Lions for Lambs
dir. Robert Redford
It’s no coincidence that the director of Lions for Lambs also cast himself as a professor of political science. The screenplay
for the fall’s latest war movie (the second written by The
Kingdom‘s Matthew Michael Carnahan) is structured like a couple of
Socratic dialogues, with cheap-looking action sequences to remind us of
the consequences of political talk. If this sounds stultifying, well,
it is. Except when a picture of Tom Cruise (as an oily Republican
senator) is Photoshopped into a manly hug with George W. Bush:
According to the preview audience I saw the movie with, the sight of an
evangelical hugging a Scientologist is comedy gold.
In the first dialogue, Robert Redford’s idealistic Professor Malley
stages an intervention with a floppy-haired frat boy (Andrew Garfield)
who’s been skipping his classes. The frat boy is sassy, but Malley
appeals to the memory of two of his former students (Michael
Peña and Derek Luke), who’ve joined the Special Forces and are
right this minute—wait for the action sequence—being
deployed to a dubious mission in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, in the second
dialogue, Tom Cruise’s senator offers an exclusive interview to
political reporter Meryl Streep, who still feels bad about the way her
network sold the invasion of Iraq. The scoop is an incomprehensible new
strategy involving “forward points” in northern Afghanistan—cut
to a sorry mockup of snowy mountains, with Peña and Luke being
stalked by faceless “Talis” after they accidentally fell out of their
helicopter. Oops.
The most aggravating thing about Lions for Lambs isn’t its
earnest attempt to instruct. It’s that Carnahan didn’t do the research
that would’ve made the details remotely plausible. Streep’s reporter
voices bland liberal reservations about war, but she doesn’t ask a
single question about the way the senator’s vaguely worded “strategy”
might play out, or about the Afghan “hearts and minds” he intends to
win over. Despite its topical veneer, this is a movie about pure,
weightless abstractions: apathy versus action, moral courage versus
careerism. It’s hardly a fair debate. ANNIE WAGNER
Music Within
dir. Steven Sawalich
Why was this movie made? What is its purpose? To educate us about a
man who played a central role in forming and advancing the laws that
currently protect the rights of Americans with physical disabilities.
If this is why you should watch this movie, for its educational value,
why isn’t it just a documentary? Why does it have to be a drama? Why
the actors? Why a script that employs the techniques and enhancements
of fiction to tell a “true story”? Really, why?
All we need is the information: Richard Pimentel (Ron Livingston)
was born in the 1950s to a mad and white mother and sad and Chinese
father; his childhood was lonely; his mother became even more loony;
his father died in a restaurant accident (killed by a barrel of soy
sauce). Richard, however, had a gift for public speaking. Because his
gift did not translate into a college scholarship, he went to Vietnam;
because the war cost him his hearing, he became an activist for
disabled people; because of his years of hard work and activism, the
Americans with Disabilities Act became a reality.
Now, what more do you want to know about this man’s life than these
facts? Yes, he had a woman in his life; yes, he had his ups and downs
with her. But nothing in all that he went through with her and others
close to him has much cinematic value. Richard is no (sweeping) Gandhi,
no (heroic) Malcolm X, no (graceful) Queen Elizabeth. Speaking of the
queen, the actor, Michael Sheen, who plays Richard’s best friend, a
wheelchair-bound man suffering from severe cerebral palsy, is the actor
who plays Tony Blair in The Queen. I’m not saying anything.
CHARLES MUDEDE
Darfur Now
dir. Ted Braun
Darfur Now is a slick, almost uncomfortably optimistic
documentary about the human catastrophe currently taking place in
western Sudan. It shies away from the dramatic “this is what a genocide
looks like” documentation that made the earlier The Devil Came on
Horseback so chilling, preferring to envision the pastoral idyll
that preceded the coming of the Janjaweed.
In the lovely opening shot, a woman scrubs her hair with a bar of
soap in a stream. Later, refugees waiting for NGO trucks to deliver
their next meal recite the crops they used to raise in their villages.
Children chase after one another down dusty, curving paths. The purpose
of these scenes isn’t to describe the literal past: Darfur Now doesn’t bother much with history, not even to address the roots of the
conflict between rebel groups and the government. It’s just a gentle
way to coax apathetic viewers into action. Sign a postcard to your
governor, the movie seems to suggest, and you can restore Paradise.
The film follows no fewer than six individuals: Luis Moreno-Ocampo
(prosecutor for the International Criminal Court), Ahmed Mohammed
Abakar (a refugee who’s become the leader of a massive displacement
camp), Adam Sterling (a student activist in California), Hejewa Adam (a
Sudanese woman who’s joined a rebel militia), Pablo Recalde (from the
World Food Program), and Don Cheadle (emoting alongside his buddy
George Clooney). With such a crowd of personalities, there isn’t much
opportunity to get to know anyone in depth.
