On Screen

...In the end, when they welcome him into their ranks, Smith weeps for joy...

...In Letters, we never meet the leaders who order a ragged battalion to hold the island for as long as they can without reinforcements or air support—a suicide mission...

...The cry of “support the troops...

...IF The Pursuit of Happyness and Dreamgirls seem harmless compared to some of the other politically oriented films released last year, it is because those hollow winners purported to be essentially comic...

...A variation on this theme, verging on the propagandistic, is the latest Will Smith movie, The Pursuit of Happyness, a comedy “inspired” by true-life events...

...Ye t they themselves are among the prime beneficiaries of the Administration’s tax breaks, and among their first priorities is to remain on good terms with the FCC...

...Director Bill Condon drowns the story’s serious overtones with the same bland abandon that catapulted his neutered version of Bob Fosse’s Chicago to an Academy Award in 2004...

...Here again we have a conflict whose objectives, given the chaos of 21st-century warfare, seem quaintly clearcut...

...He refuses, for instance, to climb inside the three planes that hit their highjackers’ targets...

...It is the American Idolization of the American dream...

...At the same time, both movies strike an elegiac tone...

...He would gratefully accept the aid of a crack FBI backup team and would walk off in the end with a multimillion-dollar reward posted by the very wheeler-dealer who seemed so smarmy in the original...

...is used to rally a reluctant America into a continued endorsement of the war in Iraq, so it is curious that Eastwood chose to tell these stories at this time...

...W o r ld Trade Center is a glossier, better-looking work...

...For most of its running time Smith is depicted as an energetic, independentminded go-getter...

...Revealingly, we hear about Iwo Jima’s strategic importance only in Letters, articulated by the f igures who failed to hold it...

...Again as in Private Ryan, the top brass are portrayed as heartless bureaucrats while the men on the ground particularly as they face their deaths, are as virtuous as they are heroic...

...SIMILARLY DECADENT notions can be detected in another relic from 1981 that has found new life on screen...

...That goes not only for the terrorist gang—evil geniuses, snarling weightlifters, and jittery computer wizards—but also for the corrupt fat cat hostage who tries to strike a deal with the villains, the bumbling L.A...

...He drew unflattering portraits of famous mid-century figures, but those he relished trashing—Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Andy Warhol, Jim Morrison—were dead and therefore unable to defend themselves...

...United 93 is filmed exclusively with hand-held cameras, as if through the perspective of a seasick visionary...

...This obsession has its roots in the late ’90s fervor surrounding Saving Private Ryan and the documentary television miniseries The Greatest Generation, but it has taken a dark turn...

...Perhaps the people are on to something...

...The film follows the fortunes of an R&B group called the Dreams, a thinly disguised version of the Supremes...

...Since the U.S...

...Much of Flags concerns the surviving soldiers who planted the Stars and Stripes in the famous photograph taken atop Mount Suribachi as they parade around the country soliciting donations for the war effort...

...In this way, both push the same message as today’s most hawkish propagandists: However we feel about war in general, we must always remember that the soldiers in the field are worthy of our reverence...

...The film is set in 1981, on the cusp of the economic boom, and Smith vies for a position as a stockbroker at Dean Witter...

...Greengrass takes pains to offer a wide view, flitting from here to there, but he avoids any note of failure...

...Recent films dealing with the sobering issues of war and terrorism have more disturbing undertones...

...The misspelled word refers to graffiti scrawled on the door of Smith’s son’s daycare center, but given the film’s hollow notes, the producers may well have feared that spelling “happiness” correctly would be false advertising...

...Critics have congratulated Greengrass and Stone for dealing tastefully with tough subject matter, but it must be admitted that they are interested only in success stories...

...The former film makes vague references to confused directives from the top, though the figures who issue them, like the faceless authorities in Eastwood’s films, never appear onscreen...

...She deploys her brassy, booming voice with the same lack of discipline regularly seen on that TV show...

...But Greengrass betrays his panoramic pretensions, asking us to remember the day as an instance of the bad guys being defeated by the heroism of the good, and to revere the leaders who carried us through the crisis...

...What he becomes, however, is a cog in a giant financial machine, and the film fails its audience by passing this off as a triumph of individual fortitude...

