The Great Joe Morgenstern

[Trivia: What are the 5 Kingdoms in taxonomy?]

Oscar Wilde has an essay, “The Critic as Artist,” where he questions and justifies the existence of criticism as a genre. “Seriously speaking, what is the use of art-criticism? Why cannot the artist be left alone?” he asks. But his meandering essay contends that, in truth, the critical spirit represents a high form of human activity. “More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not at all. That is a gross popular error. It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it.” In fact, Wilde goes so far as to frame true criticism as a thing that “treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new creation. It does not confine itself—let us at least suppose so for the moment—to discovering the real intention of the artist and accepting that as final.” It is a dramatic inversion of the lesson learned by Anton Ego in Ratatouille, who arrived at the admission that “the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.”

It’s a wild piece, in scope and in content, but one takeaway is the appreciation for criticism as a beautiful genre in its own right. The most beautiful fruits thereof are thanks to Joe Morgenstern, a film critic who worked at Newsweek for two decades and then at the Wall Street Journal for another three. He retired last year, and although much of his work might be completed and paywalled, I wanted to highlight just what a master of English vocabulary, prose styling, and humor this man is.

His vocabulary is far-reaching and his word choice never misses the mark. I personally learned a lot of words from Mr. Morgenstern, such as “noirish,” as in, “Robert Pattinson stars as the Caped Crusader in Matt Reeves’s lengthy, noirish entry to the DC universe.” His prose style has a real intuition for weaving multiple thoughts together in a way that is casual without being colloquial, as in his line that “Jessica Chastain is the only reason, though a good one, to see The Eyes of Tammy Faye.” He has a firm command of rhetorical flair that is showy but never forced, as in his glowing review on Pixar’s WALL-E: “The first half hour of "WALL-E" is essentially wordless, and left me speechless.” Morgenstern demonstrates, by the way, that criticism can be delightful and rich even when it isn’t done on the “easy mode” of taking aim at something flawed, but is rather praising something done well; his love for WALL-E is a first-class example of that.

And he has a knack for crafting elaborate and ingenious analogies that capture exactly the idea he wants to pin down, as when he said of last year’s Death on the Nile, “[Death on the Nile] has pizazz and period style in the same way today’s big-brand toothpastes have flavor — artificial ingredients give them a taste that’s discernible, but too generic to name.” Or speaking of Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho from 2021, “Mr. Wright's film, which he wrote with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, asked me to cross a street into another genre that amounted to another movie. That's where I drew the line.”

Everything that is excellent about Joe Morgenstern’s style came together in his review of Iron Man 3,

The suits have taken over the franchise. Not the corporate suits, though "Iron Man 3" is so incoherent that it might have been written by a particularly quarrelsome committee, but the robotic suits. The movie is obsessed by them.

. . . Weaving together linguistic cleverness with the making of valid points, as he does often. Later in that review he calls the early explosions in the film “novocaine,” benumbing the audience to the later climactic spectacles. That part of the review is paywalled; I just remember that word choice from when I read it in print because his language is that vivid and memorable.

He was seriously underwhelmed by Baz Luhrmann’s take on Gatsby, from 2013:

This dreadful film even derogates the artistry of Fitzgerald, who wrote 'The Great Gatsby' while living on Long Island and in Europe. In a deviation from the book that amounts to a calumny against literary history, Nick, the author's surrogate, is discovered in a psychiatric hospital where, as an aging alcoholic, he struggles to comprehend the vanished figure at the center of the long-ago story, and finally completes his treatment by writing the novel. It's literature as therapy, and Gatsby as Rosebud.

From his review of the Michael Bay-directed Ambulance, which came out last year, is this fun blurb:

The main thing you need to know about “Ambulance,” showing only in theaters, is that it’s insane. Maybe not clinically, but narratively and cinematically. The camera never stops moving, for fear that something might develop in front of it and slow things down by requiring actual attention. Watch all 136 minutes of the film’s hyperkinetic fragments—a case study of attention-deficit disorder—and your synapses will crackle, pop and eventually snap, exactly as they’re meant to.

And his opinion of The Polar Express:

"The Polar Express," an animated feature starring Tom Hanks and directed by Robert Zemeckis, is a train wreck of mind-numbing proportions. This big-and-bigger-screen version of the children's book by Chris Van Allsburg (it's also being released in IMAX) is emotionally inert, visually unsettling when it isn't flat-out creepy, and dramatically -- well, there is no dramatically, because there's essentially no story or character development, notwithstanding frenzied musical numbers, manufactured crises, multiple roller-coaster rides (OK, that's the video game, but where's the movie?) and several would-be-smash endings that rise to Christmas-crushing levels of false jubilation.

In high school, I sometimes went to the public library and fished through the stacks of Wall Street Journals for the prized Friday editions with his reviews in them, piling them up just to read Morgenstern’s opinions of movies I hadn’t even heard of. He might not be reviewing new movies these days, but if you have the chance (and the KCRW website hosts some recordings of the man himself voicing his thoughts), but if you have the chance to acquaint yourself with some of his work, I recommend it.

And in case you were wondering what Mr. Morgenstern thought of the movie whose critic character Anton Ego was such a born-again, he had one word for it: “génial.” “Not genial as in cheerful,” he explains, “though Pixar's latest animated feature is certainly that, but génial with an accent, as in brilliant, or inspired.”

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Answer: Animals, Plants, Fungi, Protists, and Monera.