STILL MORE SHORT TAKES

Eye in the Sky

            No movie could possibly be more relevant to our troubled time than Eye in the Sky, which confronts with exquisite tension one of the most morally ambiguous practices of the   combat in the Middle East.  The movie deals with a single action, the debate over deploying a drone strike on a single house in Kenya apparently inhabited by terrorists intent on a suicide bombing mission.  That simple situation expands into a number of actions, technologies, and problems that now result from the unending “war on terror.” 

            As part of its progress and as a visual demonstration of the complexities involved in its ostensibly simple story, the film shifts constantly among all the people who control the remarkable technologies that send a missile toward a particular target.  Helen Mirren plays a British officer, Colonel Katherine Powell, in charge of a team of experts tracking the activities of suspected terrorists in a surveillance operation employing satellites, drones, and agents on the ground.  She wants to order an American missile strike on the house, but must clear the action through a committee of English government officials and a general (Alan Rickman), who sit around a table arguing the pros and cons of the decision.

            The officials need a confirmation of the threat, a process that as the debate goes on grows increasingly complicated and increasingly dangerous.  In addition to the long range surveillance, the agent in the actual area (Barkhad Abdi) risks his life to investigate the suspects’ house, controlling small drones—one a mechanical bird, the other, believe it or not, a mechanical bug (no pun intended) to spy on the preparations.  The images he sends show the terrorists, apparently preparing for a suicide mission, packing vests with bombs, which increases the urgency of the deliberations.

            The whole mission pivots on one of the disturbing moral questions that contemporary, remote-controlled warfare raises, euphemistically called collateral damage, otherwise known as the wounding, maiming, and killing of innocent noncombatants.  The problem centers on one young girl, selling bread that her mother bakes in a makeshift booth near the intended target; she becomes the single human representative of the term and the reason that so many people agonize over the decision to send a missile into the terrorists’ house.  That tension escalates with the camera’s constant shifts from the British command center to the debate of the civilians in charge to the American military personnel who will fire the missile to the dangerous situation of the agent and his desperate attempts to save the little girl.

            The film also demonstrates some of the conflicts and consequently, the complex emotions among the various entities that control the mission—civilians in government, British and American military personnel, the anguished agent in place—as they debate the pros and cons of the action they contemplate.  For all its technological wonders and its convincing display of warfare as we now practice it, Eye in the Sky creates much of its considerable suspense as much from its examination of the human questions it raises as from its meticulous representation of the process of locating, identifying, and attacking an elusive enemy.

Miles Ahead

            Written and directed by Don Cheadle, who also stars as the title character, Miles Ahead purports to show a difficult period in the life of the great musician Miles Davis, when he stopped performing, recording, and even playing his instrument.  Most of the movie shows a most irascible, mercurial artist abusing his wife, arguing with friends, and fighting a pitched battle with the record company executives attempting to acquire a tape of a private recording session.  To compensate for the repetitive action, the director uses flashbacks to show some other aspect of Davis’s life and art.

            Wearing a major Afro, Cheadle makes Miles Davis, whatever his artistry, a most unpleasant person, drinking, drugging, and alienating most of the people around him.  He also invents an entirely bogus plot revolving around the mysterious tape of the mysterious music.  David Brill (Ewan McGregor), a writer from Rolling Stone, joins Davis in a ridiculous quest to recover the stolen tape from the heartless businessmen.  The two of them engage in one of those tiresome movie car chases, with Davis firing a revolver with an apparently inexhaustible supply of ammunition, thus turning a presumably well intentioned biopic into a bogus thriller.

In fact, despite Cheadle’s impersonation and Davis’s music on the soundtrack (though not enough of it, to be sure), the entire movie exudes an atmosphere of fakery.  Apparently Cheadle had to invent a white character in the form of the completely uninteresting McGregor to obtain financing for the work; the ridiculous plot, such as it is, presumably derives from Davis’s legitimate, though nonviolent conflicts with record company executives.  The final unraveling of the mystery of the missing tape provides a disappointing downbeat ending (no pun intended, jazz fans).  I am sure Don Cheadle could have done a better job, and I believe Miles Davis deserves a better picture than Miles Ahead.

