Film After Film. J. Hoberman
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then, the movies encourage semiotic readings. The green semaphore seemed more radical, if less chic, than the silver squiggle. It was less surprising to spot a green button affixed to the lapel of Michael Moore’s tuxedo than Harvey Weinstein’s. Salma Hayek, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Adrien Brody all wore the squiggle but not their fellow nominees Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep (although it had been reported they would). Presenter Richard Gere was besquiggled, surprise loser Martin Scorsese not. Susan Sarandon sauntered confidently out with her pin and held up two fingers in a goddessy peace sign. A shell-shocked-looking Barbra Streisand was unsquiggled, although she did make a statement in praise of protest music. There were some who devised other accessories—Matthew McConaughey’s lapel had sprouted a peculiar mélange of red, white, and blue flowers—but only Jon Voight seemed to be wearing an American flag pin.
Where were movieland’s macho men? Who would defend Bush’s war? Mel Gibson, Charlton Heston, Clint Eastwood, Kevin Costner, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger all seemed conspicuous by their absence. Had they driven their Humvees into lockdown? Were they stockpiling Poland Spring and boycotting the hippie love-in? Was it the hall? The Kodak Theater’s outsize, quasi-pagan Oscar statues and the Babylonian deco splendor had the look of an Iraqi presidential palace. Had the terrorists won? There was an elephant in the room, but it wasn’t Republican.
“What is a movie star?” Oscar host Steve Martin riffed. “They can be thin or skinny. They can be Democrats or … skinny.” Throughout his presidency, Bill Clinton was identified with a “cultural elite” as personified by his Hollywood cronies Steven Spielberg and Barbra Streisand; when he ran for re-election, Variety calculated political contributions from the fabulous 90210 zip code went Democrat by more than two to one.
Clinton and Hollywood were one. The president befriended, co-opted, and ultimately hid behind movieland activists. They responded by imagining his better self. One prime Clintonian legacy was the virtuous virtual presidency of Martin Sheen (perhaps to be embodied by the actual Howard Dean, the Vermont governor who, as an anti-war candidate, was briefly the Democratic frontrunner). The Clinton saga—as well as the histories of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and the Hollywood Democratic Committee, not to mention the 1968 McCarthy and 1972 McGovern campaigns—suggest that stars excel as fundraisers and campaign surrogates. Under the current Bush regime, Hollywood actors have filled a vacuum. They are themselves stand-ins without a star. The silence of elected officials combined with the exegeses of entertainment news insured that Martin Sheen and Jessica Lange, George Clooney and Janeane Garofalo would be drafted as media spokespeople to speak in opposition to Bush’s war.
The Oscar producers were scarcely unaware of Hollywood’s current role as America’s most visible opposition. Nor did they negate it. The organizers minimized wartime hoopla; the evening’s genial host never once waved the flag. Still, his deflationary razzing of the stars in attendance served to dampen their self-importance. Did they really have the right to an opinion? The anti-war remarks seemed subtle and tentative—albeit still more outspoken than those of equivocating Senate Democrats. Mexican, Irish, and Spanish presenters and recipients were far less ambiguous in their comments on the war than their American counterparts. (Of the fifty-nine Oscar winners assembled, only four—Sarandon, Day-Lewis, Anjelica Huston, and Ben Kingsley—wore the silver squiggle, and only two are American.)
The tension was palpable when arch provocateur Michael Moore advanced to the stage. But the enthusiastic standing ovation faded to silence and turned to boos when the filmmaker broke the frame by invoking the “fictitious” 2000 election and questioning Bush’s “war for fictitious reasons.” Moore succeeded in using the Oscars to reach the billion-person viewing audience. But despite his well-prepared statement, the filmmaker was not to be the evening’s hero. The Oscars are, before anything else, the industry’s main way to feel good about itself.
