"Iron Man" and Robert Downey Jr.'s quirky performance
When I caught up with "Iron Man," a broken hip had delayed me and the movie had already been playing for three weeks. What I heard during that time was that a lot of people loved it, that they were surprised to love it so much, and that Robert Downey Jr.'s performance was special. Apart from that, all I knew was that the movie was about a big iron man. I didn't even know that a human occupied it, and halfway thought that the Downey character's brain had been transplanted into a robot, or a fate equally weird.
Yes, I knew I was looking at sets and special effects--but I'm referring to the reality of the illusion, if that make any sense. With many superhero movies, all you get is the surface of the illusion. With "Iron Man," you get a glimpse into the depths. You get the feeling, for example, of a functioning corporation. Consider the characters of Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), Stark's loyal aide, and Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges), Stark's business partner. They don't feel drummed up for the occasion. They seem to have worked together for awhile.
Much of that feeling is created by the chemistry involving Downey, Paltrow and Bridges. They have relationships that seem fully-formed and resilient enough to last through the whole movie, even if plot mechanics were not about to take them to another level. Between the two men, there are echoes of the relationship between Howard Hughes and Noah Dietrich in Scorsese's "The Aviator" (2004). Obadiah Stane doesn't come onscreen waving flags and winking at the camera to announce he is the villain; he seems adequately explained simply as the voice of reason at Stark's press conference. (Why did "Stark," during that scene, make me think of "staring mad?"). Between Stark and Pepper, there's that classic screen tension between "friends" who know they can potentially become lovers.
Downey's performance is intriguing, and unexpected. He doesn't behave like most superheroes: he lacks the psychic weight and gravitas. Tony Stark is created from the persona Downey has fashioned through many movies: irreverent, quirky, self-deprecating, wise-cracking. The fact that Downey is allowed to think and talk the way he does while wearing all that hardware represents a bold decision by the director, Jon Favreau. If he hadn't desired that, he probably wouldn't have hired Downey. So comfortable is Downey with Tony Stark's dialogue, so familiar does it sound coming from him, that the screenplay seems almost to have been dictated by Downey's persona.
There are some things that some actors can safely say onscreen, and other things they can't. The Robert Downey Jr. persona would find it difficult to get away with weighty, profound statements (in an "entertainment," anyway--a more serious film like "Zodiac" is another matter). Some superheroes speak in a kind of heightened, semi-formal prose, as if dictating to Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. Not Tony Stark. He could talk that way and be Juno's uncle. "Iron Man" doesn't seem to know how seriously most superhero movies take themselves. If there is wit in the dialog, the superhero is often supposed to be unaware of it. If there is broad humor, it usually belongs to the villain. What happens in "Iron Man," however, is that sometimes we wonder how seriously even Stark takes it. He's flippant in the face of disaster, casual on the brink of ruin.
It's prudent, I think, that Favreau positions the rest of the characters in a more serious vein. The supporting cast wisely does not try to one-up him. Gwyneth Paltrow plays Pepper Potts as a woman who is seriously concerned that this goofball will kill himself. Jeff Bridges makes Obadiah Stane one of the great superhero villains by seeming plausibly concerned about the stock price. Terrence Howard, as Col. Rhodes, is at every moment a conventional straight arrow. What a horror show it would have been if they were all tuned to Tony Stark's sardonic wave length. We'd be back in the world of "Swingers" (1996) which was written by Favreau.
Another of the film's novelties is that the enemy is not a conspiracy or spy organization. It is instead the reality in our own world today: Armaments are escalating beyond the ability to control them. In most movies in this genre, the goal would be to create bigger and better weapons. How unique that Tony Stark wants to disarm. It makes him a superhero who can think, reason and draw moral conclusions, instead of one who recites platitudes.
The movie is largely founded on its special effects. When somebody isn’t talking, something is banging, clanging or laying rubber. The armored robotic suits utilized by Tony and Obadiah would upstage lesser actors than Downey and Bridges; it's surprising how much those two giant iron men seem to reflect the personalities of the men inside them. Everything they do is preposterous, of course, but they seem to be doing it, not the suits. Some of their moments have real grandeur--as when Tony tests his suit to see how high it will fly, and it finally falls back toward earth in a sequence that reminded me of a similar challenge in "The Right Stuff." The art direction is inspired by the original Marvel artists. The movie doesn't reproduce the drawings of Jack Kirby and others, but it reproduces their feeling, a vision of out-scale enormity, seamless sleekness, secret laboratories made not of nuts and bolts but of...vistas.
