[In the following essay, Sarris explains why he put Sayles's Passion Fish near the top of his Ten Best list for 1992.]

Eagle-eyed readers of the January-February 1993 Film Comment have noticed a bit of inconsistency if not outright hypocrisy in my contrasting opinions on John Sayles in my article on Hal Hartley, in which I casually dismiss Sayles as cinematic spinach, and in my 1992 Ten Best list, where I cite Sayles' Passion Fish among the finest of the year, second in my estimation only to Christian Vincent's La Discrète. Emerson's short shrift to the hobgoblins of a foolish consistency notwithstanding, I feel compelled to explain this apparent discrepancy in my aesthetic distinctions even if it involves telling a tale or two out of school.

First, I have to set the scene (or mise-en-scène). It is the middle of December. Movies are pouring out on screens in torrents. The phones are ringing off the hook with the frantic pleas of publicists to catch this screening or that one. Bags and bags full of videocassettes are dumped on one's doorstep, particularly if one happens to be voting in one or more critics' groups. Editors are screaming about deadlines and lead times. My notorious predilection for making up Ten Best lists once prompted Pauline Kael to ask me rhetorically if I were some sort of list queen. What could I say? Lists are my life, even when I haven't seen all the eligible films within a given year. To put a point to it, I hadn't seen Passion Fish when I wrote my Hartley article, but I did see it before I turned in my Ten Best list—in fact, I went directly to the 68th Street Playhouse, where it had just begun a limited year-end release, just after dropping off my piece at Film Comment—and I was frankly embarrassed to discover that Sayles had chosen this inopportune (for me) moment to deliver his masterpiece.

But why did it take such an unprofessionally long time for me to catch up with Passion Fish? Why didn't I rush out to the earliest screenings? For the same reason, I suppose, that I can't get my readers to rush out to see Passion Fish even after I have put it at the top of my Ten Best list. We all lie a little or a lot about what we really want and like in movies. Sayles is simply too serious and dedicated a filmmaker and too socially committed a human being to provide us with any guilty or shameful pleasures. Life in a John Sayles movie proceeds at its own pace with no dramatic or melodramatic foreshortening, no bursts of orgasmic violence, no easy appeals to emotion, no stark contrasts between virtue and villainy, no maudlin self-pity, no devious lechery, no campy condescension.

From the time of his first movie, Return of the Secaucus Seven, in 1980, through Lianna and Baby It's You (both '83), The Brother from Another Planet ('84), Matewan ('87), Eight Men Out ('88), City of Hope ('91), and finally Passion Fish, the critical line on Sayles has almost invariably been that what he says is more impressive than how he says it. He has emerged as that rarest of American filmmakers, one who understood the subtler overtones of class distinctions, social injustices, and economic inequalities in a land flooded with fantasies of equal opportunity and limitless upward mobility. Yet his characters were too well rounded psychologically, and too firmly anchored to a bedrock reality sociologically, to lend themselves to simplistic scenarios of radical reform. Hence, Sayles could be damned as a realist and a humanist, both box-office poison epithets, and anathema to the hedonistic strain in contemporary pop criticism.

Even his versatility as a writer worked against his commercial reputation. He wrote short stories and novels and screenplays, winning an O. Henry award with his first published story, “I-80 Nebraska,” then after publishing his first novel, Pride of the Bimbos ('75), earning a National Book Award nomination for his second, Union Dues ('77). Sayles had already paid his own dues with a proletarian passage across the country in an anachronistically left-wing working-stiff series of jobs as a meat packer, day laborer, and hospital orderly. A very tall man, like the peripatetic Dashiell Hammett and John Huston before him, Sayles evokes the muscular Marxism of earlier journalists like Jim Tully and Studs Terkel, the latter cast as a one-man Greek chorus of Chicago street wisdom in Eight Men Out.

