Shall We Dance is the morning movie today at TCM and if you go to the website’s schedule listing, you will find, as on practically all movies showing on TCM, a short blurb from the staff of Leonard Maltin’s reviews. That blurb says, “Lesser Astaire-Rogers is still top musical, with Gershwin’s ‘Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,’ ‘They All Laughed,’ and ‘They Can’t Take That Away from Me’ holding together flimsy plot about dance team pretending to be wed.” I don’t quote this to denigrate Mr. Maltin or his staff because, hell, I’ve used the “flimsy plot” line myself. My question is, what does it matter?
Let’s not get into actual technical definitions of plot and story but, rather, treat “plot” as simply “the basic storyline of the movie” so that we’re all on the same page. Again, if you want the exact definitions of both plot and story, click here and have a great time with all that. When you’re done, flush all that out of your mind and come back here. Now then, as we were saying, we’re just going with the basic, good old, “plot’s the storyline” and we’re not going to get too technical. That said, since when did a movie’s plot have anything to do with whether it was good or not?
Lines like “holding together a flimsy plot” give more importance to the plot than necessary. In the cinema, as in the arts in general, what something about is of little importance compared to how it is about it (Roger Ebert used to say this so much he called it Ebert’s Law, which is stated as, “A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it.”). One of the best ways to see this clearly is in the form of remakes. There have been many a time when more than one movie tackle the same story and one of them does it a whole lot better. The Front Page (1931) has been remade straight, as The Front Page (1974) , and as an adaptation, as His Girl Friday (1941) and Switching Channels (1988). They’re all telling the same story, using the same plot, but if the movie relied on the plot for its qualified standing, then all would be equal. They are not. Most would rank His Girl Friday as the best of the lot, and I would agree, and the fact that it is the best comes down to how it was done, not the plot. And that plot, by the way, isn’t flimsy at all. It’s tightly plotted, like a suspense thriller, but that didn’t save Switching Channels one bit.
Now look at movies that couldn’t be considered to have tight plotting at all. Daisies, for instance. The 1967 masterpiece, written and directed by Vera Chytilov, has no plot or story at all. Since I wrote the article for it here at TCM, allow me to quote from it:
“To describe the plot of this movie would not only be a futile exercise, as it would just be a relaying of separate actions, one after another, with no discernible story, but it would also greatly miss the point. There is a story toDaisies, it’s just not in the movie. It is the movie. It’s how the movie is made, where it starts and where and how it ends. Our two young adventurous women feast upon the world (both literally and figuratively as they consume copious amounts of food throughout the course of the film) and, in the end, find guilt and anxiety the reward for working against the state. After gorging themselves on more food than most people have ever seen in one room, they mash it, walk on it, throw it at each other and trample their surroundings until all lies in ruin.”
Daisies is a series of scenes that have no logical connection but work together, almost like a feature length montage whose purpose is not to tell us a story or give us one to tell, but relay a feeling, emotions, attitudes. The movie makes a statement in an indirect way without actually stating it. If Shall We Dance succeeds despite its “flimsy plot” then Daisies, without any songs by Gershwin, should be a miserable failure because, trust me, it has ten times the plot Daisies does. But it’s not the plot that makes the movie at all. It rarely is.
I have movies I love that have intricate plotting, from North by Northwest to Chinatown, and movies I hate with intricate plotting (I’ll leave those alone for now). Other favorites barely have plots at all, including almost anything by Jacques Tati but especially Mon Oncle and Playtime. So when I see a statement implying that a movie works despite its flimsy plot, I feel like the person making the statement is missing the point all together. When a movie works, it’s because of how it was made. When it doesn’t, it’s for the same reason. But plot? That doesn’t matter at all and I’m sure my friend, Jeanne Dielman, will back me up on this, if I can ever break her from her routine.