A lot of big budget f/x epics seem to abandon their stories with half an hour to go, and just throw effects at the audience. This one has a plot so ingenious it continues to function no matter how loud the impacts, how enormous the explosions. It’s an inspiration to provide Tony with that heart-saving device; he’s vulnerable not simply because Obadiah might destroy him, but because he might simply run out of juice.
That leaves us, however, with a fundamental question at the bottom of the story: Why must the ultimate weapon be humanoid in appearance? Why must it have two arms and two legs, and why does it matter if its face is scowling? In the real-world competitions between fighting machines, all the elements of design are based entirely on questions of how well they allow the machines to attack, defend, recover, stay upright, and overturn their enemies. It is irrelevant whether they have conventional eyes, or whether those eyes narrow. Nor does it matter whether they have noses, because their oxygen supply is obviously not obtained by breathing.
The solution to such dilemmas is that the armored suits look the way they do for entirely cinematic reasons. The bad iron man should look like a mean machine. The good iron man should utilize the racing colors of Tony Stark's favorite sports cars. It wouldn't be nearly as much fun to see a fight scene between two refrigerators crossed with the leftovers from a boiler room.
At the end of the day it 's Robert Downey Jr. who powers the lift-off separating this from most other superhero movies. You hire an actor for his strengths, and Downey would not be strong as a one-dimensional mighty-man. He is strong because he is smart, quick and funny, and because we sense his public persona masks deep private wounds. By building on that, Favreau found his movie, and it's a good one.
This blog entry has recycled onto the site as a review, with a 4-star rating. -RE
Studs Terkel won a Pulitzer Prize for listening to other people's thoughts, fears and dreams. (Sun-Times photo by Rich Hein)
I got caught in the Indiana Jones whirlwind and allowed an important anniversary to pass unremarked: On May 16, Studs Terkel celebrated his 96th birthday. One of the great American lives continues to unfold. If I know Studs, the great day passed with calls and visits from friends, and the ceremonious imbibing of one (1) gin martini, very dry. I hope he has eliminated the daily cigar, but I'm not taking odds. If you don't know Studs, there are few people you can meet more easily in print. He is the greatest conversationalist I've met, the author of a shelf-full of books in which he engages people from all walks of life in thoughtful conversations about their own lives.
This life-work began with the best-seller Division Street: America, (1967), in which he talked to politicians and protestors, firemen and cops, actors and salesmen, saints and thieves. These conversations were engendered by the daily radio program Studs did for decades on WFMT, Chicago's fine arts station, on which morning after morning he would demonstrate that he had actually read an author's book, or seen the play, or attended the performance, or visited the place. Studs has an insatiable appetite for people and the things they do, and may have read as many books as anyone alive. Over the years his attention to the world he lives in has made him a one-man cross-reference. I remember appearing on his program once and mentioning Buster Keaton. Studs paused the tape recorder, rummaged around on a shelf, and produced a tape of Keaton himself, talking about the very same topic.
I met Studs very soon after I moved to Chicago. It was in the Old Town apartment of Herman and Marilu Kogan; Herman was the author and Chicago Daily News editor responsible for getting me hired at the Sun-Times. The evening was all conversation, nonstop, and all consequential: No small-talk or idle chat for these people. I felt as if I'd been put at the same table with the grown-ups.
Not long after, the (now) Nobel Prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing visited Chicago. Studs knew I had read all her books while studying at the University of Cape Town, and he also knew, more importantly, that I had a car and knew how to drive. Studs has never learned how to drive; he enlisted me as chauffeur and I spent two unforgettable days observing Studs showing Lessing his own Chicago.
I have written about that day and other things Studsian in these articles:
My purpose today is not to repeat the same stories, but to tell you how the example of Studs Terkel is helping me live my own life. As you know, I've had a lot of health difficulties over the past few years. After surgery for jaw cancer, I'm told I am cancer-free. But I had operations to repair the cancer's damage, and these surgeries resulted in life-threatening situations. In recovery, I had treatment at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, was restored to health and fitness, was up and about, was even hiking in the foothills at Rancho la Puerta in Mexico. The surgeries failed to restore my ability to speak, but I was healthy and cheerful. I went back to reviewing movies on a full-time schedule.
