The Politics of Oscar
The best issue-driven films connect on a personal level
Yet whether it was coincidence or a wave of Quixotic urges, a strong group of films broke out on the cinema hustings in 2000, suggesting that not only was the political pic back with a vengeance but the very way we look at and define such a movie is up for question. All the films play into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences' endless desire for gravitas, heightened in a year of so much mediocre ephemera, and each reflects filmmaking's quest to put a human face on events. Otherwise, they couldn't be more different.
While "Thirteen Days" methodically depicts a deeply divided Kennedy White House during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, writer-director Rod Lurie's "The Contender" lays out a fictional and idealized drama in which the personal becomes political (in the White House and everywhere else in Washington) as a vice presidential candidate (played by Joan Allen) is ensnared in a sex scandal.
Missiles in Cuba are never mentioned in Julian Schnabel's "Before Night Falls," but this expressionistic account of the life and ordeals of Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas under Castro during the Soviet era represents the first thoroughgoing dramatization of life under Cuban communism ever made by an American filmmaker.
The kind of idealism saluted in "Contender" is also at the heart of "Erin Brockovich," but the political activity couldn't be further from Washington -- deep in the desert, where a town battles a polluting Pacific Gas & Electric plant. And unique among these films, "Traffic," also helmed by "Brockovich" director Steven Soderbergh, ambitiously observes its issue -- the U.S. drug war and its human cost -- through a prism of multiple angles and perspectives.
Whether any of them can attain the level of 1976's "All the President's Men" -- the gold standard of Oscar-winning political movies with four statuettes -- will be part of the guessing game between now and Oscar night.
"There hasn't been a political film that has done well with the Academy since 'All the President's Men,'" says Lurie, who doesn't factor in Oliver Stone's Oscar-nominated "Nixon" since "it was more a biographical movie than one that dealt with political issues. If political films begin to do well with the Academy, it becomes possible to make more political films in the future."
Prior to "Contender," Lurie visited the Oval Office with "Deterrence," depicting the first Jewish president, faced with nuclear war against Iraq.
This comparative glut of political pics could lead for the first time to two actors playing the commander-in-chief being nominated for best supporting actor: Jeff Bridges as President Jackson Evans in "Contender" and Bruce Greenwood as JFK in "Thirteen Days."
David Self, who based his "Thirteen Days" script on a sturdy research foundation of audio tapes, unclassified documents and books, decided that "it was important to show Jack and Bobby Kennedy as they were, guys being human and going to work. I was more interested in seeing JFK in his tank top or relaxing his back after a stressful day battling the Pentagon brass than at a gala. The screenplay may depict them in a heroic light, but I was as keen to avoid the Camelot myth as the tabloid stuff that's come out in recent years."
Lurie observes that "most fictitious presidential characters are based on JFK or Nixon" -- think Michael Douglas in "The American President" as the former, Gene Hackman in "Absolute Power" as the latter -- "and we also wanted to avoid the Clinton image for President Evans. It was overdue to create a different kind of White House persona," he says.
But the president isn't the only Capitol Hill player depicted in "Contender," and there was some speculation as to the inspiration for Evans' nemesis, right-wing Sen. Shelly Runyon, played by Gary Oldman.
"I actually received a phone call from Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.)," Lurie says, "asking if Runyon was based on him. I assured him that he wasn't. In fact, physically and emotionally, it was Gary's entire creation from the feet up."
Oldman's reported dispute with the film's liberal bent, oddly emerging just before "Contender's" fall release, proved to be short-lived, but it pointed out the risk that political films carry.
"It's hard not to offend somebody with these movies," notes screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, whose script for "Traffic" portrays ongoing efforts by the U.S. government to dam the steady stream of drugs over the Mexican border as a hopeless battle waged with the best intentions, resulting in unintended tragedy.
Along with garnering year-end awards, "Traffic," featuring a deeply conflicted drug czar played by Michael Douglas who eventually resigns in disgust, seems inevitably geared to incur the criticism of the current drug czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey.
