Robert Altman | The Company / 2003

difficult dances

by Douglas Messerli

 

Barbara Turner (screenplay, based on a story by Turner and Neve Campbell), Robert Altman (director) The Company / 2003

 

Roger Ebert describes Robert Altman’s penultimate film, The Company as, strangely enough, an autobiographical film—even though when the director was first presented with the script by former dance Barbara Turner, he responded, "Barbara, I read your script and I don't get it. I don't understand. I don't know what it is. I'm just the wrong guy for this."

      Yet, he was clearly not the “wrong” guy, perceiving that the ensemble performative elements of the Robert Joffrey ballet company and the persona of Gerald Arpino, renamed in this work Alberto Antonelli (Malcolm McDowell), and the vast group activities did, in fact, have a great deal in common with his directorial activities: both Mr. A’s (Altman and Arpino) had always to deal with the large egos of their performers and the impossible costs of mounting such exuberant and often experimental works.

      Ballet stars, however, are paid, as this film makes clear, far less that their Hollywood counterparts, often having to work extra jobs just to pay the rent, or, even worse than the balletic star of this film, Neve Campbell, having to camp out on the floors of other ballet members’ small apartments. Although the vicious hierarchal star system of Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes as represented in Michael Powell’s and Eric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes may have been obliterated by the shifting casting of the Joffrey company, the various shifts of plum roles still riffle long-time company members. And the serious commitments these endlessly-working performers must make to their career clearly interfere with any possibilities of their love-lives. 

      Although Campbell (playing a character named Loretta 'Ry' Ryan) falls in love with the seemingly perfect young man, a young chef, played by James Franco, she fails to show up on time for his lovely late-night meal. How she possibly maintains her daytime dancing career and her night-time activities, moreover, is not entirely explained.

      Even more importantly, dancers, unlike the Hollywood actors with whom Altman works, live in a fragile world not unlike beloved race horses: at any moment the strenuous imposition of legs, feet, and other limbs forced to disobey the obvious laws of gravity, endanger not only their careers by their lives.

     Both the popular dancers, Michael Jackson and Prince, one must remember, suffered so much pain that they sought relief in opioids and other drugs. These Joffrey dancers must not only bind their feet—a bit like the ancient Chinese women—but daily suffer pain that, particularly for the older major dancer of the group, often ends in broken tendons which end their careers. It is important to remember, also, that Joffrey’s own life ended in AIDS, a fact that the Arpino character, Joffrey’s real-life companion, memorializes in his comments on the AIDS-rrelated deaths of several of his greatest male dancers. Being gay and the so-called "gay plague" of the 1980s and 90s is still very much an issue for this company.

       Far more than great sports figures, moreover, dancers generally have, for many reasons, extremely short careers. Great dancers are basically lean young men and women who can accomplish incredible acts of bodily movement for a few years at most. Ten years, as one dancer indirectly argues, is a long time to perform with the company, even if her interpretations are still respected.

     And, finally, if Joffrey and Arpino were not tyrants in the way that Diaghilev was to Nijinksy and the rest of his corps, Mr. A. can certainly be a difficult and dismissive man, castigating his dancers, whom he perceives as rebellious children, at the very moment he praises them in a way that they cannot know whether he is serious or not. And guest choreographers, such as Robert Desrosiers can dismiss central dancers, endangering their careers and certainly deflating their egos, with a flick of his wrist.

      Altman, amazingly enough, says all of this while actually stating very little. The actual Joffrey ballet company primarily practices and performs their works, with only intermittent staged episodes, engaging primarily the “actors” of his work. Any conclusions we might make about this “company,” is presented in small gestures: the crack of a tendon which ends the career of a great ballerina, a voice raised in anger over the contradictory orders of Mr. A, a series of band-aids and bandages removed from a ballerina’s foot each night, the indignity of having to move to another barre simply to do one’s morning exercises, a work-out of an older ballerina before the younger ones arrive, the dancers’ mockery of their ballet masters at a private Christmas party, a late night dinner missed. Yet, the director, through these little gestures, reveals so much that he didn’t bother to shout.