 

Papa: Hemingway in Cuba

            As a lifelong reader of Ernest Hemingway’s work, and as both a student and a teacher of his stories and novels, and creator of a Hemingway seminar, almost anything connected with the author attracts my interest.  His work and his life obviously also attract the interest of a great many others—the most famous writer of the twentieth century, his novels and stories have been filmed many times; he is the subject of innumerable biographies and critical studies; a character in his own right, he’s also been the subject of several documentaries and feature films, rare for any writer, especially in America.  He appears in Alan Parker’s film, The Moderns, about the artistic life in Paris in the 1920s, and in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, which employs the same subject.  Unlike most writers, he led an adventurous, eventful, fascinating life, which along with the popularity of his fiction, made him a unique phenomenon in the world of letters.

            The latest treatment of the author, played by Adrian Sparks, based on the reminiscence of a writer named Denne Bart Petitclerc (I’m ashamed to say I’ve never heard of him), deals with some of his time in Cuba in the last years of his life.  Played by Giovanni Ribisi, the young writer, called Ed Myers in the film, writes a letter to his hero Hemingway, who likes it so much he calls him up and invites him to Cuba.  His first trip there proves a great success and leads to many more; the film’s plot, in fact, resolves itself into a series of Myers’s visits to Hemingway’s house in Cuba, where he becomes one of the entourage of friends and hangers-on who surround the writer.

            The series of visits also turns into a chronicle of the author’s battles with depression and his angry slide into madness.  Continuing the practice of a lifetime, he drinks heavily, argues with everyone, abuses his wife Mary (Joely Richardson), acts out violently, threatens suicide, and insults and alienates his friends.  Perhaps worst of all, he finds he can no longer write, a circumstance that contributed as much as his alcoholism and his various head injuries to his suicide, eighteen months after the events in the movie. 

            For the most part the film repeats a many of the known facts of a very public writer’s life, most of them reported in detail by innumerable biographers.  The script also depends heavily and frankly, embarrassingly, on a whole catalogue of Hemingway’s statements, most of them taken from his writing and again, well known to the point of cliché—all that stuff about beginning with one true sentence, for example, and the comments  about drinking, sex, danger, love, etc. , and all delivered sententiously by Adrian Sparks.  It also tends to create a parody of a man and a writer who, tragically, by that time had already become something of a parody of himself.

            The portrait of Hemingway also suffers from the performance of Adrian Sparks as the title character.  He looks a good deal like the writer in his later years, but his behavior exaggerates everything about him, taking the character far over the top and pretty much keeping him up there on one loud, long, repeated series of actions and utterances.  Covering some of the same material, the HBO movie Hemingway and Gellhorn accomplishes a significantly fuller and more interesting creation with more sensitivity and artfulness.  The fascinating man, the great writer, the adventurous life, the tragic ending still await the script and the film to bring them all fully into existence.

ANOTHER QUICKIE

ANOTHER QUICKIE

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

            After most famously establishing herself as a comedian with her uncanny Sarah Palin imitation, and as a comic actor in Sisters, where she uttered more raunchy lines and dick jokes than, well, you could shake a dick at, Tina Fey turns more serious in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.  Rather loosely based on the memoir Taliban Shuffle by Kim Barker, who covered the fighting in Afghanistan, the movie uses the military lingo for WTF, initials that every Facebook user understands.  In her first non-comic role, Tina Fey plays the reporter, called Kim Baker in the movie, which also transfers the protagonist from print journalism to television.  The film shows a great many episodes, some familiar to any viewer of television news and some even indeed comic, in that useless war that Kim Barker witnessed and reported on; in addition, it also shows the activities of the whole gang of journalists, photographers, cameramen, and their guides and interpreters.

            The general substance of the movie involves the growth and development of an inexperienced, generally ill equipped journalist as she progresses through the chaos and destruction of war to competence in her profession.  After an introduction to the chaotic life of a journalist in a war zone, Kim Barker learns how to become a war correspondent.  She manipulates the Marine general (Billy Bob Thornton) in Kabul in order to get a story; she outwits the lecherous attorney general (Alfred Molina), and she begins an affair with a Scottish photographer (Martin Freeman).  After acquitting herself admirably in a number of difficult situations, she also learns about the betrayal of loyalty and competence through the actions of a colleague and her boss (those familiar with my situation at City Newspaper will understand).

