The Talkies: There's No Growing Up
Bowman, James
THE TALKIES by James Bowman There's No Growing Up T here's no doubt that Hollywood films are, as they say, state of the art. Even the worst that Tinseltown produces will make money by worldwide...
...The ironic allusion of the title to that Heaven which people used to turn to for consolation in human loss reminds us of the bitter mockery our legalistic, self-centered culture has put in its place...
...Even the worst that Tinseltown produces will make money by worldwide sales to foreigners eager for any glimpse, however inane, of the famous Hollywood dream factory at work...
...A Fox executive told an interviewer that "There are also indications that people between 30 and 5o are returning to the cinema, both in Britain and the United States, and they want grown-up movies...
...Leaving his home and church in Texas one step ahead of the police after braininghis wife's lover (and his youth minister) with a baseball bat, Sonny becomes the nearest that Protestant America affords to an old-fashioned holy man...
...The first is Robert Duvall's The Apostle, which enjoys the almost unique distinction among mainstream Hollywood pictures of treating religion without patronizing, trivializing, or demonizing it...
...But the obvious commercial calculation involved in choosing to offend Mr...
...Even the venerable James Bond franchise shows signs of going this way, I regret to report—at least if Tomorrow Never Dies is any indication...
...Granted, we don't expect all that much in the way of verisimilitude from a Bond film...
...Duvall's creative control and the wonderful part he has given himself as the Texas preacher, Sonny Dewey, tempt him to go on at greater length than is quite good for him, but you can't help but be won over by the passionate, wise, foolish, and charismatic Sonny, who "sometimes talks to the Lord and sometimes yells at the Lord...
...Even more scary is the thought that maybe it won't make any difference, since grownups are themselves remaining psychic children well into middle age...
...Naturally, his General A-- - - - - defeats General B (oops...
...In Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, Ian Holm plays an ambulance-chasing lawyer, Mitchell Stevens, who attempts to persuade the numbly bereaved parents to sue someone—it hardly matters whom—when a school-bus accident kills nearly all the children of a small Canadian town...
...This symbolic Everyman leads the gentle, childlike, markedly feminine survivors of nuclear holocaust into triumphant battle against a vicious (racist, polluting) gang of rough, hairy boys who like to shoot guns and kill people and blow things up...
...Could it be that Hollywood has simply forgotten how to make grown-up movies...
...Well, maybe...
...For, eight years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the doctrine of moral equivalence between the West and the Communist bloc —a doctrine that the hippies did so much to advance —lives on in this former redoubt of the cold warrior spirit...
...There is only one thing left out of the list of ingredients for a great filmmaker, and that is any sense of why he is making the films...
...As a disproportionate number of film-goers are teenage boys, so the movies are filled with explosions, special effects, and other gaudy and meretricious trash designed to appeal to teenage boys...
...Now, according to the Sunday Times of London, "Market research by zoth Century Fox shows that the 24-35 age group is overtaking teenagers as the most influential cinema goers...
...The movies themselves, however, are often puerile in the extreme, morally and spiritually dead at their center...
...Take two of the biggest of the premium grade pictures, Amistad by Steven Spiel-berg and Titanic by James Cameron...
...In the season traditionally reserved for the industry's prestige products, most of the films I saw were as disappointing as ever...
...His creation of characters in Jackie Brown —both the three major figures of the eponymous Jackie (Pam Grier), her bail-bondsman and admirer, Max Cherry (Robert Forster), and the dangerous gun dealer, Ordell Robbie (Samuel Jackson), and the smaller scale gems given to Robert De Niro, Bridget Fonda, and Michael Keaton—is brilliant, but the characters contain no reference to anything outside themselves except the too familiar desires to get rich or laid on the one hand and to stay alive and out of jail on the other...
...As I have occasionally remarked before, much of the reason for this sad state of affairs is the demographics of the domestic movie audience...
...Good news for movie lovers who are also adults, right...
...Britain and Red China, in the comely persons of Pierce Brosnan and Michelle Yeoh, make a cool couple indeed as they team up to defeat an attempt by an evil media tycoon (Jonathan Pryce) to start World War III so that he can sell more newspapers...
...For, of course, even if the grown-ups are coming back, it still costs between $75 million (Amistad) and $200 million (Titanic) to make a big movie, not counting the marketing costs, and you can't afford to take too many risks with that kind of money at stake...
...In The Postman the hippie-ish quality of the gentle folk is more pronounced than ever...
...hope I didn't spoil it for you) and then, hippie-like still, instead of killing him at once says gently, "It doesn't have to be this way...
...Calling himself "the Apostle E.F.," he travels by bus to Louisiana, teams up with a retired black pastor (John Beasley), and starts a bi-racial Pentecostal church called the "One Way Road to Heaven Holiness Temple...
...James Bowman welcomes comments and queries about his reviews...
...Both of them are triumphs of the filmmaker's art: beautifully photographed and brilliantly edited...
