Film Review | The Unknown Known

The Madness of King Don

by Thomas Delapa

 

AlterNet, April 5, 2014   

 

 

 

 

So what do we know now that we didn’t after documentarian Errol Morris’ 100-minute Q&A with Donald “I Don’t Do Quagmires” Rumsfeld in “ The Unknown Known”? Only that the former U.S. secretary of defense is still a master strategist of evasion, contradiction, misdirection and malapropism.

As a footnote, here’s what we do know to date about that dirty little Iraq War that “Rummy,” the George W. Bush White House and their nincompoop Pentagon neo-cons cooked up and spoon fed to the omnivorous American public: more than  4400 U.S. military deaths and 32,000 wounded, at least  100,000 to as many as 500,000 Iraqi fatalities, millions more displaced, and an estimated price tag of  $3 trillion, give or take a few hundred billion. 

Yet like most of the questions that Morris tosses—gently—at his subject, any such factual horrors are sidestepped, parried and danced around by a fitfully nimble Rumsfeld. Relaxed, nattily dressed and imperiously self-assured as ever, Morris’ hollow yet overstuffed man does his imitation of “Hogan’s Heroes” Sgt. Schultz (“I know nothing, nothing”) while implausibly denying personal culpability for any stink that blew back from the Iraq War, whether the phony Weapons of Mass Destruction raison d’être, prisoner torture or the fictitious links between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. 

In his Oscar-winning “ The Fog of War,” Morris at least got Lyndon Johnson-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to shoulder some of the blame for the Vietnam War quagmire. But Rumsfeld is impishly unapologetic, even as his own words are shot down by Morris’ juxtapositions with TV news footage culled from the run-up and catastrophic letdown to the 2003 Iraq invasion and subsequent U.S. occupation. Yet it’s clear that Morris’ mission isn’t to catch his subject in a Captain Queeg-style meltdown that would cause Rummy to shout “Good gracious” or “Henny-penny” and storm off the set. 

Rather, Morris is chiefly interested in the infernal meta-narrative of how those in the pinnacles of power can delude themselves for so long and so often that—perhaps—they don’t even know what the truth is anymore. This is a man seemingly without an ounce of introspection and one who surely sleeps well at night, confident he did all the right things, from his time as the youngest (44) secretary of defense, during the Gerald Ford presidency, to his Freddy Krueger-like return to the Pentagon as prime architect of the shock-and-awe Iraq and Afghanistan U.S.-led invasions.

Morris goes out of his way to humanize Rumsfeld, including humdrum details of his marriage while tracing his long career as Republican White House insider and go-to warhorse who trumpeted “peace through strength” and other hawkish mantras. We hear Morris’ off-camera questions, but the slippery answers are challenged only indirectly via news footage and period headlines, not by contrary interviews that would offer known arguments to Rumsfeld’s self-serving explanations. 

The film’s title is a quote from one of the enormous number of official memos Rumsfeld generated over the decades. In one wacky rumination from 2004 (Subject: What You Know), he writes of the “things that you think you know that it turns out you do not.” For Morris, this is a four-star analogy for his subject, a polarizing public figure who indeed is a riddle wrapped in an enigma—and cloaked in an impenetrable armor of Orwellian double-talk. As running metaphor, Morris cuts back and forth to images of a deep blue sea, significantly more fathomable than Rumsfeld himself. 

As to any possible policy misfires during his Washington tenures, Rumsfeld blithely chalks them up to the unintended consequences of war, executive decision-making and the inevitable inability for leaders like him to anticipate everything, for Pete’s sake: i.e., heck, Stuff Happens. This expedient philosophy can rationalize pretty much any horrors stretching from Abu Ghraib to Gitmo. If only Emily Littella were still on active duty, I know she’d just say, “Never mind.” 

And so it goes in Rummy-speak, as Morris sends his cameras down the rabbit hole into an upside-down universe where government morality and mea culpas have no standing, yet mad tautologies like “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence” do. In the question of those well-known phantom WMDs, such inane statements can justify anything, including interminable wars in which bodies are still piling up, peace is not won, and mass Mideast destruction marches on.

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Film Review | Anita: Speaking Truth to Power

 AlterNet,  | March 29, 2014  | By Thomas Delapa 

'Anita: Speaking Truth to Power' Reignites Fury Over Sexual Harassment and Political Might

Two decades after Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Freida Mock documents the confirmation of Clarence Thomas.

