Cinema
At a distance
Peter Ackroyd
Ragtime ('AA', selected cinemas)
Norman Mailer has never looked more like himself than here, where he is playing a part. His role is that of the architect, Stanford White, gunned to death in a saloon by a jealous husband. He only survives on the screen for two or three minutes, but they are enough to set the tone of this film. For here is a famous face len- ding itself for other purposes, just as Stan- ford White was an historical figure whom E. L. Doctorow, in the original Ragtime, placed in the bathosphere of fiction. The film, however, has a chilling moment which isn't in the novel: after the murder of White, the camera pans over the crowd, and there are some women laughing at what they have seen. They are laughing because they do not understand the reality of the event: perhaps it is all a joke, or a set-up. If Ragtime had not been set in 1906, they might have been saying: they must be shooting a movie. No, they are just shooting a man.
Ragtime is, in part, about the birth of the film age. Like the music which the title celebrates, it bears witness to the strength and sweetness of a new culture — but its coldness, also, and the hint of frenzy in its somewhat mechanical rhythms. Ragtime is the music of the crank which turns the camera, just as it echoes the automobile. Milos Forman, the director, has entered in- to the spirit of this equation by turning his film into a spirited but wilful game. Fake newsreels follow authentic newsreels, so that the distinction between what is 'true' and, 'false' is dissolved immediately; characters and events are seen from a curious, uninvolved distance; a lunchtime scene is set up so that it mimics a painting by Sargent. Everything is stylised to the point of artificiality. Hence the appearance of James Cagney on the screen after an absence of so many years: he is now a cultural object, as readily identifiable as Norman Mailer, and his presence confirms the irony and self-consciousness which in- form the film.
This is in part because Milos Forman is a European director. An American, faced with the early 19th-century history of his nation, tends to go ape. All those im- migrants, all that heartbreak, and even the odd prairie or two, would have contributed to a mood of heavy-handed nostaglia. But Mr Forman is not in the nostalgia business. Although Ragtime does open on a panoramic scale — in the sense that a great many things happen at once — he tends to concentrate on small moments: the way a wife blows out her cheeks in desperation, the boredom of a young boy at the dinner-
table. Forman himself has, you might say, the eye of an immigrant rather than a possessor; the America he presents here is filled with strangeness, charged with fan- tasies of power and greed which are twisting everything into an unfamiliar shape. The screen is crowded with odd events and ec- centric faces — sometimes with the deliberate quirkiness of a Diane Arbus photograph and sometimes with the over- whelming confusion of a society which is undergoing a huge transition.
For we have here, in almost schematic fashion, the lineaments of a new America. Although Michael Weller's excellent and in- telligent script has pared down the dimen- sions of the novel, the film is still bursting at the seams: a young man who made fireworks is now making bombs, a Jewish immigrant becomes a film director, a Puritan businessman sees his values break- ing apart in front of him. Throughout the earlier part of the film, these scenes are presented in a detached fashion: the com-, edy is really a matter of farce, and the grand moments of passion or terror are treated coldly, in an almost offhand fashion.
But this wry, uninvolved manner becomes difficult to justify in the latter half of the film, which concentrates upon the career of Coalhouse Walker, a young black who turns to terrorism and arson in a fan- tasy of private vengeance. Here, again, For- man is concerned to depict the face of the new age: this is the violence of the future, and it is no accident that Coalhouse Walker should make his last stand among the priceless objets of the Pierpoint Morgan library. An old age is passing, and 17th- century chalices are thrown into the street.
I believe that, in America, the audiences have been cheering Coalhouse Walker at this point; if this is so, it shows a certain weakness in Forman's design. He wants his audience to contemplate the spectacle, but they insist on entering it instead. Walker is, after all, no more than a terrorist on the now familiar Iranian pattern. But the very coldness of Forman's treatment renders his crimes unexceptionable, even, at certain moments, comic.
This is a weakness in the film but, more importantly, it is a weakness in the filmic age which Ragtime celebrates: we live among images which are packed so closely together that we can draw no line between them. We cannot moralise about a culture, the forces of which we only dimly discern. Meanwhile, human events are being re- duced to painted images, human emotions to shadows. Ragtime tells us about that process.
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