{"id":15812,"date":"2021-01-27T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-01-27T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=15812"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:17:13","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:17:13","slug":"john-lee-hancock-and-the-practicality-of-non-auteur-cinema","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/john-lee-hancock-and-the-practicality-of-non-auteur-cinema\/","title":{"rendered":"John Lee Hancock and the Practicality of Non-Auteur Cinema"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The story goes that George Clooney<\/a> described his filmmaking style as \u201cone for them, one for me,\u201d and that ideology\u2014acquiesce to a studio or mainstream gig, then go off and do your own passion project\u2014has come up over and over again when we analyze the career paths of actors and directors. It\u2019s a simplistic understanding of how Hollywood works, but as the industry has gotten more splintered, superhero-dominated, and stratified, the idea that you can only spend time doing high-brow, weird, or challenging stuff after you\u2019ve paid your dues has become a recurring phenomenon. It\u2019s not exactly fair, but what in Hollywood is? Clooney was an A-lister when he made that observation, and stars of similar caliber continue to live by it. In seven years, Steven Soderbergh<\/a> made all three Ocean\u2019s<\/em> films and his Solaris <\/em>remake starring Clooney, plus his two-part, nearly five-hour Che<\/em> biopic with Benicio del Toro. George Miller helmed the Babe<\/em><\/a> and Happy Feet<\/em> franchises until he returned to Mad Max<\/em> with Fury Road<\/em>. Scarlett Johansson made the cerebral sci-fi Under the Skin<\/em> in between stints as the Avengers\u2019 Natasha Romanoff. Denzel Washington acquiesced to The Equalizer 2<\/em> before signing onto Joel Coen\u2019s Macbeth<\/em>. Unless you\u2019re working entirely outside the studio system, or are the kind of celebrity who can command a payday of any size anywhere you go, this balance is the status quo. Everyone has to pay their bills, don\u2019t they? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Few filmmakers have embodied this balance like John Lee Hancock, whose upcoming film The Little Things<\/em> is the culmination of a 30-year passion project\u2014the years of effort syncing up with how long Hancock has been in the business. If you only knew Hancock\u2019s name from his family-friendly box office hits (The Blind Side<\/em>, which made more than $300 million at the box office and secured Sandra Bullock an Academy Award for Best Actress; Saving Mr. Banks<\/em>, which sanded the rougher, pushier edges off Walt Disney in his interactions with Mary Poppins author P. L. Travers), The Little Things<\/em> seems like a hard swerve. How do you go from a feel-good story about a tough Southern mom guiding  a wayward kid to football success, to a thriller about a serial killer murdering women in unspeakably terrible ways? It\u2019s almost as weird as when Stephen Gaghan went from Traffic<\/em> and Syriana <\/em>to Dolittle<\/em>. But looking over Hancock\u2019s filmography will clarify how much a neo-noir like this is actually very much in his wheelhouse, and how indicative it is of the filmmaker\u2019s approach to that \u201cone for them, one for me\u201d balance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Set in 1990, The Little Things<\/em> follows a former officer, Joe Deacon (Washington), and current detective, Jimmy Baxter (Rami Malek), who butt heads during their investigation of a serial killer in Los Angeles. Deacon left the LAPD contentiously and is haunted by the case he couldn\u2019t solve, but when women start being killed again, he joins Baxter in an unofficial capacity to try and find their man. They become convinced that the slimy, obfuscating Albert Sparma (Jared Leto) is the killer, but the question of whether he\u2019s legitimately guilty, or just playing games with Deacon and Baxter because he can, provides the cat-and-mouse tension of The Little Things<\/em>. In a December 2020 interview<\/a> with Dateline<\/em>, Hancock shared that his script was first registered with the Writers Guild of America in 1993, the same year Clint Eastwood directed and starred in Hancock\u2019s A Perfect World<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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That film followed a Texas Ranger (Eastwood) pursuing an escaped convict (Kevin Costner) in order to save a child hostage (T. J. Lowther), and earned far more attention for Hancock than did Hard Time Romance<\/em>, his little-seen 1991 filmmaking debut. Roger Ebert gave A Perfect World<\/em> four out of four stars<\/a>, praising its \u201celements of a crime genre picture, but the depth of thought and the freedom of movement of an art film.\u201d For The New York Times<\/em>, Janet Maslin called it<\/a> “a rare high-powered Hollywood film that is actually about something” and praised Hancock’s “terse, colorful screenplay.\u201d $130 million made on a $30 million budget wasn\u2019t half-bad, either.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the success of A Perfect World<\/em>, Hancock stayed in the crime-genre lane: Four years later, he would team up with Eastwood again for a film adaptation of John Berendt\u2019s nonfiction book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil<\/em>. Set in Savannah, Ga., Berendt\u2019s book tracked the trial of an absurdly wealthy antiques dealer who was charged with the murder of a male prostitute, and profiled the people involved based on Berendt\u2019s interactions and interviews. Part true crime in the mode of Truman Capote\u2019s In Cold Blood<\/em>, part legalese a la John Grisham, and part sociological survey of the changing American South, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil <\/em>sold millions of copies, spent months on The New York Times<\/em> bestseller list, and substantially boosted Savannah\u2019s tourism industry. The movie version was greatly anticipated, with John Cusack, Kevin Spacey, and Jude Law receiving top billing, but critical reaction was mixed. The lyricism of Berendt\u2019s text and his insightful presentation of Savannah\u2019s half-kooky, half-Southern Gothic appeal didn\u2019t translate well onscreen, and in hindsight, Spacey\u2019s casting as a closeted gay man prone to bursts of violence seems a little too close to reality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Neither Clintwood nor Hancock escaped unscathed. Maslin\u2014who had so previously praised Hancock for A Perfect World<\/em>\u2014in her New York Times<\/em> review criticized<\/a> how Eastwood had first read Hancock\u2019s screenplay before reading Barendt\u2019s book, and Ann Hornaday wrote for The Baltimore Sun<\/em><\/a> that \u201cJohn Lee Hancock has reduced Berendt’s beloved gaggle of local characters to a parade of stereotypes.