 

    On top of that, Altman seems genuinely interested in actually showing ballet. Unlike so many contemporary directors who seem to think dance is something better left to the camera, Altman moves his camera back, time and again, to let us actually see the performers in full perspective. Yes, at moments, just as HD Met Opera, he pushes in to see the expression of his performers (Joffrey was an advocate of that very expressive quality in his dancing, “pretty” dancing “by the beat” being his self-declared enemy), but Altman generally moves out to let us actually encounter the entire performances of great works such as Alwin Nikolais’s Tensile Involvement, the film’s opening piece, Arpino’s Light Rain, Suite Saint-Saëns and Trinity, Moses Pendleton’s White Widow, Lar Lubovitch’s My Funny Valentine (performed in an open Chicago park during a sudden rainstorm), and even Desrosiers’s somewhat ridiculous dance drama The Blue Snake. Although some dance critics did not perceive Altman’s mastery, anyone who truly loves dance will want to see this film. And I’d argue that it represents some of the fortuitous filming a dance history of any film ever made.

 

Los Angeles, July 4, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2016).

Alf Sjöberg | Hets (Torment) / 1944

tormenting desires

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ingmar Bergman (screenplay), Alf Sjöberg (director) Hets (Torment) / 1944

 

Alf Sjöberg’s memorable movie, Torment, begins with an incident wherein a young boy arrives late for school, missing early morning prayers. As he enters the towering staircases, trying to  escape detection, he is watched over by a teacher who, when the boy tries to escape into a classroom, follows him. Together the two play what almost might be described as a kind of hide-and-seek as the determined elder hunts down his smaller prey, evidently so that he can identify and punish him. In this slightly perverted game, we recognize the terror of the tardy child, who does everything he can to maneuver himself out of harm’s way.

      In the very next scene, we see that things are not much different for the seniors of this school, particularly in the classroom of their Latin teacher, who they have nicknamed, with good reason, “Caligula” (Stig Järrel), who torments them during their attempts to translate Latin passages into Swedish, threatening and demeaning them upon even slight infractions, and demanding immediate rote memory of Latin endings. Like the teacher in the first scene, Caligula seems to delight in their petty errors and his gratified by serious failures, awarding demerits.   
   Although all these young men are terrorized by and hate him, one handsome student, Jan-Erik Widgren (Alf Kjellin) is clearly Caligula’s favorite target, continually putting the diligent Jan-Erik to the test, and threatening him, pointing stick in hand, for even the most minor of mistranslations and for his use even of the Swedish language.

     Although neither the director nor the screenwriter, Ingmar Bergman, openly suggest any sexual reasons behind Caligula’s torture of the boy, it is apparent that, as in the film’s first scene, there is something perverse in the teacher’s obvious focus on Jan-Erik, certainly the best-looking boy in the classroom; if his behavior isn’t a manifestation of a sublimated sexual attraction, it is, nonetheless, possible that the ugly older man is envious of young charge, and determined, for that very reason, to do him in.

      Throughout the film, moreover, Caligula admits to others and the headmaster that he has recently been “sick,” implying that his intolerance of his students has something to do with a recent illness from which he has apparently not yet completely recovered. He never makes clear what this illness might have been, but surely it must have a relationship to his treatment of Jan-Erik

      When, soon after, we discover that the sleazy teacher also has his eye on a young worker in the local tobacconist shop, Bertha, we perceive that this “sickness” is even deeper that we might have imagined. If he, at least, pushes Jan-Erik away from him or, more simply, wishes to control him, his attempts to woe Bertha are far more nefarious and disgusting.

       Caligula, we soon discover, has been following and, possibly, threatening Bertha for some time, leading her to drink. When Jan-Erik, after a night out with his classmate, discovers her  stumbling down a staircase, utterly drunk, he kindly attempts to help her, discovering her address, and leading her to her home.

     Terrified that her mysterious stalker will try to enter her apartment—even though she has changed the lock on her door—she begs her underage savior to stay with her, not only depriving him of his needed study time, but ultimately seducing him—in an act that today we would brand as child-abuse—into her bed.

     At least her “abuse” is of the pleasant kind, and this young Werther—Jan-Erik imagines falling in love with one woman for whom he will play his violin—quickly falls madly in love with her, abandoning his studies to be in her presence.

