Movies and the Moral Adventure of Life

Stone has had an illustrious career in psychiatry: he was president of the American Psychiatric Society and director of medical training at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts, and is currently professor of Law and Psychiatry at Harvard. The 15 essays on individual films collected here were published in the Boston Review from 1993-2006. The foreword from Boston Review editor Joshua Cohen notes that Stone's ""enthusiasms run particularly to films that enlarge our sense of human possibilities."" The result is a book that sees Schindler's List as a film in which Spielberg's ""accomplishments cannot be gainsaid"" (and in which the director is ""vindicated as a director and a Jew"") and that views The Battle of Algiers as fundamentalist propaganda. American Beauty points up the failure of beauty ""to draw virtue from the flames,"" while Pulp Fiction ""unmasks the macho myth by making it laughable and deheroicizes the kind of power glorified by Hollywood violence."" Stone's writing is thoughtful, but the humanism that Cohen points to in the foreword proves more of a limit here than a lens.