By Ty Burr ’76
Being a movie critic can be a strange way to make a living. For one thing, everyone wants to talk about my job, but no one quite respects it. This occasionally includes me. I’ll meet someone at a party, ask what they do, and he or she will say “cardiac surgeon” or “third-world food bank coordinator,” and then I have to admit I spend my days watching movies about heavily digitized superheroes while taking illegible notes in the dark. And then someone else will walk up and want to talk about the new Hunger Games movie when we should really be asking the doctor what it’s like to massage a human heart back into working condition.
But that’s the thing: When it comes to movies, everyone has an opinion. We all know what we think of The Departed or The Grand Budapest Hotel, whereas not many of us can speak with authority on the subject of ischemic cardiomyopathy. The fact is, everyone is a critic. When you come out of a movie and discuss it on the drive home with your significant other — parsing its meaning and effect, performances and punch lines — you are engaging your critical faculties. So what does paying someone to do this in public bring to the party? And can it ever be said to make the world a better place?
I didn’t use to think so, but now I’m not so sure. First of all, no art or artifact can change the world — only people can do that. But people are affected by what they see and absorb, and they’re profoundly affected by experiences that take them outside the parameters of their lives. I’ve come to think of movies as magic windows onto other, less familiar realities; while too many of those windows overlook our modern pop circus, others reveal different countries, cultures, kinds of people and ways of being. They can broaden your sensibilities without your being aware of it.
Back in 2005, I reviewed a documentary called Mad Hot Ballroom, about a New York City program that sponsored ballroom dancing lessons and competitions in 60 public middle schools. It was a good movie, and my daughter, then 10, thought it was a great one, and I used the review to talk about how you could see the effects of the program on the faces and in the behavior of even the toughest kids. The movie, I wrote, will speak most loudly to audiences the same age as its subjects.
About three years later, I was giving a talk at a local library, and afterward an older man came up to me and started telling me about that Mad Hot Ballroom review. How reading what I’d written convinced him to see a movie he’d never heard about, and how seeing the movie convinced him to start his own ballroom dancing program for disadvantaged school kids on the South Shore. How that program had flourished, letting boys and girls interact within the safety zone of beautiful, timeless steps.
In other words, I had pointed to a window, and he had turned that window into a door. Through that door into new territory were streaming dozens, maybe hundreds of children whose lives would never be the same.
This is why I do what I do, I tell myself whenever I’m slogging through the latest CGI action-fantasy spectacle. It’s not heart surgery, obviously, yet movies and the other arts do operate on the spirit, for better and sometimes for worse. My job, I guess, is to urge you toward the former and warn you off the latter. Once you look through those windows, you’re on your own. Who knows? Maybe you’ll start dancing.
Ty Burr ’76 is a film critic for the Living/Arts section of the Boston Globe and a critically-acclaimed author of several books about the movie industry.