After the latest restorative surgery in January, I was again very ill, again landed back in the R.I.C., was restored a third time, and again returned to work. To get into good shape for the Ebertfest in April, my wife and I went to the Pritikin Longevity Institute in Florida, where I've gone for 15 years or more to benefit from their wise programs. On our second day there, I tripped on a rug, fell, and broke my hip. A stupid accident that could have happened to anyone and was not related to illness. Just one of those things.
I found myself in the rehab institute a fourth time. Surely this was enough? Learning to walk after a broken hip is painful, but it must be done and I have done it. I've also returned to my full-time duties at the Sun-Times, and am pouring myself into the web site. This new blog is part of that effort.
What influence has Studs had on my life during these years? He has simply continued to live--to talk, read, keep up with the news, see movies, attend events, use e-mail, listen, visit--and write. It is melancholy fact that in the last three years Studs has visited me in the hospital more times than I have visited him. But let me tell you about visiting Studs three days after he had open-heart surgery a few years ago. I expected to find a sick man. I found Studs sitting up in bed, surrounded by books and papers, receiving friends. The author Garry Wills appeared at his door. Studs had just finished reading his new book. He was filled with questions.
In recent years Studs has had open-heart surgery, and broken his own bones ("I was walking downstairs carrying a drink in one hand and a book in the other. Don't try that after 90.") But he has never, ever, not in the slightest, degree, retired. He published Touch and Go: A Memoir in November 2007, but a memoir could never close the book on this life. In fact, it was his second memoir, after Talking to Myself. (1977).
The lesson Studs has taught me is that your life is over when you stop living it. If you can truly "retire," you had a job, but not an occupation. Observing people like Studs and the author Paul Theroux, and the great sports writer William Nack, and directors like Robert Altman and Sidney Lumet, I have seen those whose lifelong occupations absorb them, and who are not merely maintaining, but growing. How astonishing it was to learn that Altman made great films after having a heart transplant! Nack, having "retired" from Sports Illustrated, has co-produced the film "Ruffian" for cable TV, based on his book about the great filly. He is an on-air talent for ESPN, and is now one of the producers of a film based on his book Secretariat: the Making of a Champion. For the first time in his life, he has an agent. His book My Turf has a story in it that has made grown people cry. I know.
Theroux continues among the great writers of fiction, and remains a voracious reader. He lives with his wife Sheila Donnelly, a travel agent, on Ohau. It makes perfect sense for him to be married to a travel agent, since Theroux arguably has seen more of this planet’s surface at ground-level than anyone else in history, and written about his adventures in famous books about travel. His wanderings continue. We met at the Hawaii Film Festival, began talking, and have kept talked ever since--about books, mostly. It is such a relief to find someone who has read widely among authors you can't discuss with anybody else. We plowed through George Gissing and on to Mrs. Gaskell. Theroux continues to be curious. Not long ago he wrote a long and much-discussed essay for the Times (of London) Literary Supplement, seriously comparing the work of Albert Camus and Georges Simenon. He thinks Simenon, the Belgian author of about 400 novels, mostly about policemen, criminal, and crime itself, deserves comparison with Camus. I agree. But that's another blog entry.
Like Studs himself, I'm free associating myself away from where I was pointed and toward where my curiosity leads me. That's how he works, too. The point is Studs. Among his books is one about this very subject: Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. It became a Broadway musical. And there are The Good War: An Oral History of World War II and Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression. These books set down eye-witness, first person accounts of eras in recent history that are already fading in the rear-view mirror.
One reason Terkel gets people to talk so openly with him is that he's not an academic or a cross-examiner. He comes across as this guy sitting down with you to have a good, long talk. Pick up one of his books, and now you're sitting next to the guy. You can't stop reading. Studs has an interviewing technique I admire: He combines astonishment with curiosity. He can't believe his ears. He repeats with enthusiasm what his subject just said, and the subject invariably continues and expands and wants to make his own story better. So many people have great stories, if only they could find an audience.
