Juno talks back to the King of California

Always thought it was a generally accepted rule of screenwriting that if you've given your movie a narrator you've done something wrong and need to go back and rethink and rewrite your script.

You're supposed to show not tell and what else does a narrator do but tell?

All rules are made to be broken, especially artistic ones, but I'm beginning to think this one has been repealed and replaced by its opposite.  Almost two-thirds of the movies I've seen in the last month or so have had a narrator, and a blabby one at that.  Some of those narrators have had more lines than main characters in their movies.  The Amateurs, Fierce People, 2 Days in Paris, The Hunting Party, The Assasination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Juno, and King of California.

I think it's a sign of a fundamental flaw of Gone Baby Gone that I "remember" it as having a narrator but can't really remember there being one.  This makes me think that either Casey Affleck's character's narration added nothing to the movie and was so useless I forgot what he said the moment he said it or that his character talked to other characters as if he was a narrator rather than a character in the movie.  The latter is very likely considering that Gone Baby Gone is adapted from a novel narrated by the character Affleck plays and it's a good bet that a lot of the book character's narration made its way into the movie character's dialog.  Someone who's seen it more recently will have to tell me which is the case?  (Dan?)

At any rate, in only one of these movies is the narrator not a character in the story, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and in that one he's the voice of history, there to remind us that we are watching a true story and that some of the things that may seem too outrageous to have happened in real life really did happen and also to tell us things the characters, the real people whose story we're watching unfold, could not have known and told us by talking to each other about.

This points out why it's a good rule of thumb, if not an ironclad rule never to be broken, to avoid resorting to a narrator.  If the narrator's only telling us what the characters could have said or acted out for us then you're undramatizing what should be dramatize---you're taking the motion out of a motion picture, in other words.

The narrators in The Hunting Party and 2 Days in Paris tell us things they should have been saying to or acting out with their fellow fictional characters.  There's no reason for them to be talking to us except that the screenwriters want to pass along information they were too lazy or too incompetent to dramatize.

In Fierce People, the narrator goes back and forth from talking to us to talking to his father, reading out loud his letters to his father and the journal he's keeping to show his father, consequently he's not so much telling us what's happening but commenting on what we see happening and his narration is sort of like the soloquies in Shakespeare, a way for the character to dramatize his own thoughts and emotions.  It's a gimmick and a gimmick that could have worked if the things he was commenting on were worth the commentary.  Rich people behaving badly is a theme that was worn out long ago.

I'm not sure that the narration in The Amateurs has or needs any more justification than that it's a good way to let us hear Jeff Bridges talk a lot more than the action of the story would actually allow him too, but it at least isn't there to cover up laspes in the sceenplay.  Bridges' character, Andy, talks to us as if we're friendly people he's met in a bar who want to hear him tell his story and not as if we're an audience watching a movie who needs to be told what the screenwriter and director have failed to dramatize. 

Andy acts as his own historian.  He tells us things he and his fellow characters could not have known or understood at the time.  But more than that he gives us a point of view, his own, that allows us to see the characters on their terms, or at least on Andy's terms, which means that we can watch them with a degree of affection and forgiveness that we might not otherwise have had.  If we were allowed to view these characters objectively, we couldn't help seeing them as a pack of clowns and losers.  They are a pack of clowns and losers, but we get to know tham first and always along with everything else as Andy's good friends, people who are loved and cared for and important to each other, if not in the grand scheme of things.

The Hunting Party is a flawed movie in other ways besides it's over-reliance on narration.  2 Days in Paris is a bad one.  Fierce People is a gimmicky one that fails to get past its own gimmick and its narration is part of that gimmick.  And The Amateurs is a movie I like a lot more than it probably deserves.

King of California is a good movie that doesn't need its narration. 

I'm not sure why the movie's makers thought they needed Miranda to tell us so much.  She acts as her own historian, but very little of the history matters.  All we need to know about her father is that he's a manic-depressive whose wife, Miranda's mother, is out of the picture for some reason.  The details of their marriage and its failure aren't interesting or relevant to the plot.  She covers some holes in the plot but there aren't many of those.  She tells us things about what's happening as if she (meaning the screenwriter) thinks we won't catch or aren't there to catch, but she's wrong about that.  A lot of the time she's talking just because it seems that the director or the screenwriter are worried that they haven't done their jobs.   And sometimes she seems to be there to give us a point of view that, as opposed to the one Andy's narration gives us in The Amateurs, will distance us from Charlie, make us less tolerant and forgiving towards his antics...or possibly keep us from being so caught up in Michael Douglas' charismatic craziness that we forget that he is in fact a nutcase who is ruining his daughter's life, which means that either they didn't know they were going to be able to cast anyone as good as Michael Douglas or didn't trust that Douglas would be as good as he is in the part---Douglas does make Charlie likable in his lunacy, but he makes him edgy enough to be scary.  At no point does he tempt us to think that Miranda is lucky to have him as a father.

