The Talkies / Dreadful Martyrdom

...It is the IRA that calls deliberately blowing up innocent civilians in a pub "war...

...We need more moments like that in which Gerry tries to reassure his father by saying that he will take care of his mother if Giuseppe dies: "You haven't the maturity to take care of yourself, let alone your mother...

...It is not his fault if in the latter part of the film he is called on to show greater depth and strength of characterthan seems warranted by the facts, or than seems quite believable on the basis of some dime store psychologizing about how his father criticized him too much as a child...

...We have to care about Andrew Beckett as a human being before we are asked to care about him as an AIDS sufferer...

...How much more gracious and manly would have been something with the fine stoic dignity of that great gay poet, W.H...

...That's the movie business for you...

...By sampling the cakes, Zoran strikes another blow for the individual against a presumptuous ideology...

...Philadelphia resembles nothing so much as one of those old Stanley Kramer message movies like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner in which nothing whatever exists that is not there to assist in driving home the "message...

...But this is not, as everybody involved with it seems to claim, just the story of a ne'er-do-well from West Belfast and his relationship with his father, Giuseppe, who was also wrongfully convicted and died in prison...

...Dreadful Martyrdom by James Bowman p eople who want a critic to tell them if a movie is any good are usually asking for nothing more than an indication as to whether or not it presents an entertaining or diverting spectacle for the average viewer...

...Philadelphia, as a commercial product, adopts a more moderate tone and goes in more for self-pity than self-righteousness...

...Everything in it is there solely to prove what non-bigots already know: that homosexuals are real people and that they continue to be real people, with the James Bowman, The American Spectator's movie critic, is the American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...Zoran, though only mediocre at writing, wins the contest with a poem that concludes with the sentiment that he loves Comrade'Tito more than anyone, including his parents...

...Zoran asks him why he doesn't practice his profession, and the man tells him obliquely thathe has run afoul of the authorities and "someone more powerful than God...

...he asks...

...Kramer suffers from the full-blown form of the gay activists' plague, which is self-righteousness...

...But what the British did to the innocent people was much less calculating than he pretends, and it was eventually put right...

...A young boy of about 10 called Zoran (Dimitrie Vojnov) lives with his parents, his aunt and uncle and their daughter, his cousin, and his grandmother in a small flat in Belgrade in 1951...

...You or I might have thought that the five people who died and the scores who were injured in the Guildford pub blown up by the IRA were the ultimate victims...

...What...

...Tito is also introduced into the story when a deer, killed on one of the dictator's many hunting trips, ends up in the family bathtub because he likes to give gifts to the dancers at the ballet...

...Larry Kramer's savage attack on the film for not being propagandistic enough—for not being representative enough of gay life—shows the sorts of pressure Demme & Co...

...Much of the film is taken up with a comic look at family life in such cramped conditions—full of fights and tensions, to be sure, but warm and loving nonetheless, a portrait of private life that is not idealized but that is full of charm...

...Both are successful as propaganda but both betray the cause of art (the only truly lost cause in Hollywood) by subordinating their people to their propaganda...

...But sometimes one is called upon to assess a movie that is both entertaining and diverting and successful in accomplishing what it set out to do but that nevertheless deserves to be disqualified for setting out to do something inconsistent with the ends of art—namely, to propagandize...

...Like last year's HBO film of And the Band Played On, he absurdly reserves his hottest expressions of "rage" for Ronald Reagan and George Bush—and, now, Bill Clinton,"the third silent, useless President in a row"—for not putting a stop to AIDS...

...They don't even kiss...

...But as I have said many times before (well, at least one time before): characters must come before message...

...Nor is it impossible to imagine a splendid film in which a man like Andrew's attorney, Joe Miller (Denzel Washington), learns not to be "disgusted" by gay people by actually coming to know some...

...Zoran's mother dances in the National Ballet and his father plays woodwinds in the National Orchestra (and saxophone in a jazz club after he gets off) and Zoran proudly refers to them as "artists...

...For the human story is set in a political context that determines how the human story is perceived by audiences, and it is this political context to which critics ought also to address themselves and, for the most part, do not...

...The critic, however, more often thinks of a "good" movie, like a good high diver, in terms of the degree of difficulty of what it attempts in relation to the success of its execution...

...Auden, who knew, like the old masters, that suffering always takes place "while someone else is eating, or opening a window, or just walking dully along"—and That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree...

...Philadelphia is merely banal...

...Then, from the officially "gay" point of view, the film must be dismissed...

...Tito's shadow also falls over the household—though in rather a ridiculous than a threatening way—when Zoran's hated little cousin calls him a "degenerate...

...what the IRA did to a great many more innocent people was utterly calculated and can never be put right...

...Zoran is seen watching a newsreel of a speech by Tito and practicing making hand gestures like his...

...The prize is to be sent on a "March Round Tito's Homeland" with other youthful enthusiasts...

...They never appear naked together...

