SOURCE: Thomson, David. “Redtime.” Film Comment 18, no. 1 (January-February 1982): 11-16.

[In the following excerpt, Thomson argues against Ragtime's negative critical reception, asserting that the film is well adapted and masterfully directed.]

Milos Forman's film of Ragtime omits many delightful views and moments from the book. Why not? It is a film, and it has assets denied to the novel. It does not go to the North Pole with Peary and Father, or to the pyramids with J. P. Morgan. J. P.'s strawberry nose and his stomach rumblings about reincarnation are both dropped: apart from a “newsreel” flash, the film's Morgan is only the absent owner of a fatuous museum that looks like the tomb left by some earlier and erased civilization, or like the spacecraft from another planet, spreading unreality through Manhattan. There is no Emma Goldman in this movie, no opportunity for Emma to administer that politicizing massage to Evelyn Nesbit, or for Younger Brother to come so explosively out of his hiding place so that his “filamented spurts of jism” can settle on Evelyn “like falling ticker tape.”

Emma was cast in Ragtime, her part played by Mariclare Costello, her scenes shot; but she is gone now, along with the regiments of history left out by even E. L. Doctorow (no Wyatt Earp, no Jack Johnson, no Sarah Bernhardt—all contracted for a Steve Allen Meeting of Minds). Perhaps someone at Paramount remembered that Emma Goldman loomed large in Warren Beatty's Reds, and feared that the Christmas audience might muddle the two films. That's not a fanciful worry, for Reds leaves things out too. It doesn't trace John Reed's adventures in Mexico (where he may have met Younger Brother, the bombman for banditos); it omits entirely the pageant mounted by Reed, celebrating the 1913 silk-mill strike, at Madison Square Garden (another gray-stone, belaureled Stanford White construction). Reds skirts the other women in John Reed's life, it does not identify the thirty-two witnesses who revolutionize the conventions of its drama, and it does not tell us that his wife Louise Bryant died, too, alone in Paris, drunk and doped, in 1936 (the year Reed's Soviet nemesis, Zinoviev, perished in jail from purge and execution, perhaps not painlessly).

So, if we have read E. L. Doctorow, and looked at history enough to know the need and the impossibility of warning the Duke, we could quarrel with both films. On the other hand, they are two extraordinary, intelligent entertainments, the best things their makers have done, the restorers of dignity to the big-budget movie, and American pictures that want us to understand this century, rather than reel along in its momentum.

In the movie films, he said, we only look at what is there already. Life shines on the shadowed screen, as from the darkness of one's mind. It is a big business. People want to know what is happening to them. For a few pennies they sit and see their selves in movement, running, racing in motorcars, fighting and, forgive me, embracing one another. This is most important today, in this country, where everybody is so new. There is such a need to understand.

—Tateh to Mother, in E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime

Milos Forman is an American citizen with all the advantages of recent immigration. He knows that no one is American beyond the dispute of others; he has always enjoyed the profusion of the country, the way in which the swinging audition in Taking Off was like a version of Ellis Island. America is a stage where everyone wants to play American. That need or envy in the immigrant never dies or finds satisfaction: it is the force of idealism and the reaching out of hope, despite every brutality or horror practiced by Americans. What has always distinguished Forman in this flux is the kindness with which he viewed the big parade.

Ragtime teems with kindness: it is like looking down into a steerage full of eager faces. It is mercy when the grim voice of Rhinelander Waldo says shoot and Coalhouse Walker is saved from due process (and this is not in Doctorow). Consider the generosity that allows Norman Mailer to be party to just one psychopathic crime; and the fond eye that sees a terrible burst cherry appear in his building-block brindled head. The movie is respectful of its own modest bigot, Father. His inability to stop seeing Coalhouse as a Negro is not rebuked or underlined. Indeed, it seems less than just (by the scales of melodrama) that Father's efforts to help Coalhouse, and to serve as intermediary and hostage, are rewarded with the loss of Mother. But Forman's film knows that irony replaced justice when movies displaced life. Doctorow gave Father a much more substantial shortcoming: he was not good in bed in the book. In the movie, it is rather that James Olson's face cannot register the same sympathy as Mary Steenburgen's, and is not as vital as hers to the very precise ragtime rhythm.

