Proof

Proof is a highly-intelligent play in the tradition of Arcadia and Copenhagen. Writer David Auburn uses math as a foundation for a story about gender expectations, madness and love.

While Michael Freyn in Copenhagen uses the detective form to explore the Uncertainty Principle in personal relationships, Auburn uses the detective form to explore proof of identity and trust.

The structure gives us a first act that sets up a crime, and yet no crime seems to have been committed. The second act solves the crime that may not have been a crime at all.

See or read this play for techniques in bending a genre, in this case, the infinitely-malleable detective story.

The Constant Gardener

The Constant Gardener shows us what happens when a film's moral argument outweighs its story. The film has a serious thesis it wants to express concerning the plight of Africans and the responsibility of pharmaceutical companies that supply them with drugs. There's nothing wrong with starting with a theme and creating a story from that. But it had better be a good story.

In The Constant Gardener the writer chooses the thriller and love story on which to hang the thematic line. A diplomat's wife is killed and he sets out to find out who did it and why. This brings him into considerable danger of being killed himself. He learns that his wife had discovered truly horrible crimes committed by drug companies in Africa.

To make this work, the writer has two big requirements. First he has to show that this was a great love between husband and wife, because the husband must risk his own death to finish the job his wife started. Second, the writer must come up with a detective plot that is full of reveals and surprises, or else the audience is going to see early on that this story is just an excuse to attack international drug companies in Africa.

Unfortunately the writer fails in both of these requirements. The husband and wife meet at a lecture, go to bed together in the next scene, and then head off to Africa as husband and wife. The wife doesn't trust her husband enough to tell him about the secret investigation she is pursuing. And there is little evidence that their marriage is anything but a convenient connection between two good friends.

It's one of the great rules of storytelling that you can't montage love. An audience can't intellectually know that two people love each other. They have to feel it, and that takes screen time. Without the foundation of a strong love between the two characters, the husband's quest to uncover the injustice, in the face of almost certain death, is emotionally unbelievable. And the quest driving three quarters of the movie just falls apart.

The writer also fails to come up with a detective plot to justify the length of the story. Detective stories work by withholding information from the audience. If that information, in the form of reveals, is not surprising or shocking, the story feels like a giant stall. The wheels of the mechanism show and the audience gets impatient and bored. If the theme is top-heavy to boot, the lack of storytelling ability is fatal.

Crash

Crash is an excellent example of horizontal storytelling, for both what works and what doesn't. Horizontal storytelling is everything happening at the same time. Vertical, or linear, storytelling is what happens next. Horizontal storytelling works primarily by comparison. Vertical storytelling shows the development of one thing, usually a central character.

Horizontal storytelling causes all kinds of problems, which is why it is very rare. First, there's so much cross-cutting between approximately equal events in time that narrative drive stops.

Second, you have to present so many characters that you can't explore any of them in much depth.

Third, you have to rely too much on coincidence to bring characters together and give the story some shape, some vertical development. Otherwise the horizontal spirals out to infinity.

Fourth, you often can't find a way to end the story other than to just stop. When one story event doesn't follow necessarily from another, there is no 'right' final scene, just the last thing that happened in time.

To deal with these problems, the first thing the horizontal storyteller has to do is come up with an organizing principle, an underlying unifier that gives a logic to the unfolding. Writers Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco use a subject, and this immediately causes problems of its own.

The first problem these writers encounter by using a subject is that the one they choose, racism, is likely to blow up in their face. Any story that tries to talk about racism will appear to many in the audience to be racist. If the strategy is to show characters believing the stereotypes of the various races in order to reverse or upset them, the author may seem to believe the stereotypes himself.

A second problem the writers encounter by using a social subject as their organizing principle is that the story feels heavy-handed from the opening scene. When you are writing an extremely horizontal story, you have to do many more scenes of racial set-up, so the first third at least of the movie is in grave danger of infuriating the audience into giving up.

Crash shows all of these problems of the horizontal form at the beginning. But Haggis and Moresco know how to use the benefits of the form as well. For example, they know that the horizontal story, while running the risk of superficiality, allows them to set up a giant moral accounting system. Each character, with his unique moral flaw, gets his poetic justice through the help of every other character. This is cosmic, Twilight Zone accounting, like Vertigo, but on a much grander scale.