Sometimes, though, the expected controversy never occurs, as is the case with "Erin Brockovich." While screenwriter Susannah Grant figured that Pacific Gas & Electric -- essentially the movie's faceless bad guy -- would fire off some kind of complaint, "we received no flak from them at all, even though what I wrote comes down awfully hard on the company. Our safety valve, of course, was that the battle with PG&E is all part of the public record, so what could they do?"
More important for Grant was receiving no flak from Universal, which developed the film along with Jersey Films.
"There was no pressure to tone down the political content. The draft I turned in was what was filmed," says Grant, "and I think a lot had to do with having a story that, while it dealt with hot-button issues like toxic waste and how corporations flagrantly ignore innocent communities of people, was inherently strong because of the character of Erin. In fact, once the movie came out, I noticed a lot more press attention on her and the way she dressed than the issues."
There's nothing in the current batch of Oscar contenders to match the flare-ups in 1999, when, for example, cigarette companies and staff of "60 Minutes" attacked Michael Mann's critically acclaimed "The Insider" for exaggeration and invention. That criticism, as well as questions about the authenticity of the dramatization of boxer Ruben "Hurricane" Carter's life in "The Hurricane," might have depressed the films' Oscar hopes.
The only protest this time is some minor criticism of "Thirteen Days" by JFK speechwriter and adviser Theodore Sorenson, who observed in an interview in George magazine that the high-profile presence in the film of fellow adviser Kenneth O'Donnell (played by Kevin Costner) gives "the impression...that (JFK) didn't have many ideas, and that Kenny supplied them."
At the same time, Sorenson praised the film for its portrait of the "prudent leadership" exercised by the Kennedy brothers against formidable odds.
No political figure should be unhappier this season, however, than Cuba's Fidel Castro, who emerges as a dark, evil presence in the background of writer Arenas' besieged life in "Before Night Falls."
Director Schnabel realized that in adapting the Arenas' memoirs for the screen that "we could tell the story of the disillusionment of Cuba's recent history by telling Reinaldo's story. There's no point in making Castro the center of a movie, because by showing what a brilliant Cuban literary talent and openly homosexual artist endured is like a stain on Castro's own shirt."
No taking sides
Yet what makes "Before Night Falls" a notable political film is how it deliberately makes both the left and right wings equally uncomfortable.
As Schnabel notes: "The Cuban exile community is greatly moved by the film, even as many of them were repulsed by Reinaldo's gay identity when he came to Florida in 1980 during the Mariel boat lift. Some on the left who support gay rights but may keep a romantic flame for the Cuban revolution have to face their own contradictions here as well.
"What I know is this: I have more rights as a tourist in Cuba than the citizens do, and that's not acceptable."
Schnabel's film is, by design, much subtler than his on-the-record comments, which is in accord with Gaghan's comment that "movies aren't policy papers. There's nothing more odious than some well-fed screenwriter or director issuing messages to people about what's good or bad for them from their perch in Pacific Palisades. What motivates a great deal of movies about politics, and it was the heart for me of 'Traffic,' was expressing tragic conditions, showing a cancer -- in this case, the drug war -- gnawing at families and homes from the inside out."
"The stronger your central character," theorizes Grant, "the less you need to make big statements onscreen. Instead, let them come out of the characters' actions, and the audience is a lot more willing to take them in."
Lurie doesn't dispute this, but he also openly embraces the notion that there's a place in Hollywood movies for expressing idealism onscreen.
"Some critics knocked 'The Contender' for being Capraesque, especially the ending which reminded them of James Stewart's high-minded sentiments in 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,'" he says. "That, for me, isn't criticism, because I was trying to ask in this film if noble people, like Joan Allen's vice presidential candidate, can rise to higher office in this country. The inspiration was the Clarence Thomas hearings, but it doesn't matter which party's ox is being gored.
"Political movies are seen by many as having to be profound, which can translate as having a sad ending," Lurie continues. "I don't know why you have to have an unhappy ending to be profound. Virtues are just as thought-provoking. Making you feel good about idealism isn't a negative, it's a positive."
