Your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man could be a little bit friendlier

Peter Parker learns that with great power comes great…pain, along with various cuts, bumps, bruises, strains, sprains, and the occasional broken bone and odd scratch. What it doesn’t come with is a great deal of fun, at least not in The Amazing Spider-Man, starring Andrew Garfield as Peter and now out on DVD.

Didn't write a formal review when we saw The Amazing Spider-Man in the theater back in July, but I posted a few thoughts, Spidey Thoughts, and in Spidey Thought Number 4 I noted that the movie begins with Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker already Spider-Man in every important way except for the minor detail of not having spider powers.

He's brave, he's cocky, he's a wiseguy, he's a genius scientist---this is very important because, as I noted in Spidey Thought Number 3, most of his major enemies are mad scientists and/or victims of science experiments gone tragically awry---he's a natural born detective, and he's a hero. Heroic, at at any rate. This Peter Parker is only a target for bullies when he deliberately gets between the bullies and their first targets. He stands up for---and gets knocked down for---the weak against the strong.

It's not the case with Peter as it is for Steve Rogers in Captain America: The First Avenger that his powers are the expression of his innate goodness and strength of heart.  For one thing, Peter’s spider powers appear as temptations. Rogers goes right to work at being Captain America.  In The Amazing Spider-Man, Peter starts off in a less than heroic direction.  But like Rogers, he doesn't need superpowers to be a hero. Only to become a super-hero.

What this means is that, essentially, at first, there is no Spider-Man. There is only Peter Parker wearing a disguise he calls Spider-Man.

His challenge is to make Spider-Man into something more and greater than an alter-ego: his job and his vocation.  He has to turn that disguise into the uniform of his new chosen profession. Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.

This is a key point, thematically, as far as it goes, which turns out to be not far enough.

The first Tobey Maguire Spider-Man was about Peter learning how to be Spider-Man.  The Amazing Spider-Man (the first half of the movie, at least) is about Andrew Garfield’s Peter learning to be Spider-Man and what it means to be Spider-Man.

As I mentioned, Peter is not in a heroic frame of mind, nor a particularly friendly one, when he starts webslinging.  He’s not in the mood  to use his powers for good and not for evil. He’s in the mood to use them for revenge.

He’s out to get the thug who murdered his Uncle Ben. Any crooks he captures along the way are---what’s the opposite of collateral damage? Collateral success?

He’s not even the vigilante Captain Stacey calls him.  Vigilantes are at least nominally interested in justice.  Peter is only interested in assuaging his own emotional pain.  He’s using his powers to work out his guilt. What he has to learn is that he didn’t fail by not stopping the robbery that led to Uncle Ben’s getting killed. He failed by not doing the right thing for the simple sake of doing the right thing.

He has to learn that he has an obligation to help people, because with great power…

But he has to learn something else.  This.

He has to learn that being Spider-Man is fun!

You’d think there’d be joy and a thrill in being a superhero who has the proportional strength of spider, can climb walls, spin webs any size, and catch thieves just like flies. And it should feel good to have the power to do good and then go out and do it.

Plus, it’d be really cool.

Peter learns this.  Or he says he does.  He has an epiphany after his first fight with the Lizard---in a scene on a bridge unfortunately reminiscent of the much better staged and much more suspenseful bridge scene in Maguire’s first Spider-Man.  “Who are you?” asks the father of the little boy he’s just saved, his first truly good deed as Spider-Man, the deed that in fact makes him Spider-Man.  And that’s his answer. “I’m Spider-Man.”

He should say something else.  The guy knows he’s talking to Spider-Man.  J. Jonah Jameson (not seen in this movie because the producers had the good sense to know it’s too soon to ask any actor to try to follow J.K. Simmons in the part, but he makes his presence felt) has already been at work making sure the whole city knows he’s Spider-Man.  What Peter should say is “I’m your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man” which would be a way of claiming the name Spider-Man for himself and announcing what his job is now.  He’s a public servant.  Every neighborhood has one, right? Along with the cop on the beat, the letter carrier delivering the mail, the firefighters in the station down the block?  And he ought to say it with delight and with a great big grin that we should sense through his mask.  And then we should see him go off and have some fun in a series of scenes like the ones that make up Superman’s first night in the Christopher Reeve’s first Superman, capturing jewel thieves and bank robbers for the pure, unselfish rightness of it.

