THE DARK KNIGHT RISES: The Rules Aren’t Weapons Anymore, They’re Shackles

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – Directed by Christopher Nolan – Starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Anne Hathaway, Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Morgan Freeman, Matthew Modine, Cillian Murphy, Nestor Carbonell, William Devane, Brett Cullen, Thomas Lennon, and Liam Neeson.

If you’re new to the Anxiety and only stopping by because a search engine brought you here, welcome. Be aware that SPOILERS follow. Lots and lots of SPOILERS. Read ahead at your own risk.

The Dark Knight … Quits?

Over the course of Christopher Nolan’s outstanding DARK KNIGHT trilogy, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has been obsessed with turning Batman into a symbol, into something that has meaning beyond a guy in a black suit who goes out into the night to punch people. He’s wanted Batman to inspire those who are good to make Gotham better by becoming active and those who who are bad to make Gotham better by becoming inactive. In between the ending of DARK KNIGHT and the start of RISES, we saw that this worked, though not the way Bruce would have foreseen. Batman and Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) conspire to bury the evidence that Harvey Dent went all Two-Face in order to lay the blame at Batman’s feet. In the wake of Batman becoming Public Enemy No. 1, sweeping crime legislation was passed the the organized crime element of Gotham has been largely erased.

Meaning that Gotham has become, as close as is possible for a major city, a safe place to live.

Then Bane (Tom Hardy) shows up, causes all sorts of trouble (we’ll get to it), Batman comes back to active duty after eight years off because a gorgeous woman steals his mom’s pearls and a young cop shows up at his doorstep and calls him a (meow) quitter (meow), said gorgeous woman betrays him, Bane breaks his back, Bruce gets dumped overseas, Bruce rises, big final battle in which Bats appears to blow himself up in order to save the city and …

He retires to Italy with gorgeous woman, starting a new life under a new identity, and nods to Alfred in an outdoor cafe.

What’s heroic about that ending? Bruce Wayne, who wants to inspire Gotham to become something better, decides to run away with Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) because, screw it, his body is wearing down, he’s broke, and if they need anything, it’s not like Selina just can’t steal it for them.

I’m sure Bruce has a great life in Italy painting houses for the rest of his life or something, but it’s a completely dumb ending because the message it sends is that being a hero is not unlike being a professional athlete – you give the best athletic years of your life to your profession, and then when it wears down, you fade away into the sunset.

What bothers me about the ending isn’t that Bruce can’t physically play dress up anymore. When we first see Bruce around Wayne Manor (he hosts public events but will not attend them, preferring to stay hidden inside his big house), he’s limping around on a cane and looking the worse for wear. I completely thought he was faking, and that at some point he’d toss the cane aside and stop pretending to be Bruce and reclaim the Bat mantle. When he tells Alfred (Michael Caine) to schedule a medical appointment for him at whatever hospital the injured Jim Gordon is in, I just thought it was a convenient way for him to get close. Not so. The doctor (Thomas Lennon) lays out all sorts of injuries: the absence of cartilage in his knees, serious brain trauma, and on and on, revealing that Bruce isn’t playing injured, but really has given much of his body over to his bat-related pursuits. That Nolan has gone this way is to his credit; superhero films typically focus on the emotional injuries while any physical injuries are largely cosmetic, but here Nolan pulls back the curtain to show us that all of those shots of bruises and scratches and puncture wounds he’s show us over the course of the trilogy aren’t just to show off Bale’s physique – there’s a real, debilitating consequence to them that adds up over time.

Of course, when it’s time to fight, Bruce doesn’t walk around complaining about his sore back, doesn’t limp around like a pro wrestler selling a injured knee, and doesn’t forget people’s names or how to use things that one might expect from someone who’s suffered that much brain trauma, but it does allow us to see these fight scenes as something other than cinematic ballet. The fight scenes in RISES are brutal. Nolan doesn’t offer up any visual BAM! and POW! but they’re in the movie with every punch and kick thrown.

So Bruce is really injured. Good. He probably can’t continue to be Batman. Cool. But the idea that Bruce runs away to live a life beyond Batman is kinda bogus. There’s no heroism to running away with Selina Kyle and turning your back on a city that needs to be nearly completely rebuilt. Batman saves the day and inspires the city to, at the very least, rise up to meet Bane’s challenge, but then his job is done? Gotham is about to face it’s single biggest challenge in rebuilding itself and Bruce wants to run away?

