Stop complaining about long films — your tight schedule is not the director’s problem

Uproar greeted the rumour that Wes Anderson’s new film would be four hours long. What’s the problem? We need to learn to concentrate!

There was a minor kerfuffle this week when a rumour circulated that Wes Anderson’s forthcoming film, The French Dispatch, had a running time of just over four hours. It turned out not to be true. The International Movie Database (IMDb) had made a mistake, curiously ascribing Anderson’s film the same running time as Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac. You can relax: The French Dispatch, due out this year, will require only one hour and 48 minutes of your time. And there will, I suspect, be a good deal less sex.

Still, the hoo-ha raised an important question: why do people get themselves in such a lather about the length of a film? We have been here before, not that long ago, when Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (three hours and 30 minutes) was released on Netflix.

One newspaper ran an article with the headline “How to Survive The Irishman”, as if it required you to do anything more than sit on your backside and shovel popcorn into your mouth. People will be raising money for charity next: £1 for every minute I can do bugger all.

Wes Anderson, director of The French Dispatch (Photo: Getty)

There is a whiff of arrogance about the idea that a film (or book or television series) warrants only a certain amount of your time – as if the creators should be thinking primarily about your convenience, rather than the story they are trying to tell. Directors such as Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, two hours and 40 minutes) and yes, Von Trier, have earnt the right to leave the camera running. Your tight schedule is not their problem.

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This reluctance to engage with anything for a prolonged period is symptomatic of our need for instant gratification. (Although it should be remembered that, in the 18th century, Joseph II, the Holy Roman Emperor, is supposed to have said: “Far too many notes, my dear Mozart.”) The pleasure of many classic films derives from experiencing the slow burn of a plot unfolding and characters developing – not simply 90 minutes of crash-bang-wallop.

I am not suggesting that some films wouldn’t be improved by an edit (The Revenant, I’m looking at you). But I worry that our inability to concentrate for a few hours will persuade directors to make cuts that could reduce potentially great films to merely OK ones. And for what? So you can make it to Pizza Express before the kitchen closes?