It doesn’t happen.

Instead he swings over to his girlfriend Gwen’s apartment to tell her in the mopish way she inexplicably finds endearing that that’s what he’s going to do from here on out.

Which is a letdown, as endearing as it is to watch Emma Stone acting as if Garfield’s moping is endearing, but it would be something to shrug off if the movie had let him to follow through on his promise. 

He doesn’t get the chance. He has to go back to being plain old Peter Parker on a personal mission. The Lizard’s on the loose and it’s his---Peter’s not Spidey’s---responsibility to stop him.

When asked why it’s his responsibility, Peter replies, “I created him,” making it all about him and between him and the Lizard.

Spider-Man isn’t really part of it and goes back to being the name for the disguise Peter doesn’t really need at this point.

Never mind the stampeding crowds, exploding cars, and massive destruction of private and public property that has become the signature of too many Marvel Comics-based movies---both Iron Man movies, both Fantastic Four movies, Spider-Man 3, The Incredible Hulk, and The Avengers all end with the same insurance agent’s nightmare in the city streets---the final battle in The Amazing Spider-Man isn’t a fight to save New York City.  It’s a struggle to save Curt Connors from himself. Spider-Man can’t do it. But Peter Parker can…by using SCIENCE!  Spider-Man is just there as a distraction to keep the Lizard away from the Oscorp lab while Gwen concocts the serum that will cure Connors based on a formula devised by Peter.

In the end, The Amazing Spider-Man turns out to be a personal drama about a philosophical disagreement between two scientists.

The Lizard is one of Spidey’s least interesting enemies.  (Not as uninteresting as the Rhino, but that’s a very low bar.) Curt Connors is interesting because he might give in to the temptation to become the Lizard any frame now.  His struggle to resist the temptation and his fear that he won’t be able to and then his self-loathing and remorse after he turns back are what make him a sympathetic anti-hero.  Essentially, he’s the Wolf Man, and, like Larry Talbot’s, his is a very personal horror story. Which makes him the wrong choice of villains to build an epic public battle around.

Another way Connors is interesting is as Peter’s nightmare of himself as monster come to life.  Connors is Peter’s double.  By virtue of his scientific genius, Connor has great power but he’s always in danger of forgetting the responsibility that comes with it.  The movie could have made that a subplot, with Peter coming to realize how he and Connors are alike and that he faces the same temptation to use his powers if not for evil then for personal satisfaction and not for the public good.  They’re also alike in that as both freaks and geeks they’re outsiders and misfits who can only fit in by not being themselves.

It’s understandable that outsiders and misfits of all sorts dream of a world where the definition of “normal” and the rules that decide popularity are expansive enough to include them.  The intellectual temptation, though, is to insist that “normal” and “popular” ought to be redefined to mean them and it’s up to everybody else to conform. In real life, giving in to this temptation is usually only self-destructive because it leads to anger, resentment, bitterness, and further alienation and isolation.  But Connors has the power to make others conform to his idea of “normal.”  And that’s the motivation director Marc Webb and and his team of screenwriters have given him.

This is an apt theme for a movie based on a comic book that became famous for having a teenage hero who had to deal with the typical problems of an ordinary high school kid while saving the City from the likes of the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus.  Almost every teenager, even some of the popular ones, feels as freaky and geeky as Peter Parker at some point.  One of the things I liked about this movie (and it probably sounds as though I didn’t like much. I’ll deal with that in a minute.) is that it lets us see that the popular jock Flash Thompson, Peter’s high school nemesis but future good friend, feels like an outsider and a misfit.  

But it turns out the movie isn’t really interested in that theme.  Connor’s crackpot scheme for world domination is just an excuse for the preview of the video game that’s the final confrontation between cgi Spidey and the cgi Lizard.

