The Eternal Pleasure of a Quiet Movie
When I first started painting, I was taught to paint within the lines, as so many of us are. I was making watercolours with a tight, solid stroke; I experimented with colours and composition, but the final result was a desperate attempt to mimic reality with rigid delineations of colour that didn’t quite reflect the light. It wasn’t until I got to art school that I started to appreciate the fluidity of the medium. Four years with other artists, reading, painting, observing, experimenting, and learning about art changed all that. I learned how to appreciate the rough stroke of a thick brush, the dappled drops of transparent colour on textured paper, the cauliflowers blooming into unexpected tones, the incomplete, broken line that doesn’t quite connect, the mistakes and drips and drops that characterise immersion and passion. I began to prefer the magic of bleeds and the tactile quality of dry and wet paint intermingling on hand-made uneven surfaces. I learned to leave things to the imagination, and to paint, not reality, but the version of reality that lived behind my eyes instead.
My tastes were informed by what I read, what I saw, what I could achieve myself, and the more I learned about the world of watercolour, the more my view of beauty changed.
I understand, therefore, that movie critics see something that I don’t when they watch a movie. Art is personal, and it’s informed by personal histories, but also by trends and fads, by world events and by popular, current notions of what’s good or bad. They have a right to their opinion, and for some people, their opinion is right. Most often than not, however, I’ve realised that it’s not right for me.
Back in 1998, There’s Something About Mary was a wild success, even in Pakistan. All my friends loved it, except me. I still gag at the semen-as-hair-gel joke, and I didn’t get the humour that seemed to entertain almost everyone else in the world. After the first ten minutes, I stopped watching Titanic (I’ve still never seen the whole movie) and Celine Dion’s song, even today, makes me want to gouge my eyes out. I also hated Avengers: End Game. After a brilliant lead-in from Infinity Wars, frankly, it felt like they’d dropped the ball big time. These movies are getting louder and louder, it feels like, and I’m less and less interested in watching them.
It’s probably no surprise, therefore, that I loved The Professor (also known as Richard Says Goodbye in some countries, starring Johnny Depp). Critics did not. (I haven’t read the reviews — I just know the Rotten Tomatoes score, 10%. In contrast, it has a 76% audience score, 88% on Google.)
This is a quiet film and it’s been wildly underrated. It has its dramatic moments, but mostly it’s measured and stealthy. It’s not packed with action, and there are no hair-raising or crowd-pleasing twists at the end (I’m assuming today’s movie reviewers like that sort of thing). It’s like a book from the sixties when authors took the time to describe surroundings and feelings, when things happened because there was a point to be made, and not just to keep the reader enthralled. There are no unnecessary scenes here, and there’s an understated humour in the tackling of a very difficult subject — death.
I know a little bit about death. In the last two years, I’ve lost my mother, my brother (to COVID), and my fifteen-year-old cat. (Yes, I am in therapy.)
Even as I started watching the opening scene, when a solemn man in a white coat sits down in front of an equally solemn but elegantly suited man and pragmatically, but compassionately, tells him that he’s going to die, I wondered if I wanted to — or indeed, if I should — watch this movie. Hadn’t death already made enough inroads into my life?
Astonishingly, as I watched Richard come to grips with his mortality, I found myself smiling.
The announcement of his death doesn’t come with tears and tender moments with the family. Richard broods for hours, perhaps days — the timeline isn’t specific — alone and then walks into a duck pond in a rage. When he works up the nerve to tell his wife and daughter his impossible news, he’s distracted by his daughter coming out as a lesbian, and later, by his wife’s defiant admission that she’s having an affair with the dean of the college where Richard is a professor. There’s a hint, unsaid, and left to my imagination, of the rut into which Richard and his wife have fallen, a sad, unchanging, vanilla life that precedes the awful news.
Like the best paintings, the broad strokes of what their life was is left to bleed gently onto the paper, a soft background that teases the edge of the mind but doesn’t really disturb the present. This isn’t about what was, though it so completely informs the present. Unspoken and off-screen, I sense Richard’s rage at what could have been, what should have been, as he moves from reckless and relentless benders infused with alcohol, drugs and sex, to the slow, well-paced realisation that less really is more. Over the last chapters of his life, Richard sheds his dead weight, decluttering his life of students he doesn’t want to teach, people he doesn’t want to socialise with, distractions he doesn’t want to — or need to — deal with. He comes to terms with his best friend, his adulterous wife, his coming-of-age daughter, and he crystallises the reasons for his existence in spectacular disregard for how we think he should behave in his final days.
“If you’ve never read a book for your own eternal pleasure, get out.”
This isn’t a tear-jerker, though it is steeped in a wild array of emotions. There are laugh-out-loud moments in the movie. He purges his classroom of “kings and queens of the water cooler, corporate whores of tomorrow.” His wife asks him — another background wash that gives me insight into their past — if his ‘junk still works’, and after a quickie in the bathroom with a waitress at a bar, he stops at the motel where he knows his wife is carrying on her affair and leaves a note on her car — “it works”. His best friend, Peter (played by Danny Huston), drags Richard to group therapy where Peter stands up to share his feelings with rough emotion while Richard (who categorically refuses to participate) lounges carelessly next to him.
The dean, Henry, who’s having an affair with Richard’s wife, Veronica, in a thrall at the idea of the illicit affair, gives her a contract to create art for the college. Veronica, a well-known sculptor whose pieces aren’t inexpensive, scatters phallic columns that Richard correctly describes as ’giant boners’ around his college. In a scene where Richard ends up in the hospital for the night, his emergency contact is his gardener.
There are also scenes that leave me with a profound sense of satisfaction, such as when Richard ruthlessly kicks out two-thirds of his class. Or when he conducts a class on the college grounds, smoking marijuana with total disregard for college policies. Or when he crushes the dean’s attempts to castigate Richard for his increasingly outlandish behaviour on campus. Or when Richard greets Henry’s wife at a public event with a deep, luscious kiss that leaves her reeling. Or when he stands up in class and tells his students, “You’ve got one shot at this, one fucking shot. Don’t let a moment slip by…life, it’s a birdsong.”
Johnny Depp is not painted or costumed or disguised in this movie, and I still don’t recognise him, because he is, bringing his usual brilliance and depth to the role, Richard. As his emotional and teary best friend, Peter, Danny Huston is also marvellous — a man unafraid of openly expressing his love and undying loyalty to his best friend. (The last thing I remember Danny Huston from was a vampire movie, and this is as far removed from that as you could possibly get.) Rounding up the cast with stellar performances are Ron Livingston as the pompous Henry, Rosemarie DeWitt as the dispassionate, yet ultimately likeable, Veronica, and an exceptional Zoey Deutch as an empathetic student in Richard’s class who truly mourns his impending departure.
This is a great movie that really doesn’t deserve the critics’ wrath and I would urge you to watch it. It’s deep and dark and disturbing, but it’s also literary, funny, gentle, nuanced, and builds, step by step, up to a very straightforward message:
“Let us live well, so that we may fucking die well.”