As the novice in Afghanistan discovers, war itself provides an enormous rush of adrenaline, a complicated mixture of emotions that explains some of the attractions of combat, even for noncombatants.  Like a lot of participants in warfare, she finds the gunfire, the bombs, the several skirmishes she covers, the discomfort of primitive quarters, and the death and destruction somehow exhilarating and even addicting.  Although the movie illuminates the progress in learning and awareness of a courageous and resourceful young woman, it also shows something most observers ignore, that war, despite its obvious horrors, often arouses some powerfully positive emotions in people.  It reveals to them a courage they may not have known they possessed, it sometimes ennobles them, it encourages gestures of sacrifice and honor, it intensifies all sorts of feelings.  In the midst of danger, against the bloody background of violence and destruction, people often even fall in love.

To begin with, as a hundred years of cinema shows, Hollywood gives good war.  The innumerable war films almost invariably emphasize not only heroism and sacrifice, but also the moral and physical consequences of mass combat.  Although the movie employs some witty situations and dialogue to convey some of the ambiguity of Kim Baker’s experience of war, it also suggests some reversal of the usual war film, a common point in contemporary cinema.  In short, although this time the protagonist is female and a noncombatant, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot belongs with some other recent films, among them The Hurt Locker and American Sniper; it suggests, like it or not, some of the actual joys of war.  It explains why soldiers encounter difficulty accustoming themselves to peace, a letdown that seldom appears in the usual discussions of post-traumatic stress disorder, and why some well known war correspondents frequently return to the battle zones.  War is hell, to be sure, but it also is somehow a richly exhilarating experience. 

QUICK NOTES: Star Wars

            With the possible exception of some Antarctic explorer or some hermit meditating in some remote cave, the latest addition to the Star Wars franchise, number seven in the usual Roman numerals, (which impart more dignity) The Force Awakens , enjoyed one of the most profitable opening weeks in history, benefitting of course from what also must be the longest and loudest pre-release publicity campaign, complete with hundreds of related toys, games, puzzles, etc.   The distributors even offered advance reserved tickets, which sold out almost immediately (why people camp out to be the first to see a movie that will play for months at all times of the day at many theaters is a question that always puzzles me).   With that hype and the history of a fantastically successful franchise, the latest addition could not possibly fail.  And it did not.

            Despite the hype and the box office boffo, the new film accomplishes little in the way of advancing its subject, the history of the future.  That history, for example, remains confusing, despite all the nonsense about rebels versus the Empire, the Dark Side, the Force, and so on; at the same time, it remains the same old good guys versus bad guys, complete with all the aerial fights between the two sides, light saber duels, and troops of neo-Nazi storm troopers shooting blasters and usually missing their targets.  The picture continues the theme of fathers and sons, with a confrontation between Han Solo (Harrison Ford of course) and his estranged son Kylo Ren (Adam Driver). 

            Aside from resurrecting Ford, the film also brings back Carrie Fisher and, momentarily, Mark Hamill, reconstructing the trio that made the whole franchise work in the first place.  Although their appearance may thrill the millions of diehard fans, they actually contribute very little to the movie itself, which once again depends largely on its special effects in the usual triumph of technology over imagination.  Probably the best comment on the series and the film belongs to Harrison Ford; when he suddenly appears, a character says, “You’re Han Solo.”  He replies with a certain weariness, “I used to be.”  That line appropriately sums up the film and the franchise.

THE HEART OF THE SEA

BEFORE MOBY DICK

In the Heart of the Sea, directed by Ron Howard.

            Ron Howard’s latest movie displays a rather unusual layering of sources, originating as a book by Nathaniel Philbrick about the sinking of the whaleship Essex, itself based on the actual contemporary account of the incident, which in part inspired Herman Melville’s great novel, Moby-Dick.  The movie shows Melville (Ben Wishaw) visiting Tom Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson), who served as a young boy on the ship, to find out the truth behind the event and the subsequent survival of some of the crew.  At first reluctant, apparently laboring under a burden of guilt from the past, Nickerson recounts his memory of the voyage and the attack of the whale that sank the Essex.  His story then comes to life in the extended flashback that constitutes the major portion of the movie.