      If Caligula has long stalked her, with Jan-Erik’s interest in Bertha he becomes even more compelled to torment the woman—and, in his own version of child-abuse—his young male charge.

     One night Jan-Erik arrives to find his lover dead, with Caligula hiding in her clothes closet. Many have compared the scene which reveals Jan-Erik’s discovery of the presumed murderer as resembling scenes from Murnau’s Nosferatu, but I think the images more closely resemble the depiction of another child-murderer, Peter Lorre’s Hans Beckert, in Fritz Lang’s M. Like Beckert, Caligula seems to know no sexual bounds in his destruction of the young and beautiful.

     Although Jan-Erik calls the police, accusing Caligula as having murdered Bertha, like all the adult beings in this film, the police dismiss the boy’s assertions, finding that Bertha died of a heart attack, freeing Caligula to not only slap Jan-Erik in front of the far gentler headmaster (Olof Winnerstrand) but to demand the boy’s expulsion.

     The original film ended darkly, with Jan-Erik attending Bertha’s funeral, expelled from school, while his peers celebrate their graduation.

     Given the public criticisms of this first version, Sjöberg and Bergman added a final scene wherein, after all the other students have graduated, the headmaster visits Jan-Erik, now inhabiting Bertha’s old apartment, telling him that he will help him to get back on track and find a new life.

     Caligula arrives to seek forgiveness for his behavior, but his former student turns from him, walking into the light, now free from all the “educational” abuse that even the family doctor has described as something closer to living in a concentration camp (a theme which is underscored by a scene showing Caligula reading Dagposten, the Swedish Nazi newspaper).

     Many critics have proclaimed that the teacher called “Caligula” represents the increasing fascist elements taking over in Europe, and there is quite obviously enough in this film to give their viewpoint credence. As commentator Tom Brayton suggests in his on-line review in Alternate Ending:

     

“The film is part of the long, glorious tradition of movies similar, but worse than, Jean Vigo's 1933 masterpiece Zero for Conduct. At a school in Stockholm, several boys nearing the end of their secondary school careers are suffering under the tyrannic rule of a Latin teacher they have taken to referring as "Caligula" (Stig Järrel). He treats his classroom like a kingdom - or more to the point, a dictatorship. Given the first draft's 1942 composition date, and the 1944 release date, it hardly seems reasonable to doubt that we have, in front of us, a metaphor for the rise of totalitarianism in Europe, though I do not know that either Sjöberg or Bergman ever claimed as much. Still, given Sweden's very particular situation during the Second World War - officially neutral but geographically close enough to Germany that it somewhat nervously acceded to German influence - and Bergman's own youthful fascination with Hitler's charisma, before the developments of the late '30s shocked that out of him, it is exceedingly hard not to see this as a story about contemporary politics, and not just a coming-of-age story about a student finding it in himself to resist a single teacher's casual brutality.”

 

      Yet even more commentators have continued to puzzle over the reasons for the professor’s behavior to his fellow students, some hinting that the lack of motivation weakens the film, and turns it into a mere melodrama. Obviously, Caligula is a kind of sadist, but so common, as the writer of The Film Sufi review argues, not to even be taken too seriously. This reviewer even dismisses the political interpretations, arguing that it is simply an exaggerated vision of the student, Jan-Erik, himself:

 

“But I think such interpretations offer an overly externalized picture.  I see the film as primarily an internalized nightmare on the part of the young protagonist, Jan-Erik.  When you are young and impressionable like Jan-Erik, the world seems to have an overabundance of threatening characters like Caligula. Actually, the Caligula character, while objectionable, is not all that unusual – you have probably run into many instances of people of his type. These people are troublesome, but they are usually not monstrous ogres, and anyway there are just too many of them. Here, it is true that Caligula’s insidious hectoring of the alcoholic and vulnerable Bertha contributed to her heart attack, but, regrettably, there are many such people, and we do not have grounds for having them all arrested. We have to deal with them in a civil way and carry on with our higher pursuits.  This is what Jan-Erik has to do at the end of the film. So, yes, Torment is essentially a mood-piece about the traumas of youth.”

