Some reasons why Peter Travers is my least favorite person alive

I owe a lot to Peter Travers, the long time film critic for Rolling Stone. In 1995, a long long essay he wrote about the year in movies (it began with the fairly typical, heavily punctuated first line "Hollywood screwed up this year. Big time.") essentially started my life-long obsession with film criticism. I remember a time, then I was 13 years old, when I read his list of the worst movies of the year over the phone to a friend - I thought he was hilarious, and, with all that cussing and vituperative bullying, clearly onto something the establishment was missing out on.

It didn't really take me long to notice, however, that Peter Travers seemed to never NOT do all that cussing and vituperative bullying. Sometimes it seemed that Peter Travers didn't even like the movies he liked (in 1997, I recall, baffled, that his praise for LA Confidential was "It lurks in Chinatown's shadow), or at least was willing to get amnesia about previous opinions - despite, in 1995, praising Sean Penn's devastating performance in Dead Man Walking, he said later that the performance wasn't worthy of its Oscar nomination. That goes double for Elisabeth Shue in Leaving Las Vegas that year - a performance also, apparently, undeserving of an Oscar nomination, despite his end of the year piece stated was the best acting that year. Actually, that might be too positive a characterization of his writing - it read, "Some will tell you these performances are just for movie masochists. Bullshit."

Something happened the more I got involved in reading and obsessing over film criticism - I started to really really hate Peter Travers. It seemed, to me, that his reviews, truly, said nothing. He'd complain (of course) that the Hollywood establishment took his quotes out of context for movie posters, but then he'd seem to write exclusively in angry ranting, and movie-quotable nothingness. Today, I clicked on Rolling Stone's review of No Country For Old Men, and here is his first paragraph:

"Misguided souls will tell you that No Country for Old Men is out for blood, focused on vengeance and unconcerned with the larger world outside a standard-issue suspense plot. Those people, of course, are deaf, dumb and blind to anything that isn't spelled out between commercials on dying TV networks. Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel is an indisputably great movie, at this point the year's very best. Set in 1980 in West Texas, where the chase is on for stolen drug money, the film — a new career peak for the Coen brothers, who share writing and directing credits — is a literate meditation (scary words for the Transformers crowd) on America's bloodlust for the easy fix. It's also as entertaining as hell, which tends to rile up elitists. What do the criminal acts of losers in a flyover state have to do with the life of the mind? "

Wow. Who knew you could impugn Hollywood, television, indie movies, fans of Transformers, people who dislike violence, and people who dislike "literate meditations" in one fowl swoop.

Travers's writing is all movie-slogan cliche, portable jargon, and atrebillious crankiness aimed at whatever will fill column space. It seems to me as though the ways in which criticism can be itself an art should be manifest (read a review by Owen Gleiberman, or Roger Ebert, or A.O. Scott sometime), but Travers is worse than a bad critic, or even a bad writer - he's a flashy provocateur, but he's as substanceless as he is contentious. He says nothing, but manages to say too much of it, ruining the movie and annoying you - often within the same sentence! One rather vapid bit of praise for Tommy Lee Jones's performance:

" On the page, the sheriff is a tad too folksy, dishing out cracker-barrel wisdom to his good wife, Loretta (Tess Harper), with a twinkle written into his homespun truths. As you already know by now (and In the Valley of Elah categorically proves it), Mr. Jones does not do twinkle. He's a hard-ass. And when he chews into a good line, you can see the bite marks. "

Again, Travers' compliment is actually a dig on the Cormac McCarthy novel No Country For Old Men - except, of course, when it's obnoxious. A hard ass? Seriously? Bite marks?

My guess is that you do not see bite marks from Tommy Lee Jones, who is a terrific actor who I'm sure does his grizzled best with the best part from McCarthy's book. I don't know what twinkling, hard-asses, or chewing into lines looks like, but it isn't really what Jones does best- Tommy Lee Jones is a man of telling reserve, of eyes sunken behind fields of wrinkled, depressing skin, of a face for which his voice does the least of the talking. However, I believe he could give a (egads) hard-assed performance, though with Travers' description of that performance ending there, it's hard to say what one would look like.

Travers, I say without any evidentiary support, is still somewhat popular, listed amongst the critics whose word influences the marketability of certain movies. In a way, that makes sense - Travers doesn't make a lot of opinions of his own, and if popular support changes with a movie, he tends to change with it - for example, in 2001, he listed A Beautiful Mind as the #5 movie of the year. However, when popular sentiment soured on that movie as it became an Oscar favorite, so did he, trashing the movie in his Oscar report, neglecting to mention his own four-star review of the thing three months earlier. So, I'd have to assume a four-star review for No Country For Old Men is a good sign of what advance public word on the movie is, but I sorta already knew that.

I can say from experience that it's typically easier to write something punchy and evidentiary if you can create an argument with it rather than finding and elucidating strengths - especially a review of a new movie, in which your initial reaction might be as simple as "wow, that was upsetting." Maybe it's because he works for Rolling Stone and has to have a certain provocative edge to him. Maybe that's why Peter Travers's reviews are, ya know, terrible.