So, here’s the progress of Peter Parker through the three acts of The Amazing Spider-Man:

I. Peter Parker, budding boy hero but ordinary mortal, struggling with his sense of identity.

II. Peter Parker, spider-powered angel of vengeance, using his new abilities selfishly.

III. Peter Parker, super-scientist.

Peter Parker, the actually amazing Spider-Man? Pretty much offstage throughout.

Now, onto what I liked.

The cast.

I enjoyed The Amazing Spider-Man more than I thought I would when we saw it in the theater. I enjoyed it even more watching it again on DVD. It's not as good a movie as either of the first two Maguires. (I think we all can agree to pretend Spider-Man 3 never happened.) But it's different enough to have earned the right to be judged on its own merits. And one of the very good ways it's different is in having a heroine who is not just a damsel in distress.

Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane Watson spent a lot of time in all three of her Spider-Man movies literally hanging around screaming for Spider-Man to come to her rescue.  When she wasn’t doing that, she didn’t seem to have much else to occupy her time except fretting over her relationship with Peter.

Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy is never in distress.  The script doesn’t put her in need of rescuing at any point, but if it had, we’d know she’d figure her own way out of her fix without wasting time screaming for Spider-Man to come save her.

Of course Emma Stone is adorable in the part.  But she’s also very smart.  The filmmakers have made Gwen a budding scientist herself, which means we know she and Peter have more to talk about than his problems being a superhero.  But Stone makes her a different type of science nerd from either Peter or her boss Dr Connors.  We can’t see her holing up in a lab pursuing her research in private like them. She’d have her own lab, surround herself with brilliant grad students, and earn her reputation as a teacher and administrator.  She’s not a freak or a geek.  She’s who is she is and happy and secure with that.  She’s a people person who sees the best in everyone, including Flash Thompson, and insists on dealing only with that side of them.  The only way to respond to someone like her is to be as good as she knows you to be. 

This isn’t naiveté. It’s insight.  It’s how she handles her demanding and irascible father.  She’s not defiant. She’s not rebellious.  She just won’t to talk to him as if there’s any other side to him except the loving, considerate, and understanding side.  And she won’t let Peter keep secrets.  He has to confess to her he’s Spider-Man because she already knows he is---that is, she knows he’s a hero and won’t talk to him as if he’s not.  I wish the director had given her a scene with Connors in which she did this with him.  It would have been heartbreaking to watch both of them realize that that side of him she admires is on its way to being lost.

As Gwen's irascible father, police Captain George Stacy, Denis Leary is as convincingly upright, noble, reliable, professional, public-spirited, and incorruptible as he is convincingly all the opposites as Tommy Gavin in Rescue Me.  Stacy is always stern and earnest, but Leary gives him an underlying sense of humor and sense of proportion to make us believe that despite his present antipathy he is the character we know from the comic books (the originals not the Ultimates) will eventually get and appreciate what Spider-Man is about.  It's too bad the next movie won't be bringing Leary and J.K. Simmons together so we can have the fun of watching Stacy and J. Jonah Jameson go at it over the Bugle's treatment of Spider-Man.

Rhys Ifans plays Curt Connors as a self-absorbed but basically high-minded scientist who keeps trying to convince himself he's motivated by nobler things than vanity and wounded pride. If Garfield's Peter Parker is already Spider-Man before he gets his powers, Ifans' Connors is already on his way to becoming the Lizard in that he sees himself as repulsive and something less than human.

Sally Field is more distracted than dotty as Peter's easily flustered and apparently easily fooled Aunt May.  But as Field plays her, May isn't clueless. She's just learned that it's easier for her to get done what she needs to get done if she's willfully blind to what the men in her life are up to. Which explains how she doesn't " know" Peter is Spider-Man, but it also makes you wonder what secrets Uncle Ben has buried in his past.

