The Talkies/ What It Takes

...Stuart, hitherto AWOL, turns up with his cavalry after two days of battle...

...The very idea is alien to Hollywood, which tends to see sex roles in the same way that the makers of The Crying Game and, more recently, M. Butterfly see them...

...The weary viewer, however, is inclined to ask: Why not...

...But we still have a residual cultural sense that One acts the part of a man by, for example, being brave in battle...

...This leisurely unfolding is not necessarily a bad thing...

...Instead it just wants to amuse us with its politically correct utopia where people can't smoke, drink, eat meat, or "exchange fluids" and the popular music is old commercial jingles...

...Joshua Chamberlain (Jeff Daniels) is holding the flank of the Union army on Little Round Top...

...If the general will please give me the names of those officers . . ." begins Stuart before Lee cuts him off: "There isn't time for that," he says, referring to Stuart's obvious intention to seek satisfaction for the insult...

...They resist the kind of heavy stylization that is the essence of epic conventions...

...Here is none of the ethnocentric, racist, sexist, and probably fascist talk of Henry V before Harfleurno appeals to Maine patriotism or the warlike qualities of Maine men or the chastity of Maine women...

...That's a kind of honor, but not the kind we need to be more concerned about...

...M. Butterfly is intriguing and well acted but it has a left-wing axe to grind and is too wrongheaded in its premises to hold a permanent place in our affections...

...So it goes these days with what used to be one of the storyteller's two or three biggest subjects: what it takes to be a man...

...The injunction to "be a man" would have no meaning to us if sex were merely biological...

...Why isn't there time...

...The real competitors are there only to turn aside from making war long enough to become sentimental about Rudy and the Jamaican bobsled team and to grant them a kind of symbolic, mascot status...

...asks Dieyi as a young boy: "How many beatings...

...Stuart attempts to stand on his honor, but he is a ridiculous character and is cut off before he can get the word out of his mouth...

...Ted Turner's movie (directed by Ronald Maxwell) is itself a little like Pickett's charge: a noble effort in a losing cause...

...Great epic poems like the Iliad, the Aeneid, Beowulf, or The Song of Roland achieve their effects not by the concision that most other poetry aspires to but by something like its opposite...

...Wells and Aldous Huxley (the heroine's name is Lenina Huxley—they don't care if you know whom they're ripping off), this film presents a world, supposedly only forty years away, that "has become a pussy-whipped, Brady Bunch version of itself...

...Instead, he bolsters their self-esteem by sympathizing with their grievance, tells them that he's not going to shoot them, and assures them that, "whether you fight or not, that's up to you...

...Jeffrey R. Snyder in a splendid piece called "A Nation of Cowards" in the current issue of the Public Interest thinks that that time has already come...

...here are no exhortations to show their manhood...

...He goes on to say, sounding like Wilfred Brimley pitching breakfast cereal, that some men go to war for adventure and some because they're ashamed not to but most because it's "the right thing to do...

...Zhivago–style movies about ordinary individuals who are caught up in the sweep of vast historical events...

...Maybe this is what Joel Silver and Marco Brambilla had in mind when they made the Sylvester Stallone vehicle Demolition Man...

...B ut what happens to our society when honor is treated dismissively, when it is no longer a shameful thing to be called a coward...

...We are urged to leave any timid remonstrance we might think it permissible to make against those who would kill, rape, or rob us to those who are charged with looking after such things—the professionals in the police and the criminal justice system...

...And Roland or Beowulf would have understood the nature of that craving for fame, which is also called honor...

...There seems to be time for everything else, including fine-sounding speeches about what they are all fighting for, several instances of disagreement between General Longstreet (Tom Berenger) and Lee about tactics, and at least three reminders that Col...

...It is then that we know he has determined to do whatever it takes...

...The answer of the film seems to be that it does not...

...There isn't time for any of that...

...Yet there are few characters in the movies today who know better what it means to be a man...

...The film is in effect an attempt to translate into cinematic terms that great masculine art form, the military epic, which saw its best days—in mainstream Western culture anyway—well before Columbus sailed the ocean blue...

...It is a good idea, but the film isn't really all that interested in it...

...I am always a sucker for these Dr...

...All three of the main characters, the Chinese opera stars Cheng Dieyi (Leslie Cheung) and Duan Xiaolou (Zhang Pengyi) and Xiaolou's wife Juxian (Gong Li) betray each other more than once...

...Acting is lying—and you could say that cowardice is a kind of honesty about and hence indulgence of our feelings of fear...

...Paradoxically, part of what it takes is the sacrifice of his masculinity, as he is required to play the female parts...

...For the response of both our liberal and conservative elites to the threat of violent crime is to insist that we who are threatened should 'disarm ourselves and give the criminals what they want...

