Bonnie and Clyde / Chinatown

I choose to write about these two movies together, not only because I feel a pressing need to catch up on my writing, but also because my complaints about them mirror each other.  As before when writing about an item from the AFI's list of 100 American films, I find myself returning to the question "Is it actually great?", and in these cases to the question "Why not?" 

In the case of Bonnie and Clyde, I found myself reminded of Godard's Pierrot le Fou more than once.  While Bonnie and Clyde, Les Fous did not descend quite into the realm of postmodernism as Godard's more representative work, Arthur Penn's sudden, jarring cutaways indicated a similar discouragement to the natural tendency to build a narrative, or otherwise make sense of the proceedings.  By the same token, the cavalier, almost smirking tone that he seemed to take at times, while portraying explicit sex and violence that were shocking by 1960's American standards, seemed to reveal a Postmodernist refusal to take the matter too seriously, and by all means to avoid anything resembling a message.  All this is certainly significant, and it's very comforting to have an artistic framework within which to consider a film, but significant does not mean great.  To be fair, the AFI has never claimed that its list is of great films, merely of films. But I can't help judge a film by criteria that seem to fall under the heading of greatness:  visionary direction; insightful, sound screenwriting; and astonishing, believable performances.  This film seemed to have none of these elements, and so I wonder why anyone other than a film historian would ever watch it.

Chinatown suffers slightly less by those criteria.  I would call Polanski's direction just sort of visionary, in that he didn't quite pull it all together into something coherent.  Nicholson manages to turn his potentially cardboard gumshoe into one who clearly always has something going on under the hood, and Dunaway draws the audience in to her world in a way that she simply is never given a chance to in Bonnie and Clyde.  That script, though.  Clearly there is something being said about society, and the way the strong prey upon the week and woe are we and all that, but it feels so secondary, as though added in the final act to give it heft, and make Dunaway's demise more sympathetic than her eerily similar one 7 years earlier.  And the final bit about "This is Chinatown", clearly meant to refer obliquely to a running joke about the way Chinese fuck, doesn't seem to relate to the rest of the script. In short, while it is nearly great in some ways, it is in no way significant, while the opposite can be said of Bonnie Clyde.  The only reason I can imagine watching either again is to hone in on and write something incisive about Dunaway's performance, since she's awesome, and I like picking things apart.