CONSERVATIVE TASTES : Enemies of the Good

...That’s why John Lahr reacted to Bolt’s Sir Thomas with a sort of critical gag reflex...

...Of course, if it were Batman, or The Lion King, this would be high praise...

...What does that leave...

...conServaTIve TaSTeS Enemies of the Good by James Bowman F rank langella is a fine actor—for a movie star...

...Mr...

...Thomas More was what the audience had come to see—which is just as well, as his Sir Thomas had something decidedly second­hand about it...

...This is a form of musical grandeur from which, precisely, the grandeur has been taken away...

...It’s also why Ben Brantley, the reviewer for the New York Times, began his review of the play by ask­ing, “Is it heresy to whisper that the sainted Thomas More is a bit of a bore...

...A caricature, to coin a phrase...

...Even the Inquisition, though it might have been puzzled 86 THe amerIcan SPecTaTor December 2008/January 2009 JameS bowman by the claim, could have found nothing contrary to the teachings of the Church in being bored by either heroism or saintliness...

...It was clear on the night I attended that Mr...

...It some­times seemed as if Langella were playing Scofield playing More, rather than the saint himself...

...Wickedness, by contrast, is like parody in being right at home with the postmodern sensibility...

...This is not a criticism of him but of an egalitarian culture that has forgotten how to admire, let alone venerate, those who represent the best of humanity...

...Perhaps he can bring about that magi­cal, po-mo moment when as Paul Farhi in the Wash­ington Post puts it of the army of TV parodists at work during this election season, “the real person starts to seem like an imitation of the imitation...

...What John Lahr can’t forgive Bolt’s Sir Thomas is his goodness: “Bolt is portentous without being penetrating...

...Langella and not his impersonation of St...

...The blind doctor in that film, played by Mark Ruffalo, who has no moral choices to make but is simply the victim of his own innocence and the viciousness of power, is today’s equivalent of St...

...Audiences didn’t care much for it either, judging by the anemic box office...

...Maybe something like this is what John Lahr meant when he wrote in the New Yorker of the Roundabout’s Thomas More that he was, of all things, a “cartoon,” a “caricature...

...Rather the reverse, in fact—or so it seems to me he wants to say...

...A parody of something that insolently rejects parody...

...Bolt’s script…neglects to include several essential ingredients for a compel­ling dramatic hero...

...In that film, directed by Fernando Meirelles, even Gael García Bernal’s villain seems boring to me...

...Goodness for the liberal can only mean help­less victimhood, as in Schindler’s List and other Holocaust studies—the most recent of which is The Boy in the Striped Pajamas—or such fantastical varia­tions on the theme as José Saramago’s Blindness,a movie version of which also came out this fall...

...Not so much...

...As it happens, it is Frank Langella who, as you read this, will be pronouncing the liberal and postmodern culture’s benediction over the grave of our 37th president in Frost/Nixon, a cinematic reprise of the role he originated on Broadway last year...

...People like Messrs...

...Lahr...

...Lahr’s rather comical attempt to use the word “hagi­ography” in its common, pejorative sense in describ­ing a literal saint’s life, is a tip-off that what we have here is our old friend nuance, the liberal shibboleth constantly used to criticize those who act for the good—or to paralyze those who might be tempted to act for the good...

...Like conflict, doubt, vacillation and change...

...Thomas More— and, some might say, a lot more boring...

...Maybe they thought the character looked too much like a caricature...

...This imaginative failure does lead to some bizarre critical judgments, as when Mr...

...Lahr and Brantley dislike being reminded that it has ever been otherwise...

...At the time of writing, I have not had a chance to see this film, but I look forward to the great actor’s take on old floppy-jowls...

...Even the wooden beams and struts of the skeletal set, by Santo Loquasto, which divide the stage into large squares, contribute to the sense that ‘A Man for All Seasons,’ with its broad, garish narrative strokes, is a kind of classic comic book,” writes Mr...