With the thematic heavy-handedness in the beginning of the story, Crash's grand accounting program may feel a bit schematic. The more you push the horizontal, the more you stretch the skin and bones of the organic body to its breaking point, the more you show the contrivance, the mechanism, of the author underneath.

But about a third of the way into this film, the benefits of the horizontal story form start to kick in. Much of the pleasure of the grand accounting comes in the pleasures of the comparisons, of who will show up to give a character his comeuppance. This is the pleasure of the grand story weave. It requires top plotting ability, and these writers have it.

The story weave, in the form of reveals and reversals, is also what saves the film from being too morally top-heavy. Having done the difficult set-up work, the film can run a series of great flips: the car on fire, the little girl, the guy releasing the slaves, etc.

Another benefit of the horizontal form is that you can set the firing pins to go off for all the characters about the same time, so you can give a succession of hard shots to the head and body of the audience. By the end of the film, these shots come with terrific intensity.

There is one more bonus to the horizontal story, and it's a thematic one. This complex social weave is the story equivalent of a Breughel painting, for example, the large canvas of the village in winter where pockets of individuals and groups go about their daily affairs, largely unaware of each other, but as part of a diverse community where the hidden hand of mutual benefit is always working. In Crash, the characters are divided off from one another by their city and their cars. But in the rare moments of connection, these people, each with the same moral blind spot, show their essential humanity.

Spanglish

James Brooks' Spanglish is a classic case of a film with some great lines and moments wasted by weak character and structure.

The film starts with a storyteller, Cristina, recounting the path that led her, a poor Mexican girl, to apply to an elite American college. Structurally, then, she is the main character and the story line is how her mother, Flor, changed her life.

But this places certain requirements on the character. She must have unique weaknesses and a Need that, through struggle, will lead her to a self-revelation at the end of the story. And since her mother is the main agent for that change, the mother should have weaknesses and a need, otherwise the story is nothing more than hero worship.

But this girl is barely drawn. Yes, she learns the value of keeping her unique Mexican traditions while succeeding in an American world. But there is really no weakness or need defined for this child at the beginning. And mother Flor is such a mature, advanced and beautiful human being from the start that all one should logically do is stare at this woman in awe.

The structure is further confused by the fact that this is a Hollywood mainstream movie. Which means that a little Mexican girl is not going to drive this story. The story will be driven by American movie star Adam Sandler and his movie wife, played by Tea Leoni.

But they haven't been set up structurally to drive the movie. Sandler's character, John, is even more perfect than Flor. His only flaw is being foolish enough to have married Leoni's nutcase character, Deborah, in the first place. Deborah has plenty of weaknesses and needs. But not the kind that show character complexity. Her weaknesses and needs are so extreme she is a caricature. She is the comic version of the mother in Ordinary People, a woman of such towering insensitivity and neuroses that no one could stand to be with her for longer than ten minutes.

Brooks tries to tack on some kind of self-revelation and moral decision when John and Flor admit their love for each other but won't go off together because of what it would do to their kids. But this doesn't work for all kinds of reasons. First, neither one is the structural main character. Second, this is two perfectly righteous characters acting righteously. And three, they are actually making the wrong decision; the best thing that could happen to their kids is to get them as far away from Deborah as possible.

There are some great lines in this movie. But these aren't real people. And that means the mechanics of the storytelling is always right on the surface.

Alfie

The big lesson of Alfie is the difference of episodic and organic story. An episodic story is one in which the individual event or scene stands alone. An organic story is one in which all the events and scenes are connected under the surface and build to a surprising but also logically necessary ending.

This film is extremely episodic. Alfie loves a number of women who are only mildly different. So each segment seems like the same beat, hit again and again.

Couple this with a simplistic moral decline on the part of the hero and you have a predictable story that devolves. This is the kiss of death.

All good fiction has a strong moral element, but a moral tale is too heavy-handed. The original Alfie was also episodic. But it had the great advantage of a hero whose hedonistic, amoral lifestyle was in shocking contrast to the prevailing morality and movie history at the time.

