Bordwell, in his 2006 The Way Hollywood Tells It,is one of the first to discuss the multi- protagonist film at length in a manner that stays true to perhaps the most noticeable feature of the form – the high number of lead characters.106 Bordwell starts the discussion by arguing for Hollywood’s long tradition of innovation, illustrated, for instance, by the trend of flash back films that followed Citizen Kane and How Green Was My Valley (Ford, 1941).107 Similarly to his take on the forking path film, Bordwell stresses that such artistic developments never stray too far from classical cinema’s conventions, claiming that: “However creatively a movie twisted causation or temporal order or point of view, its revisions were always intelligible to mainstream audiences”.108 The 1990s stream of innovation, which the multi-protagonist film is
often considered to be a part of, according to Bordwell, likewise keeps “one foot in classical tradition”.109 As suggested earlier, there appears to be a constant conservative tone to
Bordwell’s arguments that keep tracing various types of films back to the rules of the classical narrative cinema, as laid out by himself together with Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson in The Classical Hollywood Cinema [2005 (1985)]. According to such logic, to put it crudely, no matter the innovations of past or current cinema, practically all films, at least to some extent, stay true to the classical storytelling principles.
106 Bordwell 2006. Bordwell also adds to the discussion on the form in his 2008 Poetics of Cinema by expanding
his original ideas and adding several close analyses of multi-protagonist films. As the central argumentative logic is in both cases largely the same, for the sake of brevity I will concentrate in this chapter only on the chapter in The Way Hollywood Tells It.
107 Bordwell 2006: 72. 108 Bordwell 2006: 72. 109 Bordwell 2006: 73.
29 It is highly probable that most filmmakers consider to what extent can they pursue their artistic aims without losing their target audience, but for Film Studies it is important to also analyse more closely how the contemporary multi-protagonist film thematically explores several current and fashionable understandings. Bordwell is quite aware of such a crossroad in cinema and frequently stresses that films attract their audience by combining the novel with the traditional.110 My concern, however, is that a strong scholarly interest in the structural and generic, inevitably leads to the undervaluing of the thematic interests of a specific film. Even though these methods do not have to be mutually exclusive leaning too far to either direction nonetheless tends to do injustice to the other strand. Thus it is not only filmmakers who have to find a balance between tradition and innovation, and a focus on formal games and attention to complex ideas, but the same also applies to film scholarship.
Bordwell associates the wave of experimentation and innovation in cinema that emerged from the late 1980s with the profitability of independent productions, the progress of home video that provided greater control over spectatorship and consequently allowed for more complex film narratives, and with a new generation of filmmakers who “brought TV, comic- book, videogame, and pulp-fiction tastes to the movies”.111 Importantly for the multi- protagonist film, Bordwell mentions that Nashville, A Wedding (Altman 1978), and Network (Lumet, 1976) served as a great inspiration for the later “converging fates” films.112 The latter category most often consists of multi-protagonist films, because at least two characters are needed in order for their fates to converge. Although Bordwell does not explicitly make the connection, it could be argued that he recognises the multi-protagonist films’ tendency to often connect their main characters through accidental encounters, as being foreshadowed by several Alfred Hitchcock films, such as The Trouble with Harry (1955) and Family Plot (1976), that “intertwine story lines connected by happenstance”.113 Bordwell also notes how Intolerance
and some modern independent films, such as Mystery Train, Slacker, Night on Earth, Flirt (Hartley, 1995), and The Hours, differ from the classical storytelling norm by favouring parallelism over causality.114 It is important to clarify that while parallelism is certainly important in both the Grand Hotel/Mystery Train type of multi-protagonist film and in the
110 See, for instance, Bordwell 2006: 78–79, where he says about Memento that “seldom has an American film
been so daring and so obvious at the same time”.
111 Bordwell 2006: 73–74. 112 Bordwell 2006: 74. 113 Bordwell 2006: 74. 114 Bordwell 2006: 94.
30 Intolerance/Night of Earth version, only the former plainly converges fates as the latter does not actually bring the characters from the different storylines into direct contact.
Bordwell also aptly demonstrates the extended history of the multi-protagonist film and its great constancy by arguing that many features of the contemporary multi-protagonist film were present already in early examples of the form such as Grand Hotel (an important comment to which I will return also in the context of the next chapter).115 These characteristics, according to Bordwell, being: a circumscribed time and space, star actors, and a number of protagonists connected through contingent encounters.116 Perhaps the least changed from these qualities is the function of well-known Hollywood actors. Whereas Grand Hotel features such legends of the classical Hollywood era as Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, John Barrymore, and Lionel Barrymore, the following actors, among many others, regularly perform in contemporary multi- protagonist films: Julianne Moore [Short Cuts, Magnolia (Anderson, 1999), The Hours, and Crazy, Stupid, Love (Ficarra, Requa, 2011)], Brad Pitt [Snatch (Ritchie, 2000), Full Frontal (Soderbergh, 2002), Babel (Iñárritu, 2006), Burn After Reading (Coen, Coen, 2008), Killing Them Softly, and The Big Short], Kevin Spacey [The Usual Suspects, L.A. Confidential (Hanson, 1997), Hurlyburly (Drazan, 1998), American Beauty (Mendes, 1999), and Margin Call (Chandor, 2011)],Matthew McConaughey [Dazed and Confused (Linklater, 1993), Boys on the Side (Ross, 1995), and Thirteen Conversations About One Thing], Philip Seymour Hoffman [Hard Eight (Anderson, 1996), Happiness (Solondz, 1998), and Magnolia], John C. Reilly [Hard Eight, Magnolia, The Hours, and Carnage (Polanski, 2011)], and Benicio Del Toro [The Usual Suspects, Snatch, Traffic (Soderbergh, 2000), 21 Grams, and Sin City (Miller, Rodriguez, Tarantino, 2005)]. While the marketing strategies of contemporary multi- protagonist films undoubtedly differ from those of the early 1930s, Hollywood stars are still meant to attract a larger attention and audience for a film.
With some of the abovementioned character actors in mind, it could be argued that the regular appearance of the same actors in multi-protagonist films is not only a marketing principle, but related to their talent of fleshing out a personality type with limited screen time. In addition to production and marketing benefits that well-known actors can grant to a project, they are chosen also for thematic reasons – because of their ability to create believable characters in a multi-protagonist setting. This reasoning is supported by some of the other film experts who repeatedly work on multi-protagonist films. These people, among many others, include scriptwriters, such as Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel),
115 Bordwell 2006: 94. 116 Bordwell 2006: 94.
31 cinematographers, for instance Rodrigo Prieto [Ten Tiny Love Stories (García, 2002), 21 Grams, and Babel], editors, such as Stephen Mirrione [Go, Traffic, Thirteen Conversations About One Thing, 21 Grams, Babel, Contagion (Soderbergh, 2011), and August: Osage County (Wells, 2013)], and of course directors, to name but a few, Robert Altman [Nashville, 3 Women (1977), A Wedding, Short Cuts, Prêt-à-porter (1994), and Gosford Park (2001)], Linklater [Slacker, Dazed and Confused, and Fast Food Nation (2006)], Steven Soderbergh [Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), Traffic, Full Frontal, and Contagion], Rodrigo García [Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her (2000), Ten Tiny Love Stories, Nine Lives (2005), and Mother and Child (2009)], and Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel). This pattern suggests that there is a form specific expertise involved in making multi-protagonist films that is above all related to creating a coherent world out of the “lives” of several lead characters and which the viewers have only very limited access.