24th
Transformers: ROTF (2009)
And so we come to Michael Bay. The artist. If anyone wants to deny him that title, well, they can go screw. His movies are unique, they are his. All media fields - television, film, games - have tried to steal his style, his flash, his self. Rarely to any effect. Michael Bay is inimitable. The only other director of the past decade to have exerted as much influence on the collective celluloid consciousness has been Wes Anderson, a director who plays to a different (more self important) crowd, but pushes himself towards essentially the same goal: raw sensation. Bay and Anderson, at their very best, represent the pinnacle of a certain kind of filmmaking, in which the minds of an audience are crowded out of the theater and viewing bodies are given over entirely to their particular, personal enthusiasms. Anderson traffics in the soul-sick, life-could-be-good-but-isn’t mope songs of America’s intelligentsia (both minor and major); Bay in the brass-trumpeted regalia of red-meat America’s Sunday morning myths. The audiences of both go for the same reason: to live for a little while in the mind (and outlook) they wish they had. Artists attract audiences like that. Michael Bay is an artist.
It sounds like I’m ramping up to defend Bay’s new film. I’m not. Since The Rock he has been on a downhill slide. The energies, the vitality of his youth are leaving him; he is becoming old, relying on habit and comfort. In his first two films, he delivered pictures that were both well-plotted (with defined, singular goals) and authentically himself (crass, juvenile, bawdy). Since then he has either tumbled through loose plot structures with incoherence and ugliness (Bad Boys II, Transformers) or has sought shelter from criticism (to no avail) with plodding sincerity (Pearl Harbor, The Island). His notoriety is driving his decline. I think he knows this. His second film is still, fifteen years later, his darling picture; he speaks of it fondly, like an old lover. Sean Connery, The Rock’s lead actor, is still his favorite player to have worked with. Now, retooling GM cars to carry firearms the size of sheep, the (gross, adolescent) passion that drove his early films seems to have left him. In interviews since Pearl Harbor, he has increasingly been emphasizing his ability to work quickly (and cheaply), and dismissing criticisms of his content, style, and tone with waves in the direction of his gross revenues. He has developed a strong (inappropriately strong) working relationship with the U.S. Military, and has been at pains in his last two films to reinforce and buttress that business tie - Bay features positive (flat) portrayals of “common man” soldiers, and unnecessarily flashy picture postcard shots of military hardware at every reel change. The cavalry is called in aggressively and often in Bay’s films, not because plot or scene demand it, but because doing so flatters the army and reinforces their affection for the filmmaker, an affection that Bay can then point to when artistic pride is fleeting. (“‘What do you think of your films?’ ‘Oh God well, you know I’m unique among directors. You know the Army just fucking loves me. No one has the access to personnel and equipment that I have. No other director.’”)
But even in decline, he is still an artist, and his new toy car commercial is unmistakably A Michael Bay Product. His little boy personality romps through every scene, its hallmarks hanging from every bedpost: short-sighted misogyny (of the sort that only a grown-up dweeb could harbor, a sort of ritualized hate worship of women); unsettling racial humor (black-face pulled off with shameless bravado; Bay acts like he has a home-made NAACP hall pass in his pocket); and action scenes executed with a rigid pride in difficulty, not effectiveness. Bay is Bay. His films are him. Arguing against one of his pictures, even a weak one, is an argument against a personality. You cannot say it is “wrong” or “bad,” you can only detail the points of disagreement, and explain why you would never act like that. Is Bay doing us harm? No. His films, recently, are so scatterplot and episodic that it is difficult for them to build up the momentum needed to be anything more than a little offensive, or a little entertaining. They are essentially harmless. The work of a dispirited artist.
Part of me hopes that Bay makes good on his promise to do a smaller picture next. He mentioned, in one interview at least, the possibility of a two-hander. That, at least, would be intersting. A film, small and explosion free, emanating directly from the man child’s heart, would likely be dark, hateful, and isolated (if it were true to himself; he could just as easily shoot a mindless romantic comedy for hire). It could be gloriously infuriating. Or perhaps enlightening. It would be, in the end, more useful and engaging (even if it engaged only our spite) than this new two and a half hour Transformers. If you see it at all, see it either alone or with someone very dear to you - someone with whom you can be silent. The film is so vacant, so inconsequential that, with a casual acquantence, the after-film conversation would be unbearable. Really. How many times can two people look together into the distance and intone softly, dispassionately: “Well…that was nothing much…”