...Yet Dieyi, who is personally the most treacherous of the three, does understand one sort of faithfulness: faithfulness to his art which, through all the vicissitudes of Chinese culture in the twentieth century, has kept alive the impossible heroic ideal...

...A t times that seems to be the view of Farewell My Concubine by Chen Kaige, our Movie of the Month and the second film about Chinese opera I saw in as many days after not having seen one in all my life before...

...Looking even more hang-dog than usual with a silly walrus mustache, he harangues a company of Maine volunteers who have mutinied and whom he is trying to graft onto his own Maine regiment with a kind of New Age version of soldiership...

...Farewell My Concubine, however, uses the historical backdrop of revolutionary China to much better effect...

...In many ways a typically Hollywoodish amalgam of H.G...

...It is just a matter of which mask we put on...

...The quarterback (Craig Sheffer) proves his guts and thus his title to leadership by lying down on the center line of a busy highway and daring the team's hotshots to join him...

...People talk about going to war for adventure or high ideals, but when it comes down to stepping out in front of the musket balls and the canister shot, everybody does it because he's ashamed not to—which is another way of saying to avoid dishonor...

...As in opera where the characters have to sing for ten minutes before they do anything—including, usually, James Bowman, The American Spectator's film critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Sppplement dying—epic heroes wind up for a good long speech before and after they smite or are smitten...

...When will I ever enjoy such fame...

...But if courage, like masculinity itself, is always to some degree a masquerade, it would be wrong to believe that it is only a masquerade...

...Humbug...

...This a lot of fun, but when the lone gunman has to be disposed of, the gentle future folk have to call a cop from the past (Stallone) to do it for them...

...Probably not...

...The Chinese opera, like epic, is about heroism, and the opera of the title is about a defeated emperor's concubine who remains "faithful unto death...

...There is even time for General Stuart to come up with something else (his resignation) that Lee tells him there isn't time for...

...Judgment Night is about four middle-class Chicago suburban guys who achieve their manhood (sort of...

...Moreover, the film's early scenes in the sadistic training school for performers in the opera (who, when successful, are treated like film stars in China) show what he has sacrificed for his art...

...Both it and M. Butterfly dependon the fact that it is traditional in Chinese opera (as it was in Elizabethan drama) for males to play female roles, and both exploit this fact in order to examine the whole question of sexual identity and its relation to love and loyalty...

...No doubt epic speeches about obsolete politics (saving the Union versus states' rights) are necessary, but could we not also hear some on the sense of honor that has always been the epic hero's defining characteristic and that still is principally what makes men willing to risk death in battle...

...It is a rather extravagant and silly way of making the point anyway, but it has had to be cut by the studio because a couple of dimwitsout in the real world tried the stunt and got run over...

...What else could an adult male person be...

...Robert E. Lee, played by Martin Sheen, tells him that there are some officers who are of the opinion that Stuart has badly let the side down...

...Faithfulness of any kind, let alone faithfulness unto death, seems a joke, as one set of demanding political masters succeeds another up until the enigmatical and not very satisfactory ending...

...You only have to look at the casting of Jeff Daniels as Chamberlain...

...The trouble is that epic just does not work very well on the silver screen...

...There is some truth in this view...

...The only other person in the whole of this long film to make any reference to this universal soldiers' motivation is one of the last of the recalcitrant Maine mutineers, who finally agrees to join the fight by saying, "Nobody's going to call me a coward...

...Movies are too realistic a medium...

...they still seem pretty wimpish to me) while being chased through a desolate urban landscape by a gang of vicious killers, but it is too far-fetched, the acting too poor, and the bad guys too ludicrously caricatured to say anything useful or interesting...

...Does that heroic image bear any relation to the real world...

...What does it take to become a star...

...The Program is really much more about corruption in college football than it is about what it takes to win or the rite of passage to manhood, but there is one scene that has achieved a certain notoriety...

...Rudy and Cool Runnings are both heartwarming stories about lovable individuals, but neither the warriors of the Notre Dame football squad in the first nor the severe fellowship of the world's top bobsledders in the second are of much interest to the filmmakers...

...There are a lot of films out now about the masculine ethos...

...The speed with which events happen in battle has to be slowed in order for each nuance of significance to be teased out of them...

...The people have become so docile and unused to violence that one man with a gun (Wesley Snipes) can destroy their whole society...

...Epic time is slow time...

...As Jeremy Irons admits in M. Butterfly, the mystique of sex is a lie, but a lie that we want to believe...

...The whole panoply of distinctively masculine and military values has fallen on hard times...

...In both those films, being a man or being a woman is not part of nature's destiny but a question of personal choice—that and a lot of really good make-up...

...But it could have been made more successful, more interesting anyway, if it had had a little more the courage of its conventions...