Well, the movie awards season has now come to a close, with Argo triumphing at the end. I've read quite a few articles that claim Ben Affleck's lack of a Best Director nomination helped him win the sympathy vote - perhaps that's true, but Steven Spielberg failing to win Director suggests that maybe Lincoln's strength wasn't what it was thought to be. Of course we'll never know, and does it ultimately matter in the grand scheme (even in the not-so-grand scheme of filmdom)? No, but that won't stop plenty more discussion on the subject. We film buffs must get our fix one way or another.
Biggest surprise was obviously the tie for Sound Editing - the first to happen in quite a while - but Ang Lee winning Best Director was not far behind. Spielberg seemed the most likely prospect (like Daniel Day-Lewis, he's earned enough respect by now to be considered worthy of a third Oscar) but there was always the chance that Harvey Weinstein would come through for David O. Russell. Neither would have been a bad choice, but among the five nominees Ang Lee was perhaps most singlehandedly responsible for how well his film turned out. The other four had superb scripts, excellent casts, or both, but (not to slight its writer or actors) the real star Life of Pi was Ang Lee himself. Though his earlier films were very good (especially The Ice Storm), I haven't been a big fan of his newer Oscar contenders, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain. This made Life of Pi an even more surprising pleasure to watch.
I guess as a patriotic Canadian I am duty-bound to carp about how Affleck's picture short-changed Ken Taylor's efforts, but after all the whining that's already polluted the internet I just can't. Perhaps what actually happened would make a good movie too, but this film was really designed to be a caper flick in the style of those being made in the late 1970s (right down to the grainy photography of some of the Iran scenes). For most of the film it's clear we aren't meant to take it as a serious document. However, the clips and pictures at the end do suggest this (especially ex-President Carter's voiceover), which was a mistake and the only real grounds for complaint.
All this does create an interesting question, and the real reason for my writing here: what's acceptable to fictionalize and what isn't? A decade ago a lot of British critics were irked by U-571's crediting of the capture of the Enigma machine to the Americans, while most American reviewers weren't bothered too much (though perhaps they didn't know this was inaccurate). Critics, especially those like Jonathan Rosenbaum, Jim Emerson and the late Pauline Kael, tend to jump on liberties like this only if a third-world (or non-white) nation is the one being short-changed. Just look at the differing reactions to 1987's The Untouchables and 1988's Mississippi Burning: both are pumped-up crime movies that only use the true stories for some period and location flavor. Most of each film is arguably fiction rather than fact (though some names used were real, and the ultimate outcomes were reasonably accurate), but the critical reactions were very different. De Palma's Untouchables was highly praised, with its liberties barely being discussed, while Parker's Burning was viciously attacked by the three aforementioned critics (Mr. Emerson routinely brings it up even today as an example of pure cinematic evil).
Why the split reaction? First let's compare the two movies:
De Palma's film depicts four (or really just two) men who gun down hordes of Al Capone's goons while they help put him in prison for tax evasion. Kevin Costner's Eliot Ness ultimately gets revenge on Capone's top killer by throwing him off a building. The District Attorney & local police are little help as they are all weak-willed, corrupt, or both.
Parker's film depicts two FBI agents who track down the killers of four civil rights workers by intimidating co-conspirators and speaking to previously passive locals. Ultimately they get one guilty man to talk by pretending to be fellow Klansmen who try to kill him.
You can see that while the overall plots have some truth in them, there's a lot that's been fictionalized in both films. (Recently it even was revealed that the climactic trick that Parker's FBI agents played actually did happen, or something very much like it.) The crucial factor is that, in Mississippi Burning, the (fictionalized) efforts of FBI agents are emphasized over the real-life work of civil rights leaders. White FBI agents over black civil rights leaders. Bad. Very bad. Or so the Rosenbamian school of critics say. Fictionalizing history is fine, but if a non-white character is negatively (or less-heroically) portrayed, that sets off the alarm. Mr. Rosenbaum & Ms. Kael attacked The Deer Hunter along very similar lines, citing its depiction of a fictional North Vietnamese torture of American prisoners rather than any American atrocities. (Commendably, Mr. Emerson did not share this view.) Mr. Rosenbaum even threw out Apocalypse Now over Colonel Kurtz' fictional story of North Vietnamese cutting children's arms off, conveniently forgetting that the rest of the film depicted equally fictional American massacres. Alan Parker's Midnight Express is also often cited (by all three of these critics) for its villainous Turkish prison guards. Certainly they are way over the top in their sadism, and can't really be taken seriously as villains. But would these same critics have complained if the guards had been American (perhaps in a Texas prison) but otherwise depicted in exactly the same way, beating on a college student imprisoned on drug charges?
If you look at a lot of older Hollywood films - Gone with the Wind is most often cited, but you could also choose most of John Ford's Westerns or Preston Sturges' comedies - you'll find racial views that are pretty unenlightened by modern standards, and it's understandable to be bothered by them. Unfortunately there's now a school of thought that demands almost nothing but favorable portrayals of non-white characters, and if anything otherwise is shown, the film in question deserves to be condemned. Mr. Emerson even cited Matt Dillon's rescue of Thandie Newton in Crash - a white man rescuing a black woman! Evil! EVIL! (Certainly that film had a lot of faults, but that sequence is pretty low on the list.) Going back to Argo, some critics like Mr. Rosenbaum are taking it to task for its depiction of Iranians (he even listed it as the year's worst film). Yes, you do witness the protesters storming the building at the start of the movie (and the diplomats walking fearfully through a market later on), but the introduction to the movie lets us see why the protesters are unhappy with America and why they're doing what they're doing. As for the marketplace scene: we're seeing everyone through the diplomats' eyes, folks! When you're in fear of being captured at any moment, anybody you see will seem threatening to you whether they really are or not. This device has been used in countless movies without much criticism, so it's silly to single it out here.
What this all amounts to is this: if the real-life story had been about Americans being sheltered at the Indian or Kenyan embassy, would Argo's fictionalizations have been tolerated by American critics? My guess is no. My guess is that this film would have been condemned by a large chunk of them: not even the hardcore Rosenbamians like Jim Emerson, but even the softer politically-correct types like Michael Phillips. Please don't think I believe this film should be condemned for its fictionalizations - my point is that critics need to tone down their so-called sensitivities and realize that D. W. Griffith, John Ford and Margaret Mitchell are long gone. Not every unheroic (or not-fully-dimensional) black character is evidence of insidious racism.
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