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Robert Redford, Julie Taymor: America At War
By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers (about the author) Page 2 of 2 page(s)
2) A liberal professor (Redford) is chagrined that his best, brightest student (Andrew Garfield) is failing to use his potential to make a difference in the world. He tries to convince the student to abandon his materialistic pursuits and become actively engaged.
3) Two of the professor's former favorite students (Michael Pena, Derek Luke), who joined the Army as their form of activism, are in the first wave of troops carrying out the new tactics in Afghanistan that were discussed by the senator. The situation, as often happens, doesn't unfold the positive way the neo-con theorists dreamed it up in their ivory towers.
It isn't hard to figure out that Redford really is talking about CheneyBush's "surge" strategy in Iraq: The Administration needs something, anything, to spin positively, for its own political purposes. Streep's character keeps trying to get the senator to talk about how the U.S. got itself into such a catastrophic war, but Cruise's senator says that's old, useless history. He refuses to acknowlege that the mistakes made early help explain why U.S. war strategies don't work -- old, new, "surge," whatever -- especially when there is precious little political reconciliation among the local warring factions.
Redford, like Taymor, is addressing the issue of how citizens can and should use their energies, their brains, their bodies, their idealism, to react to the negativity and repression that buffet them daily.
GOOD INTENTIONS GO AWRY
Strange: Redford is notorious as a liberal icon, and one gets the sense while watching the film that he's reined himself in, to keep his red-hot political views in check. That reticence, and perhaps a desire to reach ordinary middle-class American citizens by lowering the political volume, may be the movie's undoing.
The intent of the film is admirable: to elevate ordinary Americans out of the cesspool of immoral politics that CheneyBush have helped create. But the script by Mathew Michael Carnahan is deficient: long on talk and short on drama. (First rule of script- and play-writing: Show, don't tell).
As a result, the film, as directed by Redford, comes off as a static, muddled but heartfelt civics lecture on the value of getting involved in what you believe in. But who knows? Maybe the elementary civics lesson may actually reach more undecided Americans than if Redford had gone full-out with his political anger.
I'm not sorry that I saw it; the very making of this kind of film -- which assumes that audiences have an intellect and like to exercise it -- is a testament, however botched, to positive progressive faith.
But I think I'd much rather go watch movie-movies like "Redacted," "Rendition" and "In the Valley of Elah," even though these hard-hitting films amount to preaching to the choir since the American public several years ago came to the conclusion that the Iraq war and occupation were disastrous mistakes and needed to be ended ASAP.
One can hope that all these commercial Hollywood movies, and the large number of anti-war documentaries (for example, the excellent "No End In Sight"), will do the trick of firming up 2008 opposition to CheneyBush and the Republicans (and those Democrats) who enable them. Which suggests that if history repeats itself, an Iraq-war equivalent to the rightwing 'Nam-era film "The Green Berets" should be released any day now. #
Bernard Weiner, who reviewed films and plays for the San Francisco Chronicle for 19 years, holds a Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org). For comment: crisispapers@comcast.net .
First published by The Crisis Papers and Democratic Underground 11/20/07.
www.crisispapers.org/essays7w/redford.htm
Copyright 2007 by Bernard Weiner.
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