SQUIRRELS TO THE NUTS, the director's cut of Peter Bogdanovich's final film, reveals the director's radical retrogradation.
By Doug Dibbern
I finally got the chance to see Peter Bogdanovich’s last fictional feature recently at the Museum of Modern Art. Technically speaking, I saw Squirrels to the Nuts, the director’s cut of She’s Funny That Way, the title it was released under in 2014 in a heavily redacted form.1 For a movie with virtually no reputation, even among ardent cinephiles, this director’s cut turned out to be a surprisingly entertaining little movie—that is, if you were willing to accept it on its own, admittedly idiosyncratic, terms.
The film is an oddity, a throwback to a 1930s screwball sensibility. This madcap farce follows a theater director played by Owen Wilson and a young call girl turned actress played by Imogen Poots whose paths cross sexually, romantically, and professionally as he commences rehearsals on a new play. But it was this old-fashioned approach, I understood immediately, that had been the source of audiences’ and critics’ negative reaction back in 2014. So many people today think that they admire “realism” and “plausibility”—but, to my mind, that just means that they’ve unthinkingly accepted the arbitrary narrative conventions of their time. Bogdanovich and his co-screenwriter (and former wife) Louise Stratten, on the other hand, were ostentatiously embracing a quite different aesthetic agenda. They’d consciously orchestrated their screenplay around a series of increasingly odd coincidences whose implausibility was the very source of their ideas about both comedy and their characters’ lives.
I was at MoMA on assignment, and I assumed that I’d write an article that compared the two versions of the film. And eventually, I did come around to preferring the director’s cut (even though I liked that they’d edited out most of the scenes with the old judge for the release version), but when I left the theater, the differences between the two versions was not the aspect of the experience that interested me. Instead, I found myself thinking about artists’ late careers, that sometimes frustrating but sometimes fruitful period when their decades-long drift from the triumph that originally made their reputation has provided them with a surprising sense of artistic freedom. But I also found myself thinking about questions of taste—about how our artistic judgments sometimes emerge from within as an unbidden response, but how other times they’re the product of a conscious act of will. I’d found myself in the theater chuckling along with the movie sometimes without fully understanding why; but I also knew that on some level I’d made a mindful decision to like the film precisely because I understood that most other moviegoers wouldn’t. When a filmmaker makes unusual decisions, we have to decide whether we want to undertake that same aesthetic journey along with them. But I’d been interested in Bogdanovich’s career for decades, so I was primed to be open-minded. And once I willed myself to be liberal with my judgments, I found myself reconsidering—surprising, given Bogdanovich’s very obvious conservatism—the extent to which we might think of him as a radical filmmaker.
While peers like John Cassavetes and Robert Altman were taking bold artistic risks, Bogdanovich wanted to retreat into the old studio system, turning each of his movies into an homage to—or parody of—some old classical genre: What’s Up Doc? felt like a newer version of Bringing Up Baby, while At Long Last Love felt like a reimagining of an Astaire-Rogers vehicle. If anything, Bogdanovich seemed to be the very antithesis of this Saidian/Adornian model of the late avant-gardist. It was his friend Orson Welles–with his never-ending experimentation on F for Fake and the Other Side of the Wind—who was the real cinematic paradigm of the forward-looking late career radical.
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