Are summer blockbusters too long? July 4, 2009
Posted by Evil Bender in Film, arts and culture.trackback
Matthew Yglesias asks an interesting question:
I went to see Public Enemies last night…the movie just seems way too long.
This is, it seems to me, a surprisingly common problem with would-be summer blockbusters. And it’s a problem I have a lot of trouble understanding. After all, movie studios would seem to have a strong incentive to make movies shorter. With a shorter movie, you should be able to pack more showings into a given day and sell more tickets and popcorn and such. And yet I feel like it’s way more common to walk out of a theater feeling that a movie was too long than to walk out feeling like I wished there’d been 15 more minutes. I don’t think I’m alone in this feeling. So what’s going on?
I don’t think the problem is actually the length of movies is the problem, but rather the choices of what to include. I didn’t walk out of the 150-minute Dark Knight wishing it had been over sooner, but Year One, felt agonizingly long at 100 minutes.* Public Enemies did drag, despite excellent performances, because too much of the film seems unnecessary: there are several scenes in the film that just aren’t that compelling.
It’s easy to name an excellent long film and contrast it to a terrible short film to make this point, but I think there’s something larger at work: part of what makes a movie excellent is that you don’t feel like there is lots of unnecessary filler. If you’re consistently entertained, then the film will seem well timed at 90 minutes or 160. If you’re bored (which happens either because the film is terrible or because at least some sections of it aren’t compelling) then the film will feel too long.
So my interpretation is that a film only becomes “too long” when it no longer holds its audience’s attention. Comedies which fall in the third act, “thrillers” which drag in the middle, and action films whose plot dawdles are all examples of “too long” films, while length matters almost not at all to a film that’s working. Watching the flop Grindhouse in the theater I had one of the best movie-going experiences of my life despite (or perhaps because of) its double-feature length, and the few others in the 11:45 PM showing seemed to agree. Most others didn’t, and the film bombed.
Personal experience isn’t the only datum to suggest this interpretation. A glance at the top-grossing films of all time suggests that audiences will happily sit through long movies when they’re entertained, and that making a film that clocks in at the now-standard 115 minutes isn’t necessarily a better choice.
The last two films I’ve seen, Public Enemies and the odious Transformers 2: Racism and Robot Balls, both stretch a little story into a long film. In Public Enemies, we tolerate some of that due to some quality film making, but eventually the movie drags. In Transformers, the entire first act is a complete waste, and so even the (pretty cool) robot fights in the last half-hour seem like agony, because I was too bored and offended by that point to really appreciate them. If Bay was a smarter film-maker, he would have brought us to the action much more quickly. If the film was 90 minutes, it would have at least been tolerable.
If Hollywood wants to avoid lengthy films that unnecessarily drain the box-office, they should encourage their directors to be better editors of their own films.
As a side note, this theory also explains, I think, why the best films’ deleted scenes aren’t generally compelling. Watch the deleted scenes in Reservoir Dogs, if you haven’t done so, and it’s clear why they were cut. The film feels perfect at its length, and the deleted scenes don’t add anything important. Some deleted scenes are interesting on their own merits, and some directors over-cut their films, leaving key information out of the narrative and making the film incoherent. But the more deleted scenes seem to add to a film, or the more that scenes in the film should have been deleted, the more likely it is the film is going to feel the wrong length, and that it won’t work.
*I saw Year One for free, and still felt I’d overpaid.
I think part of the problem is “auteur inflation”. Some directors have done well with complete creative control, but most don’t. Today everyone who can string two scenes together considers themselves auteurs, and if they have made any money the studios treat them that way. Most directors are too enamored of the own writing, or too much in love with their own raw footage, to make good editors. Jackson (especially for King Kong but evident in LoTR) and Bay (who lets this man behind a typewriter?) are prime examples. Bad editing makes too-long films.
It’s one of the first lessons you learn when learning how to translate criticism about your writing. Length is never about length. It is almost always a narrative tension problem.
One famous writer told me, “Too long never means too long. Go back and add in elements that increase the narrative tension, and trim things that don’t. I’ve never seen a story an editor called ‘too long’ that I couldn’t fix by adding a couple thousand more words.”