There are weeks in every critic’s life when she spends most of her time watching movies through her fingers.
I’m not talking about Us, with its jump scares and prodigious helpings of gore. Or even The Beach Bum, the latest gonzo assault from Harmony Korine. I speak here of a genre that strikes far more terror in my soul than the most graphic thrillers or cringeworthy stoner comedies: the animal movie.
See: The Mustang. Seriously, see it! I gave Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s touching portrait of a prison inmate who heals his past through training a wild horse an enthusiastic three stars this week, impressed by its inspiring story, astute direction and magnetic lead performance by Matthias Schoenaerts.
But reader, I cannot tell a lie: I squirmed my way through The Mustang, from its alarming opening sequence, in which a pack of magnificent horses is rounded up by an intimidating helicopter and led into a transport trailer to painful sequences during which Schoenaerts’ character rushes, yells at and punches his horse. I didn’t cover my eyes, but I will admit to repeating, “It’s only a movie” over and over again, like a 10-year-old getting her glimpse of Freddy Krueger.
I even cringed at Dumbo, the live-action Disney adaptation in which a computer-generated baby elephant faces all manner of peril and pain, from a wrenching separation from his mother to being threatened by fire and various forms of human wickedness. “That was sad,” a little boy said on his way out of the preview screening. Brother, tell me about it.
Admittedly, I’ve always been a bleeding heart where animals on-screen are concerned, having been raised on the typical, traumatizing baby boomer diet of Born Free and Old Yeller. But as anyone who suffers the same complex can tell you, it gets worse with age: I’m at the point where the slightest suggestion of a non-human character experiencing mild discomfort can send me into a swivet of neurotic projection. This happens even if the part is played by an ensemble of pixels or a robot in polyurethane. I rooted for the bear in The Revenant. I think the shark in Jaws got a bad rap.
My feelings about animals on-screen aren’t just rooted in knee-jerk empathy. There’s also a critical argument to be made against using furry, big-eyed creatures as an easy way to raise the emotional stakes and telegraph heroes and villains. The harder a guy kicks the dog, the worse he obviously is. It works, but it’s lazy filmmaking.
(This, of course, is also the problem with children who are reduced to manipulative narrative devices. So many of this year’s Oscar-nominated shorts featured kids in jeopardy, agony or varying states of despair that I barely made it through the lineup. There’s a fine yet bright line between heart-rending and sadistic.)
Despite some unsettling stories of mistreatment of animals on movie sets, I try to remind myself that most of the creatures I’m seeing on-screen weren’t really whipped, abused or interfered with. But I still question our attraction to having extreme vulnerability and distress packaged for human pleasure: A filmmaker creates an animal character, subjects it to pain, then delivers it from that pain, to our great relief. That’s entertainment?
This is the kind of breaking point that all critics reach when it comes to a genre that they can’t appreciate regardless of the virtuosity of a particular movie. If I’m unable to appreciate the most basic appeal or formal conventions of torture porn, I won’t be able to evaluate the latest Saw movie in a way that’s useful or illuminating for its fans. As critics, our job is to meet the movies we see at least halfway.
And that can be literal as well as figurative: Last year, I declined to review the horse movie Lean on Pete because I realized while watching an advance copy of the film that I wouldn’t be able to make it to the end. That was my loss: I’ve heard it’s a wonderful movie. But part of a critic’s job is knowing her emotional limits and recognizing when they will get in the way of being open-minded and fair.
Still, it can pay off to white-knuckle it through even the most heart-pulverizing scenes. In the end, I was glad I saw The Mustang. The story it told, which was inspired by real-life programs in which horses and people rehabilitate one another, justified its most discomfiting moments.
Scanning the upcoming calendar, I see that Penguins, the latest Disney-pomorphic nature documentary, will waddle adorably into theaters in April. All I can say is: Pray for me.