...The country portrayed in the movie is everything the Reagan Revolution promised to create but fell short of realizing: a land where a homeless African American with no more than a high school education enjoys the same chances for achievement as a Harvard man, if only he shows sufficient grit...

...Some of the most critically acclaimed films of the last year worship the idols of the marketplace and put their faith in the cure-all of wealth and power...

...Stone, like Greengrass, entombs his narrative in a venerable yet tired genre: the disaster film...

...By far the most nuanced visions of war made in 2006 were the pair of movies by Clint Eastwood (and produced by Steven Spielberg) about the battle of Iwo Jima: Flags of Our Fathers, which presents the American view, and Letters from Iwo Jima, a Japanese-language film that traces the struggles of the opposing side...

...It falls on New York cop Bruce Willis to liberate them by luring their captors, one by one, to a variety of gruesome deaths...

...Although the end titles tell us that of the thousands crushed by the falling buildings, only 20 were pulled out, the film looks at two men from those lucky ranks, detailing their sufferings as they waited to be rescued, and the anguish of their families...

...Although the film is neither elegant nor subtle, compared to the political content of many movies darkening screens today, its broad, raw satire comes as a breath of fresh air...

...We are asked to place unconditional trust in his integrity largely because he does not covet the money and authority that have corrupted almost everyone else we meet...

...Even if you have not seen the film, you probably know the story—it has been imitated endlessly: A band of terrorists commandeer a Los Angeles skyscraper and hold a group of business executives and office workers hostage...

...The Dreams, their handlers and their friends become estranged as they grow famous, but it never occurs to anyone that they might have been better off before stardom corrupted them...

...Our movies have not caught up with the times...

...It is one more triumph of the American character and its professional competence...

...Until last year, the major studios shied away from this sensitive topic...

...As in United 93, the trappings of the genre—the race against time, the faces of agonized wives and terrified children as they wait for news, the grandiose recreation of debris-ridden sites—take precedence over any effort to grapple with the meaning of September 11...

...Big-budget filmmakers may be right in assuming that audiences so crave upbeat, self-affirming endings that warfare, terrorism, and the struggles of race and class must be drenched in glory to make money...

...These films confront it from divergent angles...

...In both films we follow the steady American advance through beaches and over mountains that culminated in victory for the Allies...

...The jolly rich folk who work at the firm are nurturing mentors...

...Has fear of being attacked by Rush Limbaugh, the Fox News Channel, or the White House driven them to selfcensorship, or do they really believe the pap they peddle...

...Air traff ic control in United 93 runs a tight ship...

...OnScreen In Praise of American Re ctitude By Raphael Shargel BOWING TO the unwritten rule that every red-blooded American male must subject himself to repeated viewings of the father of modern action movies, Die Hard, I recently took another look...

...invasion of Iraq in 2003, American movies have dealt primarily with the one war in our history for which most accept clear definitions of good and evil: World War II...

...The bulk of the film concentrates on Smith’s domestic life (the few scenes where he tries to sell retirement packages to potential buyers are the most awkward), yet the closing titles tell us nothing about the fate of his family...

...T w o decades ago, Oliver Stone made a name for himself by beating political dead horses...

...The narrative purports to be an American success story, but it plays like Frank Capra reimagined by Donald Trump...

...the horror of the calamity is thus also muted by a style that constantly reminds us we are watching a movie...

...Nevertheless, neither film confronts the political machines that order troops to war...

...Much of the blame is laid on bureaucratic red tape, as if it were a force of nature, beyond human control...

...He watches with the same reverence accorded this supposed visionary by the Right today...

...his best-known films exposed political corruption, but always in the bygone days of the 1960s and ’70s...

...It was the critics, to their discredit, who doted on them...

...But outside of a scene when a white band turns one of the Dreams’ songs into a maudlin hit by slowing down and sanitizing its melody, the tenor of the era is communicated through alterations in fashion...

...Die Hard was released in 1988, at the height of the Reagan era, and it struck me that much of its appeal lies in pitting a man of the people against the rich and powerful, who are despicable without exception...

...AMORE SERIOUS charge can be leveled against another pair of films—the two features from 2006 that deal directly with the e v ents of September 11, 2001...

...The filmmakers imply that to be a genuine success, one must become both famous and a millionaire...

...The endorsement of American rectitude implicit in Greengrass’ film is made explicit in Stone’s...

