BEFORE: From models who want to be actors to....more actors. I've got a few films about plays and playwrights lined up for this week. Linking from "The Notorious Bettie Page", Gretchen Mol carries over, tonight playing Marion Davies, the future wife of William Randoph Hearst. And this sort of follows the Rita Hayworth films because it focuses on her husband, Orson Welles. That's my twisted organizational logic for you.
THE PLOT: A true story of politics and art in the 1930s U.S., focusing on a leftist musical drama and attempts to stop its production.
AFTER: Let me see if I've got this straight - there really was a play called "Cradle Will Rock", which Orson Welles' theater company tried to stage, and the play seen in this film is not exactly that play. And before he died, Welles was trying to make a film called "Cradle Will Rock", which would have been a narrative accounting of what was done in the 1930's to try and stage that play. This film is not that story either, not exactly. This is a fictionalized account of those events, with a couple of other storylines weaved in, with fictional people mixed in with real ones. Hmm, right away this one set off my B.S. meter, because when someone messes with real events, I start wondering WHY.
If "The Notorious Bettie Page" was guilty of not having a point to make, this film suffers from trying to make too many. There's stuff here about the nature of art, the creative process, labor unions, the Red scare, the Great Depression, class struggle, patronage, censorship, etc. etc. It's a lot to cover - and it seems like the 1930's might have been a different and confusing time. But after seeing other films about the House Committee on Un-American Activities, I used to be dead-set against that whole blacklisting thing, but after seeing all of the points of view expressed here, now I'm not so sure. (I'll explain this later.)
The four stories woven together here include: 1) the aforementioned staging by Welles's theater troupe of an allegedly radical play about a steel-workers strike, funded by the Federal Theater Project, 2) the testifying in front of the committee done by managers of the FTP, 3) the prep work being done by a ventriloquist and a whistle-blower he seems to sweet on as they prepare to testify (though they never actually do?) and 4) Nelson Rockefeller's commissioning of a mural by Diego Rivera, which turns out to be "leftist". There are a number of problems with this structure, or lack thereof, but the main one seems to be that the storylines never converge in a satisfying way. Other films like "Crash", "Traffic" and "Babel" have pulled this sort of thing off better, because they understood that the plotlines need to connect, or at least influence each other, otherwise things end up seeming more or less random.
Of the four plotlines, it's tough to say which one is more disconnected from the others - and the stunt casting seems inclined to get as many famous actors and characters into the film as possible, which amounts to the equivalent of name-dropping. What's worse is that the storyline is firing in so many directions at once, trying to land something akin to a point, that it ends up contradicting itself. The play is pro-union, yet Actors Equity seems against it. So, are labor unions good or bad? Liberal or conservative? I don't even know any more.
NITPICK POINT: When I say that labor unions are seen as "bad", I mean the part where the union prohibits the actors from taking the stage to perform the radical play. What this means is that they are forbidden to perform it in public, not specifically forbidden from getting on stage. The solution of having the actors stand in the audience to perform may satisfy the letter of the law, but not the spirit. I'd wager that they'd still be drummed out of the union, technicalities aside.
NITPICK POINT #2: If you don't like a mural painting, isn't it a lot easier to just paint over it, rather than destroy the whole wall with sledgehammers and jackhammers?
Now, when I said that the blacklisting has now become a more complex issue for me, what I mean is that you can take any controversial issue - let's take a more modern one like gay marriage. It may be a simple issue to you, but it's also simple to your opponent on the other side of the issue. By that I mean that everyone involved is trying to do the "right thing", as they define it. Gay people are trying to stand up for their rights, which is admirable. Conservatives are trying to defend the institution of marriage, so they believe they're doing the right thing as well. No one is trying to do the wrong thing as they see it, it's just that people can't agree on what the right thing is. And me? I'm sitting on the sidelines laughing as DOMA is struck down as unconstitutional time and time again - meaning that the well-meaning people who passed that act inadvertently opened the door in their state for gay marriage to become legal, which is not what they intended at all. But then, I'm a big fan of irony.
I now see the blacklisting, the HCUA and even the McCarthy hearings in a similar light - the government was trying to do the right thing by fighting Communism, the people who testified were trying to do the right thing, and the people who didn't testify were trying to do the right thing. Everyone feels they are the hero of their own story, nobody sees themself as a villain, and in the end we get a big mess, and history decides the winners.'
With that said, it should be the job of a historical biopic to sort through all of the information and clarify things, not to make them more confusing.
Also starring Hank Azaria (last seen in "Love and Other Drugs"), Ruben Blades (last seen in "Safe House"), John Cusack (last seen in "Shadows and Fog"), Joan Cusack (last seen in "Where the Heart Is"), Cary Elwes (last seen in "Comic Book Villains"), Philip Baker Hall (last seen in "Mr. Popper's Penguins"), Cherry Jones (last seen in "New Year's Eve"), Angus Macfayden (last seen in "We Bought a Zoo"), Bill Murray (last seen in "Hyde Park on Hudson"), Vanessa Redgrave (last seen in "Howards End"), Susan Sarandon (last seen in "Anywhere But Here"), Jamey Sheridan, John Turturro (last seen in "Summer of Sam"), Emily Watson (last seen in "War Horse"), Bob Balaban (last seen in "Alice"), Jack Black (last seen in "The Muppets"), Kyle Gass, Paul Giamatti (last seen in "Rock of Ages"), with cameos from Harris Yulin, Dominic Chianese, Audra McDonald.
RATING: 3 out of 10 spotlights
No comments:
Post a Comment