Remember the good old days, when bin Laden was one of us?
Published by punkass marc December 8th, 2007 in Movies, Historical WankeryTom Hanks. Julia Roberts. I figure those two would do just about any film as long as it paid well enough and gave them the contractual minimum of 3 Oscar moments*.
Aaron Sorkin. Mike Nichols. Them? Not so much. …Okay, maybe Nichols at this point, what with his late-term resume of stinkers like Regarding Henry and The Birdcage. But he’s still got some hangover cred from The Graduate, Catch-22, etc. And Sorkin’s a known lefty, not to mention a guy who felt politically competent enough to pretend on NBC that he knew how the country should be run.
Why on Earth, then, would a Sorkin script shot by Mike Nichols result in a trailer like this?
The trailer leaves us with 2 distinct possibilities:
1) It’s designed to get the war-loving rowdies into the theater and then hit them over the head with how best intentions go wrong and we always think we can control this stuff when we can’t.
2) We’re actually witnessing the impending release of a film expressing patriotic nostalgia for our bungled covert military actions that trained Osama bin Laden and eventually led to Taliban rule.
I’d say (hope?) there’s at least a 51% chance of the former. There almost has to be some “we thought we knew how to help but we didn’t” message. Except we did sort of help keep the Soviets at bay, and I’m marginally terrified the film will celebrate that. Don’t put it past citizens of the US to make a movie waxing poetic about fighting a covert war 20 years ago in a country in which we’re losing an explicit war today that nobody even remembers is going on.
Freedom Prophets
*Oscar moments are defined as “cinematic speeches and/or extended reaction shots of no less than 30 seconds in which a stiff upper lip is (barely) kept in the face of tremendous emotional stress and a swelling background orchestra.”
The music they’re using is by the Scissor Sisters.
It’s the first one.
It’s worth noting that Nichols, if not Sorkin, is old enough to be of the liberal generation that went to great efforts to distance themselves from communism, though. I mean, it’s worth remembering things like how Gloria Steinem worked for a CIA front group in her youth, because good liberals hated communism. So leftover knee-jerk hostility to communism might be fueling this, even though we know what happened after the fact.
Exhibit #1 in how Hollywood liberals can become infatuated with right wing spin: The now-embarrassing movie Wag The Dog. From the Wikipedia:
The problem is that the timing of it made it seem like it was a smackdown of Bill Clinton for ordering air strikes against terrorist training camps in Afghanistan after a series of successful Bin Laden-funded attacks. But the right wing paranoids accused Clinton of trying to distract from The Blow Job Heard Round The World, a blatantly ridiculous statement. (The American public was not even remotely wrapped up in a wash of patriotic fervor because of some two-day police action strikes.) But the movie played right into that narrative. They had the option of sticking by the book and making the President George Bush or someone like him, but instead chose to let the Bill Clinton interpretation dominate.
In retrospect, it’s quadruply horrible. How could the Hollywood liberal set be angry at Bill Clinton and buy into baseless accusations about wagging the dog? It seems to me, if anything, Clinton was restrained in his reaction for the attacks because the sex scandal took away some of his leverage in an environment where anything he did (outside of corporate giveaways) was opposed by a Republican Congress on the principle that Clinton was evil embodied. Had that all gone down differently, we might have done a better job of killing Bin Laden and leaving Al Qaeda in disarray.
All of which is to say that it seems obvious that Hollywood liberals are setting a trap to hit people over the head with some truths (exhibit #1 in how that can happen: Three Kings). But I won’t believe that’s what’s happening until the reviews start coming out.
Game, set, match: Nichols directed “Primary Colors”, a hit piece against Bill Clinton based on a book by one of the perennial DC media whiners, Joe Klein, an ostensible liberal who whines non-stop about how actual liberals are too liberal and stuff.
Nichols did a brilliant job of “Angels in America”, but only because he was working with source material that shines with a brilliance that overwhelms his uglier instincts. It helps that he didn’t adapt the script in any meaningful sense, and put all his efforts into making the fantasia work as a movie conceit. It’s not that “Angels” is an easy topic, either. The play is supposed to be about AIDS, but it’s about so much more—the end of faith, the way that the existence of America undermines the meaningfulness of the concept of “Western civilization”, the end of “history” as a concept based around heritage instead of understanding—and how all these things are great things. In a way, Nichols being such a shallow thinker helps the adaptation. He just lets the logic of the set pieces guide his direction, and the themes sparkle from the writing. And the acting of course—one of the things that was a revelation to me was the angel played by Emma Thompson. In stage version I saw, she’s mostly forboding and the realization that her time has come and gone is not an ambiguous thing, but mainly a good thing. (She’s scary, after all.) But the way she acted it, with humanity, made it clearer to me that Kushner was saying that while the end of history is generally a good thing, it’s not without its losses, and we can and should mourn that.
The book is absolutely not #2. But it isn’t exactly #1 either.
I have a feeling that the film is going to lean towards #1. Either way I can’t wait to see it.
Given that, from the reviews I’ve read, it’s actually something of a screw ball black comedy about the whole thing, I don’t think #1 is exactly right either. I’d go with #3, they have the most incompetent trailer development staff ever employed.