The Talkies: Nonsense and Insensibility

...they allow one individual to take the measure of another, while showing deference along with respect...

...The good news is that Nixon is supposed to be a Shakespearean hero...

...But the racial propaganda here may actually be only camouflage for another and more interesting kind of propaganda: on behalf of traditional manners and morals, formal styles of speech, dress, and behavior, and the patriarchal societies in which these things grew up...

...John Travolta, affecting a lightened version of the black patois and black gestures, loses his job when he accidentally sees the wife of the black boss (Harry Belafonte) naked, then gets evicted, loses his own wife and family, gets beaten up by the police, and generally has a hell of a time of it in ways that would be overfamiliar and melodramatic but for the piquancy of their happening to a white guy at the hands of blacks, instead of the other way around...

...Manners can accompany affection and even intimacy, but they also imply distance and restraint...

...But leave that to history...

...Not only are there the usual conspiracy theories (featuring Larry "J.R...

...I did not find this to be the case with Sense and Sensibility...

...The American Spectator • February 1996 61...

...These would-be Shakespearean artistes do not feel themselves bound by such petty considerations...

...Hugh Grant as her own young man, Edward Ferrars, may have his limitations as an actor, but he is perfect for this role, which calls for exactly his puppyish brand of stammering, good-natured embarrassment...

...This nostalgia for manners he associates with "the way filmgoers gaze upon the lost worlds of social privilege in Merchant Ivory films," but really it is exactly the opposite...

...Rothstein points out that the story can be taken as a kind of parable of what happens to those who neglect the considerations of manners, but it is also a parable of what happened to manners on the way to the twentieth century: They ran into the romantic demand for authentic feeling as represented here in the figure of Marianne Dashwood (Kate Winslet...

...You expected maybe Hamlet...

...In the Merchant Ivory films there is, along with a loving re-creation of the material conditions of bygone life, a crude insensitivity to its moral conditions...

...If racism took place on such an exalted human plane it would never have existed in the first place...

...If this were true, it would be a case of dramatic malfeasance, but in fact the purposes are, no less than Stone's, political rather than dramatic...

...What is interesting about this picture is that the advanced racial views of the 1947 novel now look merely quaint and naive...

...We should demand that their attempts at entertainment should, in order to be entertaining, come to us couched in something like sense...

...True, nobody takes Bond's politics any more seriously than his improbable gadgets...

...Elinor is not only rewarded for her own restraint but saves her sister for happiness in the arms of Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman...

...On the contrary, even more than Persuasion, it is itself mannerly towards the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of our ancestors and pays them the compliment of taking them and their quaint prejudices seriously...

...They only want to judge it and find it wanting...

...whatever was bad or discreditable is the fault of Nixon himself (Beau Bridges) and his witless lackeys, Haldeman (Ron White) and Colson (Tony Rosato...

...Racial propaganda is perhaps the most uncriticizable type of all...

...The young black murderer (Eric Miyeni) is obviously a decent sort who44 It is remarkable that Jane Austen's conception survived the translation into film...

...All his family are immensely decent and dignified and noble, as is that of his white victim...

...But the question is: What do we take seriously anymore...

...Much hailed by critics, Oliver Stone's Nixon turned out to be a terrible movie not so much because it is a hatchet job—though if anyone so thoroughly be-hatcheted as Nixon could still suffer this fate he has suffered it again —as because it is completely lacking in taste or elegance or wit...

...That is not true of Cry, the Beloved Country, a beautifully made film by Darrell James Roodt from the novel by Alan Paton, and starring James Earl Jones, Richard Harris, and Charles S. Dutton, as well as some fine South African actors...

...the bad news is the hero is Macbeth...

...It matters nothing to such cinematic historians that we have the testimony of everyone in a position to know—from William Safire to Alexander Haig to Henry Kissinger to our own Ben Stein—that this is simply not true of Nixon...

...When it comes to party politics, in fact, we should be grateful that Hollywood's reflexive liberalism is still capable of stirring up a certain amount of controversy...

...They have their origins in the court but flourished in a hierarchical society like the one Austen portrayed...

...Some scenes and dialogue have been created for dramatic purposes...

...The film has its faults, but the melodrama of Elinor as a kind of manners-heroine — who is punctiliously true to the code in spite of superhuman temptations to renounce it—may be just what we need...

...Desmond Nakano's White Man's Burden takes as its fantastical premise a hypothetical world in which white is black and black is white: that is to say, where black people are the top dogs and white people the oppressed minority...

...Merchant Ivory always look at the past from a modern perspective...

...Even The American President by Rob "Meathead" Reiner was widely recognized by critics not of The American Spectator's political stripe to be a bit of liberal wish-fulfillment, a projection onto the decent and attractive figure of Michael Douglas's President Andrew Shepherd of all that people like Reiner still hope for from President Bill Clinton...

...They are an annoyance rather than a serious threat to lovers of the truth...

