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Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Tag Archives: politics

Review: “Lincoln”

30 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

bruce catton, civil war, confederacy, daniel day-lewis, doris kearns goodwin, drama, james spader, joseph gordon levitt, lincoln, politics, sally field, thirteenth amendment, tommy lee jones, tony kushner

Lincoln

“This American Life”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ISN’T just a man but a monument.  Meanwhile, the movie inspired by his commitment to ending slavery and the Civil War is a mixed bag, a union, as it were, of playwright Tony Kushner’s talky script and Steven Spielberg’s love of spectacle.  What happens when you pair the intensely verbal with the intensely visual?  Sadly less than the sum of its parts, “Lincoln” is a mathematical equation as tricky to decode as “four score and seven years ago.”

Sally-Field-LincolnOn the plus side, there are the performances.  Daniel Day-Lewis is a titan of serious cinema, from “My Left Foot” to the best American film tragedy of the 2000s, “There Will Be Blood.”  This is a Method actor so focused and unfunny that he makes Anthony Hopkins look like Robin Williams.  He nails Lincoln’s reportedly reedy voice and effortless erudition. Reviewing “A Room with a View” back in 1985, Pauline Kael wrote of the actor: “In some scenes I wished the camera were at a more discreet distance from Day-Lewis, because you can see him acting and you’re too conscious of his black hair and mustache – you suspect he’s made up to be ascetic and all profile.” All these years later, Day-Lewis’ profile finally gets the close-up of its career.

On the surface, the casting of Sally Field as Mary Todd seems questionable given that the actress is eleven years D-Day’s senior, but dress any actor in Lincoln’s chin curtain beard and top-hat – and any actress in a hoop skirt and greasy hair curls – and their ages somehow find equilibrium.  The Lincolns’ youngest son Tad (Gulliver McGrath) is seen before the fireplace, studying pictures of slaves disfigured by their masters’ whips. Mary is agonized over the enlistment of her older son Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) into the Union Army while, beyond the domestic, Republican abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) and Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn) are busy strategizing how to squash the Southern delegation.  “Lincoln,” at its heart, is not a biographical portrait but a study in political procedure. Seward has hired a group of Falstaffian fellows to cajole members of the House of Representations into passing anti-slavery legislation. The stand-out is W.N. Bilbo (a greasy James Spader) who brings some much-needed levity to “Lincoln” as he struts right through the front doors of the White House and delivers some deliciously salty language.

On the other hand, there are elements that subtract from “Lincoln,” or, at least, oppositional elements at work that make the film wobble like a house divided. Thanks to Kushner, “Lincoln,” inspired by Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” limits its scope to the political wrangling involved in the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery and put one more nail in the Confederate coffin.  As the famed1ea284fabeb8cb8df6779196e5615d49b08dcbaafd7f816ff5ce83b6 Civil War historian Bruce Catton wrote, “To save the Union the North had to destroy the Confederacy, and to destroy the Confederacy it had to destroy slavery.”  Given the misnomer of its title, one expects from “Lincoln” a sweeping biopic that begins with the sixteenth President as a young prodigy growing up in a cramped log-cabin on the Sinking Spring Farm in Kentucky and ending with a very bad night at the theatre. The maximalist Steven Spielberg is no doubt up to the task.  So, too, is Kushner, the Pulitzer prize-winner who co-wrote the screenplay for Spielberg’s 2005 “Munich” and, oh, just a little play called “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.”  Whether Kushner and Spielberg are a match made in heaven should remain in question.  There’s a palpable tension between Spielberg’s love of the panoramic (i.e. the coast of Normandy, the Atlantic Ocean, space) and Kushner’s theatrical impulse to withdraw to the musty interiors of the White House and other Washingtonian halls of power. Regardless, “Lincoln” is destined to dominate next year’s Academy Awards; they might as well host the ceremony at the foot of Mount Rushmore.

Have no fear: there will be Oscars.

Review: “The Campaign”

12 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

adam mckay, comedy, dan aykroyd, grant goodman, jason sudeikis, jay roach, john lithgow, kya haywood, politics, sarah baker, the campaign, will ferrell, zack galifianakis

“Attack Lads”

Grade: B (RENT IT)

THE PHRASE “DIRTY POLITICS” acquires a new meaning in the amusing but ultimately frivolous “The Campaign,” directed by Jay Roach (“Meet the Parents”) based on a story by Adam McKay (“Anchorman,” “Talladega Nights”).  The film is a veritable raunch-o-rama that makes strange bedfellows of the already strange Zack Galifianakis and Will Ferrell.  No one will be surprised to learn that they have great comedic chemistry together though the script is cynical and ultimately too silly to really leave a black-and-blue.

As political opponents Marty Huggins and Cam Brady, respectively, the pair square off as congressional candidates in North Carolina and along the way, poke fun at the emptiness of political rhetoric in America today – Brady runs on the platform “America, Jesus, Freedom” but confesses off-stage that he doesn’t believe it much less know what it means – while satirizing the hypocrisies of campaigning and the deep pockets that make it all possible.  Pulling the strings, and downing brandy after brandy, are the film’s villains, John Lithgow and Dan Aykroyd, who, as Glenn and Wade Motch, mirror the real-life Koch brothers, the Tea-partying billionaires who abominate President Obama.  There’s also Dylan McDermott as the Motch’s errand boy and, in Brady’s bunch, Jason Sudeikis, as a campaign strategist.

