A superhero's Saga
PODHORETZ, JOHN
A $uperhero’s Saga How the rich are different from you and me. BY JOHN PODHORETZ The greatest piece of editorial advice ever given about a screenplay was offered by a comedy writer...
...He kills a few terrorists...
...They all roll their eyes and smile at Tony Stark’s irresponsibility, because he is an amusing genius—and, after all, if you were as rich as he is, what would you do...
...All in all, as super heroes go, Iron Man is not all that accomplished, and if being a superhero were all there were to this movie, the whole business would have been a dreadful bore and a fl op...
...It’s being the guy with all the money in the world, the guy who can afford to make that suit...
...But it does conclude on Downey’s quicksilver face as Tony punctures a key element of superhero mythmaking...
...Usually he does his work in the basement of his Richard Neutra house, which sits atop a cliff in Malibu...
...Tony Stark, the character played by Downey, is a sybaritic fellow who can indulge any passion he wishes and indulges all of them, all the time...
...His private plane has a stripper pole that rises from the fl oor, around which his stewardesses dance...
...It spits fi re, shoots bullets, and releases missiles...
...And that brings us to Iron Man, which earned $105 million at the box offi ce in its fi rst weekend and has, at long last, made the brilliant ex-con Robert Downey Jr...
...He would, in other words, live the dream life of every college student—hiring a contractor to gussy up his dorm room, and hiring Kurt Vonnegut to ghostwrite a paper for him about Kurt Vonnegut...
...The fantasy wish-fulfi llment that makes Iron Man so winning is not being a guy who can fl y around and shoot fi re from his robot suit...
...He blows up some bombs...
...For if Rodney’s character were rich, he would not be acting out of desperation, or self-consciousness, or a lack of self-worth, but rather as a lark...
...He blows off a dinner where he is winning an award to play craps in Las Vegas...
...Make Rodney rich,” Belson said...
...But it will do so for the wrong reason, alas...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ The greatest piece of editorial advice ever given about a screenplay was offered by a comedy writer named Jerry Belson...
...Belson’s three words were the salvation of Back to School, one of the most successful comedies of the 1980s...
...Tony is also a brilliant inventor, and can make anything out of anything...
...into a bona fi de star...
...He is looked after by three people—his assistant Pepper Potts (a charming Gwyneth Paltrow), his friend Colonel Rhodes (a delightful Terrence Howard), and his surrogate father, Obadiah Stane (an unrecognizably Gene Hackman-like Jeff Bridges...
...What saves Iron Man is that its protagonist is a billionaire who really, really loves his money...
...The movies that Iron Man evokes are not the other superhero pictures but the screwball comedies of the 1930s and the overheated Texas melodramas of the 1950s and ’60s—movies in which audiences luxuriated in the luxury on screen...
...And he suffers pangs of conscience because he is a weapons manufacturer and makes things that kill people, a fact that only seems to have dawned on him at some point in his early forties...
...In Iron Man, a guy builds a suit of fl ying armor...
...Hollywood will think that the public loves Iron Man because it is a superhero movie, a fantasy in which an ordinary person fi nds himself endowed with supernatural abilities...
...Rodney Dangerfi eld wanted to make a movie in which his character would enter college as a 50year-old freshman, but no one working on it could fi gure out how to get him there or why he would do it...
...He saves a few people in a car...
...When he wears it, he looks like a robot...
...It’s a great kicker, perfect for the rich guy who really does have everything...
...True, Tony goes through various trials and tribulations centering on a nuclear-powered pacemaker...
...In fact, the public loves Iron Man because it is a rich-guy movie—a type of movie that offers the same kind of fantasy fulfi llment without the supernatural nonsense...
...He doesn’t just spend his money on cars and planes and women...
...Belson understood that few things in life are as much fun as thinking about what you would do if you had unlimited resources...
...Its huge take ensures Iron Man will be a movie Hollywood will emulate...
...His look seems to have been cryogenically frozen in the 1970s, with Downey sporting the beard worn by Roy Scheider in All That Jazz and the sunglasses worn by Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman...
...And he would feel free to do whatever he wanted without fearing the consequences...
...John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...It’s too bad Iron Man has to revert to form in its last 15 minutes, with two boring robots punching each other on the streets of Los Angeles...
...But Downey’s immensely entertaining performance—which vies with Johnny Depp’s in Pirates of the Caribbean as the most notable career shift in recent history—goes easy on the tormented stuff and very heavy on the exhilarating freedom enjoyed by Tony Stark...
...He lives there alone, save for a chatty computer system named Travis and a robotic minicrane equipped with artifi cial intelligence, which Tony treats as though it were an overenthusiastic puppy...
Vol. 13 • May 2008 • No. 34
