Entertainment Weekly‘s Nicole Sperling asks, “What happened to movies made for grown ups?” Her article’s point is that all audiences want these days is to be entertained. We don’t want anything serious or artistic — just car chases and special effects and escape. It’s a hard time to be making movies for grown ups, since grown ups aren’t buying tickets for movies made for grown ups.

Give Robert Downey Jr. a glass of scotch and a suit made of metal, and lines will form around the block. But cast him as a newspaper columnist who befriends a cello-playing homeless man, and these days the only crowds gathering will be for the movie playing next door.

Iron Man was a fun movie. I have not seen The Soloist, in which Downey plays a newspaper columnist and Jamie Foxx plays a homeless cellist. But I do remember feeling a collective rolling of the eyes from the entire audience in the theater when I saw the preview. It seemed so earnest even in the preview, like it was one of those movies Robin Williams likes to star in, canned inspiration with a social message. Sperling writes:

Reviews were less than rapturous, but producer Gary Foster thinks there was something deeper at play.

“Audiences don’t want to be reminded of the darkness in the world,” he says.

Well, of course the producer of a bad movie doesn’t think the badness of his movie is the reason people didn’t see it. (Not that The Soloist could possibly be as bad as the preachy homeless-person-as-saviour movie With Honors, with Joe Pesci as the most annoying character I have ever seen in any movie. (Plus, it stars Brendan Fraser, to whom I am allergic.) Just read the description of the movie at IMDB: “Convinced he’ll graduate with honors because of his thesis paper, a stuffy Harvard student finds his paper being held hostage by a homeless man, who might be the guy to school the young man in life.” Feel that in your mouth? It’s called vomit.)

Still, Foster might be right that audiences don’t want to be reminded of the darkness in the world just now. Maybe there’s something about a plummeting economy and death and destruction in the news every day that makes people avoid serious movies. But part of the problem is how hard it is to take the serious movies seriously, and how seriously they take themselves, and how seriously bad they often are, and how preachy, and how caught up Hollywood is in its own self-importance:

“People are turned off to stuff that’s holding a mirror up to their lives,” says one prominent producer. “But that will all change when we return to a more solid economic footing.”

As if message movies like The Soloist and the other serious movies mentioned in the article, among them The Road (just kill yourself now), My Sister’s Keeper (based on the manipulative tear-jerker novel by the queen of the genre), and State of Play (another newspaper-reporter-as-hero story — commence eye-rolling), really hold up a mirror to our lives. I don’t know much about the difficulties of getting a serious movie made these days, but I do know that Sperling and Foster are blind to the real problem. Sperling writes:

It also helps if you can give your drama the commercial hook of a genre film — like last year’s hit “Gran Torino,” a meditation on tolerance wrapped in the guise of a movie with a gun-toting Clint Eastwood and a cool car.

“That movie worked because you could put a 30-second spot together where people said, ‘Oh, that sounds kick-ass,’ ” says Foster.

People were not tricked into seeing Gran Torino. Yes, the trailer of Clint pointing his rifle and rasping “Get off of my lawn” probably helped bring some people into theaters. And moviegoers like Clint, so that didn’t hurt. But the “wrapping” is not why the movie worked. The “cool car” does not feature in any car chases; it does not turn into a robot. People knew this before they decided to see the movie. It is not the reason people went to see Gran Torino and it certainly is not why people told their friends that they had to see it and why it got good reviews. The movie worked because the movie worked, because we believed in Clint’s character and the story, because we cared about the characters, because despite its heartbreaking ending, it was entertaining, and funny, and uplifting, and didn’t preach.

Gran Torino is not a “meditation on tolerance wrapped in the guise of a movie with a gun-toting Clint Eastwood and a cool car.” It is precisely because of Sperling’s cynical view of film-making as social lesson, wherein the message is the reason for the story, and not the other way around as it should be, that so many serious movies are so bad and no one wants to see them.

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