Bruce is certainly entitled to getting some rest and relaxation after everything he’s been through, but I find it incredibly disappointing that he fails to embrace the words Alfred spoke earlier in the film. The two men have some harsh words when Bruce decides to become Batman again, which results in Alfred quitting. Alfred’s point, however, was that Bruce didn’t need to become Batman to inspire the city. He’s sitting on all this incredible forensic technology that would benefit the police, but he refuses to give it to them because they’re not ready for it and might misuse it. He’s sitting on a new form of fusion energy reactor, but he refuses to let it out to the public because … wait for it … they’re not ready for it and someone might turn it into a weapon. Alfred tells Bruce that he can apply himself to the city in other ways and do just as much good, but Bruce is locked on the idea of being a symbol.

At the end of the film, after Bruce has faked his death, and all of his assets are being sold off to pay for debts, and Wayne Manor has been turned over to the city to be a new home for orphaned children, and Detective John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has been given the Batcave, and Alfred has been given whatever was left, and someone has fixed the Bat signal, Bruce and Selina have relocated to Italy, leaving behind that demolished city. I’m glad that he’s happy but he’s missed Alfred’s fundamental point – that he can help his city in ways other than being Batman. One of the plot points in the film has Bruce lose nearly entire fortune due to a board member’s illegal trading on Bruce’s account (his plan was to bankrupt Bruce and buy Wayne Enterprises on the cheap), but Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) says it’s possibly to eventually prove it and recover the funds, but Bruce can’t be bothered to do this. He just wants out, and I get it, but he’s not doing what’s best for his city. At the end, he’s doing what’s best for him.

Was that really the point of all this?

Even if he couldn’t get all of that money back, he’s still got his brain, which is as valuable as the money or equipment or symbolism, and it would allow him to have a life beyond Batman and inside his city. Bruce had such a man-crush on Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) in DARK KNIGHT that it would make sense for him to follow in Harvey’s footsteps and become the “White Knight” of Gotham, being a philanthropist instead of a lawyer, but giving his money, his time, and his brain to improving the city.

Instead, he tosses them a few gifts and leaves it up to Blake to become Gotham’s new vigilante.

That final argument between Alfred and Bruce rings a bit false, or repetitive, or just silly because what does it prove? That Alfred really will leave? Well, he does, and at first I was really disappointed by it. I wondered when Alfred would re-establish himself in the narrative, but he doesn’t until the epilogue. Nolan has assembled an exceptional cast of actors for his DARK KNIGHT films, but Caine has been at the top of that chart and it’s a curious decision to bench your best player halfway through the film, let alone that it didn’t make much narrative sense for Alfred to bail when times were toughest.

As the film rolled on, however, it becomes clear why Nolan jettisoned Alfred – there was nothing for him to do. Bane ends up cutting Gotham off from the rest of the world and setting up a chaos-filled, down-with-rich modern day revolution, and there’s really nothing Alfred could be doing. I mean, sure, he could hang out in the Batcave and, you know, do all those things he does when Bruce is around. Or he could, you know, be out helping people. Or maybe even fighting, since we know from the last film he was in the military, but that view of Alfred doesn’t fit into Nolan’s world because even though Gotham is going through this massive crisis, no one really does anything they weren’t normally doing. Gordon and Blake are still cops gathering intel and trying to solve the mystery of where the bomb is being kept, Lucius is still the quiet man in charge of the board members holed up and working on science solutions, and Bruce is off building himself back up. There seems to be nothing for Alfred to do in Nolan’s damaged Gotham; he has become a relic and unable to contribute to the narrative.

I made passing mention in my DARK KNIGHT review that Nolan is something of an illusionist and that’s in evidence here to a much greater degree. If you go to a movie for a tight, sensible narrative, you might not enjoy RISES all that much. Nolan’s general storytelling technique is to sketch out a Big Idea but then focus on the arcs of the individual characters talking about that Big Idea. That’s what he’s interested in … characters and ideas, not waterproof narrative coherency. What’s amazing is that he’s such an incredible talent and creates such interesting stories that a good number of people (myself included) are happy to sit in a theater and absorb the show, making a choice to ignore any of the red flags that pop up.

