He Fixes The Cable?

[December 3rd, 2008]

The one great movie about pornography, Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1997 epic of excess, Boogie Nights, had at its gooey center the hope that pornography could be great. It was a desire voiced by director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), who wanted to make dirty pictures with plots more ambitious than one more pizza delivery. “It is my dream…to make a film where the story just sucks them in,” Horner rhapsodized. “And when they spurt out that joy juice, they’ve just gotta sit in it—they can’t move until they find out how the story ends.”

We know how that story ends—with digital video, roving vans and Real Next-Door Housewives Who Want to Do It with You. Porn never turned into drama; instead, comedy has turned to porn. In the past few years, thanks in part to Judd Apatow’s snickering over hardcore, a handful of slapstick movies have explored the farcical possibilities in producing smut. (It was a natural topic, if only as a remedy: The willful humorlessness of porn is among the reasons why watching—while it has its satisfactions—is inevitably kind of deflating.) First came the wan Jeff Bridges vehicle The Amateurs, then Kevin Smith’s Zach and Miri Make a Porno, and now Portland director James Westby joins the circle jerk with The Auteur—which marks a departure for this burgeoning genre in that it is actually funny.

The Auteur is Westby’s fifth feature film, and his fifth collaboration with the flexibly ethnic actor Melik Malkasian. Their last work, the minor festival hit Film Geek, starred Malkasian as a movie-obsessed sap who masturbates a lot of the time, so this new role isn’t a radical departure. Here, Malkasian is Arturo Domingo, an Italian filmmaker whose aspirations are not very different from those of Jack Horner. But he has fallen on hard times: His wife, his leading man and his career slipped through his fingers as his filming of an Apocalypse Now takeoff called Full Metal Jackoff plunged into a Coppola-level breakdown. Such are the perils of shooting your Vietnam movie “on location in Ohio.” To Arturo’s credit, his widescreen cinematography would have looked a lot like the nightmare jungle of the DMZ, if not for the snowdrifts.

The central joke of The Auteur is the same one riffed on in Zack and Miri—the absurd unsexiness of having sex on camera, made worse by the titles. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that both movies were directly inspired by the college-dorm game of making up the most ridiculous porn titles. Kevin Smith came up with Lawrence of a Labia, which is very good work, but Westby tops him with Alice Doesn’t Lick Her Anymore—and ups the ante by filming each conceit. (Five Easy Nieces is shot in the style of Bob Rafelson, at least until the nieces arrive.) Sadly, we never get to see a scene from Arturo’s planned indie departure, Me and You and Everyone We Blow, but the rigorous, ramshackle staging makes The Auteur the first titty movie that could have been produced by Rushmore’s Max Fischer.

In the middle of this topless pretension is Arturo, infuriatingly pompous and miserably beaten down: part Antonioni, part Borat. (A little too much Borat, in fact. The similarity is one of the movie’s two flaws—the other being its provincial need to name-drop every significant Portland location.) Reduced to attending a retrospective of his films at the Clinton Street Theater, he looks for resolution with his leading man, Frank (a wily John Breen), and his lost muse Fiona (Katherine Flynn). This quest requires a lot of artisanal weed.

Here’s where The Auteur most significantly departs from Zack and Miri, a movie that floundered in Kevin Smith’s Madonna-whore complex, with its sentiment of “Don’t suck dick under the apple tree with anyone else but me.” James Westby knows better than to divide hedonism and affection, and he gives Arturo the most grief for making that false distinction. For the same reason, Westby recognizes that erotica and art can get together and grind. The Auteur may be just the latest movie to mock pornography, but it’s the first one since Boogie Nights to show a belief in movies. It’s an ode to joy juice.