Art And Whatever

Like Phoebe Maltz and Will Baude I don't quite understand what's going on in Jonathan Last's review of Closer. I'm going to see the movie in a couple of hours, so I won't say anything about Last's characterization of the film, but as he writes on his blog, Galley Slaves, "it deals mostly with Natalie Portman and the cultural legacy she's left behind." In particular, as Will says it "really seems to be nothing more than lingering fury at Portman's admittedly-chilling role in Leon." And here's where I must protest. Last's beef:

In her big-screen debut, Luc Besson's 1994 Léon, Portman played Matilda, a pre-pubescent orphan who is taken in by the movie's titular middle-aged professional killer. Matilda dresses mostly like a prostitute, with tight leggings and a black velvet choker. Trying to shock another character, she refers to Léon as her lover, before later telling Léon that she is falling in love with him. In the European release, there's a scene in which, while the two are in bed together, Matilda asks him to make love to her. In Léon, Natalie Portman is 13-years-old.

There's no explanation of what Last thinks the wrongdoing is here, but I take it the point is that it's immoral for a girl as young as this to be sexualized and especially immoral for a middle-aged man like Léon to have some kind of sexualized relationship with her. No disagreement from me there. But here's the thing -- the movie is about a professional hit man for the mafia. That's also a pretty immoral line of work. Another character is a corrupt cop. That's an immoral thing to be. Immoral characters, in fact, are popping up all around the worlds of cinema, literature, and drama. It's sort of integral to the enterprise. Sometimes these immoral individuals are pitted against clearly moral, heroic individuals. At other times, in the fictional world as in the real world, things are rather more complicated and most everyone does bad things to some extent. Weird, uncomfortable situations arise. I wouldn't describe Leon as a rigorously realistic work, but it's about seamy underworld life so the characters in it are a bit, well, seamy and underworldish. Obviously, you could make a movie about gangsters without featuring a sexualized 13 year old girl. But you can't make a movie about hit men, corrupt cops, drug dealers, and a mafia boss without something shady going down. And you can't have art -- decent art, at any rate -- if the bad guys always need to be beaten by a pure-of-heart knight in shining armor type. Plato, for just this reason, wanted to expell poets from the Republic, but we generally think that was a bad idea.