Politics Schmolotics: A Droll CHARLIE WILSON & A Serious BREACH

Alan Rudolph: "Does Political scare you?"
Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins): "Political doesn't scare me. Radical political scares me. Political political scares me.
Alan Rudolph: "This is politiely politically radical, but it's funny."
THE PLAYER (Dir. Robert Altman, 1991)

Politics doesn't play well at the multiplex. If you don't believe me just ask the makers of LIONS FOR LAMBS. Despite critical acclaim people have stayed away in droves from just about every Iraq-related drama and especially documentary fare like NO END IN SIGHT as well so it appears that these days - political scares moviegoers. Keeping this in mind I made it out to the Lumina Theatre last week to see the Mike Nichols/Tom Hanks comic drama CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR (which actually at #6 on the box office charts is doing pretty well) and I cozied up to the warm DVD player to watch BREACH so consider me unafraid of political. Or at least political pop pieces like these:

CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR (Dir. Mike Nichols, 2007)

The charismatic senator famed for funding arms for Afghanistan against Soviet occupation is a tailor made role for Tom Hanks. He's a charmer with a bevy of buxom secretaries, always a stiff drink in hand, and a penchant for punchy one-liners like "You know you've reached rock bottom when you're told you have character flaws by a man who hanged his predecessor in a military coup". Unfortunately the film is as glib as his character. Hanks glides through many West Wing-esque walk and talks (with the Aaron Sorkin scripting that's got to be a given) and his scenes with Julia Roberts (as Texas socialite and activist Joanne Herring) with such a winking detachment that we never really feel invited in to his story - as fascinating on the surface as it is.

It starts out so promising - for instance Phillip Seymour Hoffman has a show-stopping shouting intro but then even he falls back into a laconic gruff presence. At one point, as if to borrow the gravitas from a far better satirical standard barer, Ned Beatty shows up to give a speech which helps the proceedings a little but NETWORK this ain't. With the A-list gloss stripped away Wilson's war story would be better told as a History Channel documentary. Sure, it sucks that people opt for fake history bullshit like NATIONAL TREASURE over films based on such juicy real events but when it's the too smug for fun CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR - moviegoers might be better off with cinematic junk food.

BREACH (Dir. Billy Ray, 2007) "He was trying to commit the intelligence equivalent of the perfect crime" says Paul Moore of his former collegue Robert Hanssen (from a MSNBC report enititled "Mole" included as a bonus feature on the just released DVD). Hanssen, who sold military secrets to Russia during the height of the cold war, has had his story told before (the 2002 TV movie MASTER SPY: THE ROBERT HANSSEN STORY starring William Hurt) but this time the perspective is through the eyes of an upstart FBI agent wannabe Eric O'Neill (a stoic but moody Ryan Philleppe).

As Hanssen, Chris Cooper, in a career best performance, is suspicious but mostly oblivious to the scrutiny his position and power was undergoing. O'Neill is kept in the dark too at first - thinking that he's assigned to Hanssen because as he is told by a handler (Laura Linney) that he is a sexual deviant. Despite this he builds a grudging respect for the man and even believes that his superiors have no case. This naive view shatters as the world of Hanssen's making becomes mindblowingly clear. Some liberties were taken with the story - in actuality O'Neil knew going in what they were after Hanssen for - and a number of dramatic liberties are taken but the essence of the story remains sharply intact. Like Billy Ray's previous film - the excellent SHATTERED GLASS the tension has a palpable edge missing in a lot of current thrillers. BREACH is a quietly absorbing tightly told tale of homegrown espionage and one that never forgets or lets us forget how high the stakes are.

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Some Fall New Release DVDs If You Please

Catching up on some new DVDs fresh out of the red Netflix envelope into my DVD player then onto my blog. Let's start with yet another movie I recently regretted missing at the theater :

NO END IN SIGHT (Dir. Charles Ferguson, 2007) I was not the only one that missed this one in its brief limited release - from what I've heard it played to mostly empty theaters. Seems like most are tapped out when it comes to another liberal hatin' on Bush anti-war documentary so folks stayed away in droves. That's a damn shame because this is such a different animal than such staples as FAHRENHEIT 9/11 or WHY WE FIGHT in that it gives us much more of a precise and sobering overview of the war in Iraq from one horrible decision to the next. Campbell Scott's straight narration (some have called it flat but I think it has more gusto than that) lies over the many interviewees that this manifesto is mostly made of. The ones interviewed are so high up in there that it can't be denied - sorting out the good guys from the bad can be quite a game - I figure Colonel Paul Hughes who was director of strategic policy for the U.S. occupation in 2003 to be one of the good guys; Walter Slocombe (who comes across as a 'dumbfuck' as Natalie Maines would say) - senior advisor for National Security and Defense and head of CPA is, by my guess, one of the bad guys.