  Howard shows the fascinating details of loading the ship’s supplies, the implements and tools the crew need to ply the profitable and extremely dangerous trade of whaling, and examines a few of the personalities involved in the voyage.  He essentially invents a conflict between the chief character, first mate Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth) and the captain, George Pollard (Benjamin Walker), both of them actual people who sailed on the doomed voyage, providing a perhaps unnecessary context that ultimately distracts from the central story.  When in the course of the voyage—a three-year journey—the crew meets another ship’s crew in South America, they hear the story of a white whale that sank their ship; the captain refuses to believe what he regards as a fantasy and sails for the area where the sinking allegedly occurred.  When they encounter a whole herd of whales, the crew launches their boats, but one of the whales (not really white, by the way, but mottled), turns and swims furiously toward the Essex, ramming and sinking it.  The rest of the film turns into a survival story, with Owen Chase and Captain Pollard sailing their little boats across thousands of miles of open ocean before finding land and eventually, rescue.

The author of the book shows that the survivors accomplished an amazing feat of seamanship in their long journey, superior even to the epic feat of Captain Bligh of the Bounty.  The director chooses to deal mostly with the Tom Nickerson’s remorse, the result of the cannibalism that the survivors practiced, actually an accepted practice in such desperate circumstances, a kind of law of the sea, well known among the inhabitants of the great whaling port of Nantucket Island.  That focus makes the presence of Herman Melville a kind of footnote to the story, perhaps to remind the audience of the basis of the novel.  Although colorful and certainly authentic in its details, the film sacrifices the real dangers and real courage of whaling for the melodrama of guilt and the personal stories of Owen Chase and George Pollard.  Although it shows some of the actual work of whaling, In the Heart of the Sea could benefit from more of that historical accuracy and less emotional invention.

Haunting and Revenge

Haunting and Revenge

The Revenant, directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu.

            Hollywood often rewards actors for stretching themselves to a new dimension, which usually translates as shaving their heads, choosing to look less attractive than usual, playing a disabled person, or simply playing against type.  That thinking probably accounts, at least in part, for the nomination of Leonardo DiCaprio for his performance in The Revenant, a film surrounded by many stories about the difficulties of its production.  According to the director,

Alejandro González Iñárritu, DiCaprio not only performed under conditions of extreme cold and discomfort, but also, though a vegetarian, ate (or at least chewed on) a chunk of raw bison liver or heart or some organ, depending on whose account  your read: the sacrifices one makes for the sake of art.

The film itself derives from a famous historical incident as well as from the novel of the same name by Michael Punke.  In 1823 a trapper named Hugh Glass, one of a party of mountain men seeking beaver pelts, was badly mauled by a bear; the leader of his group left two men behind, one of them Jim Bridger, who became one of the most famous Westerners of them all, to tend his wounds and protect him until he died.  Thinking he was doomed and fearing for their own safety in an area patrolled by hostile Indians, the men abandoned him, an act that haunted Bridger the rest of his life.  As it turned out, Glass miraculously survived and, without weapons, tools, or supplies, traveled hundreds of miles to catch up with the men and exact a fitting revenge.  (In 1971 a pretty good movie, Man in the Wilderness, starring Richard Harris and John Huston, told a somewhat different version of the Glass story).

The major plot of the picture, changed and embellished significantly by the director, follows in a linear fashion Hugh Glass’s (DiCaprio) struggle for survival and his phenomenal journey through difficult and dangerous country.  It also presents an almost masochistic epic of suffering, as Glass manages to cauterize his throat wound by burning it with gunpowder, shows him crawling, gradually limping, swimming through icy waters, and evading Indian attacks in order to catch up with his betrayers, Bridger (Will Pulter) and John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy).  The director fleshes out that relatively simply plot by intercutting scenes showing Fitzgerald, the major villain, spinning lies about Glass’s death and burial, and Bridger suffering his guilt in silence.