It's curious, how only two of Studs’ books are technically about himself, but in a way they're all about himself. Reading a novel, we may identify with one of the characters. Reading Studs, we identify with him--with the questions. Through his example, we become inquiring minds. And his subjects range widely. Look at his book Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith. He provides not New Age malarkey, but real people having real thoughts about their real lives, and the inevitability of their own real deaths. Some people never articulate such thoughts to themselves, but they should, and in reading the book you are invited to turn inward and interview yourself.
Studs was married for 60 years to a beautiful woman named Ida, who stood by him in the good times (he starred on one of the first sitcoms in network history) and the bad (he lost that job because of the blacklist). He was envious that her FBI file was thicker than his own. When Ida grew older, she refused to use a cane, "because I fall so gracefully." Her death in 1999 inspired him to write Will the Circle Be Unbroken? In his introduction, he remembers her last words to him, as she was wheeled into the O.R. for heart surgery: "Louis, what have you gotten me into now?"
Studs has gotten a limitless number of people into things. I am one of them. He has taught me that if I break my other hip next week, I will simply learn to walk again, and continue do what engages me the most, which is to write about movies. Life might have taken me in many other directions, but this is the one given me, and if I stop following it, I will have lost my way.
True, after all that surgery, I still lack the power of speech. And after all those interviews, Studs is now, in his own words, "Deaf as a post." But I can still write about movies, and thanks to "a nifty little thing-a-ma-jig" device hooked to his hearing aids, Studs can still hear people and write about what they say. You hear about people retiring and then dying a month later, maybe because their life has lost its purpose for them. The lesson Studs teaches me every day is that to live is to live is to live.
At noon Sunday, I attended a press screening of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." I returned to my laptop, wrote my review and sent it off, convinced I would be in a minority. I loved it, but then I'm also the guy who loved "Beowulf," and look at the grief that got me. Now Indy's early reviews are in, and I'm amazed to find myself in an enthusiastic majority. The Tomatometer stands at 78, and the more populist IMDb user rating is 9.2 out of 10. All this before the movie's official opening on Thursday.
Why did I think I would be in a minority? Because of what David Poland at Movie City News poetically described as "one idiot." As everybody knows, an exhibitor attended a closed-door screening last week, and filed a review with the Ain't It Cool News website. This single wrong-headed, anonymous review was the peg on which The New York Times based a breathless story on a negative early reaction to the film. That story inspired widespread coverage: Were Spielberg and Lucas making a mistake by showing their film at Cannes? Would it turn out to be a fiasco like showing "The Da Vinci Code" there? The Code got terrible reviews, and only managed to gross something like $480 million dollars at the box office--suggesting, if not to the Times, that even a negative reception at Cannes might not cut Indy off at the knees.
Maybe even Harrison Ford was influenced by Mr. Wrong-Headed. "It's not unusual for something that is popular to be disdained by some people," he said at the press conference following the Cannes screening, "and I fully expect it." What he got was a standing ovation in the Palais des Festivals that night. The S.O. was heralded in all the coverage, even though any Cannes veteran would tell you it meant--nothing. Every film gets a standing ovation at the black-tie evening premiere at Cannes, unless it is so bad it transcends awfulness.
There are really two premieres at Cannes: The press screening at 8:30 a.m., and the black-tie, or "official," screening in the evening. Both fill the vast, 3,500-seat Lumiere auditorium. The morning offers a tough audience: Critics, festival programmers, people who have may have seen hundreds of other movies in this room. They are free with their boos, and if a movie doesn't work for them have been known to shout at the screen on their way out.
The black-tie screening, on the other hand, includes many people who have a financial motive for wanting a film to succeed: The worldwide distributors and exhibitors, their guests, and lots of Riviera locals. Or they may have been given tickets and are thrilled to be there. ("I recognized the woman sitting next to me from my hotel," Rex Red told me one year. "It was my maid.") In some cases, they may simply think it's good manners to cheer movie stars who flew all the way to Cannes. Then too, the stars are seated in the front row of the balcony. Everybody below stands up after the movie, turns around, and sees them bathed in spotlights. The Standing O creates itself.
Nevertheless, I believe the S.O. was genuine the other night. It takes a cold heart and a weary imagination to dislike an "Indiana" film with all of its rambunctious gusto. With every ounce of its massive budget, it strains to make us laugh, surprise us, go over the top with preposterous action. "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" does those things under the leadership of Spielberg, who knows as much as any man ever has about what reaches the popular imagination. The early reviewer on the web site, on the other hand, knew as little.
