It’s a Good Thing Movie Theaters Don’t Charge by the Minute

Lord bless Woody Allen. His new movie, the charming “Sweet and Lowdown,” is only 95 minutes long--that’s a fraction of the length of most other holiday movies, in fact less than half the running time of two prominent ones. For my money, it’s a better value than most of them. For some reason, though, critics keep referring to it as “slight.”

Starring Sean Penn as a dishonorable guitarist--the world’s second-best, as he keeps telling people--the movie is a swift-moving comedy that also happens to be about creativity and its relationship to moral character. As movie subjects go, that would seem a worthy theme.

Still, they say it’s “slight.”

That could be because it’s a comedy--comedies never get the same respect as dramas. Or maybe it’s because the film is so easy to digest. (Since Ingmar Bergman’s great, despairing works pierced our consciousness in the 1950s, we’ve equated cinematic depth with suffering; Allen’s own self-consciously “serious” films are proof that he does it, too.)

I fear, though, that one reason “Sweet and Lowdown” strikes so many people as minor is that it’s short. Not terribly long ago, an hour and a half was considered the average length of a Hollywood movie. In recent years, to the chagrin of smokers, those of us with small bladders and sufferers of ADD, we’ve come to think of two hours as normal. But after a bumper crop of butt-numbingly looooong movies in 1998, the films released this holiday season are setting new benchmarks for eye fatigue.

Two of them are more than three hours long--”The Green Mile” and “Magnolia,” both three hours, eight minutes. And I count 20 new and recent movies that are longer than two hours. They include: “Topsy Turvy” (2:41), the Chinese film “Emperor and the Assassin” (2:41), “Any Given Sunday” (2:40), “The Insider” (2:38), “Anna and the King” (2:28), “Angela’s Ashes” (2:25), “The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc” (2:21), “45 Up” (2:20), “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (2:19), “Titus” (2:19), “Ride With the Devil” (2:18), “Bicentennial Man” (2:13), “The Cradle Will Rock” (2:12), “Liberty Heights” (2:08), “The World Is Not Enough” (2:08), “Girl, Interrupted” (2:07), “Snow Falling on Cedars” (2:06), “Dogma” (2:05), “The Hurricane” (2:05) and “Cider House Rules (2:04). And that’s only in the last two months.

Some longer-than-average movies earn their epic length. The “Godfather” movies--take your pick--could not have been told in an hour and a half, for example. And everyone knows of the cases where studios have yanked good but long movies away from their directors and ruined them by making cuts.

*

But just because the Oscars in recent years have tended to go to long movies (even if we pretend for a moment that there is a link between awards and worth), that doesn’t mean that length automatically confers importance or quality. Stretching a 90-minute movie to 180 minutes doesn’t make it an epic. It just makes it long.

The standard defense for long movies has been that, if a film’s good, no one notices the time. No argument there. Leave it to movie execs and exhibitors to fret about lost ticket and popcorn sales--movies should be as long as they need to be. That said, I defy anyone to tell me why “Dogma” needed all of those windy philosophical speeches or why “The Green Mile” needed to spend more than 40 minutes just telling the story that frames the story people are going to the theater to see.

I should say “reportedly” because I didn’t clock the scenes. With its glacial pace, I would’ve sworn the film spent 40 minutes just showing the nice prison guards and inmates playing with their pet mouse.

The film is a fable, and one could argue that director Frank Darabont deliberately slowed the pace to a crawl for much the same reason Stanley Kubrick slowed down “Eyes Wide Shut”--to shift the audience out of its everyday reality and into an allegorical world that looks pretty much like our own yet isn’t. In order to take that ride we need to get on a different wavelength.

Still, the story in “Green Mile” is a simple one. It’s legitimate to ask if it warrants such an investment in time and the air of self-importance that inevitably attends a tale told so magisterially. Even with its childlike and racially retrograde sensibility, this is a high-minded story, but inside the spacious architecture Darabont has built for it you spend most of the movie’s three-hour, eight-minute running time wandering around looking for it.

There is so much going on in “Magnolia,” on the other hand, that even at more than three hours the movie’s bursting at the seams. With its interlocking stories, intersecting characters and ideas pinging off the proscenium, so much seems to be happening at once that you’re stunned when you realize that it can’t all be happening at once.

If Julianne Moore’s character was having a nervous breakdown in her psychiatrist’s office at the same moment that Tom Cruise was getting gently grilled to a crisp by a sly television reporter and Philip Baker Hall was on the verge of collapsing on national television, then it should be impossible for her to get from there to the drugstore, to her lawyer’s office and then home in the space it takes for Hall to mop his brow during a commercial. The stories are running simultaneously at different speeds, in other words. Which is impossible. But that’s OK. It’s a fun ride.

At times during “Magnolia” I found myself wondering what writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson could do with a little less ambition. I’d love to see him settle down and tell the stories of, say, three of the nine main characters populating this movie, to dig more deeply into them. But banish the thought: If he were any less ambitious a talent, then he could not have made “Magnolia.” And even at three hours-plus, I wouldn’t have wanted to miss it.

But very few of the other movies currently in theaters couldn’t be improved by a little tightening. Creative control belongs in the hands of the creators--not bean counters. But it isn’t stifling artistic expression to suggest that a bit of restraint and discipline might make for better movies.

Hubristic directors have always vied for bragging rights to having the biggest picture. Michael Cimino became the symbol for unchecked directorial ego when his three-hour, 39-minute-long “Heaven’s Gate” (which I still say was a good film) sank United Artists.

But long movies didn’t start with Cimino. Erich von Stroheim turned in his 1925 classic “Greed” at 9 1/2 hours. (A four-hour version recently ran on Turner Classic Movies.) That almost makes James Cameron’s “Titanic” (three hours, 14 minutes) seem short.

“Gone With the Wind” (1939) was three hours, 42 minutes. David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962) exists in varying prints ranging from three hours, 22 minutes to three hours, 42 minutes. Sergio Leoni’s 1984 masterpiece “Once Upon a Time in America” was three hours, 47 minutes in its uncut version.

The difference now is that the ability to make unnecessarily and unwisely long movies seems to be the new mantle of success in Hollywood. Since possessory credits became cheapened by still-green film school grads getting their names above the titles of pictures you’d think no one would want to own, this seems to be the new way to announce that you’ve got clout.

The bright side is that pretty soon this pathway to respect will become cheapened, too. Then they’ll have to find another way to one-up each other.

Until then, for way too many movies there will be only one answer to the question “What’s it about?”

The answer?

“About an hour too long.”