So director Ted Braun soon culls the crowd and settles on the only
campaign with any chance of achieving success in a timely fashion:
Sterling’s effort to get California to divest its pension plan from
Sudan. Sterling supplies the film with a happy climax (complete with a
grinning Arnold Schwarzenegger), but it rings a little hollow. Perhaps
Braun has figured correctly, and an uplifting ending is necessary to
get anybody to do anything—but that calculation is depressing in
itself. ANNIE WAGNER
Terror’s Advocate
dir. Barbet Schroeder
The tantalizing title of Barbet Schroeder’s new documentary profile
is really a bit of marketing mischief—the French title uses
“avocat,” which generally means “lawyer.” (It can also mean “advocate,”
as well as “avocado.” Terror’s Avocado—now there’s a
movie I’d like to see.) The French attorney Jacques Vergès is
the go-to guy for accused terrorists and war criminals of a bewildering
array of persuasions: first, anticolonial Algerians, and then,
anti-Zionist Palestinians, and later, in rapid succession, radical
German leftists and the notorious Nazi Klaus Barbie. Before the trial
of Saddam Hussein, the now-82-year-old lawyer had offered to defend
him, too. But is Vergès really advocating all the various
positions his clients espouse? It hardly seems possible.
The elegant, cigar-fondling Vergès isn’t about to give up his
mystique so easily, so Schroeder sets the stage by finding some really
bad guys to claim Vergès as their friend. Voilà:
various retired leaders of the Khmer Rouge, complimenting their buddy
enthusiastically. (Apparently Vergès befriended Pol Pot when
they were both active in anticolonial student groups in Paris.) The
documentary then recounts Vergès’s thrilling, confounding
career, spiking its talking-head testimonials with illustrative film
clips. Sultry scenes from The Battle of Algiers describe the
tactics of his client and first wife, the beautiful Algerian
bomb-planter Djamila Bouhired. If we find these things exciting in the
movies, Vergès finds them sexy in person. After abandoning
Bouhired and their two children, he courted yet another client, the
dark-haired, blue-eyed radical German leftist Magdalena Kopp.
Terror’s Advocate is riveting not because it explains
Jacques Vergès’s motives (he’s inscrutable), or because it
condemns him as evil (boring)—and certainly not because it
absolves him of any moral stain. It’s fascinating because the unsavory,
even antisocial glamour that Vergès depends on for his life’s
work is exactly the stuff that makes for a chilling international
thriller. Vergès was made for the movies—the only trouble
is, he also exists in real life. ANNIE WAGNER
Fred Claus
dir. David Dobkin
Once upon a time, Kathy Bates lived in a hut. Then, even though she
was approximately 76 years old, she went ahead and gave birth. “It’s
the fattest baby I’ve ever seen!” screamed the Bavarian forest doctor.
“I promise to be the best big brother in the whole world,” said some
other kid. “Sometimes it’s easier to make promises than to keep them,”
warned the condescending narrator.
That fat baby’s name was Nicholas. He scampered around the
forest—Delta Burke thighs straining the seams on his red long
johns—doing incredibly “saintly” stuff like falling down
chimneys, murdering birds, and dragging dirty trees into the living
room. This behavior, for reasons unexamined, delighted Kathy Bates and
caused her to HATE the other bowl full of jelly that fell out of her
shriveled womb. His name was Fred.
Fast-forward nine million years: “In manhood [Nicholas] literally
became a saint.” Hmm, that’s weird! Wouldn’t he be dead by now,
narrator? Nope? It’s a “little-known fact” that when you become a
saint, you “freeze in time!” And so does your ENTIRE FAMILY! Yes, this
is obviously correct. In fact, I recently purchased a George Foreman
Grill on Craigslist from St. Augustine’s uncle, Kevin Augustine! Wait! No, I didn’t! Oh my god I hate this lying sack of shit
movie so much!
Christmas is in peril, as usual. Fred Claus (Vince Vaughn), now
estranged, has become a ne’er-do-well and a naughty-kid apologist. St.
Nick (Paul Giamatti) and his huge, shiny sausage fingers are in danger
of being “shut down” by “the board” for the purposes of “efficiency.”
(Wait, what?) Also, his back hurts! But who will deliver this year’s
rigidly gender-biased gifts? “There’s a rule: Only a Claus can deliver
the presents,” cock-a-doodle-doos some gay elf. Oh, well if there’s
a rule… LINDY WEST