 

     Strangely, this argument seems to only concur with most of the adults of this film, who do not even take Bertha’s death seriously, and certainly couldn’t be bothered by the horrified reports of what they see merely as merely an overwrought youth. In this case the critic appears to be siding with the villains of the piece, the society which looks the other way when it encounters a system—in this case the state of education in the day—which, again as the good doctor has observed (as summarized by the Film Sufi commentator) “overworks the students with pedantic, narrow, and meaningless exercise of no good purpose.”

      I would argue that all we need do is return to Caligula’s own assessment of himself: he has been sick, he insists. That sickness fits the pattern of a closeted gay man’s recognition of his own attraction to men, or in this case, young boys. It seems quite apparent to me that, as I hint above, it is his own attraction to Jan-Erik that forces him to keep at the greatest distance that keep’s the boy by constantly enforcing various punishments to maintain a hostile relationship and at arm’s length. The metaphor of the teacher on the chase has already been established in the very first scene of this film, and Caligula is careful that he might not fall into that pattern.

      A common resolution to such feelings in closeted men is to search out a woman who might be attracted or needy enough to involve herself in a sexual relationship with the individual, thus proving to himself that he is a heterosexual at heart. Caligula has seemed to find such a figure in the alcoholic shop clerk Bertha. And despite her abhorrence and fear of him, he literally stalks her as a solution to his increasing attraction to his student.

      Inevitably, when he discovers that his student and his would-be heterosexual solution have joined up in their own sexual relationship, his entire world collapses; he has lost both his originally sublimated lover and its mediating alternative. Such a diseased mind, a self-hating homophobe in love with a boy, now has only the choice of destroying both if he can. In this case, it is the professor who is the tormented beast, who, in turn, torments the others around him as a palliative to his own sickened condition.

       The tacked on last scene, accordingly, is not at all in accordance with the rest of the film, and actually weakens the original horror story which is not that different from many a later psychological nightmare Bergman would create.

       For that last scene, Sjöberg was absent, having other commitments, enabling the young Bergman—the man who would eventually rise to take over Sjöberg’s position as the most noted of Swedish directors—to direct his very first scene.

      Yet this picture is still very much Sjöberg’s film, with its intense use of deep blacks and luminescent whites, along with the director’s fascination with winding and treacherous staircases—clearly representing the terrifying paths these young students have daily to undertake in order to become adults—and the many mirrored images which the children (and audience) perceive but seemingly have little effect on the frozen-minded and visually blind adults, who like vampires, cannot see themselves for who they truly are in the mirrors images.

 

Los Angeles, April 17, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2018).

 

Mario Monicelli | I compagni (The Organizer) / 1963, USA 1964

hunger

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mario Monicelli and Age & Scarpelli (screenplay), Mario Monicelli (director) I compagni (The Organizer) / 1963, USA 1964

 

Italian director Mario Monicelli’s I compagni (“The Comrades,” translated into English as The Organizer) is a fairly realist fantasy that is beautiful to watch, at times comic and heart-warming and at other times painfully touching. Yet ultimately this film is utterly frustrating, for at its heart it is a portrait of stasis. Nothing truly changes in this work despite all the hoopla of its beautifully portrayed characters. If the film begins with a young teenage boy, Omero (Franco Ciolli) forced to abandon his bed at 5:00 a.m. in order to join the others of this Turin community in their daily trek to the giant textile plant where nearly all of these poor men and women work from 5:30 to 8:30 each evening—14-hour days with only a short break for lunch or “requested” bathroom breaks—the film ends with the same trudge to work, after Omero’s death from a police shooting to quell the workers’ protest, with his younger brother now at the rear. His family needs his employment if they are to survive, despite Omero’s long desire to make enough money to send him off to school.

      Soon after Monicelli’s camera follows this 19th century workers to their factory, we see them briefly enjoying their lunch before being called back into their endless labor. By the end of the day, they have all become so exhausted that one of their fellow workers nearly falls to sleep, mauling his hand in a machine. A group of workers, the heavyweight Pautasso (Folco Lulli), Martinetti (Bernard Blier), and the tough woman worker Cesarini (Elvira Tonelli) form a committee to argue against their 14-hour work day, only to be entirely ignored with the Dickensian-like management force who not only ignore their protests but hurry off to their own leisurely lunches.

