The movie American Gangster grew out of a profile of Frank Lucas that Mark Jacobson wrote for New York magazine, and now Jacobson is back at the same place with another troublemaker, Armond White, movie critic for the New York Press and newly elected chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle. As Jacobson notes, White has the position "because he was the only one who wanted the generally thankless job." That's a clue both to how seriously White takes his job and also to the mixed feelings, to put it gently, that he arouses among many of his colleagues. White is a man of strong opinions, opinions that run against the main current of received opinion more often than not. (He panned the Dark Knight and thought the world of Torque.) The late, great Pauline Kael used to say that people who could agree to disagree with other people about politics and religion and whether their own kids belonged in rehab or on Death Row would lapse into seizures and hurl death threats at you if they found out that you disagreed with them about some stupid-ass movie. You might think that people who form and express opinions about movies for a living would be beyond this sort of thing, and boy, would you be wrong. But even in the the smaller-than-it-looks world of movie criticism, White is a contentious figure. He says that his father "taught us about the rights of the working man, and also that if you didn’t have anything to say, you should keep your mouth shut. But if you did have something on your mind, you should talk up, don’t keep it to yourself." There isn't much that White doesn't feel comfortable sharing when it comes to movies and writing about movies. There was a time when Kael and the self-styled "auteurist" critic Andrew Sarris had a rivalry that inspired younger critics to pick sides and keep old fights going, but when White spoke to Jacobson, he made a point of pledging allegiance to both critics, as a way of declaring his admiration and kinship with any good writer and sharp thinker who takes movies seriously. The reason so many other contemporary critics treat White as the enemy isn't that he provides an alternative to a chorus of mainstream voices but that when he goes after his colleagues in print, he isn't shy about suggesting, or even saying out right, that they're not as serious as they should be. This can even take the form of things such as White's decision, back during his previous tenure as head of the New York Film Critics Circle in 1994, to schedule the annual awards dinner "during the Sundance Film Festival, creating conflicts for some members. White defends this decision. 'The circle is the oldest and most legitimate film-critic group in the country. We’re not the Dallas Film Critics Circle. If people wanted to carry water for penny-ante shit like Sundance, that’s too fucking bad. The circle comes first.' ”
"If you cut me open," says White, "that’s what you’d find: the movies, Bible verses, and Motown lyrics.” He recalls growing up on movies as a kid, when “I used to love to see stuff like The Long, Hot Summer and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. To me, this was a window into the adult world. Now people watch movies so they can stay kids, which proves how infantilized the culture is. I wanted to see how grown-ups acted, in CinemaScope." And for all his vitriol, he sees himself as a positive force, claiming that "he has never knocked a film without suggesting a superior movie a viewer might more profitably spend his time watching. Instead of the usual ten-best list, White offers the 'Better-Than List,' in which he expounds on why one lesser-known or critically unfashionable movie is better than another highly touted but ultimately empty product." It sounds great in theory. In reality, you'd be surprised how few fans of The Dark Knight are soothed by hearing that while the movie they love is a piece of shit, they can redeem themselves by trading it in for Transporter 3. Meanwhile, some of the critics who respect his intelligence and faith in his own taste and who might be expected to have his back feel that he's showboating when he does what they call his "last honest, angry man" routine. His show of principles has also taken the form of writing a controversial piece a few years ago in which he castigated his fellow critics for accepting DVD screener copies of movies for review, thus ending the accepted idea, once taken as gospel among critics, that you haven't earned the right to claim to have really seen a movie unless it's been on a large screen in proper theater conditions. “I don’t say these things to call attention to myself or to get a rise out of people," White protests. "I say them because I believe them. We’re living in times when critics get fired if they don’t like enough movies. People don’t need to hear what mouthpieces for the movie industry tell them. They need to hear the truth.”