Oscar hopefuls humanize serious issues

Pics like 'Locker' hold up a mirror to society's ills

By JOHN ANDERSON

'AIR' BAGS: George Clooney plays a hatchet man for a firm that specializes in corporate downsizing in 'Up in the Air.'

Like a bunch of eager sixth-grade civics students, filmmakers lately have been mirroring current events as if the multiplex were show-and-tell: War. Immigration. Economics. Even the horror crowd has joined the fray: In "Drag Me to Hell," the central character is a banker who declines a mortgage extension -- and is cursed with eternity behind Satan's teller window. It makes sense, of course: Wish fulfillment has always been a big part of the Hollywood formula.

But a little closer to Oscar reality, a number of very serious contenders this year are involved with very serious issues -- and that's not counting "District 9" and its allusions to immigration, racism and otherism (or "Star Trek's" glancing blow at colonialism). While the docs are always immersed in the topical -- "Food, Inc." (corporate agriculture), "Capitalism: A Love Story" (bank bailouts) and "American Casino" (a bankrupt mortgage system) -- mainstream dramatic features have dived in, too: Jason Reitman's "Up in the Air," for instance, straddles the tightrope between the cold brutality of corporate downsizing and its human costs.

And while the world doesn't have W to push around anymore, his legacy lives on in a number of dramas emanating from the war on terror: "The Hurt Locker," about a bomb squad in Iraq; "The Messenger," about the military men who deliver death notifications; "The Men Who Stare at Goats," about our paranormal Army; "In the Loop," about averting a Mideast conflict.

A crap shoot, to be sure, if one examines recent history: "Charlie Wilson's War," which now seems destined to be a Netflix favorite, crashed and burned in 2007 thanks to its Afghan connection; last year, both "Stop-Loss" and "Body of Lies" were welcomed like a case of swine flu.

Considering the allergic reaction exhibited toward war movies the last few years, it might be suspected that the makers of the aforementioned films were working within a fog of defiance -- or ignorance.

"We operated under a sense of blissful naivete," says Mark Boal, who wrote and co-produced "The Hurt Locker" and points out that, given the gap in time between conception and screen, it wasn't really possible to gauge where audiences were going to be on the issues.

But while viewers may have softened their resistance toward war-themed features, the films themselves have performed an end run around that resistance. "The Hurt Locker," directed by Kathryn Bigelow, for instance, is a thriller -- characters and motivations are always in question; relationships, rather than politics, drive the story; and the essentials of the drama aren't necessarily conflict-specific.

"It's vital in a piece like 'Hurt Locker' to have a central character that fascinates and draws viewers in," says Bigelow of James, a bomb defuser (played by Jeremy Renner) with a devil-may-care approach to his job. "The narrative strategy was to tell this particular war story through the eyes of James and a few central characters and to use their humanity to reveal the larger themes."

It worked for Homer. And Shakespeare. And Hemingway. And maybe even Michael Bay: War -- or peace, for that matter -- doesn't work by itself; human elements must come into play.

Another way to engage is through laughs, which is the tactic of "In the Loop" and "The Men Who Stare at Goats," the latter of which might exist in the black-comedy zone between "Three Kings" and "Dr. Strangelove."

In the case of "The Messenger," according to its writer-

director, Oren Moverman, there's also a certain timelessness. "Unfortunately," he says, "this is a movie that's good for the next war, and the one after that."

Moverman says he and co-writer Alessandro Camon enjoyed a "manufactured naivete."

"We thought if we made a good film, it's going to stand on its own," he says. "People can bunch it up with whatever films they want, but for us this was not going to be a film about Iraq, it was going to be about human beings."