Forman loves behavior. He has always seen it as diverse, characteristic, and beyond judgment. That is why [One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest] is his most forced film, for it obliged him to dislike Nurse Ratched and to take sides. Give Forman a face and he wants to see the best in it: He shows us the pathos in the bogus rhetoric of Booker T. Washington, the weary humor in Pat O'Brien's devious lawyer, the attempt at decency in Father's headache-tight face, and the creamy goodwill that radiates from Mother. Whereas the novel slips from the local to the large, from fact to fiction, to excuse the silhouette flatness and speechlessness of its characters, as well as the cool aloofness of the narrative tone, the movie is full of faces and the moral distinctions that come from the shyness and the assurance with which the various people regard events.

This is not simply a matter of close-ups. The cutting of the film is its conscience—a dynamic but gentle connecting system, looking from here to there, that the audience is required to follow. Thus, Forman has reappraised the action of the novel and extracted this key contrast: there are two outrageous murders—Harry K. Thaw shoots Stanford White, and the Coalhouse Walker gang assassinates several firemen. They are both enraged crimes, both mad, helpless responses. The one is frivolous, though, and the other is profound.

Thaw's violence becomes a popular entertainment: Younger Brother goes to the trial, and even Mother tells Evelyn Nesbit that the family read about her and the case in the papers, kindness and celebrity confusing her instinctive distaste for the squalid actuality. Thaw was provoked by his own mania, by White's gracious philandering, by Evelyn's cheery lack of principle (she is a chronic onlooker), and by his own fatal belief in the hugeness of petty things. The trial is a fiasco: Thaw shouts that out at its conclusion, and he is correct for the first time because scarcely a word of truth has been uttered in court. He will go to the asylum, but he will be free soon. He is seen at the end of the film, drinking champagne in an automobile, as rich and complex a vehicle here as it was in The Magnificent Ambersons. He is the killer set free, a daft monster the result of privilege and that lunatic individualism so admired by America.

Coalhouse is mad from pride and logic—the first the crucial right denied by his times, the second the process that white society prides itself on. He is wronged, and he refuses every opportunity to keep the wrong at its level of triviality. He knows what it represents, and he capitulates to the urging to give up his own life and be an example. And so he kills, becoming an image of terror. He is as much dedicated to fairness as Thaw's trial travesties it. Coalhouse is humane, balanced, and talented. But because he kills, we begin to see Thaw as something other than just a mad dog. Principle meets uneasily in these two killers; they are twin zealots. But we are left to measure the difference of issue, and to grasp the banality of racism's damage. Ragtime the movie does not merely applaud Coalhouse's stand—as MacMurphy's was in Cuckoo's Nest. It shows us his sweet-faced arrogance, his vanity, and his final bewilderment. But it reactivates a cause that it would have seemed unnecessary to film today, so thoroughly has complacent liberalism buried the continuing reality of racial discrimination.

What in God's name possessed you on that? The country has facilities for indigents. You took her in without sufficient thought. You victimized us all with your foolish female sentimentality.

—Father to Mother in E. L Doctorow's Ragtime

Yet another of the gifts Forman brings to Doctorow is Coalhouse as a movie-theater piano-player, witnessing the newsreel that introduces the film and which serves as that society's hectic, inadequate record of itself. Ragtime the movie is about looking, and the lessons of cutting that juxtapose a face and a spectacle. Men in the film do sometimes look with intelligence and feeling. Younger Brother is a follower and a voyeur, as repressed as James Stewart in Vertigo. Brad Dourif's lopsided stare is a vivid mistake of excessive good nature, of nobility and awkwardness and what Doctorow calls “the violence underlying all principle.” The sad twinkle of James Cagney looks through his swollen face and through the jagged frame of a broken window—the police do more damage in Ragtime than any other gang. Cagney is immobile, but the old voice still spars with Warner Brothers belligerence and John Reed idealism. I don't think the casting was opportunistic; it was historically motivated, for Cagney was one of the most pained radicals in Hollywood, and he was the presiding champ of street battles. When he looks down on the Morgan museum, you imagine “Top of the world, Ma,” but you feel the futile escapism of its showbiz bravado. Very subtly, a farewell appearance serves as oblique criticism of the ethos of his earlier work. This is exactly the spirit in which Forman has challenged Americana with history. Thank God Robert Altman wasn't allowed to make a carnival of the project. The film has to be as precise as the book. The faces are always examining an issue, just as the novel never forsakes the numb inability of the present to intervene in, or stop contemplating, the past.