The director, who made the most successful Birdman, also thickens the soup by adding characters and events to both the factual and the fictional story—flashbacks to Glass’s Indian wife, now dead, Fitzgerald’s murder of Glass’s young son, a climactic fight, and so forth.  He also appears to have attended the Terrence Malick school of sentimental mysticism, interpolating events from Glass’s life, his memories of his wife and son, and dreamy, sometimes hallucinated images of the wife for some reason floating in the air above the wounded trapper.  Presumably these memories and images provide some of the motivation, beyond mere revenge, for Glass’s epic quest.

Although Leonardo DiCaprio occupies most of the screen time, raw meat eating and all, several other actors also perform competently and believably.  Tom Hardy in particular, as John Fitzgerald makes a most convincing villain who betrays without a qualm and embellishes his story with a number of inventive details, becoming for a while the hero of his own tale.  The bear that attacks Hugh Glass deserves at least a mention for best performance by an ursine actor since the late Bart the Bear, who distinguished himself in The Edge a number of years ago.

Filmed in natural light in appropriately rugged surroundings and terrible weather in Canada and Argentina, The Revenant stands out among the current crop of honored films for the daring and determination of the director.  If he bears comparison, for good or for bad, with Terrence Malick, he also resembles the Werner Herzog of Fitzcarraldo in his apparent attraction to suffering, a kind of obsession with authenticity that cost his cast a good deal of physical pain, hypothermia, frostbite, etc., similar to the problems Herzog’s alter ego, Klaus Kinski, complained about in Burden of Dreams.  If directing a movie presents the sorts of challenges that involve something like running a small country, Iñárritu may qualify as a benevolent dictator and his film certainly reflects the verisimilitude he sought.

HATEFUL

The Hateful Eight, directed by Quentin Tarantino.

            Judging by the advertisements littered with exclamation points by the usual exclaimers and the raves by the usual ravers, Quentin Tarantino’s newest movie, The Hateful Eight, represents yet another success for the writer-director.  Sporadically a darling of the reviewers, his peculiar penchant for excess and his delight in spilling blood, for reasons I cannot fully understand, endear him to many commentators.  His debut film, Reservoir Dogs, represents just the sort of amoral, brutal nihilism that launched his career; an attempt at a big caper flick, it features an ensemble of actors who turn up in his later work, and enough blood to paint a whole room red.  One memorable sequence shows a man bleeding to death for practically the whole movie, with a red tide washing all over the set; another shows a man, Michael Madsen as I recall, in an apparent attempt at grisly wit, shouting into the severed ear he holds.

Now in The Hateful Eight the director employs some of the standard devices of the Western, along with a few other forms, to create a complete bloodbath, with something like a dozen corpses littering the scenery, a kind of Reservoir Dogs with horses.  The title itself suggests his take on The Magnificent Seven, an ironic inversion to show his cleverness.  The movie begins in a time-honored manner, with a long panorama shot of a magnificent Wyoming mountain landscape covered with snow, as a solitary stagecoach traverses the screen.  Blocking its path, Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a bounty hunter, sits on a stack of corpses, evidence of his success and proof of his prowess.  In the coach another hunter, John Ruth (Kurt Russell), holds Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in handcuffs; he plans to bring her, a murderer, to the nearest town for hanging.

The three of them, along with a couple of others, stop at a saloon/restaurant/ lodging house called, for some reason, Minnie’s Haberdashery, where the bulk of the movie’s action takes place.  Inside the Haberdashery, a stagey situation unfolds, where another half-dozen actors play cat-and-mouse games of identity and motive with Warren, and several of them refight a battle in the Civil War, where Warren’s troops opposed the Confederates led by another inhabitant of the bar, General Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern).  The action settles into a violent, profane version of an Agatha Christie whodunit, with a cast of likely suspects marooned in a secluded location while Warren determines, through available evidence and reasoning, who poisoned a pot of coffee, which results in a couple of spectacular deaths; he also works out some of the truth about the assorted characters and their reasons for visiting the Haberdashery.

Tarantino divides the very long movie into chapters as if it were indeed a detective story, then adds his own voice-over narration, showing a series of brutal killings that created the present situation in Minnie’s Haberdashery.  The narration accompanies flashbacks to events that explain the identities of the characters, the evidence that Major Warren uncovers, and ultimately, the fate of all the people in a film that, oddly, combines incessant violence in language and action with as much talkiness as some polite British drawing-room comedy. 