...Day-Lewis does a brilliant job of putting across Conlon's terminal childishness and fecklessness as he inadvertently starts the riot with his petty thievery and then, to avoid a kneecapping, sets out for London in search of "free love and drugs" in a hippie squat...

...usual complement of civil rights, when they contract AIDS...

...A torchlight procession and a presentation by the mayor in Veterans' Stadium...

...But in the final scene, the food stands for the pleasures of private life, which any sane person would prefer to the public hero worship of such a man as Tito...

...F or our Movie of the Month, it is a balm to the soul to be able to turn to one that satirizes rather than indulges the propagandist...

...Sheridan, by contrast, is sophisticated enough to have answered, when asked about the rough treatment he is getting in the British press: "There's a war on, right...

...This, of course, goes disastrously, hilariously wrong in ways that provide an education to the young Candide who, by the end of the film, gives a speech to his fellow pioneers asserting that he loves everybody around him better than Comrade Tito—a sentiment with which, by that time, the rest are in cordial agreement...

...In the Name of the Father is much more subtle and much more sinister: the perniciousness of its message is directly proportional to its unobtrusiveness...

...As it is, he only exists to suffer from AIDS...

...Food has been an important motif throughout the film...

...That is the situation I find myself in with two of the big movies—at least in terms of media coverage—of the early part of the year: Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia and Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father...

...But the only thing to do about suffering these days is to screech about how unfair it is...

...We can understand how this happened...

...But we forget that as we get caught up in the excellent performances of Daniel Day-Lewis as Gerry Conlon and Pete Postlethwaite as his father and such other triumphs of the film-maker's art as the thrilling depiction of a riot in Belfast...

...T hat is also the keynote of In the Name of the Father, a compelling re-creation—with the help of considerable artistic license—of the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of Gerry Conlon and others for the IRA bombing of two pubs in Guildford, England...

...As if Jonathan Demme hadn't placed enough weight on the shoulders of Tom Hanks's character by making him stand for all AIDS sufferers, Kramer takes Demme to task for not also making him stand for all gay men...

...his father was, but not enough weight is given to the contrast between the two in any but the most cliched ways—accommodating, patient father, rebellious, hot-headed son...

...Gerry Conlon is not an attractive character and never will be...

...It is not as if a genuine artistic vehicle could not be devised in which a man like Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks) gets AIDS and gets fired and gets even...

...See what the British did to these innocent people...

...You fight the war in the newspapers as much as you can...

...Tito holds a reception for the pioneers where perfunctory adulation is still the order of the day, but Zoran sneaks off to sample the banquet that has been prepared for the children...

...Tom Hanks and his screen lover (played by Antonio Banderas) don't have a love scene...

...What, exactly, does he imagine Philadelphia's not turning its back on him would consist of...

...One day he and some friends are playing when they meet another artist—or rather an art historian—who has got a job pushing a wheelbarrow...

...Its characteristic note is struck by Neil Young's whiny song, "Philadelphia" (which was of course nominated for an Oscar), in which he pleads: "City of brotherly love/Place I call home,/Don't turn your back on me...

...What chance for any spark of genuine humanity to glimmer out from under this suffocating weight of generalization...

...were under...

...But the façade is maintained...

...He is inconceivable apart from his disease...

...This is the truth about Gerry Conlon that gets lost in the innocent-man-wrongly-condemned scenario...

...Jim Sheridan says that "this film is being made in the name of Giuseppe Conlon, the ultimate victim...

...By adopting their terminology, Sheridan makes himself objectively useful to them—just as by portraying the political import of the pub bombings in terms of a failure of British justice he makes himself useful to them...

...Tito and Me is a delightful Yugoslavian film by Goran Markovic that looks in a comic way at, the collision between private life and the public pretensions of a totalitarian state...

...He stays out all night, frightening his family half to death, so as to get a place to see Comrade Tito pass by...

...They eat the venison appreciatively, but don't like it very much...

...Zoran is a fat boy who is made fun of by his cousin and who eats the plaster off the walls in the flat...

...They make it clear what direction is being taken when Zoran's childish enthusiasm for Comrade Tito assumes center stage...

...In The American Spectator March 1994 65...

...At school there is an essay competition on the theme: "Do you love Comrade Tito and why...

...Let us stipulate that the convictions of all the Guildford Four as well as Gerry's relatives, the Maguires, were wrongful, though there are still those 64 The American Spectator March 1994 who say they did it...

...These three incidents are unobtrusive but ironically pointed aspects of the attractive portrait of family life that takes up most of the first half of the film...

...But their stories are unknown or uninteresting to show biz, whose politics are just about sophisticated enough to grasp the idea of the romantic Irish...

...I don't think it is unduly cynical to suspect that it does so not just because the i-m-w-c-s is more dramatically compelling but also because there is an influential political faction that includes the film-going British and American intelligentsia as well as the Irish Republican Army and its sympathizers who want the reputation of British justice to be sullied...