It's funny how the line - "refused to be interviewed for this film" is so dramatically used again and again but not so funny when it pertains to administrator of the CPA L. Paul Bremer (whose 3 central mistakes make up the bulk of this film's crux), Dick Cheney, Condolezza Rice and asshole golden boy Donald Rumsfeld whose glib remarks like "I don't do quagmires" will anger any reasonable human. Less a ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN than a All Satan's Men this documentary is the definition of 'incendiary'. As a blogger pretending to be a substantial film critic I would say this is a "must see" but as a guy watching this in an apartment sitting on a couch with a cat - I just can't help from tearing up.

MR. BROOKS (Dir. Bruce A Evans, 2007) Without a doubt the best Kevin Costner film in ages, yeah I know that's not saying a lot but hear (or read) me out. Costner plays Earl Brooks - a box company CEO who is in the dark of night a cold calculating serial killer. His murderous impulses are personified to him and us in the presence of Marshall (William Hurt) - an alter ego or better yet -an evil imaginary friend. After a murder of a young couple in the bed of their townhouse, Mr. Brooks finds himself being blackmailed by a voyeur played by Dane Cook who has compromising photographs (the curtains were left open in the couple's bedroom). Cook though wants to be a killer himself and wants Mr. Brooks to show him the ropes. This idea scares Brooks but amuses and challenges Marshall so on they go off into the night following a measured but still convoluted scheme. Meanwhile Demi Moore (who is far from believable but that may just be my own personal problem with Moore) as a beleaguered police detective suffering through a tortured and costly divorce is on their trail and Costner's daughter (Danielle Panabaker) is home from college under mysterious circumstances so the plot thickens. Maybe some would say it gets too thick - in more than one sense of the word.

I am reminded by the late Pauline Kael, several years after she retired from writing, speaking in a Newsweek interview about a little late 90's dog called THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE (starring Al Pacino as the devil disguised as a big-time New York lawyer taunting up-start Keano Reeves). She said that that film had a "hambone quality" to it that she enjoyed. I strongly feel the same thing can be said about MR. BROOKS. It has a lot of meticulously plotted psychological edges but they all frame what is essentially pulp - highly entertaining but kitsch all the same. This is what makes it work though - you don't employ Dane Cook if you are not aware of the diciness of your material so director Evans and screenwriter partner Raynold Gideon (both collaborated on MADE IN HEAVEN, STARMAN, and STAND BY ME) know what they're doing to some degree. Costner with his charisma in check coupled with Hurt's smug leering sociopath repartee and a strangely sober yet almost satirical hold on the material makes MR. BROOKS resemble at more times than I'd like to admit a really good movie. Ham-boned as it is.

THE HOAX (Dir. Lasse Hallström , 2006) Definitely the best Richard Gere film in like...forever! Yeah, I know I played that hand already above but it's really true. In this tasty tale of a man who lies his way into a major book deal Gere has just the right spin. The man was struggling novelist Clifford Irving and the lie was that he fabricated a book of interviews with Howard Hughes in the early 70's. Hughes had been reclusive and completely out of the public eye for well over a decade so Irving and proffesional partner Richard Suskind (Alfred Molina) speculate he would not come forward to denounce the project. They also figure that Hughes denies everything anyway so how could they go wrong? The how is a huge part of the fun as is Gere and Molina's camaradarie. Well cast as well - Marcia Gay Harden as Irving's exasperated wife and Julie Delphy as actress Nina Van Pallandt as his mistress. THE HOAX takes some truthiness liberties that at times turn towards the surreal - like the people at MacGraw Hill that Irving pitches to - we don't know what to believe at times especially when supposed Hughes' hired goons show up at Irving's door. These fatanstical touches though are carried off in a more successful manner than in George Clooney's CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND - a likewise questionable adaptation of 'real' events. Irving is credited as "technical advisor" on this film but reportedly he disowns it and has denied its accuracy. He really should get over himself! This may be the best thing he's ever had anything to do with.

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