The problem with Hollywood movies today is not necessarily
stupidity or too much sex and violence. It’s that in too many of
today’s movies, characters never change.
A perfect example is Rent, the film adaptation of
Jonathan Larson’s hit play. I absolutely loved this film — that
is, for the first 90 minutes. The gifted cast is charismatic and
the songs terrific (if not Rodgers and Hart). More importantly, the
story is compelling. A group of bohemians in New York circa 1989
can’t pay their rent. Their landlord is the father-in-law of one of
their former comrades, a former boho who “sold out” and became a
yuppie.
It ain’t Shakespeare (or even Puccini), but there are
interesting lines of conflict. Mark is a film maker whose footage
of a riot gets him noticed by a local tabloid television show. Rock
musician Roger resists the advances of stripper Mimi because he is
HIV positive — not knowing that she is also. A lesbian couple
struggle because one of them can’t be faithful.
These are situations that are ripe for the kind of personal
transformation that give drama its heft. How will Mark negotiate
the world of television and the conflict with the conventional? How
will New Mexico change Roger? How will Maureen struggle to overcome
promiscuity, which hurts her preppie girlfriend? After all, change
and transformation are the very stuff of drama; Scarlett O’Hara
goes through the hell of war and hunger and is reborn as someone
tougher and wiser — “after all, tomorrow is another day.” In
Casablanca, Bogey goes from cynic to patriot — and gives
up rather than gets the girl. In The Lord of the Rings,
every single character changes dramatically from beginning to end.
More recently, in the great film Capote we see a writer
undone by his own ambition and manipulation.
But to most the Hollywood left, the defense of leftist orthodoxy
means that characters do not change. This is what undoes
Rent. Near the end of the film a character dies, and it
blows apart friendships. The rock musician sells his guitar and
moves to New Mexico — for about 45 seconds, then he returns to New
York. Aspiring director Mark actually gets a paying job — then
quits. The “uptight” lesbian decides that promiscuity ain’t all
that bad. Mimi the stripper dies — but wait! She’s actually alive
again, saved by the dead transvestite Angel, who told her to “go
back.”
To be fair, there was one film conservatives embraced that was
guilty of the same thing — the awful Forrest Gump. Lead
character Forrest doesn’t change — heck, he doesn’t even think. He
just stands there for two hours, reacting to what goes on around
him. Yes, his values of love and loyalty are venerable. But he
never has to pass through any fire to come to hold those beliefs.
When things get rough, he goes on a cross-country jog.
This is not only dramatic malpractice, it evidences a kind of
cowardice. Liberal orthodoxies about politics and culture have
become sacramental in some circles, and better to make a movie that
moves from point A to point A than risk undermining those beliefs.
In North Country — which tanked — a woman has to take on
the sexism of her workplace, and is exactly the same person after
two hours. George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck
spends almost two hours on Joseph McCarthy and the 1950s and never
mentions Mao, Whittaker Chambers, or any of the actual Soviet spies
who were in the government. Edward R. Murrow serves as liberal
Gibraltar, everlasting, unchanging, implacable in the face of a
genuine communist threat. Forget politics — how much more tonic
would be a film about a character who must alter course at the risk
of his life. Indeed, why has no one ever made a film of
Witness, the remarkable memoir by Whittaker Chambers?
Because Chambers traveled from left to right, and that just
can’t be depicted in Hollywood. And it’s been going on a long time.
I recently revisited the Woody Allen film Manhattan, and I
was struck by a particular scene. Woody Allen’s character meets a
woman played by Diane Keaton, and they fight. Keaton’s character is
a woman from Philadelphia, and she’s in New York working as a
journalist. She works for a magazine called Insight that
is run by “shmucks mired in 1930s radicalism.” She rejects what she
calls “the hall of the overrated.” In that hall are, among others,
Lenny Bruce, Norman Mailer, Carl Jung, and Ingmar Bergman —
Allen’s favorite film maker. Allen bristles when his hero is
attacked, but Keaton goes in for the kill: “[Bergman] is just so
bleak and Scandinavian. It’s all that fashionable pessimism and
Kierkegaard — ‘the silence of God.’ Ok, I get it. I loved it when
I was at Radcliffe, but you outgrow it. Let’s face it: it’s the
dignifying of our own psychological and sexual hang-ups by
attaching them to these grandiose philosophical issues. I mean, I’m
from Philadelphia, I believe in God.”
You have to give Allen credit: he pulled no punches in
introducing a smart, articulate character to challenge his Upper
West Side liberalism. But then, with no explanation, Keaton’s
journalist loses her edge. She suddenly becomes Annie Hall,
fumbling, stuttering, and smitten by Allen’s charms. But then she
goes back to the married man she had been having an affair with. He
ends that film at exactly the place where she began it — sans the
wit and edge and conservative streak. This is not to say that a
character can’t go from right to left. But there’s no reason for
it. Perhaps Allen, like most of his audience, simply assumes
conservatism is a mental illness and Keaton got over it. Indeed, in
Crimes and Misdemeanors Allen depicts conservatism
literally as a mental illness.
Yet the best movies are the ones that turn characters’ lives
inside out — and they tend to be conservative or family-friendly
movies. The Harry Potter series is really about nothing
but transformation and meeting the challenges of life. Ditto
The Incredibles, whose accept-your-destiny theme was
embraced by the Right. In both Saving Private Ryan and
Schindler’s List, characters experience epiphanies,
triggered by life experience and the face of evil, that dismantle
then reconstruct their world views.
My favorite number in Rent is “La Vie Boheme,” a
high-energy defense of the boho lifestyle. What makes it so winning
is how light it is; the playfulness of the scene, a wink to the
audience, says that the characters are self-aware enough to realize
that they will grow our of this phase in their life — that they
too realize that they are a bunch of dumb, if sweet, kids. Too bad
it didn’t come at the end of the show.