Spielberg at heart will always be that kid who sneaked onto the back lot at Universal and talked himself into a job. He's the kind of man who remains in many ways a boy. He likes neat stuff. He thinks it would be fun to have Indiana and friends plunge over three waterfalls, not one. He knows that we know what back projection is, and he uses it blatantly (Indy arriving in frame as if he had jumped there, while the background rolls past a little out of focus). He knows back projection feels differently that perfect digital backgrounds -- it feels more like a movie. He likes boldly-faked editing sequences: We see the heroes in medium shot at the edge of a waterfall, we see a long shot of their boat falling to what would obviously be instant oblivion below, and then he shows the heroes surfacing together and near the shore (no rapids!) and spitting out a little water. The movie isn't a throwback to the Saturday serials of the 1930s and 1940s. It's what they would have been if they could have been.
Consider another action series, the Matrix films. They're so doggedly intense and serious. They seem to think the future of the universe really is a stake. There's a role for serious action, but not when it's hurled at us in a cascade of quick-cutting and QueasyCam shots that make dramatic development impossible. Even if the they are constructed out of wall-to-wall implausibility, the Indy films have characters who aren't frantic. Harrison Ford and Spielberg are wise: They know a pumped-up Indy would seem absurd. Indiana Jones himself is so laid back he sometimes seems to be watching the movie with us. He's happy to be aboard, just as long, of course, as he can stay in the boat/truck/airplane.
After the release of his "Standard Operating Procedures," the director Errol Morris writes me: This movie seems to have incited controversy, almost as if I broke some sort of rule or series of rules. The ultimate mystery is people. They are often mysteries not only to others but to themselves. Almost everyone wants to dismiss the bad apples rather than look at them, as if there is nothing inherently interesting in their stories. Oh well. The words "to themselves" hold the key.
None of the opinions in the film are owned by Morris. They belong to the people on the screen, who actually appear in the infamous photographs from Abu Ghraib. There are a few very brief off-screen questions by Morris ("That was on your birthday?") but they're not penetrating, do not suggest opinions, are the sorts of things any attentive listener would say. Most of the reviews of the film get this right. Sampling the reviews linked by IMDb.com, I found little to disagree with. I assume the "controversy" Morris refers to involves message boards, questions at film festivals, people walking up to him in the street, editorial page bleats, talk radio, those sorts of things.
But listen to the words in the screen. The people in the photographs are as puzzled as we are. They did things they might not have done under other circumstances, and yet were blindsided by this particular set of circumstances. The wisest statement in the film (however obvious) is by the prison guard Javel Davis, who says, "Pictures only show you a fraction of a second. You don't see forward and you don't see backward. You don't see outside the frame." You don't see why these Americans enlisted in the military or the National Guard, you don't see their training, you don't see their experiences, you don't see how Iraq changed them. They seem to wonder about these things themselves. We look at old photos of ourselves and wonder why we ever wore that shirt, or combed our hair that way. When did I stop using Brylcreem? Why was I that person?> Still more does Lynndie England wonder how, at 20, she found herself in photographs from Abu Ghraib, pointing to a man forced (not by herself) to masturbate.
I'm not sure I agree with Morris that the Americans in the photos are even "bad apples." The one who does deserve that description seems to be Charles Graner (not allowed to be interviewed for the movie), who England believes deceived and manipulated her, and held the camera for a lot of the photos, and instructed the others in their poses. The others may not have been bad apples but good ones left to spoil too long in the sun of the war in Iraq.
Morris is correct; there is no rule that says he may not simply listen to them speaking. His chief occupation has always been to listen. Perhaps that's why Robert McNamara choose to be interviewed by him; you might think McNamara would go instead for someone like Ken Burns. In his Oscar-winning "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara" (2003), Morris freely used montages and newsreel footage and all sorts of visual material to illustrate McNamara's words, but McNamara didn't squawk, and I think the visuals were fair enough. In "SOP," on the other hand, although Morris does use some reenactments, all his visuals are based on what might have been seen in that place, at that time.
