American Sucker

After Peter Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures, the buzz of Sundance, recently reviewed by Dwight Garner in the New York Times, etc., etc., the other book causing a stir in Film-Related Blogdom is David Denby's American Sucker. Which isn't really about movies, but we get to blog about it anyway because Denby is, of course, a film critic at the New Yorker, a critic evidently admired across the board by the participants of Slate's "Movie Club" last week, though I tend to agree more with Jonathan Rosenbaum who takes Denby to task more than a few times in Movie Wars, most succinctly when he calls him "the film critic who can be counted on most regularly to express American doublethink with the least amount of self-consciousness."

Reviews of American Sucker in print have been generally negative. Slate blurbs a few; the quote from the New York Sun nails my overall impression so far as someone who hasn't actually read the book: "he seems more ashamed to be thought unintellectual than to actually be lowdown and deceitful." But the rhetorical volume is cranked up considerably at, for example, Persistence of Vision, where Liz writes that Denby...

...has somehow contrived to put the bloated carcass of his financial ego on display in the hopes of eliciting our pity cash.... Denby turns out to be one of the of hoards of "investor class" late-Boomers who, dazzled by the prospect of astronomical returns, threw their extra cash into an investment arena known to be fraught with risk, then had the gall to be all aghast about it when the bottom fell out.

Liz then recommends reviews by Chris Lehmann in the Washington Post and one in the New York Observer whose URL seems to have slipped off somewhere, which is too bad, because this bit, in my book, applies equally to Denby and Anthony Lane: "Mr. Denby is a capable writer. The problem here is not the author's prose but his judgment, which is serially bad (an alarming failure in a critic)."

Especially when it comes to real life and, as chronicled in the book, Denby's is a "monumentally selfish (and really quite uninteresting) personal journey," at least according to Adrienne Miller in Esquire. Richard Gehr goes strangely soft on him in the Village Voice. But let's let cinetrix at pullquote have the last word: "Like I'm going to throw my limited cash away reading about that whiny perv with his boo-hoo four-room apartment on the Upper West Side and sweet New Yorker gig."

Posted by dwhudson at January 15, 2004 2:46 PM