Succumbing to the siren call of the screen, Sayles funneled his literary gifts into Roger Corman's New World Pictures factory, for which he wrote Piranha (dir. Joe Dante, '78), The Lady in Red (Lewis Teague, '79), and Battle beyond the Stars (Jimmy Murakami, '81). By the time of The Howling (Dante, '81) and Alligator (Teague, '81), his scriptwriting lifted the horror genre to a level of wit and humor and irony that startled jaded mainstream reviewers. But instead of making a pitch to direct his own genre scripts for Corman, Sayles sank the ＄60,000 he had earned as a screenwriter into a non-genre post-Sixties elegy to the idealistic young people of his generation facing the metaphysical malaise of thirty-something middle-class reality. As it turned out, Return of the Secaucus Seven was released by fits and starts until it seemed almost contemporaneous with Lawrence Kasdan's 1983 The Big Chill, with which it was compared very favorably. Indeed, Sayles' movie became a convenient club with which to beat Kasdan for his alleged slickness and glibness in satirizing the silliness of a period many younger reviewers still regarded sentimentally as a Great Awakening and Liberation.

So far, so good. Sayles had passed every test of the integrity thing with flying colors. He had shown he could work within the system with Baby It's You, his high-school-into-college, wrong-side-right-side-of-the-Trenton-tracks mainstream romance with Vincent Spano and Rosanna Arquette, and yet never lose sight of the poignantly conflicting class and gender viewpoints of lower-class boy and middle-class girl. The emotionally charged ballroom scenes of Jezebel and Gone with the Wind do not have all that much of an edge on the moving spectacle of Spano and Arquette dancing their last dance to the sentimentally requested tune of “Strangers in the Night” amid a sea of snickering with-it college couples. A fine romance indeed, impossible but ineffable.

He could handle the awakening of lesbianism in Lianna without degenerating into pathological sensationalism. He could return to the forgotten oppressions of pre-World War II movie coal miners in Matewan without depriving them of their prickly humanity for the sake of labor union propaganda. He was so comfortable with the race thing he could explore it playfully in Harlem with his extraterrestrial whimsies for The Brother from Another Planet.

It was while he was promoting Brother at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival that I first encountered Sayles. He was drinking a Coke at a table in the Majestic Bar with his partner in life and art, Maggie Renzi. I was so wary of his deadpan straightness—which in the paranoid atmosphere of Cannes passed for a perpetual put-on—that I didn't get much of an interview. He had taken a cut-rate route to the Riviera through Barcelona, perhaps shedding a tear along the way for the long-departed Loyalists in that long-ago struggle against fascism. He mentioned in passing that his parents had been teachers. To tell the truth, I had not been overwhelmed by The Brother from Another Planet, and though I accepted the fact that Sayles was a better and brighter man than I could ever hope to be, he was not exactly my cup of tea as an auteur. The deficiencies of his mise-en-scène denoted a lack of the kind of auteurist depth and mystery I could profitably explore. His undeniable virtues were too close to the surface. He was simply too good to be true. Not that I suspected him of hypocrisy and insincerity. Indeed, he stood out in the glossy commercialism and carnality of Cannes as a rugged Diogenes waving the lantern of honesty. He just didn't blend with all the mendacity and opportunism being flaunted every nanosecond on the Croisette.

And so it has gone, until that moment in Passion Fish when I turned to my companion and said this is good, this is really good, as if to say who could have known that Big John had it in him. The other reviewers had virtually dismissed it with familiarly faint praise. There were a few raves, of course, but hyperbole has become so commonplace that the discerning moviegoer has to be reassured that something is not merely great but really good. Sayles, of course, arouses special suspicions inasmuch as his moral and social intentions are invariably honorable, and where is the “fun” in that? Yet something clicked for me in Passion Fish that had never clicked for me in a John Sayles movie before. Actually, it was more of a lightning bolt, a bright shaft of insight and perception, at that moment when a hospitalized Mary McDonnell, a soap opera actress hit by a cab as she was going to have her legs waxed, and now a paraplegic, is looking at her own preshot soap and exclaims, “They've stolen my fucking closeup!” It is a writer's line of Norma Desmond proportions, but it is an auteur's moment of mood modulation as well. From then on, I followed Sayles wherever he wanted to take me at whatever pace he desired.

