#20 — Smoke (Wayne Wang, 1996)
Smoke is about the power and pleasure of stories. The film is enamored with the very act of spinning a tale, whether it be complete concoctions, embellishments on personal histories, or even the fictions people create about themselves as buffers against the sadness of the world. The mere craft of it is admirable enough, and there’s perhaps no better indicator of its value than the smile that irresistibly rises to the visage of a teller who has completed their task particularly well.

The film is centered around a Brooklyn cigar shop, the perfect setting given the mission at hand. By it’s very nature, the business is filled with kindly loiterers swapping anecdotes, theories, and philosophies. And whenever the filmmakers need a new story, they can simply bring it in through the front door, jingling the bells hanging from the upper part of the frame. The screenplay is by Paul Auster, an acclaimed novelist making his first real foray into film, and it bears the mark of being created by someone who is accustomed to bringing enough depth to characters and complexity to situations to sustain a work across a few hundred pages. Everyone onscreen is deeply fascinating, even if they’re only operating at the fringes or showing up for a moment or two. Ashley Judd has exactly one scene, for example, but it has a jolt that’s volcanic. The actress deserves ample credit for that, of course, but Auster also gives her so much to work with, a full damaged life wedged into a handful of razor-wire sharp lines of dialogue.

That’s the case with practically every role in the film, and there are plenty of them, parceled out generously to skilled, insightful actors. Wayne Wang’s challenge as the director–a job he reportedly shared with Auster, though the author isn’t credited that way–is to keep it all straight and clear. It requires gentle balancing of the varied plot threads, returning to them often enough to maintain the emotional investment while making sure that every strand gets its due time. They intersect, but never in a contrived way. When pieces of the film come together, it always feels like a fitting development based the relationships that have already been established with care. The characters move together, fully invested in the stories of one another.

That is literally the case in the film’s closing scene, one of the simplest and, in its simplicity, most daring and inspired in the ten year span of film I’m tracking through. When the film’s Paul Auster stand-in, a writer named Paul Benjamin who’s played by William Hurt with his trademark off-kilter magnetism, is stumped while trying to write a Christmas story, his friend who clerks at the tobacco shop sits down with him and relays a personal history involving the acquisition of a camera. The clerk is played by Harvey Keitel, and in these few minutes he holds the screen, the camera trained firmly on his face, as he tells about an encounter with an elderly woman he calls Granny Ethel. There are no camera tricks or cutaways to flashback images. This film about stories ends with one of the main characters simply telling a story, almost completely unadorned. It is a reductive sort of cinema, and, in this lengthy scene, the achieves a grace that its very concept promises. After spending most of its running time subtly expounding on the value of storytelling, Smoke ends with the perfect closing argument to drive home its point.