In RISES, for instance, Bane turns Gotham into revolutionary France rather easily. Why? Because the story needs him to do this in order to create a big, fitting end to the trilogy. It doesn’t really make sense that Gotham would so easily turn against each other at the urging of a muscle-bound terrorist with a mask, but here they are, going rabid as soon as Bane tells them to take back their city. Bane is in possession of a retirement speech that Gordon had written where he comes clean about Harvey/Two-Face and exonerating Batman, and he reads the letter and everyone instantly believes him. If anyone questions the veracity of the letters, we don’t see it.

The admission letter itself, is problematic. After all this time, Gordon is going to out his and Batman’s cover-up? Why? Guilt? Go to church. Wisely, Gordon never actually delivers the note, which suggests that writing it down serves as a form of confessional for him, but he must have entertained the idea to deliver the letter because he brought it with him. Maybe this is Gordon’s guilt shining through, or maybe he’s punishing himself for his wife leaving with their children (apparently unable to see him propping up the man who was going to kill his son), or maybe he’s tired of seeing Batman’s name dragged through the mud. Whatever the case, the decision to write the letter now does signal that Gordon misses the old days a bit. He has to realize that revealing all of this information will effectively serve as a jailbreak, letting out countless criminals who were prosecuted by Dent, but there he goes, jotting it down on paper. What’s worse, is that this letter also serves as Gordon’s retirement announcement, as if everyone’s going to go, “Sure thing, Jim, have a nice rest of your life,” instead of arresting him and tossing him in jail for all the crimes he and Batman committed.

Because let’s be clear – Batman is, by the letter of the law – a criminal. He’s not guilty of all the Dent crimes he took “credit” for, but he’s guilty of all sorts of crimes. I’m not sure I buy Deputy Commissioner Peter Foley’s (Matthew Modine) decision to go after Batman instead of Bane, but Foley is a political animal looking to make the collar Gordon never could.

Then there’s Bane’s weakness – his mask. When Bruce has been dumped into the prison where Bane was raised, there’s still prisoners there who remember him and tell Bruce his story. All that’s fine, but then they tell Bruce that Bane is in constant pain that’s only kept in check … by his mask. Meaning that the key to Bruce having a chance to take him down is to … punch him in the face.

I know Cinematic Bats doesn’t have the experience that Comic Book Bats has, but if I was fighting a big, scary dude with a mask on his face, I think I might, I don’t know, hit it, at some point, if only to shut up his modulated voice. I certainly wouldn’t need some dude half a world away to tell me that this was the key to defeating Bane.

The prisoners’ relationship to Bruce is rather inconsistent. They know Bane has dumped him there, and one of them has even been assigned to watch over him, in order that he can watch TV to get updates from Gotham. (I’m not even going to get into how Bruce can get Gotham Cable News in a hole in the ground on the other side of the planet and everyone is totally okay with this.) The only way to get out of this prison is to climb up through the hole that just so happens to look like the well he fell through when he was a kid. They cheer Bruce when he makes the attempt (cheering “Rise” in their native language) but while the medical man tells Bruce about Bane’s weakness, he also lets Bruce believe that Bane was the one and only person to ever climb out of the prison, when in fact it was Talia al Ghul (Marion Cotillard).

And why does Bane allow all of Gotham’s cops to remain underground? Because he wants them to suffer? Or because the story needs them to stick around so Gordon has some ground troops to deploy against Bane’s troops in the final battle.

Illusionists (like the League of Shadows, the group formerly led by Ra’s al Ghul and now led by Bane) use misdirection, and Nolan does this, too, because while this clunky, contrived narrative is going on, Nolan does such a great job of creating heightened interpersonal drama that I’m largely willing to forgive faults in the story if they’re needed to hit the emotional notes.

Nolan gets another round of brilliant performances from his cast. Tom Hardy is really terrific as Bane, though after an entire movie of being super bad-ass, he’s dismissed by the Cat with one blast from the Bat-cycle. She gives Bats a funny line about how she’s not totally committed to his “no guns” policy (and don’t think Batman’s earlier declaration of that policy didn’t ring extra loud in the aftermath of the Aurora shootings), but it does open up questions the narrative doesn’t want to answer. When Bane reads Gordon’s letter on the TV, Gordon is at Blake’s apartment, and Blake comes down hard on Gordon for having dirty hands. Gordon insists that sometimes you reach a point that’s so far gone that “the rules aren’t weapons anymore … they’re shackles,” and that you need to work outside the law. He and Bats were willing to do this with Harvey Dent for the good of the city, but now Bruce won’t cross that line to take out a gun and pop Bane in the head? Why? Because the physical line is further than the philosophical line? He’s willing to put Gotham through all this pain instead of doing what Selina eventually has to do to defeat Bane?

