Until I was four or five years old, I was under the mistaken impression that the scenes in movies were acted out by live performers behind the screen. The purpose of the screen, I thought, was to act as a kind of magnifying glass to help the audience to better see the action on stage. (It is probably worth noting here that the first movie I remember being taken to see was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, when I was three years old; it is satisfying that such neuroses as I have date to that golden age of American cinema.) In 2000, Ethan Hawke starred in a film version of Hamlet, and in my mind’s marquee it is always titled: Hamlet Starring Bill Murray as Polonius. It was a mediocre film, but there was a sly something to Mr. Murray’s performance, a poignancy—which has since thickened into treacle—in the famous clown’s refusal to play the clown as a clown. He let Hamlet be Hamlet rather than Ethan Hawke in Hamlet. Most films lack that sort of balance, because the narrative structure of a Hollywood movie resembles the physical structure of celluloid film itself: flashes of concentrated starpower are used to produce discrete, well-defined moments that then are strung together to form the illusion of a continuous whole. It’s like watching a piano falling from twenty stories up: Even if it is arresting to watch, there is no question about where things are going. It