Doctorow's narrator is the child of the family—but a child wrapped up in a later life that we know has not been good or easy, even if it had years in Our Gang and lived on to see Marilyn Monroe. That magical but disarming intervention at the end of the first chapter, when a voice speaks through the child, telling Houdini to warn the Duke, dips the whole novel in melancholy, a feeling that times change for the worse and that history is the preoccupation of disappointed conservationists. We have to watch the picture show, and Jack Ruby's aim will always be as sure, and as lucky, as Gavrilo Princip's, and it will be over before we can shout out. The narrator of Ragtime cannot quite come to terms with that fate: history is the wisdom of the powerless; action is the decision of the helpless.

In the film, this boy yawns over the soup that is never started, and looks sideways in bashful ecstasy when he meets the heiress to the Ashkenazy title. Forman films the children with genius: they are delectable individuals, divine, erotic, and bored, without ever being cute or sentimental; they are a tribute to Our Gang, but also the proof of that untaught vitality that Forman's eye always picks out. And, if Stanley Kauffmann is interested, the film's “feeling of walking past a head-high fruit stand or a series of costume displays in a museum” comes from Forman's recognition that the action is in large part seen and felt by a child's consciousness.

Not that this stance is ponderous or persistent. The movie also cranes up and down to discover fresh settings, the movement being part exposition and part commentary, for height is another representation of time's vantage. The camera style is less participatory than analytic. That's how cutting and the points of view compose the two leading female faces in a kind of polarity. You cannot begin to see Ragtime without appreciating what Forman has done with Mary Steenburgen and Elizabeth McGovern to illustrate “that foolish female sentimentality.”

A fascinating subversion affects the family home from the moment we see it: Mother and Younger Brother are framed like the couple of the house, and Father is the outsider. This way of seeing is too subtle for the characters themselves to notice. The humanity of Mother is something beyond her own awareness; ordinariness and excellence work together, depending on our perceptiveness. All that Fordian bombast of “we are the people,” and we won't stop saying it, slides into oblivion as we recognize the equation of directorial encouragement and the characters' potential in Forman's way of seeing. Time and again, Mother comes alive in Ragtime, but only with the meekness of a woman tranquil in her normalcy and the actress's determined disavowal of glamour or attention.

The film asks us to see the differences between the anxious authority of James Olson's Father—hardly one of his brittle orders is obeyed—and the humble, glowing rightness of Mother. Mary Steenburgen's face is still but active, like that of someone beginning to realize that she has not been seen, but too modest to show alarm. That is why the most tender close-ups are kept for her self-discovery. Beneath the demonstration of racism, the film suspects that the oppression of women is an even greater injury to ourselves. The ending is as light and off-hand as a leaf falling upstate, but the film has moved towards a wife leaving a husband who is brave, striving for honor, faithful, honest … but wrong. Mother gives up this bleak pillar of society for an opportunist, but her new man shows love, delight, and a sense of changing times. Irony remembers that he is also the husband who once beat a tempted wife out of their home.

Like a little boy, silent and unnoticed, but still suckling the idea of his mother, Forman attaches the film to Mary Steenburgen's face. When the black baby is discovered in the vegetable patch, the visual and aural consternation are resolved in the close-up of Mother holding the baby. (She is too real to be a madonna, but we realize why she needs no name.) We know the answer to where the baby will live before the question is asked. It is as if this is Mother's first child, the fruit of aroused conscience. How remarkable then that the son's gaze is not ruffled by resentment. When the Inspector proposes the workhouse for the baby—“These people don't have the same sense of family as what we do.”—punched out past the cigar that he has lit up at the family dining table without permission or request—Mother's downcast face (looking down at the son's mute level) is filled with the humility of discreet dissent. It is the shot's moral weight that wills insecure Father outside (into the area of the vegetables) to discuss the matter further: this is also her first quitting of the house. And, much nearer the end of the film, when Tateh/Ashkenazy toasts light, on that word we cut to Mother and she turns towards the camera and the man like a New Rochelle Liberty that has felt the warmth of the light, discovering herself and a true context of reality in the same instant.