The problem is that “The Campaign” doesn’t exactly rise – or is it sink? – to the level of great satire; its best bits involve what you have likely already seen in the previews (Ferrell taking an accidental swing at a baby on the campaign trail) and Sudeikis coaching his boss through a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, which Ferrell botches badly but with brilliance.  A crazy-eyed Ferrell is little more than a haircut here and the Bush impersonation he does so well distracts.

As Huggins, the great Galifianakis gives us another of his effeminate manchild personae – he does essentially the same shtick in the road-trip comedy “Due Date” – that makes you wonder if he is parodying gay men for cheap laughs or, more subversively, playing it “straight” to ultimately undo masculine gender norms.  [New York Times film critic A.O. Scott raises the question in his review, asserting: “Marty is squeaky-voiced, easily flustered and just a wife (Sarah Baker) and two sons (Grant Goodman and Kya Haywood) away from being an egregious gay stereotype” (8/10/12).]   You half expect his macho enemy, Cam Brady, to out Galifianakis’ character and though that doesn’t happen, it is hard to know what Galifianakis wished to achieve with this queer performance and whether he is sending a knowing wink-wink to the audience.  The joke could be that the American mainstream demands a put-on masculinity.  “The Hangover” remains the apotheosis of man-cinema and yet no one talks about how the character of Alan deviates from the hetero-dullness of the typical buddy film.  The rest is simple: Galifianakis is the most dynamic comic actor of our time with the hardest working facial hair in show business.

If not for him, however, and Sarah Baker as his bewildered wife, “The Campaign” might even further lose the race.  It could have been a contender – and it packs in the laughs, for sure – but winds up as something of a minority leader.

Review: “The Ides of March”

11 Tuesday Oct 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

audacity of hope, barack obama, beau willimon, Caesar, chuck schumer, drama, evan rachel wood, farragut north, george clooney, grant heslov, hbo, hilary clinton, howard dean, jeffrey wright, karl rove, marisa tomei, mildred pierce, ohio, paul giamatti, philip seymour hoffman, politics, president, Rome, ryan gosling, The Ides of March

“Et Tu, Brute?”

Review: “The Ides of March”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

Back in 2006, when President Obama was still on the top of the world, he wrote in his bestseller The Audacity of Hope that an American politician may not “lie” per se, but “understands that there is no great reward in store for those who speak the truth, particularly when the truth may be complicated.”  The fact that the system facilitates political prevarication, Obama asserted, remains a sufficient obstacle to making American politics cleaner and more transparent.  George Clooney’s fourth directorial effort, “The Ides of March,” could serve as another reality-check to Obama’s loftier aspirations.  In many ways, it’s not far off from Sarah Palin’s snide rejoinder: “How’s that hopey-changey thing working out for ya?”

Still, the truth is actually quite uncomplicated in “The Ides of March,” but it’s the cover-ups and team-switching to protect the lying politician at the center of it all that powers Clooney’s indictment of a corrupt and corrosive political arena.  The truth is simple because it’s sexual in nature: no spoilers here, but suffice it to say that when a fresh-faced intern named Molly Stearns (played by Evan Rachel Wood), strolls onto the scene, men in power quickly come unglued, or rather, unbuttoned.  As erotic napalm, Wood reprises the vixen role she played so expertly in HBO’s reboot of “Mildred Pierce,” but she’s more vulnerable here and ultimately, tragic.  The script smartly piles it on, too, inasmuch as Stearns is the DNC chair’s daughter and soon an important player in the Ohio state primary.  Thankfully, Clooney’s film also treats its viewer like a grown-up; when Morris’s top aid gets the axe, for example, all we see is actor Philip Seymour Hoffman step inside the governor’s Suburban, then, without dialogue, exit to a rainy alleyway.

Adapted from a Broadway play, entitled Farragut North (2008), by Clooney’s longtime collaborator Beau Willimon (and Grant Heslov), who worked on campaigns for Schumer, Dean, and Hilary Clinton, “The Ideas of March” has the realist pulse of an exposé based on firsthand experience.  Our man-on-the-ground is Stephen Myers (played Ryan Gosling, who has more or less commanded the screen since the summer), a thirty-year-old campaign advisor to Clooney’s Mike Morris (a governor and presidential contender with a few skeletons in his closet).

“The Ides of March” is ultimately a cynical and disillusioning film in which Marisa Tomei, as a jaded Beltway reporter, speaks to its central beliefs.  “He’s a nice guy,” she says of Morris, “They’re all nice guys.  He’ll let you down sooner or later.”  Tomei is just one of the film’s great supporting actors: in addition to a Karl Roveian Hoffman – can’t someone in the costume department help Hoffman tie a necktie so it reaches his belt-buckle? – there’s Paul Giamatti as the top aide to Morris’s opponent and Jeffrey Wright (briefly) as another influential senator.  Each has a secret agenda and if Stephen survives their machinations it’s because he’s cut from the same duplicitous cloth.  It’s a relief to find an unabashed anti-hero at the core of “The Ides of March”; love or hate him, at least Gosling’s Stephen will inspire some spirited discussion after the film.

Historically, the Ides of March refers not just to the Roman calendar but to the day Julius Caesar was stabbed twenty-three times on the Senate floor.  We may no longer carry out our assassinations in the open-air, but as Clooney’s fine political drama suggests, we’re every bit as dead-set on power and revenge.

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