  

There she was, polite and poised in her smart, turquoise dress suit, facing off against a murderers' row of aging, not entirely august, white men, an ebony Joan of Arc versus a court of incredulous grand inquisitors. To a bitterly divided 1991 America, University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill was either witch, scorned woman, martyr or feminist heroine. In any case, when the smoke cleared it was Hill who was burned at the Senate stake.

Twenty-plus years after the most incendiary and indecent Supreme Court confirmation hearings in U.S. history, filmmaker Freida Mock flips through the sensationally lurid pages of Anita Hill v. Clarence Thomas in Anita: Speaking Truth to Power, a documentary sure to re-fan the flames of righteous indignation among anyone, man or woman, sitting to the left of Strom Thurmond.

If, as legendary attorney Clarence Darrow argued, “almost every case has been won and lost when the jury is sworn,” Anita Hill was toast as soon as she sat down to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee that steamy October weekend in 1991. Chaired by now-Veep Joe Biden of Delaware, the all-white, all-male committee wasn’t quite a kangaroo court, but it resembled something from Down Under the Mason-Dixon Line, circa 1930. Rather than hostile witnesses, this was an open-and-shut case of hostile politicos, aghast and appalled that a Supreme Court nominee and “pornography,” “pubic hair” and “penis size” could be publicly uttered in the same sentence. 

For investigative reporter Jane Mayer (then with the Wall Street Journal), the televised hearings—“Judge Judy” crossed with the Playboy Channel—were just a smokescreen for Democratic and Republican senators alike: “It wasn’t about the truth ... it was about winning.” Despite a majority of Democrats on the committee, Hill was largely led to the dogs alone. Ted Kennedy sat mostly sullen and stone-faced as a bit player.

An Oscar winner for the superior documentary, Maya Lin: A Strong Vision, Mock may not win votes from the pro-Thomas minority, but she pointedly sets out to give Hill back her voice, free of the clumsy, tedious and badgering questions posed by Biden and company. Between long, still-shocking reruns from that R-rated C-SPAN sur-reality show watched by millions in 1991, we are presented with evidence that Hill has moved on, literally, leaving her beloved small-town Oklahoma life for the greener (and far bluer) pastures of Massachusetts and Brandeis University after years of death threats, hate mail, vicious phone calls, and public confrontations.

As for Thomas himself, not surprisingly he’s nolo contendre except for his infamous, scenery-chewing costarring role as self-professed victim of a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks.” Through all his indignant denials to the committee and the nation regarding any hint of sexual harassment toward Hill (Coke? Never touch the stuff) while she was his assistant at the EEOC and the U.S. Department of Education in the 1980s, Thomas didn’t just play the race card, he dealt the whole deck to the committee members, who promptly folded under pressure. Only Sen. Paul Simon from the Land of Lincoln objected to Thomas’ nomination, while a few days later the uber-conservative Thomas eked out a win in the full senate 50-48. In one of American history’s most unjust ironies, Thomas replaced the revered Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Supreme Court justice and the victorious voice behind the landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Civil Rights decision.

But from the ashes of Hill’s public humiliation, a new wave of female empowerment rose up from Phoenix to Washington, D.C., and beyond: witness the 1992 “Year of the Woman” at the ballot box, renewed political vigor by females of all parties and races, and a new awareness of sexual harassment in the workplace. Today Anita Hill lives on as both a woman and a symbol. For her legions of admirers, she’ll always be standing on the mountaintop.

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DVD Review | Stories We Tell

Capturing the Polleys

by Thomas Delapa

For critics and serious filmgoers who’ve given up on the Academy Awards, especially after last year's Seth MacFarlane fatuous hosting fiasco, here’s another reason to shrug and say "I told you so": Despite being one of the best and most talked-about documentaries of 2013, Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell was shockingly shut out of the Oscar nominations.

The Canadian actress/director may take cold comfort in the fact that the Oscars have regularly been on the wrong side of cinema history. Leading the nominations for worst Oscar snubs: Alfred Hitchcock (nil directing awards), Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather (loser to Cabaret’s Bob Fosse), and the snub of all snubs, Orson Welles’ nonpareil Citizen Kane bested by How Green Was My Valley. Vice versa, does anyone outside of Robert Osborne remember the lachrymose Luise Rainer, winner of back-to-back best actress Oscars in the 1930s? And post Y2K, let’s just fugetabout The Departed, the noxious 2006 best picture winner that should be left to sleep with the fishes.