I’m not a huge Anne Hathaway fan but she’s really good here, too, as is the usual standout performances from Bale, Caine, Freeman, and Oldman. With Selina, Bruce finally has a match. I didn’t think Hathaway had it in her to stand up to Bale’s intensity, but her performance displays a Selina Kyle that’s able to shape situations instead of dominating them. Gordon-Levitt and Modine are also good.

The best line in the movie is when Batman is about to take off with the bomb and sacrifice himself. Gordon admits that he never really cared who was underneath the mask, but since this is the end. Bats doesn’t tell him outright, but does tell him that a hero can be anyone, even someone who puts a coat around a young boy’s shoulders and tells him it’s going to be alright, which is how they first met on the night of the murder of Bruce’s parents.

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES is a fitting end to Nolan’s trilogy, and Nolan proves himself the first director, and Batman proves itself the first superhero franchise, that delivers three excellent movies. There’s no drop-off in quality here, at all, though from much of the critical reaction (both professional and personal), it does seem that tastes have changed a bit since THE DARK KNIGHT hit theaters four years ago. 2012 has been an excellent year for superheroes, though, as the three biggest cinematic franchises currently in operation (the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man, and Batman) all released outstanding films this summer. Not only that, but Avengers, Amazing Spider-Man, and RISES are all very different movies, with Avengers offering the rousing thrill-ride, Amazing spinning a teen-angst web, and RISES asking the big questions.

The end of RISES infers that Blake will continue on the Bats tradition, but I can’t believe we’ll ever see that future. I don’t envy the director who gets control of Batman next, but what young filmmaker wouldn’t want that challenge? With Man of Steel hitting theaters next summer, and Marvel running full engines ahead with their slate of projects, I imagine we’ll see the Batman reboot in theaters no later than 2017, and probably closer to 2015. Christopher Nolan and his team have done superheroes proud, creating a self-contained universe that took from some of the best comic book story lines in Batman’s history.

As a fan of Batman, then, and even with all my minor quibbles, there’s only one thing I can really say to Nolan for creating these three films.

Thank you.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND: Alice Among the Assh*les

Alice in Wonderland (2010) – Directed by Tim Burton – Starring Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Crispin Glover, Matt Lucas, and Anne Hathaway; Featuring the Voices of Stephen Fry, Alan Rickman, Michael Sheen, Barbara Windsor, Timothy Spall, and Christopher Lee.

Every movie has a message, whether it wants to have one or not. In Tim Burton’s ALICE IN WONDERLAND, the message is this: You have to do what’s expected of you before you can do what you want. As messages go, it’s not a bad one, especially in early 21st century America, where it seems everyone is expected to either go to college, join the military, or get a low-paying, hard-working job. Societies tend to work this way; the general populace wants to watch films about individualists but they don’t want them mucking up the agreed-upon system. The hope of Burton’s message is that you have to earn your own path – but it is a path that is attainable. Just do what others want until you have enough capital to tell them you’re flying away.

It is critically important that Burton reinforces this idea at the film’s end; Alice has come back to Earth from post-apocalyptic Underland and convinces Lord Ascot, her father’s old would-be business partner, that she’s got a daring, bold plan to make them money, and he takes her on as an apprentice. The film’s final scene is Alice boarding a ship, bound for China, where she’ll be the first to open trade with that nation. (More in a moment.) Only one character that we’ve seen comes with her, and that is Absolem (the blue hookah-smoking caterpillar that comes to her now as a blue butterfly; voiced by Alan Rickman). Absolem is the only character in the film who’s primary involvement with Alice is to get her to realize her own potential.

Other than Absolem and Lord Ascot, every other character who has a major interaction with Alice wants her to do what they want and not what she wants. It could even be argued that Absolem wants Alice to know who she is so she fulfills the prophecy to fight the Jabberwocky, but at least his method is to allow her to come to her own conclusion. Both Absolem and Ascot get something from Alice’s choices (Absolem gets Underland saved, Ascot gets potentially richer), but Alice is in control of both.

Really, then, in both England and Underland, Alice is surrounded by self-serving assholes who expect her to act based on what’s best for them, whether she’s interested or not.

