by Oliver Spicer.
Paper Moon (Peter Bogdanovich, 1973) is a film centred around lies.
Its protagonist Moses Pray is a con-man whose cunning and suave character fits perfectly into the smart crook archetype seen in Catch Me If You Can (Steven Spielberg, 2002) , Ocean’s Eleven (Steven Soderbergh, 2001) , or even Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, 2009) . Moses is joined by Addie, a young orphaned girl that he’s stuck with after one of his scams. Although he claims not to be related to her, she’s just as smart and stubborn - refusing to leave Moses alone until she receives the $200 he gained in the con, which he has already spent on a Ford Model A. So in Road-Movie style they travel together from Kansas to Missouri, scamming people along the way to regain the money.
These cons range from short changing cashiers to stealing illegal alcohol from bootleggers in order to sell it back to them. But the most important scam is the most morally bankrupt and involves Bibles…
An elegant use of editing is used to reveal the premise of the scam, with the film cutting between Moses at the door of a victims house and Addie searching around his car. After knocking, Moses starts to explain he is from the ‘Kansas Bible Company’ and wants to speak to a ‘Mr Morgan’. At the same time, Addie picks up a newspaper and a extreme close up of a circled obituary is shown. Moses then explains to the widow that her husband ordered a custom and deluxe Bible with a name printed on the front whilst Addie looks at the trunk of the car and finds a kit for stamping. Just before Moses reads out the name printed tentatively, Addie finds the stamp and reads out ‘PEARL’. ‘I’m Pearl’ the widow says, and Moses explains that the Bible cost $8 minus the one dollar deposit - which is where we get a close up of Addie in disgust, a stand in for the audience’s opinion of Moses. Of course as a good con-man he explains that she’s ‘not obliged to take it’to come across as sympathetic, and the widow gladly pays.
One way this scene can be analysed in through looking at the mise-en-scene; which can be described as ‘all the elements in frame’ and includes costume, props, hair, make-up, body language, location, composition, and lighting. Thinking about how these elements are controlled by a filmmaker is a good starting point for analysing a film, as the links between the visual presentation of a scene and its meaning are straightforward.
What’s interesting about this scene is that Moses pays attention to his own mise-en-scene, exploiting it to his advantage just as a filmmaker utilises it to tell their story. Before he gets out of his car, he looks into the rear-view mirror and places a gold tooth in his mouth. Here, Moses uses the weath and status that was associated with gold teeth at the time to visually convince the widows he is a trustworthy businessman - reinforced by his costume of a full suit and hat. Before knocking on the door, he pats down his hair to look professional and to match his neatly styled moustache. Props are also used by Moses in his speech in the form of a business card that he briefly shows in later scenes but never hands over, and of course the Bible that is used maliciously to represent a sense of hope and resolution to the widows. Whilst speaking, his body language is passive and non-intrusive: standing by the side of the front-door with his hands occupied by his hat and the bible, only occasionly using a slight hand movement to emphasise his false sympathy. He uses Addie and the car as simply a background for his pitch, proof he’s a travelling salesman and a reason to support his business. Moses (whose name may only be another manipulative tactic due its religious origin) through altering his mise-en-scene becomes the art director to his own story, and the widows become the audience to this one-man play designed to trick.
As the story progresses, Addie begins to join in with the scams and mise-en-scene is used in a different way. Like Moses, Addie does change her own costume - converting from denim dungarees and a cloche (a style of hat associated with flappers and the breaking of gender norms) to a dress and bow to amplify an innocent look. However, Addie puts a more benevolent twist on the Bible scam (which sounds impossible) by looking at the mise-en-scene of the widow’s houses. When they arrive at a house with a grand piano and a sparkling chandelier she interrupts Moses to overcharge the woman, but when a mother comes to answer the door of the next house surrounded by children in a composition reminiscent of Dorothea Lange’s photos of the time Addie says the Bible was fully paid for and gives it away to them. She justifies this to Moses by talking about ‘Frankie Roosevelt’ and how the president said that ‘We gotta’ look out for the poorly’ in reference to his New Deal reforms that had aims to combat the Great Depression - which Moses has a cynicism towards. Through this price balancing game Addie still uses mise-en-scene, but instead to judge wealth - possibly in reference to a sense of curiosity that children are often given in films, with panning from her perspective making it seem as if we are her eyes looking around the locations.
The relationship between Addie and Moses can also be seen as visually untrue, as although the two are played by father and daughter (Tatum and Ryan O’Neil) Moses constantly disputes her suggestion they are related due to having ‘the same jaw’. But in many scenes they visually appear to be father and daughter, such as one shot where they are sitting opposite to each other in a cafe with Moses treating her to whatever kind of hot-dog a ‘Coney-Island’ is or when they are in a hotel room and Moses is lying on the hard wooden floor next to the bed which Addie is which shows a sacrifice for her wellbeing. Moses also acts fatherly in many scenes, telling the child to stop smoking cigarettes and even consoling her when she is upset after being mis-gendered by a barber due to her non-feminine attire. Its hard to see how they’re not related after she hatches a scam-like plan to get rid of a woman Moses has been seeing, which also represents a threat to their established but possibly fictitious relationship. When Addie is asked whether Moses is her father, she answers ‘I’m with him ain’t I!’ showing that even if they are just playing the part of father and daughter that is enough.
Aesthetically, Paper Moon as a film can be seen as a scam: a film shot in 1973 that aims to emulate the Classical Hollywood style established in The Great Depression. It achieved this look mainly through the choice of grainy black and white film stock, which is supported through a slow editing pace and an appreciation for long shots over close-ups. The same aspects of props and costume that Moses uses to lie is used to lie to the audience about the time-period, with the classic Fords that are driven and Addie’s transistor radio showing the technology and media during 1930s America. Along with visuals, sound is also used to recreate the style of Classic Hollywood - with the sparse score of light jazz combined with minimal sound effects that create an empty soundscape, along with dialogue that is slightly out of synch and has a canny tone that makes it seem as if it was recorded in the early years of talkies. Even the credits to the film are mimicking the period: positioned at the beginning, using terms such as ‘and introducing’ for Tatum O’Neil, and in an art-deco typeface that is so hard to read it pushes the definition of minimalism. ‘Pastiche’ is a great term here, which means to imitate another work or artist or movement in art and beyond, but there are some elements that make it obvious (such as the widescreen format) and the comical tone of the film might mean ‘parody’ is a better one.
Overall, there is a symmetry between the lies of Moses and the possible lies of their relationship and then the lies of the aesthetic of the film. It creates a sense of mistrust in everything, but also to question how reality is falsely created in a film through the presentation of film form. This symmetry of lies is purposefully internal: because the film deals with lies the film itself is also a lie, just as how a musical format is often used for telling the story of a musician or an animation is used to tell the story of an artist. It is the specific ideology in filmmaking that the film form should reflect the emotions inside of a story to an extreme degree. But for some cases that is also a lie…
by Oliver Spicer, August 2022