...Goodness...

...It’s strange to hear these words reassuming their formerly pejorative sense...

...Brolin’s boyish W. whines his way along from one political or military pratfall to the next, all the while lamenting that he gets no respect from his emotionally distant father, played by James Cromwell...

...T here’s complexity for you: the complexity and the moral satisfaction of sheer passivity...

...James bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center...

...In the meantime, I will have to make do with Josh Brolin’s President Bush in Oliver Stone’s W. Either because Bush-hatred is fresher in the popu­lar imagination than Nixon-hatred or because the Stone-Brolin combination is simply not a very good parody, this film didn’t get much in the way of kudos from those whose appetite for moral complexity and nuance you would think would have been amply satisfied by it...

...But, generally speak­ing, evil is full of nuance, complexity, and psychologi­cal conflict—to the point where even such obviously evil figures as Richard Nixon or George W. Bush are allowed to settle down beneath a warm blanket not of forgiveness, exactly, but of understanding...

...For what does Frank Langella—or any other actor playing the part today—have to do with saint­liness that he should be demonstrating it to us...

...If we mentally sup­ply the word “inward,” it helps a little, though my own imagination boggles before the effort of under­standing how it remains possible not to see the play’s outward complexities and conflicts as reflecting an inner struggle that the hero is otherwise powerless to express...

...But to find these things boring is, I think, a sign of a lack of imagination in someone who lives in the secularist’s paradise of 21st-century New York, where not only martyrdom but the existence of any principle worth dying for is far more remote even than it was in 1960...

...He is always wise, always modest, always decent...

...There is a kind of stolid seriousness to goodness—let alone saintliness—that seems repellent to us...

...Langella took on what is still probably—on account of the 1966 film version of Bolt’s play—his most famous role...

...In this exercise in hagiography, the saintly Sir Thomas has no flaws, no appetites, and no depth...

...Lahr writes that Bolt “is uninterested in complexity, and certainly unable to demonstrate it,” or when Mr...

...Brantley writes that “Mr...

...Watch­ing Mr...

...Brantley’s characterization of Bolt’s Sir Thomas as a study in “monolithic goodness,” like Mr...

...The devil is a laugh a minute, and irreverence is the coin of his realm...

...Langella’s performance reminded me just a bit of listening to the music of Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov, which often sounds like a distant echo of 19th-century, Brahmsian romanticism as if the music were playing a long way off but still just audible...

...He came just a bit short of the grand British style embodied by Paul Scofield, who died only about six months before Mr...

...What Sir Thomas More calls “the thickets of the law” in which he hopes to find refuge from the devil himself is here replaced by the thick­ets of Oedipal psychology, as Mr...

...It’s not possible, even in the pages of the New Yorker or the New York Times, to be so blind as to be unable see either the moral complexity or the conflict in A Man for All Seasons...

...I suppose that, when everything else is cartoon or caricature, that which is triumphantly neither of these things and, indeed, a rebuke to them, is what begins to look like the caricature...

...What self-respecting critic will stand for that...

...But that he is primarily the latter rather than the former you can tell by the applause that greets him on his first entrance in this autumn’s Broad­ way revival, directed by Doug Hughes for the Roundabout Theatre Company, of Robert Bolt’s old favorite of 1960, A Man for All Seasons...

...No, not heresy exactly...

...Or maybe they are simply growing weary of a cultural milieu that is all caricature, all the time...

...He is the author of Honor: A History and the new book Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books...

...As Barack Obama put it to Rick Warren, “a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil.…Just because we think our intentions are good doesn’t mean that we’re going to be doing good...

...The echo effect in this portrayal of a 16th-century saint, who was also very much a man of the world, is partly owing to the utter uncongeniality of saintliness—or even goodness—to the playful, parodic, postmodern culture that we all, willy-nilly, inhabit today...

...December 2008/January 2009 THe amerIcan SPecTaTor 87...