Simultaneously, Forman is declaring his highest faith in humanity and having Tateh salute the profession they share. If ever reverence might have smoothed away doubt, it is here, but Forman rises above smugness, thanks to the baby-face burping exasperation of Evelyn Nesbit, a comic character as disreputable and adorable as Carette's poacher in La Règle du jeu. Elizabeth McGovern, the actress here, has come in for amazing obtuseness, our critics have such difficulty in watching a film. Stanley Kauffmann thinks she is a “dead loss,” not pretty enough. She is not beautiful like a photographic model; she is not Joan Collins in The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, the face a sultry-prim mask of loveliness, shutting character out of the role. She is beautiful if you rate that term according to the difficulty you have taking your eyes off her restless responsiveness to passing surprises. She is also, I suspect, very close to what was most admired in the age of ragtime. More important, she is a great actress playing an artless fool who happens to inspire a killer, an artist, and a lonely extremist.

Evelyn Nesbit is character shrugging off morality. She is wonderfully unredeemed, undiscovered, and without apology—all in a film that cherishes Mother's awakening. It is in the vein of Renoir to enjoy enlightenment and its opposite in the same film. Evelyn lies in court. She makes silly photoplays and soaks up compliments like a pancake in syrup. She is a victim of her own good nature and of sexual leverage. As Doctorow put it, “It was characteristic of Evelyn that she could not resist someone who was so strongly attracted to her.” But she is never victimized because of that sunny, lazy fecklessness that is her river, winding on, never dammed and free from damnation. She is silly, frivolous, fickle, and grasping, and all those warts are made into beauty marks. She is also honest: she knows Harry's mad, she knows Tateh's an artist, she can see what he sees in Mother, she believes ＄25,000 in her bush (or very close thereto) is better than ＄1 million in prospect, and she knows how boring it is when film directors rhapsodize over the light. Thus, straight after Tateh's toast, and Mother's moment of annunciation, there is an overflowing close-up of the pouty, flirty sighs of injured long-suffering from Evelyn. It's Elizabeth McGovern's face, of course, Magdalene to Steenburgen's Nazarene—both as inviting as peaches.

So warn yourselves (never mind the Duke) about possibly the most mistaken paragraph Pauline Kael has ever written. At the end of her dismissive review of Ragtime, Ms. Kael lamented the scene in which Evelyn is about to screw with Younger Brother, naked but for black stockings, when detectives arrive, pounce on adultery, and offer the cut-rate divorce settlement of ＄25,000. McGovern plays the quite lengthy haggling scene as naked as she was on the brink of love. Younger Brother tries to stick a robe on her. But it only falls off her concentrating person. (“They are not pulling that one on me,” grumbles the infallibly wrong and right Evelyn, as McGovern's breasts sit at the bottom of the frame like babes begging for attention.)

Kael thinks this is awful, and a mark of Forman's crudeness. I think it is one of the best things in the film, for, if the actress's nakedness is appropriate for love-making, then why is it gross during the intimacies of money? Love and money are loyal American companions, and Ms. Kael should remember love and money. It is the epitome of Evelyn's nature that she negotiates in the raw, and then counts the bills against the frills of fat in her tummy. Ms. Kael should understand the repression that lurks in Younger Brother's attempt at cover-up: he will make the fireworks that kill with the same righteousness. Evelyn's flesh and McGovern's openness are a judicious match, and in that one scene we learn so much about desire, gratification, and the superstition that sex is sanctified and bodies more secret than behavior.

… Ragtime falters with Coalhouse inside the museum. I think that the film needed to open out again at that point: the willful holing up of the terrorists being matched by an explosion of references to the outside world. That's where Houdini would have worked so well, forever escaping but still imprisoned by life and death. At the very end of Ragtime, there is a pregnant image of Houdini, hanging upside down, rid of the strait jacket but still tethered and suspended. It's Forman's verdict on the land of the free, and it extends as far as the anxious beauty of Warren Beatty, at liberty but haunted, like the rich man seeking to enter the kingdom of heaven. The troubling majesty of these films is in letting us know that freedom is not enough.