But all of these problems could have been solved by the addition of one character, someone, anyone, Miranda could talk to.  She wouldn't have even had to say much to that character.  When all's said and done, it appears that Miranda is narrating the movie to save the producers the cost of hiring another actor.

So, our Screenwriting 101 lesson so far:

If you've resorted to using a narrator and all that narrator is doing is covering holes in your plot or saving you from having to write some dialog or your director from having to convey an idea visually, you've goofed up somewhere and need to write another draft.

But if your narrator is there to provide a perspective (The Assassination of Jesse James, The Amateurs) or give a character the opportunity to say things he can't say to the other characters (Fierce People, The Amateurs) or to provide us with a point of view we would be unlikely to take if left to our own devices (King of California, The Amateurs) then you might be ok.  Your problem then is in the execution.  Ideally, what you want to do is make the narration not something apart from what's happening on the screen but integral to it.

What you want to do is what's done in Juno.  To do that, though, you need a script as sharp as Diablo Cody's, a director as smart as Jason Reitman, and an actress as brilliant as Ellen Page, all of them working together to create a character and narrator as engaging and funny and lovable as Juno McGuff.

No sweat.

Juno is her own historian.  She tells us things she couldn't have told the other characters at the time, either because she didn't have the words or the understanding yet or because she was too scared or embarrassed or distressed to tell them.  And she gives us a point of view that is affectionate and forgiving but also wry, wise, ironic, and---this is important---incomplete.  Juno doesn't know everything that's going on and can't a lot of what happened to her.  We can't get by by listening to her.  We still have to watch the movie.

Juno's narration is transitional far more often than it's expositional and it's far more often commentary than it is either.  Juno talks to us, not as friends she's met somewhere since the story took place, but as the audience watching this movie, an audience that includes Juno.  She talks to us as if she's watching the movie right along with us.  It's part of the joke---Juno is the kind of artistic teenager who would imagine her own life as a movie or a novel narrated by herself---but it also makes Juno one of us.  It brings her into our lives and us into hers.

What's more, as Juno is talking to us, the movie is talking back to her.  Just about everything she tells us about her life or about another character is answered by a short scene or an image or a line of dialog illustrating her point but not always proving that point.  It's as if the illustrations are being chosen and put up on the screen not by Juno but by an assistant alter-ego of hers who sometimes disagrees with her. 

It's not the case that the assistant thinks Juno is wrong.  Juno is usually right, up to a point.  The assistant just wants us to see that even if Juno's telling us the truth, there still might be more going on than she knows or grasps.  This has the effect of pulling Juno the narrator back into the movie she's narrating and making her narration integral to the movie---Juno is a very smart sixteen year old, but she is still a sixteen year old, and one of the important themes of her movie is that life is very much beyond the abilities of even the brightest and most together sixteen year olds to handle.  As Juno herself says, she is dealing with things way above her maturity level.

That Juno is able to muddle on and even triumph (on a small scale) despite her relative immaturity, lack of experience, failures of understanding, and general human beingness marks her as an exceptional character.

All of this is very clever but it wouldn't work without Ellen Page's pitch-perfect delivery.

Note:  What once went here is now in a post all its own, Seat-fillers at the Academy Awards: Threads open up when the stars go to the bathroom.  Please join in.

Cross-posted at newcritics. 

Comments

[John C.]

Name a good movie WITHOUT a narrator. They all have 'em.

[Geoduck]

It could be worse; while channel-surfing last night, I came across the start of Uwe Boll's Alone In The Dark, and it started with, literally, a five-minute narration/text scroll: "There was this ancient Indian tribe and they opened the gate to Hell and they were wiped out but they left behind these evil artifacts which were scattered around the world and the US government set up this secret agency to collect the artifacts and one of the scientists working for this agency turned rogue and went down in a mine shaft and conducted vile experiments with children and turned them into monsters who still lurk in the mine waiting for fresh victims..." That was the point where I tuned out.

[Linkmeister]

I'm trying to remember whether "The Gods Must Be Crazy" had a narrator.

[Batocchio]

Good write-up. All About Eve has a very prominent narrator, but it works well, because George Sanders is so snide and tells us things we wouldn't necessarily know.

Linkmeister, The Gods... did have one, although IIRC, he speaks less as the film goes on. It's heavily narrated setting up the tribe at the start.

John C, you have to be kidding! There are at least half a dozen or more from 2007 alone.

Geoduck, as soon as you mentioned "Uwe Boll"... I guess they though the opening narration/scroll could somehow fix it, huh?

[velvet goldmine]

Sometimes when I'm really tired I realize I'm talking exactly exactly like Travis Bickle. This proves a lot of things, one of which is that Taxi Driver had some pretty hypnotic narration.