The Talkies

...What he writes is obviously not nearly so important as the fact that he continues to write it, like Reynaldo Arenas, in spite of all that authority can do to stop him...

...He learns to like it...

...He is forever moaning about his "art" and the attempts to suppress it by the Napoleonic authorities and his keepers at Charenton, but anyone who, in search of a little titilla-tion, has ever struggled through one of this writer's turgid and unreadable volumes of pornography will have much more sympathy with the forces of sexual oppression, at least in this instance...

...THE TALKIES by James Bowman Halfway Measures Lacking convictions, Hollywood can't display courage...

...Thus, although Hollywood may want to give us a Christmas-appropriate, family-friendly message, the constraints of ideology will not allow it quite to follow through...

...The Piscataway, N.J., school board declared a moratorium on excessive homework...

...But it is a rather querulous point, it seems to me-as if the filmmakers are saying that a man shouldn't have to make such a choice...

...F or in spite of the setting of these two films in Castroite Cuba and Napoleonic France respectively, most of the battles of the sexual revolution (and all of the successful ones) are fought among the affluent and leisured 61ites of America and Europe...

...So far as we can tell, his post-castaway existence is still to be lived as a FedEx employee and so is unlikely to be all that different from what it was before his life-changing experience...

...A recent Harvard admissions paper described applicants as "dazed survivors of some bewildering lifelong boot camp...

...All three movies more or less explicitly set out to say that they are, but none of them quite has the courage of its convictions...

...Even kids are burned out...

...In Roger Donaldson's Thirteen Days, for example, the romance of the Kennedys and Camelot is revisited for the express purpose of informing an audience of historical and political illiterates that the real enemy during the Cold War was not the Soviets so much as it was our own trigger-happy generals and admirals...

...This is made up of les pauvres of Paris who are portrayed as yearning to breathe (sexually) free - just as if they, like Messrs...

...Cast Away, directed by Robert Zemeckis, raises the subject of the time-obsessed workaholic only to drop it again in favor of such more interesting matters as Mr...

...Yet none of these movies is unambiguous in its appeal to more humane or family-centered virtues than those of mere acquisition...

...It might have been as good as those two films, too, but for the sour note it strikes in leading Mr...

...John Leland, a writer for the New York Times, claims to believe that the new Bush presidency portends a change in the national mood...

...If you want an honest and emotionally powerful portrayal of what these values are, both the good and the bad, try to get to one of the few places where A Time for Drunken Horses by the Kurdish director, Bahman Ghoba-di, is showing...

...And after eight years of what he describes as a "workaholic frenzy" under Clinton-Gore-something that the vice president's frenetic style of campaigning threatened to continue-Leland believes that the American people are looking forward to a good long rest with George W. "If this man stands for anything, surely it is for working only as hard as he has to," Leland writes...

...Like dogs and their owners," he writes, "nations often resemble their leaders...

...But he did imprison homosexuals, and that is quite enough to taint his otherwise "progressive" r6gime in the very progressive eyes of the American film industry...

...In The Family Man, Nicolas Cage plays a high-living bachelor and Wall Street mergers-and-acquisitions specialist who wakes up one Christmas morning to find that he is a tire salesman in New Jersey, working for his father-in-law and married to his college sweetheart...

...True, despite his pining for the old affluence, Jack offers to give it up for his now-beloved wife (Tea Leoni), who rather improbably doesn't fancy leaving New Jersey for a luxury apartment in Manhattan and private schools for the kids...

...Kate Winslet, as an improbably pretty and even more improbably virginal washerwoman who just can't get enough of the wicked Marquis's descriptions of perverted and licentious sex, represents his appreciative audience...

...Like the Christian martyrs of yore, he suffers for his faith (in sex" Nobody wants to be seen sticking up too fervently for the traditional family...

...Where less favorable conditions obtain, as for instance among the Kurds who inhabit the inhospitable borderlands between Iraq and Iran, something more like family values as they have been understood throughout most of human history are still to be found...

...Like failed or disgraced politicians who claim that they are leaving office "to spend more time with my family," we try to put the best face we can on our new slothfulness...

...Its presentation of a family of orphaned children, including one who is severely handicapped, desperately trying to make a living by smuggling and sanctions-busting through literal and political minefields, is unforgettable...

...And elsewhere in the Christmas output, there was plenty of evidence that the propaganda machine is still cranking it out at a Clintonian level of RPMs...

...So are the human ties of home and hearth the most important things in life or not...

...ual freedom) and is held up as an object of cultural adoration for that reason...

...But when a plane crashes and he is cast up on a desert island as its sole survivor, he learns to take quite a different view of time...

...or wrecked his country's economy or drove millions into exile and murdered thousands of others, or kept them in appalling conditions as political prisoners, you wouldn't know it from this film...

...People entering the job market now say they would rather have more time than more money...