It’s an interesting and not wholly effective technique. While it’s nice to see a fairy tale where not only is the fantasy world just as demanding towards our hero as the real world but where the hero recognizes and resents it, the technique also makes it hard to root for Alice going along with the Underland crowd. Granted, someone has to kill the Jabberwocky, one supposes, but by the time Alice is being pressured by the White Queen you really just wish she’d toss the Vorpal Sword into a lake and tell these nutbags to sort out their own issues.

Because the only real difference between the Red Queen (Carter) and the White Queen (Hathaway) is that Her Whiteness isn’t quick with the killing. Hathaway plays her wonderfully as a flighty, passive-aggressive, off-her-rocker Queen that seems the very embodiment of being the lesser of two evils. She’s Obama to the Red Queen’s McCain, or maybe more accurately Al Gore to Red’s George W – neither of them are actual leaders, but depending on one’s point-of-view, one would certainly seem to be a little less offensive.

Nineteen year-old Alice’s pre-Underland life (or more accurately, her time in between trips to the fantasy land) sees her mother attempting to marry her off to Lord Ascot’s son, who’s rich, but a loser, and is just trying to trap Alice further into high society life. Alice’s mom isn’t an evil witch or anything (Ascot’s wife fills this role nicely), but that’s the point; it’s not just the mean that trap you, it’s the weak and meek who simply strap themselves in and ride the ride. There’s a huge scene at the Ascot estate that’s all boring dancing and society-demanded behavior. There’s a huge level of phoniness to it all, of course, as evidenced by Alice’s brother-in-law making out with someone who’s not his wife, but the overriding existence of this whole party sequence is to show us how trapped Alice is by society’s expectations.

Cool.

Burton does a good job of not overplaying the hand too much – we get the message a few times but we’re getting it from different people so it provides a sense of how completely trapped Alice is and not just that there’s a singular wicked stepmother responsible for everything bad.

But when Alice leaves Ascot’s kid on bended knee, waiting for an answer as the entire fancy pants crowd watches, you’re ready for her to jump down the rabbit hole – or the hole beneath a tree, as it’s played here – and get on with it.

Perhaps because Burton has an Alice on the verge of womanhood instead of one that’s a child, the demands of Underland’s expectations really pop in this version. Almost everything Alice does in Underland is every bit the society-driven expectation that she’s experiencing from the jerks back home.

She lands in a round room full of doors, and a vial tells her to “Drink This.” Then she finds a cake that tells her to “Eat This.” There is no explanation or hint as to the consequences of these actions because Alice is beneath whomever left the food for her to find. Alice dutifully drinks and eats and drinks again and finds herself in Underland, where the local community of greeters dismisses her as not the real Alice, even though they don’t know for sure.

She needs to be “the right Alice,” you see, because the right Alice is foretold to be the slayer of the Jabberwocky on Frabjous Day, whatever the stupid that means.

Alice has fled from a society that expects her to act a certain way only to land in a society that expects her to act a certain way.

Alice is convinced this is all a dream because if it’s not a dream then she might probably run off and leave this assholes waiting like she did the fancy pants at Ascot’s.

At this point I got frustrated with the movie and sighed loudly several times, which only succeeded in bringing Darwin into the room, looking to be taken for a walk. Which I did. Because the expectations of a dog who might soil your rug are never to be denied.

Why did I keep watching? Well, for starters, ALICE really is a beautiful movie to watch. Despite getting yet another run down fantasy world, Burton offers up a wide palette of bright, vibrant colors, which combined with visually striking fantasy creatures (some CGI, some CGI/live combos). The visuals are so good that you’ll almost forget that Burton used to be strange for a reason and not just because he can, and honestly, this is his best use of the weird since Big Fish.

Simply put, ALICE is the prettiest live action cartoon since SPEED RACER.

Underland’s animals all look amazing, from the fantastical Bandersnatch to the chess piece and playing card armies of the Queens White and Red. The backgrounds look amazing, the digital and make-up enhanced Crispin Glover and Helena Bonham Carter look great, and there is a constant shifting of colors so your eyes never get bored looking at the same palette over and over again.

You can tell real professionals put this film together and that’s worth a lot – though not nearly everything.

I’m a thousand-plus words into this reaction and I have yet to mention Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter. Here’s why: the character is rather useless.