    Later, a bit as in the later earlier American musical The Pajama Game, they plan a walk-out an hour earlier that their normal quitting time. One of their group sneaks away to set off the whistle, while the others prepare to leave the moment they hear it. But a stray dog betrays him, and despite having released the call to quit, factory owners not only pull him out of hiding, but threaten their employees who might leave with firing, all remaining in place until the regular closing hour.

 

    The point, of course, is that these mostly illiterate and disorganized workers will never succeed given their inability to work out logical alternatives; all they can comprehend is they have to feed their families and themselves. Even in their attempts to educate themselves in afterwork school lessons they find themselves.

       Suddenly the comical-tragic fool Professor Sinigaglia (Marcello Mastroianni), evidently a labor agitator on the run from police in Milan, appears in their midst. Unlike the experienced labor leader Reuben Warshosky of the 1979 drama, Norma Rae, Sinigaglia is more a Fellinesque-like clown, a man, as J. Hoberman describes him: “a hobo in a battered hat and a greasy, threadbare cloak, a stooped fugitive on the run from the police in Milan. In a movie where neither Karl Marx nor any of Italy’s working-class heroes are ever mentioned, Mastroianni’s professor is a stunningly perverse embodiment of revolutionary hope.”

     He is also hungry, in every sense of that word. Sharing a bed on the floor of the local teacher, he awakes each morning to wake up the workers as well, using his skills as a rhetorician to convince them that they have made all of the wrong decisions. But when they leave for the night, one worker forgetting his sandwich, the would-be “organizer” eyes the sandwich, grabbing it up with an almost sexual relish. When the worker returns to reclaim his trophy, Sinigaglia woefully gives it back, truly becoming another version of Chaplin’s Tramp. Later, he eyes the window of a local chocolatier and restauranteur. He’s clearly starved, even more than these poor provincials, for food and companionship.

      Nonetheless, he engages the community through words, convincing them to go on strike, but first buying up food and supplies on credit for the long period he knows it will take. Of course, in doing so, these peasants, are quite literally selling away their lives. To survive the long period, some of their group highjack a coal car of a train, tossing the precious commodity up to the waiting women and men, who scoop them up in order to warm their cottages. Even when a local man is killed, Sinigaglia claims it has only helped their cause, that their case has now become national news. As if taken from today’s papers, when the company attempts to hire outsiders from another city to replace their workers, the “comrades” threaten them and force them to disperse, although some actually do make it into the textile mill.

       Finally, when Sinigaglia attempts to re-energize his base by encouraging them to march in protest, they are, this time, met by the police, the moment when Omero is killed. As if we are hit by a sudden jolt of reality, the viewer can now only see the total futility of this series of events, both comic and dramatic. We can only recognize La commedia è finita!

     Hoberman argues that “although the movie closes with a long shot of the defeated workers reentering their factory prison, including the child forced to take his older brother’s place at the machines, the mood is not exactly unhappy. The gates close, yet minds have been opened. The Organizer is a historical comedy that demonstrates a very Gramscian (Antonio Grancsi was the founder of the Italian Communist Party) formulation—'pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’—as well as very popular one, to name another Monicelli title: Viva Italia!”

       I wish I could see it that way. Even if we know that changes in labor laws always come in small increments, and certainly did not happen overnight in Italy or even the US, I can only see the film today as confirming the gradual erasing of labor rights across the world. Italians may well live today but look at how the right now regained control. In the US, immigrant workers are regularly being turned away. Gradual change has seemed to be replaced by endless reversals. Perhaps the honesty of this film is precisely Monicelli’s achievement. Things in 1963 were perhaps not so very different different from the Risorgimento-era this movie presents or are not so totally altered even today in the US. And we all know what has become of the Turin—auto workers struck the Fiat plants in that city the year before this film, which left that city in much the same condition as the US city Detroit. People are still very hungry, even if governments do not wish to truly investigate that fact, and they, in turn, will be forced to steal even from those poorer than them in order to survive. 

 

Los Angeles, June 25, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2018).     

