Spectator's Journal/The Loved One
Maier, Francis X.
SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL THE LOVED ONE by Francis X. Maier There's an old Hollywood adage that a screenwriter hears on the very first day of his very first job: Less is more. Usually you hear it from a...
...Or can it...
...It is not often—perhaps not at all—that one comes across a movie reviewer with a sens'e of observation matched only by irony: "When are men going to denounce all those truckstop waitresses who call them 'Sugarpie...
...Braestrup, for one, dismisses the notion that ideology was the root of the problem...
...I find simple 'ideological' explanations of media flaws gravely insufficient, particularly as applied to Tet coverage...
...This film, like Attenborough's other massive effort, A Bridge Too Far, is about events that have a larger meaning...
...DorrH...
...Those are tall words, partner...
...In covering the Vietnamese war, "correspondents were almost compelled to become partisans, and most became partisans for Hanoi, or, at least, against Saigon and Washington," he wrote...
...he goes out and fights it...
...The allies, not the Vietcong...
...Clark Staff Writer The Shadow Santa Clara University Santa Clara, California More Martha...
...Let me illustrate why...
...What this results in, however, is flabby stories and overripe heroes...
...This three-hour epic begins with Gandhi's assassination and funeral, Francis X. Maier is editor-in-chief of the National Catholic Register...
...So why are crowds flocking to see it...
...They're frightened, as they ought to be, of what the world is becoming...
...Attenborough has provided them with proof that it can be done...
...Why such poor reporting...
...The press dwelled on the siege of the Marine base at Khe Sanh as another Dien-bienphu, Braestrup writes, though that analogy was false...
...We are colorful mavericks, standing firmly on our principles, turning to wicked humor and outrageous antics...
...A good screen character has at least one important flaw upon which the story turns...
...Regardless of who is correct on this, the fact that it is being debated in the first place is significant...
...The canvas is crowded with bizarre appearances by Candice Bergen and Martin Sheen—two Hollywood stars obviously playing cameo roles...
...Not once do we see him grappling with his own self-doubt, fear, lust, or ambition...
...Nowhere does anyone suggest that Gandhi's fasting for peace might have a whisper of egomania attached to it...
...More important, the struggle between good and evil that goes on in every man's heart is absent in Gandhi's...
...How refreshing it is to find sober analysis of cultural trends that does not fall into the equally odious extremes of facile self-righteousness or fawning praise...
...Nobody in the real world was as good or as pure as the saints my mother had created...
...Also, we are unfairly saddled with a distorted image of the Nixon youth of 1968: stiff, shallow, boring and one-dimensional...
...Joseph Arbadji Northvale, New Jersey PRESSWATCH (continued from page 25) Systematically, reporters overrated the battle prowess of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese and discounted the ability of the South Vietnamese army, Braestrup says...
...My mother was Irish, and when I was a kid, I heard endless stories about those Christian saints who were eaten by lions, or beheaded, or torn in two, rather than renounce the faith...
...Every writer likes to overwrite...
...He sees injustice...
...Even as they described the flaws and problems of the allies, the newsmen in Saigon and Washington by and large failed to examine the North Vietnamese and Vietcong with the same critical eye...
...In the end, nonviolent resistance will work against an oppressor who still has a conscience...
...I've been away from screenwriting for four years now, but the catechism lessons you learn as a young writer s,tick, because every once in a while they're proved right...
...Gandhi is hagiography at its most florid...
...Like many, I've often wondered how Gandhi would have fared had he taken on Stalin or Hitler...
...When indeed...
...For an example of the groundwork for this image the movie Animal House will suffice...
...How does this relate to Gandhi...
...The character therefore is not finally believable...
...Here was a man who had changed the course of a world religion, whose impact on Western culture is felt to this day...
...to make our points...
...Emotion is sacrificed for historic sweep...
...And exactly because he makes his sin real for the reader, his encounter with God is also believable...
...Nowhere does anyone persuasively argue that nonviolence might be immoral...
...Elegant disagrees...
...That's about all there is to this movie...
...What comes after had better be good...
...the massacre of 3,000 by the Vietcong at Hue was largely overlooked...
...Why the distortion...
...I'm sure he has an answer for that somewhere in his writings, but the .truth is that the British, no matter how brutal they were, were finally constrained by their own moral premises...