...Hanks plays a gung-ho FedEx employee who exhorts his co-workers to remember that "we live and die by time" and urges them not to "commit the sin of turning our back on time...

...He ought-and we ought-to be able to have it all...

...Cage and Miss Leoni is obviously meant to be taken as a model of burden-sharing and co-parenting- to allay any fears that the movie might be advocating a retum to the old ways...

...But even though Leland's piece was written with tongue in cheek, there is some evidence both from the leading economic indicators and from the recent crop of Christmas movies that he is on to something...

...The splendid Spanish actor, Javier Bardem, plays the real-life Cuban writer, Reynaldo Arenas, who died of AIDS after coming to America in the Mariel boatlift, as what is almost the only kind of hero that Hollywood recognizes anymore, a hero of the sexual revolution...

...The most striking example of an ambiguous message is provided by The Family Man, written by David Diamond and David Weissman and directed by Brett Ratner, which is a sort of cross between Groundhog Day and It's a Wonderful Life...

...Another take on the Cold War is provided by Before Night Falls by Julian Schnabel...

...Michael Caine and Joaquin Phoenix represent the forces of oppression and repression, respectively...

...It is a film which might even serve as a reminder that, although (we hope) the pendulum may be swinging ever so slowly back towards conservative values, those values have themselves been transformed - even, perhaps, since the last Bush presidency...

...Another such hero is the Marquis de Sade in Philip Kaufman's ludicrously awful Quills...

...It has little to nothing in the way of plot and its main characters - well acted by Laura Lin-ney, Mark Ruffalo, Matthew Broderick, and Rory Culkin - are often less than entirely attractive in their moral and personal lives...

...Sade is, in fact, a twofer, a hero both as a sexual libertine himself- though as the film deals with the period of his confinement in the Charenton lunatic asylum we don't actually get to see that side of him - and, as a writer and soi dis-ant "artist" in prose...

...This is a natural Movie of the Month, but because few if any readers will find it at their local Movie Multiplices, I suggest as an alternative You Can Count on Me, a charming little independent film written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan...

...Wisely, the movie and Doug Wright's play on which it is based do not attempt to demonstrate the Marquis's alleged artistry but rather rely on our cultural predisposition in favor of the artist-hero to carry their man through...

...Miss Ryan's character in Taylor Hackford's Proof of Life at first wants her husband back very much, but as she begins to fall for the hostage negotiator (Russell Crowe) she has employed to get him back-in real life as in the movie, so the gossip columns tell us- the focus naturally shifts to the sexual tension between them rather than the family values the movie sets out to promote...

...Kaufman and Wright, were pathetic leftovers from the 196o's still dazzled by the advent of the Pill...

...James Bowman welcomes e-mail at JamesBow-man@home.com...

...In Cast Away, for instance, Tom JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...Hanks's character's various survival strategies and his ultimate homecoming to a fiancee (Helen Hunt) who, thinking him dead, has married another...

...A big part of the work force that entered the Clinton years afraid of never getting on the economic treadmill now dreams of getting off...

...But one comes away from it with a sense of the importance of family ties all the stronger for the determined understatement with which they are presented and the lack of sugar-coating on its sentiments...

...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on TAS Online at www.spectator.org...

...Hollywood, though subject to occasional bouts of nostalgia, is politically unsympathetic...

...If Fidel Castro allied himself with the enemies of the U.S...

...Clearly, nobody wants to be seen as sticking up too fervently for the traditional family in which the wife (you may remember) was supposed to be subordinate to her breadwinner husband, and was expected to stay at home with the children...

...Cage's character, Jack Campbell, even in its family-friendly version as father, husband, and tire salesman, back into the big money by staging a completely hokey meeting with a Wall Street colleague of the other Jack whose Rolls Royce gets a flat tire as he happens to be driving in New Jersey...

...In Proof of Life a yuppie American couple in South America learn what is really important in their lives when the husband, played by David Morse, is taken hostage by guerrillas and his wife, played by Meg Ryan, has to try to get him back without help from government or his employers...

...Part of the reason she wants Jack to turn down his brilliant job prospect is that she might have to give up her own career as a public-interest lawyer...

...In the latter role he chronicles the doings of other sexual libertines for the entertainment of the unfortunately oppressed and repressed common people of France...

...Neither of the characters played by Miss Hunt and Miss Ryan has any chil60 February 2001 The American Spectator dren in these films, and the marriage of Mr...

...Even Robert McNamara (Dylan Baker) is presented as the voice of wisdom and prudence and moderation in resisting the war-mongers in the Pentagon during the Cuban missile crisis, which was otherwise a personal triumph for Jack and Bobby Kennedy (Bruce Greenwood and Steven Culp) and Kenneth O'Donnell (Kevin Costner...

...Here the bad guys are really the bad guys, but only because of their puritanism about sex...

...The American Spectator - February 2ooz 61...