Rod Lurie | The Contender / 2000

saving the drowned

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rod Lurie (screenwriter and director) The Contender / 2000

 

I first saw Rod Lurie’s political film The Contender when it originally appeared in 2000, a period in which I was not yet writing film reviews. Seeing it again the other day on the TV Sundance channel I was faced once again with both its pleasures and failures. When the film first appeared in late October 2000, a great many reviewers saw the movie as a contender for the Academy Awards, and two of its stars, Jeff Bridges and Joan Allen were nominated for acting awards. But in retrospect, it seems clear that the movie was not destined for greatness.

      The film begins well enough, with a sudden plunge of a car into the waters near where Governor Jack Hathaway (William Petersen), a Democrat from Virginia, is fishing with a male assistant. The Governor miraculously escapes the car, attempting—but alas failing—to save its other occupant, a woman friend who has accompanied him on the trip.

      His valiant attempt to save the woman has made him a kind of hero in the eyes of many, and he is a shoo-in, so some claim, to be President Evans’ (Jeff Bridges) Vice-Presidential appointment to replace his former Vice-President, who has apparently died in office.  When called to the White House, we can see Hathaway almost drooling with anticipation for his appointment; yet, somewhat inexplicably, Evans deflates the governor, explaining that he plans to extend his legacy in his second appointment by choosing a woman for nominee, Republican-turned-Democrat Senator, Laine Billings Hanson (Joan Allen) of Ohio.

     So far, so good, the film having interestingly mined two major political events for its subject matter: Kennedy’s accident at Chappaquiddick and Presidential Candidate Walter Mondale’s choice of Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate.

     Writer-director Lurie immediately takes these somewhat historical events into new territory, however, when those who oppose Hanson’s appointment, notably, Republican Representative Sheldon Runyon (Gary Oldman) and Democratic Representative Reginald Webster (Christian Slater), investigating Hanson’s background, come up with seemingly shocking pictures, revealing that, as a young college Freshman, Hanson had participated in an orgy, willingly, so it appears, servicing several young frat boys. Although she has long been married and has a charming son, her sexual openness is apparently reconfirmed by her having begun an affair with her husband while he was still married to her best friend.

     With a kind of cold passivity that is not only slightly unbelievable but helps to make Allen’s character almost unbearably passive, Hanson, under the scrutiny of the House Judiciary Committee, determines to take the high road, refusing to discuss her private sexual life in any form, insisting that she is open to all matters political, which the sleazy Runyon and associates cleverly refrain from asking while insinuating through cynical denial that, not only is Hanson a whore, but that she has taken money for those sexual acts, opening her up to a charge of prostitution.

      The issue is an important one, particularly since Lurie’s script ties Runyon to Joe McCarthy-like tactics—even if that is a far reach, since McCarthy destroyed numerous careers and lives, while Runyon is only attempting to squelch one contender, much in the same manner—conservatives will claim—that the same body attempted to end Clarence Thomas’s judicial career. Yet it is hard to believe, given the visual and testimonial evidence against Hanson which Runyon and his group have already leaked to the press, that any president, no manner how highly-principled—a quality which this fictional President seems not to have—would so calmly continue to support his nominee.

     Lurie’s script insists that were Hanson a male candidate, her long-ago indiscretions would be utterly ignored; but we know, given the dead-ended careers of several congressional and gubernatorial candidates (Edwards and Wieners* immediately come to mind, although, admittedly, their behavior occurred during their campaigns instead years previous to it. Even the not-so-saintly fictional Hanson votes to impeach Clinton, we discover mid-film, because of his “responsibility” for his sexual behavior) that sex is still a potent factor within the American consciousness. Lurie might have done better to explore that very fact: why is it that Americans are still so puritanical when it comes to their public figures’ sexual behaviors?

     Unfortunately, Lurie drops the whole issue by revealing that Hanson, despite her refusals to deny or admit her past sexual “deviancy,” was, in fact, innocent. Expected by her sorority sisters to participate in the orgiastic celebrations, she has refused to go along, leaving the event even before it had begun. The pictures held by Runyon and, now, by the media are of another woman; and the rumors about Hanson’s own participation are, as she puts, “urban legend.”

     Not only is this a cop-out, I would argue, but it renders Evans’ moment of rising to greatness by refusing Hanson’s resignation quite meaningless, particularly since he has also discovered, through his own back-street investigations that Runyon’s favorite, Hathaway has paid his woman companion to join him in the drowning so that he might be able to save her—an action that has turned him from a potential hero into an obvious criminal.