The violence includes the graphic murders, complete with buckets of blood, of almost everyone in the cast, a couple of bloody projectile vomitings, the amputation of an arm, the explosion of a head, and a slow strangulation by hanging.  The acting for the most part meshes nicely with the action, with the prize for the highest ascent over the top won easily by Samuel L. Jackson.  His presence, by the way, underlines the status of Tarantino himself, who has now gone all self-referential, employing actors from his previous movies, like Jackson and Michael Madsen in this one, and in effect repeating himself in echoing the situation and action of Reservoir Dogs.  As for Jennifer Jason Leigh, the poor woman serves as something like a punching bag for Kurt Russell, who slugs her almost every time she opens her mouth, applies a bowl of hot stew to her face, then vomits blood all over her.  (For this she attended drama school?).  The crude violence she endures, along with the elaborate verbal and visual exposition, serve well to sum up the meaningless, sadistic, and essentially juvenile vulgarity of Tarantino’s vision.

TRUMBO

The Writer and the Blacklist

Trumbo

            Perhaps out of guilt and shame—if such feelings operate out there—Hollywood has swept an important chapter in its history under a large and colorful rug.  Not even a handful of movies deal with the infamous blacklist that ruined so many careers and lives in the entertainment world back in the 1950s.  The Front, directed by Martin Ritt in 1976, which employed a cast of formerly blacklisted actors, addresses television writers and their use of an amiable dunce (Woody Allen) as a pseudonymous cover for their work, but too often plays the situation for laughs.  Although it starred some accomplished performers, including Robert De Niro and Annette Bening, Guilty By Suspicion (1991), which focuses on a blacklisted director, barely raised an eyebrow.  George Clooney’s much more successful Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) deals directly with the career of the radio and television reporter Edward R. Murrow and his confrontations with Senator Joseph McCarthy, the prototype for the right wing demagogues of our own time.

            Now, almost 70 years after the events, the new movie Trumbo, directed by Jay Roach, provides the best and fullest depiction of the anti-Communist hysteria and subsequent persecution of the 1940s and 1950s, centering on the career of the highly successful screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston).  The docudrama shows the actions of several victims of the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), led by an odious Representative named J. Parnell Thomas (James DuMont), in an obvious quest to attract attention from the press and inflame the dependably panicky American public.  That hysteria promoted the careers of a great many politicians, including not only McCarthy, but an obscure Red-baiting congressman from California named Richard Nixon.

            HUAC asserted that the radio, television, and film industry employed a great many Communists and their sympathizers, who attempted in their work to subvert American values and even, in a favorite phrase, to overthrow the government of the United States.  Since most of the accused began their careers as writers, directors, and actors in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the disastrous result of laissez-faire capitalism (known these days as trickle-down economics), many of them joined various leftist movements to seek some alternative political philosophy, method, and solution.  Marxism presented such an alternative, attracting a great many intellectuals and artists to a number of radical movements and organizations, and some indeed joined the Communist Party.  When America waged the Cold War against the Soviet Union, most of those people found themselves the objects of suspicion and hatred, vilified by politicians, press, and the public.

            Once HUAC decided to pursue Communists, sympathizers, those so-called “fellow travelers” in Hollywood, the reactions, as the picture shows, followed a distressing pattern.  Resolving to resist the ridiculous charges and insinuations, actors, directors, and writers protested publicly; a number traveled to Washington to demonstrate against the actions of the committee.  The reactions of the majority of the film community, however, reveal something less than a profile in courage.  Goaded by the press, including the vicious virago Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren), who blackmails Louis B. Mayer, studio executives caved under pressure and fired the people who had been making their pictures and fattening their incomes.  Many of their coworkers, initially supportive, threatened by the loss of work and the end of their careers, “named names” as the committee demanded, betraying friends and colleagues.  Others, like Dalton Trumbo, defied the committee, asserted their Fifth Amendment rights, and as a result, suffered ostracism, loss of employment, and even in some cases, like Trumbo’s, imprisonment for contempt of Congress.