...71 the classics of film noir so wittily and so successfully, that it is almost possible to overlook the fact he has left out the dark morality which informed his originals...
...I mean, apart from the fact that it is a cool—and presumably lucrative—way to spend one's life...
...76 February 1998 • The American Spectator mindedness is even worse than Spiel-berg's, since slavery really is bad (dull...
...One of the women (Olivia Williams, looking improbably gorgeous for a hippie) makes the flower-children's Postman-guest feel welcome by joining him in bed...
...But there are accidents—or at least disasters for which the apportioning of guilt can bring no peace of mind...
...The second Movie of the Month also has a God-haunted hero played by a superb actor...
...Both these wonderful films hold out some hope for us that, if the grown-ups really do want to come back to the movies, there may be here and there, if you look real hard, something for them to watch...
...And, lo, for once it comes to pass...
...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on the TAS web site —http:fiwww.spectatonorg...
...S uch rudimentary or non-existent morality is so much the rule in Hollywood, that it is even more impressive when something of genuine moral interest comes along, and this Christmas gave us not one but two Movies of the Month...
...As in Pulp Fiction, he imitates4 Has Hollywood simply forgotten how to make grown-up movies...
...It may be simplistic but at least it's safe to confine your moral analysis to the proposition that slavery was bad, or that women's living life to the fullest and not marrying for money is good...
...There is no such thing as an accident," he says as he persuades the distracted parents to impart some meaning to their suffering by finding someone to blame for it, someone to hate and to punish...
...It's the old hippie dream redivivus: "Wouldn't it be great if wars could be fought just by the a who start them," says Costner's Postman to the General...
...The American Spectator • February 1998 77...
...but it is dangerously delusional to suppose that you can solve the world's problems merely by decreeing (as, Moses-like, Costner does to the acclaim of both armies after the battle) that "live and let live" is the law of the land...
...There is an exception to this rule, which is that if your theme is a progressive cause close to the heart of the aging baby boomer, the studio's surplus cash may be thrown about like confetti...
...Better than this would be to leave any moral dimension out of the film, which is the way of Quentin Tarantino in his eagerly awaited Jackie Brown...
...He also tries to reconstruct for himself some kind of personal existence but has in the end to realize that neither the intensity of his devotion to God nor his own past will allow him ever to live even a part of his life as an ordinary man...
...Most significantly, when we come to the climactic final battle, Costner and his co-ed army of rag-tag long-hairs persuade the rough, hairy boys under psychotic General Bethlehem (Will Patton) to stand aside as the two leaders fight it out man to man...
...Thus are grown-ups even further discouraged from going to the movies, and the audience that is left is even more weighted toward teenage boys...
...But what is left in both cases when serious moral thinking has evaporated is mere posturing and the showing off of the filmmaker's own compassionate and unselfish — not to say politically correct—feelings...
...That, at any rate, seems to have been what happened with Kevin Costner's spectacularly awful new movie, The Postman...
...They live in small agrarian communes fortified against the world, get their living by basic agriculture, simple handicrafts, and alternative technologies (not that there is anything for them to be alternative to anymore), and entertain themselves with folk-singing, folk-dancing, and dope smoking...
...E-mail him at IVBowman@compuserve.com...
...Beyond that, he has nothing to say to us...
...Stevens knows this because his own life has been blighted by a beloved daughter's turning to drugs and prostitution...
...As a result, they are ultimately not only uninteresting but even incoherent...
...And yet in each case all this technical wit and sophistication is employed in order to convey a childishly simple morality that would have put a writer of Victorian chapbooks to shame...
...Like their creator, they have no function in the world except to look cool and act like people in the movies...
...They produce an endless series of more or less impressive images to no serious purpose whatsoever...
...In this land-locked version of Waterworld we once again find ourselves in a post-apocalyptic America where ordinary folk being terrorized by unscrupulous war lords turn for help to a mysterious drifter (or Drifter) with a generic name (Mariner/Postman) played by Costner...
...Tarantino again shows himself to be the most prodigiously gifted auteur of his generation— a man who knows how to tell a story in pictures, to make a compulsively watchable movie, and to write clever dialogue as well...
...Such moral simpleIf you film it, they will come...
...But this year's crop of Christmas blockbusters seemed to me to suggest that the habits of moral vacuousness and cynJAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement ical manipulation of audiences die hard...
...Rupert Murdoch—who, so far as anyone knows, does not actually employ a private army to exterminate anyone or anything that stands in the way of increasing his profits — rather than the genuinely thuggish rulers of a billion Chinese does seem to stick in the craw...
...As I write, it has not yet been released, but I think it safe to say that it will be the biggest flop of theyear—unless there are a lot more nostalgic ex-hippies out there, spiritually quick-frozen in 1971, than I think there are...
...As a result, and almost in spite of himself, he becomes a quasi-mythical figure, and one of a stature to be believable in the scene where he effects an almost miraculous conversion of Billy Bob Thornton to the Lord...
Vol. 31 • February 1998 • No. 2
