Tony Scott’s films — Top Gun the best known of them — made a lot of money. But he was never a favourite of the critics
Tony Scott, who died last Sunday at 68, apparently from suicide, was one of the most influential film directors of the past 25 years, if also one of the most consistently underloved by critics. One of the pop futurists of the contemporary blockbuster, he helped turn Tom Cruise into a megastar with the 1986 smash Top Gun and was instrumental in transforming Denzel Washington into a global brand. Scott made a lot of people rich and even more people happy with his enjoyably visceral work.
Scott effectively began his film career in the early 1960s by acting in a student effort, Boy and Bicycle, directed by his older brother Ridley Scott. Their lives continued to overlap: Ridley attended the Royal College of Art, and Tony followed him there; after Ridley graduated and created his production company, Ridley Scott Associates, he hired his brother as an associate. Ridley tended to win better reviews; Tony regularly dominated the box office. They built on the success of their commercials (Nike, etc.) and music videos (Madonna, et al.); established Scott Free Productions; bought the British film studio Shepperton; and directed and produced an array of entertainments.
Advertising was the creative playground where the Scott brothers — and other British filmmakers, like the directors Alan Parker and Adrian Lyne, and the producer David Puttnam — honed their skills before going to Hollywood. The movies of this particular British invasion cut across genres and subjects, and ranged from the vulgar to the visionary. What they shared was an emphasis on striking visuals that translated ideas (like sex) into sleek, eye-grabbing images that could also work for the marketing.
One such film was Scott’s debut feature, The Hunger (1983), a contemporary vampire tale with David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve as a pair of the beautiful undead. The movie was predictably slammed, with the critic John Simon mocking its “totally effete interior decorator sensibility,” which of course was exactly part of its appeal.
The same year that The Hunger hit, the producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson, inspired by some magazine imagery of a so-called Top Gun flight school at a Southern California naval station, had a billion-dollar idea. “It was a picture of a helmet with the visor down, and a plane reflected in the visor,” Bruckheimer said of the crystallising image, which needed a crack advertising man like Tony Scott to sell it. And sell it Scott did with fast editing, faster jets, a bottle-blond astrophysicist (Kelly McGillis) and a linchpin rivalry about two absurdly named pilots, Maverick (Cruise) and Iceman (Val Kilmer).
Years later Quentin Tarantino, in a hilarious on-screen bit in the 1994 indie film Sleep With Me, would argue that Top Gun was “about a man’s struggle with his own homosexuality,” an analysis-endorsement that boosted Scott’s cinema cred.
Right around the same time, Scott directed one of his best films, from Tarantino’s script for True Romance/ (1993), an often funny, frenzied thriller. Tarantino counted himself as one of its fans, despite reservations: “He uses a lot of smoke,” he said of Scott, “and I don’t want any smoke in my films.”
A maximalist, Scott used a lot of everything in his movies: smoke, cuts, camera moves, colour. This kind of stylistic, self-conscious excess could be glorious, as in his underappreciated film Domino (2005), about a gorgeous bounty hunter (Keira Knightley), in which the superfluity of the visuals matches that of Richard Kelly’s screenplay.
A common knock against a director like Scott is that his movies are all style and no content, as if the two were really separable. Yet the excesses of Scott’s style invariably served those of his over-the-top stories, like that of the enflamed title avenger (Washington) in Man on Fire (2004), who — amid the saturated palette, liquid slow motion and a hailstorm of bullets — vows that “anyone who gets in my way, I’m gonna kill him.”
If Scott didn’t inspire a lot of respect from critics, he does have some dissident champions among serious cinephiles. There was plenty about his work that was problematic and at times offensive, yet it could have terrific pop, vigour, beauty and a near pure-cinema quality.
© 2012 The New York Times