Would this embarrassment be the evening’s moment to remember? There was no John Wayne on hand to shoot down the obstreperous Moore. As if on cue, Jack Valenti wandered out, too stunned or clueless to defend the honor of the Bush administration. Hollywood saved itself when, in a performance worthy of a second Oscar, Adrien Brody stopped the show. The surprise Best Actor winner had the youthful energy to expend ten precious seconds and who knows how much bodily fluid kissing Halle Berry and the presence of mind to express his gratitude to the Academy, thank his mother (photographer Sylvia Plachy), and—silencing the band—cite the war, enact anguish, and invoke Allah. He even wound up by naming a childhood friend who was an actual American combatant in Kuwait.
It was only then that Academy president Frank Pierson could, speaking like the fictitious president, extend an offer of peace to the Iraqi people, who were even then being bombed, a mere flick of the remote away.
In the early hours of April 2, CNN broke the story that US Army Rangers and Navy Seals had stormed Saddam Hospital in Nasiriya and rescued a prisoner of war, Private Jessica Lynch, a nineteen-year-old army maintenance worker captured in an Iraqi ambush on March 23. That morning, newscasts and newspapers put forth a picture of Pvt. Lynch on a stretcher, sheltered by a folded American flag, and it was reported that she had sustained at least one gunshot wound in her battle with Iraqi soldiers. April 3, the Washington Post ran a front-page story headlined “She Was Fighting to the Death” that, citing unnamed government officials, suggested that Lynch was a veritable teenaged Rambo who “fought fiercely” and sustained multiple gunshot and stab wounds. “Hollywood could not have dreamed up a more singular tale,” per the April 14 issue of Time. Almost immediately, NBC announced plans for a made-for-TV movie to be called Saving Private Lynch.1
The Saving Private Lynch scenario dominated US war coverage even after Baghdad fell on April 9—symbolized by the rigorously staged and tightly framed toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in the city’s main square, an event that was made for TV and routinely compared to the fall of the Berlin Wall. (“Lights! Camera! Combat! Iraq Passes Its Screen Test,” per weekly Variety’s April 14 front page: “Viewed as showbiz, the Iraq war was a winner, as expertly executed as it was scripted.”) On May 1, in a photo op seemingly inspired by the 1986 movie Top Gun, George W. Bush piloted a Navy S-3B Viking onto the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and, standing in a flight jacket before a banner reading MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, declared victory: “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” Soon afterward, US toy companies were manufacturing twelve-inch action figures of the president in a flight suit, some labeled “Top Gun.”2
As the Events of 9/11 deranged the 2001 Toronto Film Festival, so the war in Iraq was a tangible presence at the next international film festival I attended.
CANNES, MAY 30, 2003
The appropriate Hollywood ending for the 2003 Cannes Film Festival would have been a Palme d’Or garland for Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River. Directed by a seventy-three-year-old legend, rhapsodically received by French and American auteurists alike, this character-driven crime thriller offered an opportunity to end a lackluster festival with a burst of manufactured glamour.
Even more interesting, a winning Mystic River—which, like many of Eastwood’s movies, can be read as a meditation on lone-wolf, vigilante justice—would have provided a suitably ambiguous conclusion for the much discussed Franco-American tensions that, as explicated in the pages of Variety and the leftish French daily Libération, provided this festival with its particular narrative. Instead, the jury (evidently as unhappy with the quality of the competition films as the press) opted for Gus Van Sant’s Elephant—a poetic evocation of a Columbine-like American high school shooting that was attacked by Variety’s Todd McCarthy as “pointless at best and irresponsible at worst,” but that proved markedly more popular with French critics than Americans.
Elephant, though stronger on formal values and surface tension than social context or psychological analysis, was scarcely the least movie that the jury, headed by French director Patrice Chéreau and including Americans Steven Soderbergh and Meg Ryan, might have decorated. Strictly in terms of passion, originality, and sustained cinematic chutzpah, however, Lars von Trier’s allegory Dogville towered over the competition. Still, speaking of unpopular foreign entanglements, the most topical and perhaps the most universally admired movie in Cannes’ official section was Errol Morris’s The Fog of War—a documentary portrait, shown out of competition, of former