How reliably realistic is realism?

March 10, 7:05 PMPhiladelphia Movie ExaminerWilliam Sternman

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Movies really shouldn’t be realistic. But they should appear to be realistic.

Here’s what I mean.

Although Laurent Cantet’s The Class (Entre les murs) is a fictional film (based on the real-life experiences of writer-actor François Bégaudeau as a teacher in a tough Parisian school), it is shot like a documentary. In scene after scene, we see the teacher going through the same struggles with his unruly students. We never get know any of them as real people. And after about 20 minutes, I wanted to shout, “Been there. Done that. Let’s get on with it.”)

Showing the events as close as possible to the way they actually occurred may have been “true to life,” but the deeper realism—of the characters and their relationships to each other—is nowhere to be seen.

Then there’s The Passion of the Christ.

Since Jesus and his disciples all spoke Aramaic, director and co-author Mel Gibson had his actors speak their lines in that dead language. (Other characters speak in Latin or Hebrew.) How much more “realistic” can you get?

The only problem is that the dialogue had to be translated into English with subtitles. That put an artificial wall between the actors and the audience. It made the audience aware that they were watching a movie, rather than vicariously experiencing the events as they took place on the screen. It would have seemed more realistic if the actors had just spoken their lines in English so that we could have experienced them directly.

Another assault on verisimilitude is the fact that in Passion, as in so many of its predecessors, none of the supposed First Century Middle Eastern Jews looked Jewish.

But the worst sin of realism here is that the passion of Jesus (like the childbirth scene in Charles Vidor’s 1957 remake of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms) goes on and on almost beyond endurance. Empathy turns into impatience, and you find yourself just wishing the end would come so that your agony, as well as the main character’s, would end.

This is how I felt as I squirmed through the incomprehensibly titled The Last House on the Left . (Since all the action takes place either outdoors, in a motel or at a summer cottage by a lake, the only reason I can see for the title is to hook those who loved the Wes Craven movie of the same name.)

Dennis Iliadis’s update takes graphic realism to a sadistic low. We are forced to witness act after act of physical and emotional cruelty. Like so many horror films, this one intersperses periods of serenity to put us off our guard before the next attack strikes. The only saving grace is that none of the characters really comes alive as real human beings; otherwise, our vicarious suffering would have been unbearable.

Halfway through the screening, the audience greeted each act of gratuitous savagery with nervous laughter. When the tables were finally turned and the villains got their equally cruel and graphic comeuppance, the audience responded with cheers, hoots, hollering and clapping. Although I too wanted the villains to get their just deserts, I had had enough brutality already.

The last half of the movie takes place at night and in the rain. But in the feel-good ending, the sun is shining as the family motorboat speeds away to civilization and safety. This is, I suppose, meant to redeem us for having indulged our baser instincts. Nothing that simpleminded could have taken the bad taste out of my mouth.

I can’t help wondering if I was the only one there who thought about—or even cared—how this formerly normal family would come to terms with their nightmare. The adults, who had been turned into savages, although in a worthy cause, would have an easier time, I’m sure, than their 20-year-old daughter, who had been raped, shot at and stabbed, in addition to seeing her best friend tormented and killed.

 You can watch the trailer here.