Of all the main characters in the film, it’s the Hatter who’s the least important. You could drop him out of this film and it wouldn’t be worse for it. That’s not a knock on Depp, who does what he can with this role, but the Hatter is neither compelling nor interesting. He used to work for the White Queen and now he doesn’t and he’s crazy. Bravely, I suppose, he’s not even crazy like a fox. He’s just weirdly nuts with his brain quick to scatter; this makes him sympathetic to Alice, but not to me because he’s using her as much as anyone else. He gets points for saving her from the Knave of Hearts (Glover) but he immediately takes her to the White Queen, though they don’t arrive.

Everyone just wants Alice to get the Vorpal Sword so she can kill the Jabberwocky because they all suck too much to do it themselves. There’s something here about how societies can be trapped by prophecies but that’s a comment about fantasy worlds more than real worlds and really, the film doesn’t do anything with it. We’re just supposed to accept it. Well, screw that, I’ve got a new story idea; thanks, Tim Burton, for not thinking too hard about the story. There’s also something here about how societies can have their spark beaten out of them by dictators, and that they can end up simply wishing for rescue instead of doing anything about it themselves, but the film doesn’t do anything with that, either.

In fact, the real big moment for the Hatter is when the Cheshire Cat helps him escape his beheading and he rallies the animals of Underland to rise up against the Red Queen. They do, and they all (like, maybe 6 of them) hurry off to the White Queen’s place, where they … well, where they try to convince Alice to do the real fighting.

Because that’s what the prophecy says.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND is totally that movie that starts out with a solid idea, sets it up reasonably well, and then the wheels don’t fall off so much as they sputter to a halt. For all the crazy, wild, strange things one finds in Underland, it would be nice to have found an engaging narrative, as well.

Alice ends up accepting her place in the prophecy, mostly because she feels bad for Hatter, I think, and she kills Christopher Lee in Jabberwocky form by beheading the big dragon thing. She actually cheezes out a “Off with your head!” before delivering the final blow, meaning maybe Tim Burton has a soft spot for those awful Joel Schumaker Batman films that came after his Michael Keaton movies.

Returning to England, Alice tells everyone off at the wedding except for Lord Ascot, whom she convinces to go off and exploit China before anyone else gets there to do it first. I guess it’s not unexpected that Alice’s reaction to being used and trapped would be to simply flip the dynamic and put herself in a position of power, but it’s a trifling turn of suck to see such an independent spirit simply buy into the existing system of colonial exploitation.

Alice’s best moment in Underland is her experiences with the Bandersnatch. When they first meet, he tries to eat her, giving her a set of nasty Wolverine-styled slashes across her arm. Mallymkun the dormouse sticks her sword into the Bandersnatch’s right eye and rips it from his head, helping to save Alice. Later, Alice takes the eye back from the mouse, who carries it around as a trophy, and gives it back to the Bandersnatch. They become uneasy allies, at first, as he allows her to steal the Vorpal Sword that he’s been protecting, but when the Red Queen’s army threatens Alice’s life, the Bandersnatch saves her.

It’s a nice arc of overcoming differences, of the monster rejecting society’s expectations to embrace his own path, but the film’s narrative drops him soon after. It’s a rare, but well-realized moment of striking out on one’s own for selfless reasons, but no one seems to notice.

Alice certainly misses the message. Maybe in the sequel, someone in China can set her straight.

POLIWOOD: Celebrities Shou- Wait, This is TV’s Fault?

Should celebrities shut up when it comes to politics? That question lies at the heart of Barry Levinson’s documentary, which is actually about how television is the most evil thing in the history of the world.

Or something.

It’s a bit hard to tell because there’s two separate ruminations at play in POLIWOOD – the first one is how television has blurred the lines between celebrities and politicians, leaving us in a Very Bad Place politically where politicians need to be telegenic and elections are run as stories sold to an expectant audience, and the second deals with the role of celebrities in politics, following The Creative Coalition (a non-partisan political group made up of entertainment types) around the Democratic and Republican National Conventions to watch celebrities talking politics.

Levinson tries to tie it all together at the end by equating politicians and celebrities, but it’s not a new argument and it’s one that’s largely unsupported by the film. He scares Rachel Leigh Cook half to death in a hotel lobby by dissolving into a depressive rant which ends with him telling her that he isn’t sure television isn’t the worst thing ever, but it puts the wrong capstone on the film that precedes it.

Levinson spends most of the film interviewing celebrities, and then every so often he makes a point about how television is ruining the electoral process. The thing is, the celebrity sequences are actually interesting, and there’s actual arguments to be made about them and their involvement in the political process but Levinson shies away from making any definitive statements about their involvement and instead gives us the warmed over arguments about television being bad.