...An example of the first is 60 February 1996 • The American Spectator the ludicrous Cutthroat Island, in which Geena Davis is made to swashbuckle about a pirate ship pretending to be Errol Flynn...

...In other words, this is a movie in which the gimmick is everything...

...77 made an unfortunate mistake...

...Whatever of value was accomplished during the Nixon presidency is attributed to his efforts...

...There are three major types of propaganda films that hardly anyone thinks to identify as such...

...Stone's biggest problem has always been that he knows how to use no cinematic instrument more delicate than a bludgeon, and Nixon is, like his other films, about as subtle as a freight train...

...As their audience, we should demand more of them...

...The immense dignity of James Earl Jones as the murderer's father, the Rev...

...It is remarkable enough that Jane Austen's conception survived the translation into film, but that the result should be regarded as just another Merchant Ivory–style costume drama shows that there may be some few effective propagandists for our side as well...

...THE TALKIES by James Bowman Nonsense and Insensibility Hollywood propaganda had a big month in December...

...Stephen Kumalo, stands out anachronistically, like the magnificent South African landscape, as a reproach to all the meanness and pettiness of the modern world, and not merely to racism...

...It's not exactly hopeful for the American way that a big businessman is presented as being in need of a personality transplant in order to become a human being...

...us in an opening disclaimer...

...The second manages to insinuate itself into the latest Bond film, Goldeneye, in which renegade Russian techies, set free by capitalism, threaten to obliterate London with electromagnetic pulses beamed down from outer space unless their greed is slaked...

...Kissinger may be thought to be playing a very deep game in expressing his outrage, as he did in an article in TN/ Guide, since he comes out of the film rather well...

...Sydney Pollack's remake of Sabrina actually presents the head of a big corporation, played by Harrison Ford, rather sympathetically—but only because he leaves the corporation and runs off to Paris with Julia Ormond in the end...

...The Movie of the Month is a new version of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility by the Taiwanese director, Ang Lee...

...Or everything except for the minstrel-show comedy of Travolta acting black...

...Party politics is only a trivial part of cinematic propaganda, most of which produces its had effects without ever stirring up the slightest controversy...

...The fact that Shepherd is a widower may or may not have the dark significance attributed to it in a column by Frank Rich entitled "Hillary Clinton, R.I.P.," but even his romance with the environmental lobbyist played by Annette Bening should be seen as the symbolic seduction of a wayward New Democrat by the irresistible charms of the Hollywood left from which he has unaccountably strayed...

...I myself have never been able to separate the entertainment from the political manipulation in this way, but the fact that there are so many moviegoers who don't find it a problem is what keeps the likes of Rob Reiner in business...

...As the passionate, impetuous sister, she gets herself in a heap o' trouble by requiring of her suitors in the modern way that they cast aside dull convention and speak and act from the heart...

...Hagman as a right-wing Dallas oil man) lurking just beneath the surface, but these are complemented by the bumptious psycho-dramatist's determination to reduce his subject to the sum of his neuroses...

...Writing of this film and others of the recent Jane Austen boom (including December's Movie of the Month, Roger Michell's Persuasion) Edward Rothstein of the New York Times detected something he called "manners envy": Manners include behavior and obligation within a family but also refer to behavior toward outsiders, strangers, visitors, debtors and distant relations...

...Both Ron Silver as Chetwynd/ Petrie's Kissinger and Paul Sorvino as Stone's are the most sympathetic characters in their respective opuses, though Anthony Hopkins as Stone's Nixon is allowed to be a little more human, a little less loathsome than Beau Bridges in the TNT version...

...As one of my favorite critics, Tom Shone of the London Sunday Times, put it: "You can see right through the film—its designs on you are transparent—but the movie sparkles like cut glass...

...What is worrying about the kind of infantile politics that invariably result from Hollywood's attempts to put Washington on the silver screen is precisely that they are so easily dismissable...

...All history is subject to interpretation," Chetwynd and Petrie tell JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...Nor is this the only recent film which tends in this rather surprising direction...

...There is the women-can-do-anything-and- must-do-it-if-men-do type, the big-govern-ments-and-corporations-are-in-league-to-poison-you-and-rob-you-and-destroy-the-envi-ronment type, and the (white) racism-isoriginal-sin type...

...So too we can leave both these films to the judgment of this history they travesty...

...It is the rather stuffy, undemonstrative older sister, Elinor (Emma Thompson), who stands out against this tendency on behalf of tradition...

...Like Stone, Lionel Chetwynd and Daniel Petrie's TV movie Kissinger and Nixon, which appeared on TNT in December, presents Nixon as a drunk and a buffoon and the sort of man who would deliberately prolong the war in Vietnam for his own political advantage...

...It is Kissinger whose voiceover in the latter pronounces the pious hope for the Paris Peace Accords that "when the record is written, one may remember that perhaps some lives were saved and perhaps some others may rest more at peace...