Forty years later, showing a playboy who learns that easy sex is hollow is so common, obvious and p.c. that the point is made by the second scene of the film. Everything after that is a test of endurance.

Big Fish

The teller of tall tales takes on a tough task (besides risking too much alliteration). The tales have to be exceptionally creative, because they are supposed to surprise and delight. But their fabulist nature also makes it more difficult to affect the audience emotionally. The audience knows the stories are fake and thus have no anchor in real human need and motivation.

Tall tales also tend to become highly episodic. Made up of bizarre and outlandish events, they highlight a moment or a single image instead of a steadily building web of cause-and-effect.

Big Fish doesn't know how to solve the unique problems of the tall tale. It's a patchwork script, and its attempts at solutions just make the problems worse.

The writer tries to affect the audience emotionally by framing the fantasy story with a son's attempt to get close to his storytelling father. This line is psychologically real but boring in its execution. It also feels like much ado about nothing. So what if dad likes to make up stories and repeat them a few too many times.

What's worse, this technique of a second, realistic story line backfires. Instead of anchoring the tall tales in some recognizable human emotion, the realistic line cross cut with the fantastical line seems like two different movies stuck together, and neither is done well.

An even more serious flaw with this script is that the tall tales aren't that delightful. This is where the fantasy game is won or lost. In Big Fish we have a giant who doesn't do much, a big fish, and a parachute drop behind enemy lines where the hero encounters a woman with two heads.

There is a Utopian town, which is quite common in fantasy and can be very powerful. But this town is never explained or given any larger symbolic meaning.

The first lesson here is simple. If you are going to do tall tales, do them all the way. You're in the fantasy genre, and once you get the audience in its own fantastical world, you have to keep them there.

In the Fantasy Class, I talk about the fact that fantasy is more dependent on the premise set up than any other form. If you don't get in and out of the fantasy properly, you can't build the fantasy and you can't make the necessary emotional connection between the fantasy events and the characters' psychology in the real world.

The second lesson is: once your audience is in the fantasy world, you better tell the most imaginative tall tales anyone has ever seen. Great fantasy is about showing people possibilities they never even dreamed of. That's a high standard, but in this form it's the only one that really matters.

Cold Mountain

Spoiler Alert: This breakdown contains information about the ending of the film.

The myth-drama is one of the most powerful story combinations that we have. Myth gives us the hero's journey and the epic scope. Drama gives us the family and the deep, complex issue. When the love story is added, we have the potential for a real knockout.

Unfortunately, the original writer of Cold Mountain structured his story in such a way as to remove much of the power of the myth-drama. By doing a straight cross-cut between the two leads for most of the story, the hero's journey does not build and the family cannot explore a central issue through conflict.

Cold Mountain is obviously The Odyssey set during the Civil War. In The Odyssey, Homer also cuts between the traveling Ulysses and the faithful Penelope back home. But notice the key difference in structure. Homer doesn't do an equal crosscut. He heavily weights the story in favor of the traveling hero. This gives the story a building line and a powerful spine on which to hang all the symbolic elements that come with the myth form (for more on this see the Myth Class).

The biggest drawback to doing a crosscut throughout most of Cold Mountain is that it kills the love story. The lovers barely have time to meet and have a quick kiss before they are separated. Yet we are supposed to believe they will both fight through three years of silence and the worst assaults of war to get back together.

Of course the thematic point of the crosscut is that the juxtaposition of the two story lines creates a larger point through comparison. But here that comparison remains on the broadest level, showing that the two leads are equal in the obstacles they must overcome for their love. But the specific scenes where the crosscuts occur are largely wasted.

This film almost overcomes its foundation structural weakness through a number of excellent scenes. But then it commits one of the great sins of storytelling, the false ending. When an audience invests two and a half hours of their time watching two people struggle through hell to be together, you better have a profound reason to kill one of them at the end.

In Cold Mountain, we're not even close to profound. Yes, in war, especially civil war, a lot of people die. But by that logic, you could kill off everyone in this story. But killing off one of the lovers after all that effort serves no thematic point, and gives no new story value.

It is fake tragedy, what I call "death ex machina." It doesn't make your movie better. It just pisses people off.