\u201d \u201cThe nuance of Berendt’s narrative \u2026 has also been sacrificed for easy watching,\u201d Hornaday added in her review, and that idea of \u201ceasy watching\u201d would define Hancock\u2019s career for the next few years as he shifted away from crime and death. Perhaps part of this was caused by his failure in getting The Little Things<\/em> off the ground: Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, Warren Beatty, and Danny DeVito all passed on directing, and the project languished. Remember: One for them, one for me<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So Hancock went where the jobs were. There was The Rookie<\/em>, a G-rated Disney film about Major League Baseball pitcher Jim Morris that Hancock wrote and directed. The Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u2019s Joe Morgenstern said<\/a> it was \u201cright up there with the best,\u201d praising its inspirational tone and big heart. In The New York Times<\/em>, Peter M. Nichols praised its combination of \u201cschmaltz and a serious, believable character<\/a>\u201d in Dennis Quaid’s depiction of Morris. Box office receipts were nearly four times its budget. And so when Hancock\u2019s next big film, The Alamo<\/em>, flopped both critically and commercially (the logline \u201cYou will never forget\u201d was \u2026 unfortunate), he went back to what had worked: uplifting sentiment inching right up to corny treacle. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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There\u2019s a comforting quality to The Blind Side<\/em>, Hancock\u2019s adaptation of Michael Lewis\u2019s book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game<\/em>, that made it such a smash hit. The film about aspiring football player Michael Oher\u2019s (Quinton Aaron) relationship with adoptive parents Leigh Anne (Bullock) and Sean Tuohy (Tim McGraw) didn\u2019t have the melancholy atmosphere of A Perfect World<\/em>, or the smuttiness of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil<\/em>, or the historical experimentation of The Alamo<\/em>\u2014all qualities that made Hancock\u2019s scripts unique. But it was the kind of story we like to repeat about America, about hard work, post-racial harmony, and sports as a great unifier, and Hancock told that story (inaccurate as it may be) well enough. Bullock left the 82nd Academy Awards with the Best Actress award; The Blind Side<\/em> was also nominated for Best Picture. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hancock was the focus of many a glowing profile. And the boost from that film allowed him the opportunity to revisit genres rather than moving on from them completely. In years to come, Hancock would try to redeem the failure of The Alamo<\/em> with another Western, Netflix\u2019s The Highwaymen<\/em>, in which he reunited with A Perfect World<\/em>\u2019s Costner. He would consider the American Dream through Walt Disney in Saving Mr. Banks<\/em> and Ray Kroc, self-proclaimed creator of McDonald\u2019s, in The Founder<\/em>. While the former had the same kind of gently benign vibe as The Rookie<\/em> and The Blind Side<\/em>, The Founder<\/em> was an unabashedly critical portrait of the man who stole the fast-food concept from the McDonald brothers who pioneered it. And with The Little Things<\/em>, Hancock is simultaneously returning to the crime genre from which he started and finally realizing a film that has been in the works for 30 years, the original \u201cone for me.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of this is to say that we guarantee The Little Things<\/em> will be a good movie\u2014do not hold Crooked Marquee <\/em>accountable for this! It is probably logical to reserve some healthy skepticism toward a script that was written 30 years ago! Hancock\u2019s career is more interesting than you would expect from The Blind Side<\/em> and Saving Mr. Banks<\/em> alone, but a passion project gestating for that long could go either way! Putting The Little Things<\/em> aside, though, tracking the ups and downs of Hancock\u2019s career reminds us of the transactional nature of Hollywood, of the many genres and styles that directors and writers who aren\u2019t given rarified auteur status are expected to master, and of the deep pragmatism needed to keep working in this industry. As Hancock said in that interview with Dateline<\/em>, \u201cI make the movies that get made,\u201d and three decades later, The Little Things<\/em> finally is. What \u201cone for them\u201d movie from Hancock will we get next? \"\"\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The \u2018Little Things\u2019 writer and director has had, to put it mildly, an uneven career. But is there some method to its madness? An investigation: <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":582,"featured_media":15816,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381],"tags":[162],"class_list":["post-15812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/582"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15812"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15812\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22596,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15812\/revisions\/22596"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}