     Runyon is politically outed in front of the entire legislative body, and, presumably, goodness and wisdom has been revealed to all. Not even Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington provided such a lame example of political majesty.

     What if, a little voice in my head keeps asking, the Vice-Presidential candidate had really participated in and enjoyed the orgy in which she has wrongly purported in having been involved? What if she had actually committed adultery? Would that have meant that she was any less of a significant candidate, politically speaking, for the job?  We all know, of course, that such actions would have led to the contender’s immediate dismissal and, likely, the end of her career. Certainly, the uplifting message of Lurie’s fable would have become impossible. Just as Runyon perpetually twists truth throughout this tale, so too has the writer and director, who has made it easy for us to buy into this contender’s right to be a winner. Even Gore Vidal’s President in the author’s his creaky stage drama, The Best Man, was forced to make a compromise. While Lurie’s complacent Evans becomes an immediate hero, by saving the woman who, politically-speaking, nearly drowned. That nagging voice, however, will not go away: is Evans really any different from Hathaway? Well, yes, the writer has made it far easier for him to save the gal and win the public adulation which all politicians obviously seek out. And so too has Lurie pretended to create a feminist hero only so that he, like a macho-hero, can save her from drowning.

        

*New York Democratic Representative Anthony Weiner resigned was forced to resign from Congress after texting a suggestive photo of himself to a woman following him on Twitter. Another controversy erupted when he texted to another woman during his New York mayoral race.

     Former senator from North Carolina and Vice-Presidential running mate for John Kerry, John Edwards was found to be having an extramarital affair during his 2008 Senatorial campaign.

     At almost the very moment that I completed this review-essay, I opened The New York Times Magazine of September 21, 2014 to find a cover article by Matt Bai, “Legend of the Fall,” on precisely the same kind of situation in which the Vice-Presidential nominee finds herself in The Contender. Recounting the end of the 1987 Democratic candidate for President, Gary Hart—not only the likely Presidential candidate but a man far ahead of George H. W. Bush in the pre-convention polls—Bai suggests that the press’ treatment of Hart, coming as it did on the heels of the Nixon cover-ups as reported by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, represented a new shift in journalism. Prior to this period, journalists focused on the campaign issues of their subjects, emphatically steering clear of their private lives (Theodore White is quoted as being reasonably sure that of all the candidates he covered, only three—Harry Truman, George Romney, and Jimmy Carter—“hadn’t enjoyed the pleasure of ‘casual partners.’” But suddenly in the wake of the Woodward-Bernstein revelations about the private personae of a trouble President, reporters sought out all information about their subjects, permitting the public to determine whether or not the information they uncovered had any value in terms of their competency as a politician. Hart, who, like Kennedy one might argue, openly if clandestinely was involved with several women other than his wife, with whom he had had a troubled relationship. In this case he was literally tracked down and, as Bai makes clear, stalked outside his home by reporters from the Miami Herald, who, confronting him in an alley outside Hart’s home, demonstrated the candidate’s difficulty in handling questions about his affair with Donna Rice. Like Hanson in Lurie’s film, Hart also attempted to argue that his private life was no business of the press. But with a photograph and other evidence in hand, there was no way he might possibly escape published accusations, and was soon forced to abandon any Presidential aspirations. Bai, highly sympathetic to Hart’s moral dilemmas, quotes former senator Bob Kerrey: “We’re not the worst thing we’ve ever done in our lives, and there’s a tendency to think that we are.” And the sad thing, suggests Bai, is that ever since Hart, in protection of their personal lives, candidates have been terrified to speak out about their personal viewpoints, refusing to reveal any aspect of their inner beings that might be interpreted by some element of the public as morally reprehensible. Given what Bai describes of Hart and the numerous downfalls of political candidates ever since, it is even inconceivable that Lurie’s fictional nominee could win out, even with Presidential support, over the lurid details exposed in the press. The sad thing is that Hart most certainly might have been a better President than his opponent and most certainly would have save numerous American lives.

 

Los Angeles, September 21, 2014

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2014).