a play and restore the luster to his reputation, we think — as we did observing Marcello Mastroianni’s Guido Anselmi pulling at a similar existential yoke in 8½ — how uncommonly thrilling it must be for someone to have all this artistic capital to spend. Then we let our mind wander to how we might spend it better.
Creativity is also something that plays into our sense — heightened in this go-go, FOMO world — that someone else is having it a lot easier than we are, a spiritual escapist fantasy of sorts. Sure, it can’t be easy to master Shakespeare, as Al Pacino’s actor character must do in The Humbling, Barry Levinson’s upcoming film about a stage actor possibly losing his mind.
“The fear of being judged against others who’ve come before is very powerful,” Pacino said, referring both to his character and to his own turns playing the Bard. But compared to finding a babysitter or making a mortgage payment, the inconvenience quotient is low.
Needless to say, stories about these topics also come with built-in drama. In Whiplash, Miles Teller plays a jazz drummer who believes his hands must literally bleed if he’s to become the next Charlie Parker — a self-flagellating perfectionism reinforced by his abusive teacher (J.K. Simmons), who likes to say that “there are no two words in the English language more harmful than ‘good job.’” Sparks fly before anyone’s lit a match.
But just to be sure, the director, Damien Chazelle, offers some heavy stakes — Teller’s Andrew Neyman character tosses away a promising romantic relationship to commit fully to drumming.
“A lot of movies about artists are set up like sports movies, where they build to a big victory and the artist achieves their art like the athlete wins the big game, which is by learning how to balance their life at the end,” Chazelle said. “And, really, if someone is throwing themselves into their art in that way their personal life will probably suffer and vice versa. It can’t always be one happy package. That’s what I wanted to show.”
That doesn’t mean depicting creative torment is easy. Almost by definition, artistic breakthroughs happen out of sight of the human eye and thus out of view of the camera lens. For all the write-what-you-know appeal of movies about artists, depicting one in the throes of struggle is — fittingly — hard work. There’s barely a film about a writer that doesn’t contain a scene of him or her ruminating at a typewriter or computer screen — and just as reliably leaving us to wonder what on Earth is going through their minds.
Leigh’s sprawling, evocative Mr. Turner is about the 19th century artist J.M.W. Turner (Timothy Spall), an irascible talent whose unconventional landscape paintings heralded an era of Abstract art, though not before he dealt with pretty concrete personal problems. This is refreshingly not about the familiar yearning, dewy-eyed Romantic artist.
“I’m not sure you could ever show the creative moment, at least as I experience it. It’s too elusive,” Leigh said. “What you can do, or at least as I tried to do here, is show the grubby curmudgeon of a man in profound reaction to the elements around him. That’s interesting,” he added of his unkempt and at times unlikable protagonist.
Painting and drumming at least offer a more camera-ready art form that’s visually mesmerising. Ditto for dance, which has seen a fair share of films over the years. Writing or acting is a different story. Does anything prompt more restless toe-tapping than an actor playing an actor trying to act?
Creativity has become more democratic. A famous Pew Research Centre poll found that nearly 60 percent of Americans engage in “some type of artistic activity,” and that was a decade ago, before the emergence of laptop DJs and cheap film equipment. If reality singing and cooking shows haven’t turned everyone into an amateur artist, technology has taken care of the rest.
There’s something almost quaint, then, about some of these creative-torment films, in which people can be seen hacking away for hours in painful solitude in front of drum kits or paint canvases — an especially strange tableaux when you consider the chosen-one assumptions that underlie our famous artists.
“There’s a contempt of craft in this country, where we just want to believe Jack Nicholson is Jack Nicholson because he’s an amazing guy and Julia Roberts is great because, you know, ‘God likes her best,’” Hawke said. “And not, you know, maybe they worked harder.”
Hawke made Seymour — about Seymour Bernstein, a well-regarded pianist who in midcareer gave it all up to teach — to explore those aspects of the creative life. In one pointed scene, several Bernstein proteges share a disbelieving laugh with their teacher over the comments of fans who approach them and say they wish they can play like that instead of recognising that virtuosity is the product of years of hard work.
“I love that moment and what it says,” Hawke said. “You know, Willie Nelson was on the cover of Rolling Stone recently, and he said he’s still taking guitar lessons. He’s in his 80s and one of the best guitarists of his generation, and he’s taking lessons. But people want to believe someone like him was just picked.”
The balance between inherent talent and someone willing their way to greatness is grappled with in Baumbach’s While We’re Young. In the Frances Ha director’s new work, which played Toronto ahead of a release next year, Ben Stiller’s fortysomething documentarian — slaving away on one movie for a decade — is both awed and frightened by a millennial Adam Driver, who seems to be making a name in the film world by sheer force of personality, barely breaking a sweat.
Stiller’s character also wonders what it means to live in a world in which all people — even a seemingly clueless newbie like Driver’s character — are casually engaging in creative pursuits.” If everybody records everything, then what’s a documentary anymore?” he asks.
The democratisation of art has had another effect: to push the master craftsmen further to the margins.
“I think we’re living in a society that values true art less and less,” Chazelle said. “But that may be why we’re seeing these films and why we want to watch them. Any time people are fighting marginalisation, they become more cutthroat, and that makes them more interesting, because they’re fighting against a world that isn’t listening as much as it used to.”
Inhabiting a character who wages this struggle is hardly easy, a kind of artistic challenge that proves its own point. In Birdman, Naomi Watts, like Keaton’s Riggan Thomson, plays a Hollywood actor unsure of her choices as she tries to strike a balance between art and commerce — not exactly a proven relaxant for a Hollywood actor.
“You get in trouble for saying it,” Watts said, “but it’s true. A songwriter will write a song from pain. A painter will paint something beautiful because they’re tapping into a horrible memory. An actor is going through something similar. And it can be excruciating.”
Faced with that, actors try to put their heads down and rely on what’s near — directors and costars but also their resolutions that they shouldn’t conflate their own insecurities with their character’s. Sylvia Plath, in her own spin on Picasso’s mantra, said that “the worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” It certainly makes for meaty cinema, though. — Los Angeles Times/MCT