Almost as myopic in Oscar oversights have been the erratic, often obscure choices over the decades in the Best Foreign Film category. Since the Academy only allows one entry per country each year, voters are forced to dole out the nominations in globally “let’s all share” fashion, not so unlike ribbons handed out to all the kiddies on Field Day. While films from major directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Bresson and Japan's Yasujiro Ozu have never been nominated, most of the nominees—and more than a few winners— have faded out in movie memory. 

Polley can also take some solace in her own award for Best Canadian Film (and the $100,000 prize that went with it), while U.S. audiences can now see her extraordinary narrative recounted on DVD. In our era of one-sided, deceptively manipulated “docu-fictions,” Polley lyrically reconstructs (and deconstructs) an extremely personal story, generously bringing in a kaleidoscope of disparate, sometimes contradictory viewpoints.

In a near oedipal odyssey, Polley documents her search to uncover a maternal secret that lay hidden in her family's closet for 28 years. The main character in the mystery is Polley’s mother Diane, a onetime Toronto casting director and actress. While not literally present to tell her own story, Polley mere nostalgically appears in a series of glowing home movies (some actually recreated). At the other end of the Freudian spectrum is Polley’s dad Michael, a British-born actor who settled in Toronto in the 1950s to marry and raise a family.

A la Charles Foster Kane, the life of Diane Polley is reconstructed, in jigsaw-puzzle fashion, by those who knew her best as well as by those only on the family’s borders. Vivacious and rebellious, Diane was a woman before her time, unhappy with the rigid roles of middle-class marriage and family, yet also, by most accounts, a loving if mercurial wife and mother.

A clever raconteur, Polley reveals key facts of her chronicle in measured doses, never letting us know too much of this remarkable, often touching saga at once. A 3-D puzzle of sorts (without those silly glasses), the film is skillfully glued together with a complex array of stylistic devices, from competing voice-overs (one from a prepared script read by Michael Polley) and disjunctive dubbed dialogue to standard talking-heads interviews, punctuated with lingering close-ups that speak volumes.

Polley is also smart enough to realize that “truth” is often, um, relative, particularly when people have something to gain or hide—Rashomon told us that. But in this meta-home movie that continually examines its own assumptions (sometimes to a fault), Polley unveils not simply the small story of one woman’s family secret, but by extension poignantly leads us to bigger, roomier stories about marriage, motherhood, love and life itself.  

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2/4/14

DVD Review | Blackfish (2013)

Blue Water, Black-and-White Death

by Thomas Delapa

Oceans away from the feel-good New Zealand fable Whale Rider, Blackfish swims in the same roiling documentary school as The Cove, the Oscar-winning 2009 exposé about the grisly annual slaughter of dolphins at a seaside Japanese village.

But Blackfish strikes closer much to home and lands like a punch to the gut. Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite methodically reels us into her fact-heavy investigation that fatefully begins with the much-publicized death of a SeaWorld Orlando orca trainer in early 2010. “Death” is an innocuous term for what happened to Dawn Brancheau, who was caught and shredded by Tilikum, a six-ton, twenty-foot killer whale. 

Cowperthwaite—a TV sports documentarian—is never sensational in recounting the gruesome details of this and other attacks by Tilikum since he was captured off Iceland in the 1980s. The darkness lurking at the heart of Blackfish is that the attacks were suppressed by SeaWorld officials, if not altogether deep-sixed, at least according to the gallery of former SeaWorld trainers interviewed for this scathing tract. The sheer number and sincerity of these testimonials will likely convince audiences that this is no mere mammal-hugging fish tale. And those still not hooked need only note the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s 2012 ruling and fine against SeaWorld in the wake of Brancheau’s horrid death. 

Cowperthwaite constructs her tract as equal parts horror story, mystery and marine-biology lesson. Few recent documentaries have so deftly utilized video and film footage to make such a devastating, if didactic, case. In our sea-to-shining-sea world of security and surveillance cameras, seeing is believing, and we’re afforded compelling replays of the events in chilling detail. It’s almost as if Cowperthwaite were on the trail of a cold-case murderer, as the life of “Tilly” is traced from his capture to his stay at a low-rent Canadian sea park and finally on to Florida, where his aggressive past was ignored and he became the “big splash” at Shamu Stadium.

SeaWorld visitors on any coast know that these majestic creatures (called blackfish by Native Americans) are the stars of the show, performing with their trainers in a revue of risky tricks and stunts in big-top outdoor pools. To the casual observer, the whales are happy, docile, gentle giants—Flipper’s super-sized cousins. But the ex-trainers and experts testify to a dark side, speaking candidly about the volatile nature of these massive, intelligent predators that can turn on their handlers in a heartbeat. From a natural habitat of the wide blue sea, living in tight matriarchal family “pods,” these captured orcas are torn from their kin, trained (mostly by amateurs) through strict behaviorist discipline and housed essentially in underwater cages—the net long-term result often being neurotic and aggressive behavior.  

