Gotham Diary:
Beautiful
22 August 2013
In the end, I watched three movies yesterday, Kicking and Screaming (as noted) and then two French specials, De rouille et d’os (Rust and Bone), which I hadn’t seen before, and Ne le dis à personne (Tell No One), which I had never found quite so thrilling before. More about the movies in a minute. In between movies, I finished off this week’s New Yorker, where Alec Wilkinson’s profile of the nonpareil art forger who generally goes by the name of Mark Landis got the electrons in my brain jumping again.
“The Giveaway” is full of laugh-out-loud passages, but an abiding sadness prevents its being just plain fun.
In 1988, when Landis was thirty-three, he lost his savings in a real-estate investment and “returned to Mississippi in disgrace,” he said. He moved into his grandmother’s house in Laurel, with his mother and his stepfather, who had moved there to take care of her. He stayed in his room, hardly eating, and before long he grew catatonic and was admitted to a hospital.
Between 1988 and 1992, Landis gave away no art. For a year, he lived on disability payments in the company of nine other men in a halfway house, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He finally left and enrolled at the University of Southern Mississippi, in Hattiesburg, where he took economics and math classes. He lived in a housing project, where the majority of the tenants were elderely black women. In church, he was the only white man among the congregants. When he started donating [his forgeries] again, recipients would sometimes collect pieces from his apartment. “They must have thought it was strange that you’d live in a housing project, if you had enough money to give away art to museums,” he told me. “I guess they thought I was eccentric.”
He stopped showing his gift deeds to his mother, though. She might have been proud of him when he lived in California, and she believed he was an art dealer and a benefactor, but the charade was not possible to sustain at close hand. “She wasn’t stupid,” he said. “One day I showed her one, and she just looked at me and said, ‘That’s nice’.”
It’s hard not to feel sorry, more condescendingly than empathetically, for Mr Landis, or for Father Arthur Scott, SJ, as Landis presented himself now and then, wearing the clerical collar but also driving his late mother’s red Cadillac. Told of this strange man’s forgeries of minor works by second-tier artists, all that I could conjure up was the forgiving smirk of Tennessee Williams. Diagnosed twice with schizophrenia, Mark Landis appears never have been involved with anyone other than his mother, who comes off in the piece as a milder Auntie Mame. As a would-be philanthropist who gives away his productions without any thought of remuneration, he wants to be famous (or at least highly regarded by grateful museum directors) for things he hasn’t done. I see nothing criminal in his gentle frauds, but there is no doubt that he is morally in the wrong, and probably sane enough to know it. Not funny. His stunts may be naughty, but the sharpness of his hunger for respect lets all the air out of them.
But what about forgeries generally? Since I’ve got no money in the game, it’s easy for me to trust my eye. Its first check is for beauty, and beauty is beauty no matter who produces it. The converse of this is that great artists can, and do, produce unbeautiful things. The important corollary is that I put myself under no pressure to attribute beautiful things to famous names. The second check is for characteristics. The painters who appeal to me most cover their canvases with characteristic ways of handling paint, and it is unlikely that any forger would capture them all. The third check is for what some might regard as arrogance. The importance of any picture is an invisible arc running from the canvas to my mind. It exists only when we are together in the gallery.
These principles, if that’s what they are, making me receptive to forgeries. They ought to be properly labeled and accredited, but don’t take them down because they’re not by Vermeer. I want to know as much as I can about art, but not in order to protect myself from being taken advantage of. As I say, this is not a problem: I’m not in the market for valuable art.
***
Rust and Bone is a decidedly unbeautiful movie. It did not appeal to me nearly as much as The Beat That My Heart Skipped did eight years ago, partly because Thomas, the hero of the earlier pictured (played so mightily by Romain Duris) was a tormented artist, and his story a surreptitiously romantic one in a way that reminded me of Flaubert. This dimension is missing from the new picture. Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard) works with whales in an entertainment facility. My grandson would adore the kind of show that she and her troupers put on — until a terrible but rather vague accident. I thought that the loss of her lower legs and feet would be the worst thing that happens in Rust and Bone, but it’s not, because the guy in the picture, a mec called Alain who seems incapable of minding his five year-old son, commits a world-class error of judgment. Alain’s surface appeal never quite won me over. When he wasn’t fighting — boxing for money in illicit matches — he seemed a gentle giant, but perhaps he was only simple. Sullenness is the only aspect of adolescence that he appears to have outgrown, and on some fronts it might be argued that his adolescence has yet to be reached. I’ll be reserving judgment on Matthias Schoenaerts (who plays Alain) until Blood Ties, Guillaume Canet’s forthcoming movie about crime in Brooklyn the Seventies. Marion Cotillard is great in her part — ça va sans dire — but the part was not thrilling enough to distract me from worries about her legs in real life. How did they do that?
M Canet’s Tell No One is an adaptation of Harlan Coben’s novel. Kathleen read it years ago, and I tried to read it, too, but I couldn’t get past the first scene, which was full of furiously bad writing. The director seems committed to rendering pop American styles with a slight French accent, which makes his films challenging for American audiences, in that most Americans still won’t see them because they’re in French, while many of the rest of us will wish for something “more French.” Little White Lies, a remake of The Big Chill with an exclusively American playlist, works best as a sampler of how French people do things that American people do, too, but in a slightly different way. With Blood Ties, M Canet will be throwing off the burden of French altogether; in addition to Ms Cotillard and Mr Schoenaerts, his cast includes Clive Owen and Billy Crudup. I suppose a remake of Tell No One with George Clooney is not totally improbable.
But for all its accents aigus, Tell No One is a spirited thriller with a topnotch cast that hurtles through Paris like a runaway train.