There is a tradition for films, especially documentaries, that propose merely to look and listen. That seems to be the case with Robert Flaherty's "Nanook of the North." On the other hand, no one would think of Leni Riefenstahl’s "Triumph of the Will" as merely looking and listening. We now know, however, that "Nanook" was largely scripted, the locations were constructed, and the film represented a distillation of Flaherty's ideas about the Inuit people. No less was "Triumph" a distillation of Riefenstahl's ideas about the Third Reich, staged and filmed with the resources of the Reich at her disposal. The idea of a purely objective documentary is largely a fantasy, but "SOP" is objective in that it shows these people questioning their own lives and behavior, and offers no answers.
"The ultimate mystery is people," Morris writes. Yes. That helps explain a kind of film I instinctively admire: A film that examines human behavior in minute detail and infinite curiosity, and offers no conventional story structure to "explain" it. Consider "The Son" ("L'Enfant, 2002), the Cannes winner by the Dardennes brothers. Why is this carpenter instantly so fascinated by the apprentice who has been brought into his shop? Why does he leap onto a cabinet to get a better look at him? Why does he care? The young man has certainly never seen him before. It is their shared mystery that fascinates me, not anything else. And the mystery of Abu Ghraib. And the mysteries that fascinate McNamara, such as that some of the bombing raids against Japan that he participated in might have been considered war crimes if the Japanese had won. Why do we do the things that we do? Must we? Do we have a choice? There is no answer, but the question itself asserts our nature as human beings.
David Mamet's recent "Redbelt" is an example of a kind of movie that needs a name. It's not precisely a thriller, or a suspense picture, or a police procedural, and although it occupies the territory of film noir, it's not a noir. I propose this kind of film be named a Twister, because it's made from plot twists, and in a way the twists are the real subject.
A true Twister is one twist piled on another. It doesn't qualify if the twist is simply an unanticipated ending, as in "Her Life Before Her Eyes," when (spoiler!) we discover that everything after the confrontation with the killer was imagined in the heroine's dying moments. It was her future life that flashed before her eyes. The ending in that film explains and redefines all that went before, and is traditionally called a "twist ending," which is clear enough. It works as a beautiful idea, which comes at the end because that's the only place it belongs. Maybe it's not a twist at all but just the inevitable unfolding of what happened.
Twisters don't twist only at the end. They pull one rug from another out from under our feet, until we're astonished by how many rugs we were standing on. Sometimes it's almost impossible to keep all the versions of reality straight. Sometimes it's a futile exercise, because we realize the film could continue indefinitely. But when a Twister is in the hands of a master like Mamet, it can be devilish and ingenious.
Mamet's first film, the great "House of Games," kept surprising us with the unfolding levels of its con. He's fascinated by con games, and loves to use them in his films and plays. In most of his films, you'll see a saturnine, bearded actor named Ricky Jay, one of his friends, who is a consultant on magic and cons. Jay played one of the poker players in "House of Games," and is the pay-for-view TV promoter in "Redbelt." Mamet even produced a night of Jay's magic, off-Broadway, during which Jay performed the non-Mametian trick of throwing cards at a watermelon so hard they sliced into them.
After the show I went backstage to meet the magician, and was told, "Actually, this isn't the first time we've met. We met in college. You published something by me in a little magazine you edited."
"I don't remember you," I confessed.
"Don't let the name throw you off," he said. "I wasn't named Ricky Jay then."
"What was your name?"
"That, my friend, you will never know."
A nice touch. A nicer one is that in searching Jay's various biographies, I could find no mention of him having attended the University of Illinois. You see how it works. But of course it wasn't mentioned, you say, because he attended under another name. Yes, but he would have known where he went to college. Perhaps he made up his biography. Why? That, my friends, we will never know.
The difference between "House of Games" and "Redbelt" helps define two kinds of Twisters. In "House of Game," the other characters are in on the con, and Lindsay Crouse, their quarry, represents the film's point of view. In "Redbelt," while the manager of the martial arts studio (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is the quarry, he becomes a victim on more than one level, and it's hard to see how everyone else could have been in on it, even after some awkward exposition. In every Twister, the audience, by necessity, is kept on the outside, but in some of them, the film itself seems to be the confidence game.
The exposition I was referring to comes when the studio owner bluntly asks how something happened, and is bluntly given the answer. It feels so awkward I almost think Mamet stuck it in after even he found the film hard to follow. Reminds me of the story about the Roger Corman film that made no sense. Two bit actors were brought back to stand in front of a backdrop. One asked, “What does this all mean?" and the other told him. Of course in a Twister, it need not mean, but be.