            The movie shows how after serving his time, Trumbo managed to survive by writing screenplays under pseudonyms in a sort of factory he established in his home, first for Poverty Row schlockmeisters, ultimately for Otto Preminger and Kirk Douglas.  He wrote some memorable films—The Brave One, Roman Holiday, Spartacus­—that won numerous awards, including a couple of Oscars that he couldn’t accept in person.   Spartacus was the first to list his name on the credits, which incited Hedda Hopper to deliver a fiery speech to the American Legion about Trumbo’s “treason,” resulting in a boycott of the movie and that right-wing group picketing theaters.  Reminding us of how times have changed, President-elect John F. Kennedy

, a genuine war hero, crossed the Legion’s picket lines to see Spartacus; I wonder if any contemporary politician possesses the courage to make such a gesture.  That act probably assisted in diluting the power of the list and the resurrection of Trumbo’s career.

            Using actors who resemble their real life counterparts—Michael Stuhlbarg as Edward G. Robinson, Dean O’Gorman as Kirk Douglas, Christian Berkel as Otto Preminger, for example—adds a great deal of credibility to a dramatic version of an important piece of history.  The skillful blending of actual footage from the time—newsreel films of HUAC in action, speeches and testimony by a number of Hollywood cowards, including the draft dodgers Ronald Reagan and John Wayne—with the scenes and dialogue of Trumbo, his family, friends, and colleagues both enlivens and authenticates the narrative.  The picture provides an important insight into the history of Hollywood, the history of America; it also demonstrates how the exploitation of fear creates the kind of cultural paranoia that blossoms so fragrantly in the present day.

            

SHORT TAKES

SHORT TAKES:

The Martian.

Based on a most entertaining novel, the movie looks more like science fact than science fiction.  Matt Damon stars as an astronaut abandoned on Mars who embarks on a solitary quest to survive on the alien landscape.  His ingenuity in using the materials, equipment, and tools left behind by the mission, the very process of his existence, provide the main plot, the survival of another Robinson Crusoe on Mars.  The movie also employs two other connected plots, the response of the various people who run NASA, and the crew of the spaceship that left Damon, believing he was dead, on the red planet; both work in some ingenious ways to communicate with him and to bring him home.  Naturally, for a picture directed by Ridley Scott, everything works wonderfully well, from the convincing Martian landscape—I’ve never been there myself—to the scenes back on Earth and in the spaceship, and the connected plots all mesh smoothly, with a suspenseful and exciting resolution.

Spectre. 

Despite the signature line in all the Bond movies, which comes straight from the Ian Fleming novels, oddly forgotten, both martinis and audiences should be stirred rather than shaken.  Unfortunately, in Spectre, the latest addition to the series, not much pleases beyond the whole lot of shaking going on.  The film resurrects a good deal of material from previous entries in the franchise, including the presence of Ernst Blofeld (Christoph Walz), a villain with the usual tiresome plans for world domination.  It also features the usual shootouts and explosions, two terrific car chases with two terrific cars, and of course Bond’s eventual and predictable triumph.  Daniel Craig once again makes a good Bond, but displays the fatigue he has confessed with a role he has promised to abandon, and the excellent Christoph Walz is entirely wasted in his silly part.  Aside from all the special effects, the repetition of so much familiar stuff suggests that the franchise seems to be running out of both energy and ideas.

War in the Shadows

Bridge of Spies, directed by Steven Spielberg.

 If nothing else, Steven Spielberg’s latest movie reminds us all that far too often American politics and cultural attitudes depend on the exploitation of fear. Back in the 1950s, politicians incessantly mined the possibility of nuclear war with the Soviet Union for popularity and support, accusing almost any entity they could imagine, including the United States Army, the State Department, and artists of all kinds (with a special emphasis on performing arts) of sympathy for Communism; the Congress formed committees to investigate people they called fellow travelers, pinkos, and “card carrying members of the Communist Party.”  (Some may recall that in his campaign against Michael Dukakis, George H.W. Bush in an attempt to revive old-school anti-Communism, called his opponent a “card carrying member of the ACLU.”)  Named after its chief practitioner, the false accusations, hysterical bullying, and demagoguery came to be known as McCarthyism; sadly, it succeeded, destroying careers and lives, intimidating scores of institutions, and electing a gaggle of politicians, not the least of them Richard Nixon.

