The End Of Cinema As We Know It: American Film in the Nineties

7. Hollywood Redux: All about My Mother and Gladiator

7 Hollywood Redux All about My Mother and Gladiator Hilary Radner WHEN IS A film a “Hollywood movie”? Is there a relationship between Hollywood style and a national film style that we might identify as American? These are not new questions; however, filmmaking in the 1990s has underlined their significance. Two recent films, Pedro Almodovar ’s All about My Mother (1999) and Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) highlight these questions. Neither of these films was made in Hollywood . Gladiator was produced by Universal and DreamWorks but directed by an Englishman; it has a multinational cast and was shot in a number of locations, from Venice to Morocco. Almodovar is a Spanish auteur writer/director, often associated with a revival of Spanish culture in the post-Franco years; his film is a European coproduction. The two films illustrate two distinct trends, neither of which originated in the 1990s but that might be said to represent two tendencies that characterize nineties cinema. The first trend involves the European auteur director. The director is the central creative force in these films. Paradoxically, she or he looks to classical Hollywood for her or (more often than not) his model. The auteur transforms the conventions of classical Hollywood in order to convey a personal message and vision. Auteurism, of course, emerged most clearly with the French New Wave in the late 1950s. However in the 1990s the figure of the director/author took on a canonical status—a status that Almodovar enjoys and that allowed his work to be immediately seized by critics in the United States and in Europe as an example of film culture at its best. The second trend is exemplified by films with a Hollywood feel and an international cast, crew, and financial structure, like Highlander 72 (1986). These films constitute a genre that solidified in the 1990s and that depends on the creation of a single male character that becomes the focus of history. Inspired by the epic dramas of the 1950s, the genre developed over the 1990s with films like Fortress (1993) and Fortress 2 (1999) and Highlander 3 (1994). The Academy Award winning Braveheart (1995) lends legitimacy to this genre as an alternative to the auteur film. Family and freedom provide the pretext for Braveheart’s story of the thirteen-century rebel Scot William Wallace (played by Mel Gibson). But the film relies more heavily on displays of man-to-man violence that its hero pursues as his destiny, a destiny that is inevitably fatal. Gladiator looks back at this genre nostalgically.1 The film provides a baroque and overtly artificial overstatement about the ideology of these films in which masculinity, nation, and history are mourned rather than celebrated. Gladiator is about the 1990s, recapitulating cinematic past rather than looking forward to the new millennium. The film’s success at the Academy Awards underscores the significance of this idealized history and its cinematic representations. Gladiator and All about My Mother reveal how film culture of the 1990s called into question concepts of national culture and national history . These two films have a common dependence upon Hollywood movies of the studio era. These old Hollywood movies have come to constitute a shared culture in which international audiences participate as part of their visual and narrative heritage. Universal defines Scott’s film in terms of a Hollywood past. “It has been four decades since chariots raced and swords flashed across movie screens in epic dramas of a time long past.”2 The blurb refers specifically to Spartacus (1960) and more generally to the epic films of Cecil B. De Mille in the 1950s, such as The Ten Commandments (1956); however, this quote itself suggests an ambiguity in the notion of Hollywood.3 Gladiator is also indebted to the Italian mytho-melodramas of the late 1950s and 1960s: Ercole e la regina di Lidia (1958), Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide (1961), Ercole sfida Sansone (1964), and so on, or even the United Kingdom’s Jason and the Argonauts, produced by Columbia Pictures (1963). Almodovar’s title is an obvious reference to Mankiewicz’s All about Eve (1950), its topic borrowed from the women’s weepies of classical Hollywood such as King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937) and Irving Rapper ’s Now Voyager (1942) that intertwine motherhood and destiny. These references to Hollywood and to its legacy as an international film style are not mere nods to the cinéphile; they speak eloquently about...