My previous blog item, "Hillary and Bill: The Movie," has inspired a lot of comments, and some of them utterly baffle me. They take it for granted that I am pro-Hillary, if not necessarily anti-Obama. I've read the item again and believe it is neutral, as it was intended to be. I'm a political creature, but I intend to keep partisan politics out of this journal, which will, and should, deal only with the movies in various ways. I think those comments do, however, reveal something about how we watch movies.
In the piece, I set out to discuss what sort of a movie might be inspired by the endless 2007-2008 primary season. I came up with a backstage drama about the private lives of the Clintons, who, like the Obamas, have found themselves in a Mobius strip of campaigning. It is not natural to be running for office for month after month: To have every public statement and gesture, every shrug of body language, every Freudian slip, pounced on by the attack dogs. If I were forced to lead such a life, it would lead me to some species of madness.
I suggested a backstage film that had empathy for the Clintons. It wouldn't involve whether you agreed with them or not, but would center on how these two people, in private, deal with one another and the campaign hell they live in. I imagined weary scenes set late at night in anonymous hotel rooms. The ways they dealt with one piece of bad news after another. The reasons and ways they had to persist in the face of discouragement. I mentioned Stephen Frears' film "The Queen" (2006) as a possible model.
Why the Clintons and not the Obamas? Quite simply, because their story is more interesting. It has a longer history, and apparently a bleaker outcome. They seem to be losing the primary season, and have seemed so for several months, and they have both been running for something, win or lose, for most of their adult lives. To face this ultimate defeat, at the end of the most punishing primary campaign in American history, must be an ultimate test of their relationship, and what makes them persist in the face of discouragement. I wrote:
"Hillary wanted to win, and she ran and ran and ran until there was a kind of heroism to it. Futile heroism after a point, but that's where the story lies."
Some careless readers thought I was referring to Hillary as heroic. Others argued that she could not be, for one political reason after another. Still more somehow extracted from the essay a defense of Hillary, or an endorsement. But the fact is, I envisioned a movie about the Clintons, not for or against them.
My mail from readers has often assumed that by writing about something, I am endorsing it. Every new documentary about Iraq, for example, inspires a flood of e-mail to the Answer Man. My political views on Bush and Iraq are well known, and I sometimes express them in reviews, but such a documentary's greatest interest is not in what it thinks about the war, but what it brings to the table.
Its content centers on the infamous photographs of torture at Abu Ghirab. It interviews many of the American soldiers involved in taking them. That's it. In plain daylight, the film is about why we take photos, how we look at them, why those particular photographs were taken, how they looked to the soldiers at the time, and how they look now. Its political feelings about the war are never stated. Of course it's implied that the soldiers intensely regret the photos and the military culture that gave birth to their jobs as prison guards, but there is no suggestion they did not support the war in general, or that they were not proud to be serving in uniform.
Yet many of my correspondents needed only to see the subject of the review to denounce the movie, and me, as left-wing, anti-war, biased, and so on. I tried in the review to say the movie was about viewing and thinking about the photos, and wondering what the soldiers and the prisoners were thinking and feeling, and asking why they had been posed in the way we were. One of the Marines in the film states, wisely and clearly, that a photo doesn't tell you what happened before or after it was taken. I think Morris makes it clear that the events depicted, with the human pyramids and dog collars and so on, would never have taken place if a camera had not been present. So the film is about the photographs, and not about the war, Bush, or anything else.
It's the same, really, about movies about anything. It should be possible to admire a film with subject matter you deplore, or positions you despise. The critic can make that clear in a review, but he should acknowledge the qualities of the film. The acid test is Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will." It belongs in my Great Movies Collection, but I've put off reviewing it for years.
I woke up at about 3:30 a.m. and went online to see if Obama had pulled a victory out of Indiana. He had narrowed Clinton's head to two points by midnight and later added a few more votes, but the story was basically about the same: Clinton's winning margin was so small that it didn't much count, and Obama would be the likely Presidential nominee. Then I started wondering, in the vaporous midnight hours, about how you could make a movie of this primary campaign.
I'm sure there will be documentaries. In the age of the video camera, there cannot be a public moment that went unrecorded. But I'm thinking of a fiction film. What would the angle be? Like most people I k
