Photo of the Day, November 6, 2009: Newburyport Night 1
Heroic MBTA Operator and Inspector Honored: Saved Woman's Life
Week Around the Ists, November 1–7
Sunday Happenings
Book It: Book Events November 8–14
The Candidate (1972)
Thursday: 5, 7:30, and 10
The Brattle Theater
40 Brattle Street, Cambridge
more information
While we're sad the end of the presidential debates probably means the end of new metonyms for America (Joe Sixpack, we hardly knew ye), Bostonist is glad to see the election move back to its proper home, the big screen, for an unlikely face-off between Robert Redford as The Candidate and Josh Brolin as W.
Oliver Stone's W. is easily one of the fall's most anticipated movies. An explosive, political director takes on a horribly unpopular seated president, one mired in the types of scandals unseen since Watergate, and decides to play the whole thing for laughs. Somehow this doesn't seem right. We expect Stone to answer the last eight years with a strident, condemning film. Yet treating W as a comic figure is also quite natural, the result of the Daily Showification of American politics, of Americans increasingly treating their politics as light entertainment and turning to humor as a release. War may have blotted out the memory of That's My Bush!, but the underlying traits that led to that characterization still remain; they've only been obscured by the darkening public spirit.
In Picture Theory, W. J. T. Mitchell wrote, “I am old enough to remember a time when going to the movies meant going to see newsreels too…I’ve never been able to get over the idea that the news is just another kind of movie, and vice-versa" If JFK somehow returned high entertainment to a newsreel style film, W. is the flipside: the newsreel turned back into high comedy.
Its humor makes it no less political. Stone is rightly called a political director, but this has more to do with the muckraking spirit his films manifest than overt political content. JFK and Nixon are both propelled by the sense of injustice, but so too are Any Given Sunday (the exploitation of men for commercial benefit), Wall Street (outrage over the treatment of the working class), and Alexander (Baz Luhrmann was trying to steal my movie!).
Arthur Penn emphasized this point last year at the Harvard Film Archive when he placed his Bonny and Clyde in the context of the Vietnam war. People complained about the obscene violence in Bonny and Clyde, but, in his opinion, the true obscenity was the images of war Americans watched on their TV screens every day, and Bonny and Clyde was his reaction to this hyperviolence. Stone's reaction is essentially the same, reacting with humor in world where the news is more likely to laugh than to openly advocate for causes.
As prologue (to W.? the election?) the Brattle is screening The Candidate, the classic satire of a media-influenced political world, starring Robert Redford. The Candidate is a sharp, successful film, and Redford gives a great performance, one that makes us wish for a sequel where the candidate assumes his place on the list of the best fictional presidents.
Where W. would rank on that list is a question for another time.
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