Doubtless you've encountered the man on the street who suffers from delusions of grandeur and believes himself to be Jesus Christ. Perhaps you have even met the man who claims to be Napoleon. In Joe Gould's Secret, Joseph Ferdinand Gould (played to absolute perfection by Ian Holm) confesses that he too suffers from delusions of grandeur.
You see, he has the audacity to believe that he is Joseph Ferdinand Gould. And somehow he has gotten it into his head that he is special, that he deserves respect, that he has something important to share with the world--or perhaps that he can help the world to share something special with itself.
Joe Gould is a street person, an oral historian, a bohemian, a human being who has dared to scrutinize civilization and has concluded that civilized life is not for him. He is not insensible to the pleasures of civilization. Indeed, he very much likes a warm bed and a glass of beer. He likes companionship and conversation and literature and art. His appreciation for the finer things in life is unbounded. But he has no patience at all for the mundane, no tolerance for what he regards as 'dross.' And his contempt for those who pose at appreciating life is demonstrated when he crashes a poetry reading to contribute his poem on the seasons:
In the winter,
I'm a Buddhist.
In the summer,
I'm a nudist.
He is, in other words, a refreshingly heroic figure. He is not Disney's typical sympathetic indigent whose cheery smile and warm heart will magically see him through a cold winter's night spent sleeping on the sidewalk. He is full of rage at a world that has no place for him, and he shivers when he can't find shelter in the winter. His life is difficult and painful and full of frustrations that he ultimately brings on himself by refusing to kowtow to the demands of a world that he did not design and cannot understand. He is that rare thing: a martyr who suffers without whining any more than he has to.
My description is not intended to suggest that he is perfect. Like the traditional hero, he is a deeply flawed individual. He is not merely proud, but vain. He does not seek social justice or fight for the rights of the common man. He wants a special dispensation from the powers that be for himself. He is boastful and manipulative and manages somehow to make people thank him when he takes their money. But his selfishness is primitive, precivilized, and uninflected by the perverse sadism that is an integral component of any hierarchical society.
When a celebrated sculptor agrees with Gould's views on art, it makes our hero feel bad because he is aware that the sculptor's opinion matters (since he is a respected artist), but that Gould's own identical opinion is worthless (since it is merely the opinion of a vagabond). He is a social enough creature to want his opinion to matter, but there are certain things (such as fawning over art patrons) that he refuses to do in order to be taken seriously. His gregariousness is at odds with his dignity, and his dignity usually triumphs.
In a word, we need more people like Joe Gould. But not many of us would be willing to make the sacrifices necessary to emulate him, so we are content to hear his story. That story is told by Joseph Mitchell (Stanley Tucci), a writer for the New Yorker who hails from North Carolina. Tucci's Southern accent is not what I would call bad, but is so self-consciously labored as to be perhaps the only blemish worth mentioning in a film that is beautiful from beginning to end.
Mitchell wants to tell Joe Gould's story in a typically self-serving and Victorian way ('Victorian' being a cultural code word for 'bourgeois-industrial'). His purpose is to engage our sympathies for Gould and perhaps to help us shed a few tears for him before we find another story worthy of our attention--a horror story, perhaps, or a good mystery. Mitchell is a writer who does what all writers do: He uses real people as if they are characters and expects them to disappear when he is through writing about them. The use that writers make of people-turned-characters is really a far more sinister process than that undergone by the New Yorker subscriber who reads about Gould (or, to strike a little closer to home, that of the audience that watches a movie about Gould) and then forgets all about him.
It is more sinister because the writer of such stories is not only guilty of exploiting the sentimental inclinations of the audience, but of exploiting the flesh-and-blood human character he has written about. As a director, Tucci refuses to make that exploitative compromise. He is far more interested in Joe Gould's impact on Mitchell after Mitchell has finished writing about him than he is in the story of Gould himself. I'm afraid I must respectfully disagree with other reviewers who have reluctantly admitted to finding Joe Gould's Secret too long. Its length is not only intellectually essential, but emotionally vital to the film.
We must stick with Joe Gould's Secret because it must stick with us. We must carry our understanding of Joe out of the film and into our lives. His is not a story that we can shed a tear over and be done with. Joe Gould's life was changed by something that he read once upon a time. Tucci's film, in order to keep itself from sinking to the level of the mawkish and the maudlin, must at least attempt to change us in the way that Joe Gould himself was changed. We cannot simply learn what happened; we must--at least so far as film is capable of encouraging us to do so--live what happened. Not everything that happens is interesting; but every moment of this film struck me as compelling.
My favorite movie changes from day to day. More often than not, my favorite film is something by the Coen Brothers or Kenneth Brannagh. But every now and then, my favorite movie is another film by Stanley Tucci, a cinematic gem called Big Night. In that film, Tucci tells the story of a guest of honor that never shows up.
Similarly, Joe Gould's Secret is about a manuscript that is fated never to materialize. Tucci is a master at making us hope for things only to keep them from us, at raising our expectations only to disappoint them. It's so easy for a director to give us a satisfying portrayal of triumph or of love. But Tucci has now given us two different films that provide us with a satisfying portrayal of loss. He gives us hope knowing full well that he intends to take it away, and we allow him to get away with it because he manages to capture what is most natural and beautiful about disappointment. He teaches us how to deal with bitterness without becoming embittered.
He is a brilliant, brilliant filmmaker. And something tells me that it won't be long before I wake up convinced that Joe Gould's Secret is my favorite movie.
*Truly exceptional reviews of this film have already been written by grouch and nfp and others. In order to make my own contribution different, I have decided to take a somewhat more analytical (and infinitely more tedious) approach. But Nick (nfp) has proposed that Joe Gould's Secret is one of those rare films that are worthy of discussion, and I happen to think he is right.
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