Of all the chilling footage featured by the filmmakers, perhaps none plunges deeper into the shadowy sea-park abyss than the sight of trainer Ken Peters as he’s helplessly dragged underwater like a bathtub toy by an angry orca. Adams survived to tell about it, but Brancheau and several other mangled victims weren’t nearly as lucky.

Audiences may well agree that the tagline hook for Blackfish could be lifted from a poster carried by a recent SeaWorld animal-rights demonstrator: "Free Tilly."

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Blackfish, a Magnolia Pictures release, will be available on DVD Nov. 12, 2013.

Film Review | Argo

Watch your back, Lincoln.  After Golden Globes upsets, Argo just may be the smart-money candidate for the Oscar Best Picture award....


Praise, Don’t Blame, Canada 
by Thomas Delapa

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that there are no second acts in American lives.

Just a couple years ago, after a cluster of bombs like Gigli and Jersey Girl, it was almost curtains for Ben Affleck’s Hollywood career. But since he's taken a bow in his new role as director starting with 2007’s Gone Baby Gone, the jeers have been disappearing. His taut, true-life espionage thriller Argo is a movie for grown-ups, and may even garner him Oscar applause.

If all you remember of the 1979-81 Iranian hostage crisis is bad news, ABC’s Nightline and Ted Koppel's hair, then Argo is just the ticket for prime-time counter-programming. This isn’t the story of the 52 Americans held hostage in the U.S. embassy by Islamic revolutionaries for over a year. Rather, Affleck and screenwriter Chris Terrio switch the focus to six other Americans who fled the Tehran embassy and hid out in the house of the Canadian ambassador, and their daring run for freedom.

Argo unfolds like a fact-based Mission: Impossible—and, yes, it does all sound too absurdly impossible to be true. Low-key, if thoughtfully stolid, Affleck is Tony Mendez, the CIA undercover agent who dreams up a fantastic plot that could only happen in the movies: Create new identities for the six as Canadians scouting Iranian locations for a phony Hollywood sci-fi fantasy, called Argo, and then spirit them out of the country.

It’s a screwball pitch, but Mendez’s superiors in Washington (including Bryan Cranston from TV’s Breaking Bad) reluctantly take a swing, as do a profane Hollywood producer (Alan Arkin) and a make-up artist (John Goodman), who agree to create a fake production to lend cover to the ruse. The pretext is Affleck’s cue to take a flurry of roundhouse punches at Hollywood, and even himself. (“You can teach a rhesus monkey to direct in a day,” Arkin snorts.)

Terrio’s wry, lean script (based on an 2007 Wired article by Josh Bearman) is a hairy balancing act, crossbred between Tinseltown satire and topical thriller. Affleck’s casting choices for the drama are boldly non-Hollywood, mostly unknowns who add grit to the life-and-death, documentary-like luster. Along with the shaggy hair and super-sized ‘70s glasses, you may also spy stealth jabs at Star Wars-era American escapism, standing in stark contrast to the dark times that found the U.S. empire at a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate low.

In Argo's sly “meta” metaphors, Affleck isn’t only the film's director, but acts as director of the six players who must pose as Canadians, drilling them for their roles. (Their motivation: um, to live). It will be his impossible mission to lead them through a dress rehearsal, into the airport and out of the country, negotiating a gauntlet of Iranian security agents, like Moses with a movie camera. Unlike the over-the-top special effects and superhuman feats of a Tom Cruise, Affleck and his Argo-nauts do something more improbable—dramatizing real, ordinary human beings forced to do the heroically extraordinary.

As director, Affleck also does something heroic, holding shots to organically draw out the tension and suspense. The conventional (i.e., stale) wisdom in the Hollywood action movie is for breakneck editing that holds the audience hostage, throttling them into submission. Affleck and editor William Goldenberg let the scenes play out, lending to the air of pulse-pounding realism. But Big Ben also gets bogged down in a Directing 101 trick, milking his crosscuts between parallel lines of action to juice up the pulpy intensity.

In a 2012 America seemingly desperate for a patriotic story—and in the midst of interminable Mideast turmoil—Argo reaches back into an ominous dark cloud to yank out a silver lining trimmed in red, white and blue. For Ben Affleck and company, that silver lining may also rain Oscar gold.

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10/21/12