As is to be expected, many reviewers and moviegoers have complained that Passion Fish is a trifle slow for their tastes. Still, I found something more exciting there than anything I had found in Sayles' previous forays into the gritty, grimy world of losers and underdogs and sufferers generally. As a critic for the yellow-cover Cahiers du Cinéma of the Fifties declared after the opening of George Cukor's A Star Is Born: A DIRECTOR IS BORN! As I noted back in January in The New York Observer, Sayles has directed, written, and edited the most accomplished, the most nuanced, and the most lyrical English-language movie of the year.

And yet, few of my friends and readers flocked to see Passion Fish, and of those who did, few agreed with me that the movie was all that good, certainly not on the level of Neil Jordan's The Crying Game, deservedly the late-in-the-year sensation of 1992. Most people professed to be slightly bored with the basic plot situation of two women, one white (McDonnell), one black (Alfre Woodard), one a paraplegic patient, one an underqualified nurse, one hard to get along with, the other doggedly persistent. The Cajun country of Louisiana provided the backdrop, and even that seemed overfamiliar. Hadn't we seen this movie many times before, usually with an icon of rural vulnerability such as Sissy Spacek or Barbara Hershey or Jessica Lange or Sally Field? The setting may not always have been Louisiana. It might have been Georgia or Mississippi or Alabama, or even Bill and Hillary Clinton's Arkansas. But somewhere between the backwoods and the bayous, the color barrier would be broken in a belated burst of sentimental reconciliation. The publicity blurbs added to the impression of derivativeness by likening Passion Fish to such grossly overrated commercial bonanzas for the old geezer market as Driving Miss Daisy and Fried Green Tomatoes. I tried, largely in vain, to convince my friends and readers that Sayles had made a shambles of all my smug critical preconceptions by creating a dozen fully full-bodied and fully articulated characters of different races, different classes, and different generations with both wit and feeling. In the process he never weakened the thrust and clarity of his narrative. Even more remarkable was the deeply felt past he skillfully fashioned for his protagonists, a past that enriched and enhanced them as they strived to resolve their moral dilemmas in the present.

Discarded was my line on Sayles before Passion Fish that he was a better writer than director, and that he too willingly sacrificed dramatic climaxes for thematic truths. His artful pacing, his total immersion in his milieu, his grace and subtlety in directing his gifted cast made me feel after a little more than two hours that the movie was ending too soon, and that I wanted to stay in the world over which Mr. Sayles had cast his spell for at least another hour.

To confirm the pleasure principle at work in Passion Fish, one need go no further than the film's lyrical dream sequences of fulfillment and frustration. Mary McDonnell's May-Alice, seemingly unsexed by her paraplegia, dreams of her legs being liberated so that she can walk across the dock to where David Strathairn's Rennie, the Cajun swamp guide on whom she had a crush in high school, is fiddling with his nets. As she lowers herself lovingly and smilingly into his lap, her fluttering skirt veiling her impudent embrace, she executes the most sweetly erotic movement of flesh toward flesh in any movie of 1992. After this, let no one say that Sayles is a stranger to the most magical ecstasies of mise-en-scène.

Yet the triumph of Sayles the director is in no small measure the triumph also of Sayles the writer and conceptualizer, and Sayles the editor, who chose to linger on the seeming nonessentials when more “dynamic” editors would have slashed away at the scenery and the silences. The more tangled parallel plot of the involvements of Alfre Woodard's Chantelle with her daughter, father, and lover is allowed to twist and turn slowly enough in the gentle Cajun breeze that when, at a community social, Chantelle's raffish lover Sugar (Vondie Curtis-Hall) recognizes through Chantelle's furtive headshake that she is with her strict father—who has temporary custody of her child after Chantelle's treatment for drugs—Sugar asks Chantelle's shy, bespectacled little girl for a dance instead, thus taking this musical tableau into the emotional stratosphere.

Some of my friends have complained that there is not enough conflict and tension in Passion Fish. I like conflict and tension as much as anyone, but I must confess I have grown weary of the excessive malignancy of today's movies. Igor Stravinsky once remarked that it is easier to be interesting with dissonance than with consonance, and Dwight Macdonald praised James Agee's A Death in the Family as one of the rare novels of literary worth to celebrate the goodness of people and their lives. In an age of cynicism and derision, John Sayles emerges in Passion Fish as a cinematic poet of consonance and goodwill, and heaven knows we need him.