I mean, fuck, you’re Barry Levinson. You can’t come up with something a bit more?

I have no idea why he does this, but it just emphasizes what an odd combination of subjects he’s playing with in the film. POLIWOOD really feels like it should be two films – one for celebrities and one for television – because the two halves don’t effectively intertwine.

None of which should dissuade you from watching POLIWOOD. It’s an interesting, if never fully engaging documentary, that is at its best when it’s allowing celebrities to break down the all-encompassing “celebrity” label. It does this simply and effectively, and Levinson allows the celebrities to sink or swim by their actions. Some come across as actually being interested in the process and learning about how the system works so the Creative Coalition can get better at delivering their message (Tim Daly, Lynn Whitfield) while others come across as thin-skinned and bitter (Josh Lucas, Gloria Reuben). There are a couple of old political vets (Spike Lee, Susan Sarandon) who ask pointed questions, and a couple of new arrivals (Anne Hathaway, Cook) who are trying to take it all in and absorb whatever they can because they want to do the Right Thing.

And this is beautiful because we see that celebrities are just like any other bloc of voters and it’s ignorant to lump them all together – some are smart, some are stupid, some are True Believers and some just want to be one of the cool kids.

In other words, some are worth listening to and some don’t respect you enough to actually know what they’re talking about.

It’s Hathaway and Cook that are the most engaging – both of them are trying to figure out how to conduct themselves as politically-interested celebrities, and their questions (Hathaway’s pondering if she should separate her politics from her work) and revelations (Cook’s realization that the “real” people in the film actually do resent politically active celebrities) sit at the heart of the question of politics and celebrity and I wish Levinson had pushed harder in their direction.

The two actresses contrast nicely with one another – for all of their shared doubts, Hathaway is portrayed as much more willing to get up on stage and speak, while Cook comes off much more reticent to talk and willing to listen.

The two most interesting sequences in the film revolve around the question of how the voter reacts to politically-active celebrities, and we see the best and worst of celebrities in them. (Which is far more interesting than rehashed bits about how Presidents Lincoln (ugly), Taft (fat), FDR (weak), and Adams (pudgy and a lisp) wouldn’t work in today’s television age.)

In the first sequence, the Creative Coalition meets with pollster Frank Luntz, who tries to tell them that how they get their message across is important and that sometimes, through the language they choose, they’re actually hurting their cause instead of helping it. Sarandon completely gets what he’s saying, making the point that she will always say “accountability” instead of “impeachment,” because of how those words play with voters, but Lucas and Reuben don’t want to hear anything Luntz is saying. Lucas throws a bit of a hissy fit about how “I’m not here to be lectured” and Reuben is defensive about how she feels “like you’re telling me not to talk,” (I think that quote is hers) which is sort of what Luntz is doing, but they’re missing the reason behind it. It’s understandable one would be upset about being told maybe it’s best if you don’t talk, but Luntz isn’t telling them this to be a prick (though with Luntz that sometimes comes naturally) or to silence their voice, but to try to educate them about the importance of how a message is delivered.

And yeah, that means sometimes they shouldn’t talk because voters (as we’ve seen in an earlier clip of a focus group) do have such a poor opinion of celebrities. What Luntz is doing is challenging them on what’s really important – getting heard or getting things accomplished because those two things won’t always work together.

The second scene puts celebrities and voters together and lets the voters tell the celebrities how they feel. To their credit, the voters let the celebrities have it, and to their credit, the celebrities listen and reflect and engage the voters in a dialogue.

Which the voters appreciate.

Which is what’s wrong with modern politics, that too many people are talking at each other instead of with each other.

Which is, according to Levinson, probably TV’s fault.

Which is, according to me, so much more bullshit than truth. I wouldn’t argue that TV doesn’t play a role, but blaming TV for the dissolution of political discourse is blaming the gun instead of the person pulling the trigger. Yeah, you can’t shoot someone without a gun, but the gun can’t go off without you, and the gun has no agency. The idea that TV is to blame robs us, as an audience and a nation, of our accountability in letting politicians dumb down and slick up the electoral process. You can blame networks for chasing ratings, but ratings = what the collective we watches, and Levinson lets us off the hook far too easily.

Levinson is a talented filmmaker with two interesting subjects at play, but POLIWOOD is too disjointed to make an effective argument, and coming down against TV as harshly as he does is too simplistic an answer for such a smart guy.