...At one point, in a scene that does little to advance the narrative, Smith turns to his television where President Ronald Reagan is talking about the economy...

...Ultimately, the director’s diptych, looking at the battle from both sides, further relativizes the politics of the conflict and reinforces the importance of individual heroics...

...Ye t with the exception of The Pursuit of Happyness, all the f ilms I have mentioned were only moderately successful at the box office...

...Success would be measured not by our hero’s capacity to take on the mighty from a position of weakness, but rather by his willingness to become one of them...

...Of course, many did act nobly that day and deserve to be honored...

...The silvery gloss of Tom Stern’s camera (evoking Janusz Kaminski’s work for Spielberg in Private Ryan), the mournfully monotonic musical score (cowritten by Eastwood and his son Kyle), the long meditative closeups of soldiers’ faces, relay the idea that war is a deadly serious business...

...The political sentiments behind W o r l d Trade Center are exposed at the moment when the Marine who discovers the entrapped firefighter played by Nicolas Cage turns his back on the ruins and declares, “They’re going to need some good men out there to avenge this...

...Instead, they relate how much money the real-life character Smith impersonated is worth today...

...Ten years ago, a movie recounting the rise of African-American stars over the course of the 1960s would at least allude to the concurrent Civil Rights movement...

...A number of last year’s prestige pictures, including Robert DeNiro’s The Good Shepherd and Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth are set during the War years and sport fascistic villains who all but swear allegiance to Satan as they practice a cartoonish sadism...

...Instead we focus on the bravery of the men fighting for the lost cause...

...Broke, evicted from his apartment, and desperate to improve his family’s lot, Smith struggles to better himself...

...How distressing it is that one of the major exemplars of Regan-era pop culture goes against the grain of the power politics of its day, whereas most of the features made in the past year seem to endorse the conservatism ascendant in the era of George W. Bush...

...each cop in Wo r ld Trade Center is willing to sacrifice his life for a chance to remove a victim from the ruins...

...police paralyzed by an impotent bureaucracy, and two laughably stiff FBI agents who obstruct our hero...

...United 93, directed by Paul Greengrass, and Wo r l d Trade Center, by Oliver Stone, step into comparatively uncharted territory...

...Every authority figure who appears in either film behaves with valor and competence...

...ICANNOTREMEMBER a period in our history when filmmakers seemed so cowed...

...The musical Dreamgirls, adapted from the Broadway show that was the last major work of the extraordinary Michael Bennett, features Jennifer Hudson, a former American Idol finalist, in her feature f ilm debut...

...Hollywood producers, despite their reputation for liberalism, perceive themselves to be pandering to what audiences asked for at the voting booths over the last two decades...

...Despite the intricacy of their plots, their vision of war is simplistic, a matter of protecting the good guys from the clutches of the bad...

...United 93 sees the disaster from three perspectives, that of air traffic controllers, their military contacts, and the passengers and terrorists aboard the flight named in the title...

...The film ends with a concert where the principals are united for a last bittersweet hurrah...

...When a closing title informs us that this man served two tours of duty in Iraq, the film asserts that the war was a justified response to the attacks on New York and Washington...

...If Die Hard were remade today, Willis would be recast as a special military agent or a middleclass plainclothes detective, an operative from CSI, NCIS or another elite corps...

...In the hands of this director, who sandwiched United 93 between filming the second and third installments of Matt Damon’s Bourne series, the crisis becomes merely another thriller, a tale of wholesome, innocent people who valiantly oppose a great evil...

...Recalling the battle, they are consumed with survivors’ guilt, and though they struggle with their superiors and one another, they never question the integrity of their country or the wisdom of their leaders...

...W o r ld Trade Center, by contrast, stays closer to the ground, portraying the plight of two New York policemen trapped under the rubble of the Twin Towers...

...All appear incompetent next to Willis, man of action...

...Squabbles are reconciled with the mature decision to break up and go one’s own way...

...For the first time in his career, Stone has chosen to dramatize a relatively recent event, but outside of the famous TV clip of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani telling us that the number of casualties will be more than we can bear, no contemporary political figure crosses the screen...

...Ye t it too depicts success stories that were the exception rather than the rule...

...The Democratic victory in November’s election only confirmed what has long been brewing: Americans have grown skeptical of an Administration that pledged it could do for the world what Bruce Willis did in that skyscraper...