Spielberg chooses an important but probably mostly forgotten incident from the Cold War to illustrate some of the tensions of the time.  Bridge of Spies dramatizes the back-and-forth of espionage and counterespionage in the days when the government was, as they said, finding Reds under every bed. The movie opens with the FBI’s arrest, after its customary bungling, of Colonel Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), the highest ranking Soviet spy ever discovered working in the United States.   Abel’s arrest triggers the major plot, introducing James Donovan (Tom Hanks), the lawyer assigned to defend him against the charge of espionage.

Although not entirely happy with the task, Donovan, a successful insurance attorney who has not practiced in a courtroom for years, performs the job as well as he can, even arguing, unsuccessfully, before the Supreme Court.  In defending Abel, despite pressure from his wife, ostracism by his firm, and even attacks on his family, Donovan conducts the case to the best of his ability; in the process he comes to like and even admire Abel, a man of great strength and a genuine sense of honor.  Considering himself a loyal soldier for his country, Abel refuses to cut a deal with the prosecution and tolerates his confinement with stoic courage.

In a parallel story that ultimately and dramatically intersects with the case, the movie shows the training and launching of the notorious U2 program of secret spy flights over the Soviet Union, which exploded into public knowledge with the shooting down of a plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers, played in the movie by Austin Stowell.  Bridge of Spies reaches a kind of climax when, after dealing with both German and Soviet recalcitrance, Donovan manages to work out an exchange of prisoners, Abel for Powers, on the bridge of the title.  James Donovan’s sharp dealing, his skill at negotiating, foreshadowed in a scene with a rival insurance lawyer, achieves an outcome that no one believed could succeed.

While capturing in documentary style some of the fear mongering of the time, the director dramatizes some incidents in the course of Donovan’s work.  He shows the hasty construction of the Berlin Wall occurring in the cold and snow of November, just as Donovan desperately tries to enter East Germany; in reality, the Wall went up in August of 1961, with little chance of snow.  He also only briefly alludes to Donovan’s work at the Nuremberg trials and never mentions his wartime service with the O.S.S.  To maintain suspense in a story whose conclusion is known, no small feat, he intercuts between the training of the U2 pilots, Donovan’s efforts to help his client, the striking differences between East and West Berlin, and even the various prisons that come to serve as a metaphor in the film.  Rudolf Abel languishes at Fort Leavenworth; after a show trial, Powers is condemned to ten years in a Russian prison; an unlucky American graduate student, Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers) finds himself on the wrong side of the Wall and, accused of espionage, spends time in an East German prison; and Donovan himself, set up by a German lawyer, is arrested and temporarily jailed by the East Berlin police.

The dialectic of that construction and Spielberg’s skillful manipulation of his material keeps the film in a constant tension, a taut wire never loosened, a sharp edge never blunted by the actuality of history.  Its relatively low key style, rather unusual for a director known for blockbusters, shows, with some irony and even some humor, the courage, commitment, and skill of a relative amateur, who consistently outwits the opposition and outthinks all his allies in the CIA.

The two principal actors also deserve a great deal of credit for participating in an authenticity of character that meshes appropriately with the movie’s sense of time and place as well as its low-key approach to its subject.  As the reluctant defense attorney who grows to like and admire his client, Tom Hanks works with conviction and a wry sense of humor, showing hints of an irony he’s displayed in some of his comic roles in the past.  The real triumph of the film’s acting, however, belongs to Mark Rylance, who displays an almost uncanny minimalism in his performance as Colonel Abel.  With very few words, a narrow range of facial expressions, a limited array of gestures, he somehow conveys a remarkable variety of emotions, constructing a really quite admirable personality that, in their several scenes together, entirely steals the picture from Hanks.  Just like the character he portrays, he remains a mystery, but also engages the sympathy of the audience, not the hated Commie spy, but a man of honor and courage according to his own principles and beliefs.

For recalling an important incident from a dark time and telling the story with objectivity and entirely without prejudice, Spielberg deserves a good deal of credit.  In showing the courage of two different men from two different backgrounds, Bridge of Spies shows how well a movie can work, with all its elements—acting, cinematography, plotting, and construction—functioning together.  Though different from many of his previous productions, Bridge of Spies demonstrates all over again his skill as a cinematic storyteller.