Changing my mind: occasional essays - By Zadie Smith Page 0,87

begging his bank for money: “I need this, see? To get my phone on . . . cos I got a woman . . . and I need to speak to her.” That’s country music logic, and it’s really quite beautiful.

After the cultural violence of much nineteenth-century anthropology, there came a twentieth-century emphasis on reticence—we should no longer seek to explain people definitively, but rather observe them, respecting their otherness. Fortunately, no one told Werner Herzog, and that is why his Grizzly Man is so damn cool. Herzog (whose voice-over perfectly matches The Simpsons’s hard man, Rainier Wolfcastle) is an infamous egomaniacal, auteur nutjob (i.e., a great European director) with a bent for the Germanically literal. (To pay off a bet he once made a movie called Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. It did not disappoint.) Herzog is hard-core. He’s not interested in your interpretation of why American nutjob Timothy Treadwell lived among bears. Who cares what you think? Herzog has his documentary in hand, explaining that what we have here “iz on astone-ishing story of beauty and depth.” He’s not wrong. The footage itself is mostly Treadwell’s, but the film is a discordant duet of two voices: Herzog’s old-world Schopenhaurian pessimism versus Treadwell’s new-world optimism (which, Herzog believes, masks a deep despair).

Herzog calls bears a “primordial encounter.” Timothy calls them Mr. Chocolate and Aunt Melissa. Herzog believes Timothy was “fighing against the civilization that cast Thoreau out of Walden.” According to Timothy’s parents, the motivation was more prosaic. Not to give the specifics away, but “failed TV actor” is at the root of the crisis. Still, Herzog is determined to spin grandeur out of poor Timmy. And fabulous though it is to hear Herzog shouting about the “ooltimatt indifference of nature,” it’s Timothy saying to a fox, “I love you. Thanks for being my friend. I like this—do you like this?” that brings real joy. All you need to know about indifference is right there in that fox’s face.

BRIEF ENCOUNTER AND PROOF

In the spring of 1945, when David Lean’s Brief Encounter was first released, my father was nineteen. I envy him that vintage year of cinema and all opening weekends between, say, 1933 and 1955. Instead of Memoirs of a Geisha, he saw Woman of the Year. Instead of Shopgirl, he got Top Hat. The first film he ever saw was King Kong, and it was a merciful hour and a half shorter than the beast I slept through in January. In New York and Paris, we can revisit the films of our fathers any night of the week in dozens of fine revival cinemas; in London we rely on the occasional largesse of film festivals and the BFI. To those who love them, any rerelease of a 1940s film is a draught of sunshine. I have never seen a movie of this period in which there was not something to like, just as I have never come across a cheese I wouldn’t eat. Brief Encounter is a Wensleydale: a lovely slice of English fare, familiar, inadvertently comic. It has become its own parody. The English are slightly ashamed of it, as the Aus trians are annoyed by The Sound of Music. In fact, its reputation as a period piece is unfair. It is not all cut-glass diction and antediluvian good manners. The film is really about the dream life of the English, those secret parts of us that are most important and to which we have least access. It’s a shame to go to the cinema only to laugh (as modern audiences laugh at the supposed camp excess of another sincere movie, Now, Voyager). If you pass over the superficial culture shocks of sixty years passed (A lending library in Boots the chemist! A string quartet in a railway café!), it is as astute about the English character as it ever was.

The story is easily paraphrased: Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) and Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) meet in a railway station and fall in love. Unfortunately, they are married to other people. Laura has a stolid, suburban husband, Fred, whose only connection to the Keatsian strain in English life is via the Times crossword, the clue in question being “When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high . . . (seven letters).” Laura suggests “romance.” It’s right—but it doesn’t fit with the other answers. In this moment the entire film is contained. There are many things that the English want and dream