...he writes...
...Obviously the genesis of this transformation involves a number of less than desirable factors, thus many of Mr...
...Instead, they nail the lid shut on this film before it even gets started...
...Gandhi was an extraordinary man who accomplished great things, and it's been quite a while since we've been allowed unadulterated hero worship in a film...
...From that point on, she's just part of the chorus...
...That's what makes him real...
...And a good screen story says only as much as it has to, then it shuts up...
...For his part, Norman Podhoretz, in Why We Were in Vietnam, says that "Tet provided the occasion for a growing disenchantment with the war [among reporters] to express itself...
...At long last, Vietnam mediazation is dissolving...
...the truth was otherwise, Braestrup says...
...He writes about sin as an expert, with an irony that comes only from licking the bottom of the barrel...
...and a minor character suggesting that generations to come will marvel at how a man of Gandhi's moral stature could have ever walked the earth...
...Sure, Gandhi gets thrown off a train in South Africa, Gandhi gets beaten up, Gandhi gets tossed in prison...
...Lindberg's points are well taken...
...One of the few scenes that comes close to this happens early in the film, when his wife decides that cleaning latrines in Gandhi's new village commune is not for her...
...And so I decided that sainthood was the same sort of parental racket as Santa Claus until one day I picked up a copy of Augustine's Confessions...
...We have in fact attained a measure of glamour by our individualism, a commodity of value in today's media-drunk society...
...Lesher, in Media Unbound, agrees...
...But as I got older, I started looking around...
...Other regimes do not share this attention to detail...
...The scene poses a good opportunity for some sparks that might reveal the personal side of these two people and raise some sharp questions about Gandhi's motives and goals...
...People want to believe that nonviolence can change the world, and Mr...
...Just so: when you cut through the years-in-the-making and the giant budget and the box-office hype and the fine performance by Ben Kingsley in the title role, you still have a story about a saint, and not a very good one...
...As their legend spreads, the young conservative of today becomes more appealing...
...CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 2) only out of ignorance...
...She hangs in the background of numerous scenes, but says virtually nothing...
...Who caused most of the civilian deaths...
...Parsimony enhances dramatic impact...
...A case in point is Richard Attenborough's Gandhi...
...But this is the century of final solutions...
...Yet what struck me about him was his sinfulness...
...It is not earned...
...Other, more interesting characters are left incomplete, like Mirabelle, the young Englishwoman who gives up a comfortable life in the West to live as Gandhi's helper and daughter...
...Character inevitably suffers...
...That's why Confessions is one of Western literature's classics, whether you believe in the Christian God or not...
...Moreover, the film's appearance coincides with a wave of pacifist sentiment in the West unequalled since the 1930s...
...Usually you hear it from a producer who, in every other respect, is illiterate, but it's still a true observation...
...Part of the reason for this is scope: the film tries to do too much...
...In short, Gandhi's selflessness, his essential goodness, is presumed by the filmmakers...
...it is one note played relentlessly for 180 minutes...
...The prominence of the Dartmouth Review and the individuals who produce it has served to help dispel these images...
...Gandhi is portrayed as an elemental force for good, but we never really understand his interior chemistry...
...Instead, the wife, who is portrayed as caste-conscious and shallow, sees the error of her ways after a stern lecture and allows herself to be absorbed into Gandhi's plans...
...Among kids who grew up on Archie Bunker this idea is very easy to sell...
...Whatever the ideology of most reporters may be," Lesher says, "distortions result from the nature of journalism, not from the nature of journalists...
...I loved those stories...
...The heralded pacification program had been wiped out by the Tet offensive, the press determined...
...and with proper education anyone with a glimmer of intelligence will convert...
...For one thing, people are hungry for saints...
...And if you admire a character, you want to make everybody else admire him, too...
...It wasn't very long ago, remember, that the subjects under discussion were such things as whether the press had sufficiently scrutinized Henry Kissinger for possible war crimes...
...As with almost all of her reviews, Martha Bayles's trenchant analysis of Tootsie (TAS, March 1983) did not fail alternately to charm, edify, and delight...
...These are facts, but while they touch the intellect, they have strangely little effect on the heart...
Vol. 16 • May 1983 • No. 5