Martin Sheen’s Uncle Ben doesn’t seem to be a man keeping secrets, only a man trying not to show how he’s weighed down by longstanding regrets and probably unjustified guilt and self-recrimination.  Sheen has built his characterization of Uncle Ben around the idea of Peter’s budding greatness.  Ben, even more than Gwen, senses the hero within Peter, and as proud as it makes him, it also scares him.  He knows that with great power---by which he means talent, brains, and the ambition to put them to work, the webslinging and the wallcrawling haven’t started yet, and when they do, he won’t know about it---comes more than great responsibility.  It comes with the potential for all kinds of trouble and heartbreak that he wants protect Peter from but knows he can’t.  This worries and saddens him but it also makes him feel like something a failure.  He believes Peter deserves a surrogate father up to the job of helping a hero.    He’s at a loss.  It’s a little more complicated than the sense of loss all parents of teenagers on the brink of outgrowing their ability to protect them feel, but he deals with it in a familiar way, by being inconsistent in his approach, alternating between indulgence, humor, over-asserting his authority, and just plain asking the child he wants to help for advice on how to help him. This Uncle Ben never says the iconic line but in the two speeches that boil down to “With great power…” there’s more than a hint of apology. He feels judged by Peter, one of the few ways in which he underestimates his nephew.

Of course the movie depends on Andrew Garfield making Peter the hero Uncle Ben and Gwen expect him to be while still making him the awkward, angst-ridden, insecure, self-absorbed typical teenager he can’t help being.  Garfield works this balancing act just fine.  He overdoes the mumbling, mopey act sometimes, and seems a little too taken with this as one of Peter’s charms.  But he is charming.  As for how he compares to Tobey Maguire, it’s not a matter if he’s as good, it matters that he’s different.  And he is.  He’s more inward, to start. More of a jerk.  Even when he’s doing good, his cockiness crosses the line into jerkiness. Which is in keeping with the idea that this Peter needs to learn more personal lessons than Maguire’s Peter did.  He’s more romantic than Maguire, and sexier.  Maguire’s Peter needed to be Spider-Man in order to approach Mary Jane. Garfield’s Peter lacks for poise but not confidence and Gwen and he are well on their way to hooking up before he gets bitten.  And he’s smarter.  Maguire’s Peter was no dope. But Garfield’s is undoubtedly a genius.

Garfield doesn’t seem to be having as much fun as Maguire did.  Some of that is due to what I was trying to get at above, his Peter isn’t allowed to have much fun.  That could change in the next movie, but I wouldn’t count on it.

The producers have made it plain they’re doing a trilogy. The movies are going to tell one complete story and, given that the heroine is Gwen, fans already know where that’s going.

The Amazing Spider-Man, directed by Marc Webb, screenplay by James Vanderbilt, Alvin Sargent, and Steve Kloves. Starring Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Martin Sheen, Sally Field, Denis Leary, and Rhys Ifans. Rated PG-13. Now available on DVD and to watch instantlyat Amazon.

Ever hear of a fighter name of Gans?

Both Members of This Club painted by George Bellows.  “Joe never threw a punch unless he was sure it would land on a vital spot,” Harry Lenny, a frequent sparring partner said. “He had the spots picked out, mentally marked in big red circles on his opponent’s body: the temple, the point of the chin, the bridge of the nose, the liver, the spleen, the solar plexus.  He’d pick out on or tow of these points and maneuver his opponent until he left a clear opening.  It was a thing of beauty to watch Joe in the ring.”---From The Longest Fight: In the Ring With Joe Gans, Boxing’s First African American Champion by William Gildea.

Joe Gans. Never heard of him. Fighter. African American. Champ, around the turn of the last century. First black champion. First African American sports superstar.

I thought that was Jack Johnson.

Fought a big fight in the Nevada desert. Spectators arrived by horseback. Umbrellas held over the fighters in their corners.

Thought that was Jack Johnson too.  His championship fight against Jim Jeffries.

It was Johnson.  But it was Gans too. A few years before.

Gans did it all a few years before Johnson.

Native of Baltimore. Born 1874.  Between 1891 and 1910, twenty-one years, fought close to 200 fights, won 145 of them, 100 by knockouts.  Of the ones he didn’t win only 12 were losses, the rest were draws or no contests.  Lightweight champ on and off, mostly on, from 1900 to 1908. His most memorable fight a forty-two round defense of his title against a holy terror named Battling Nelson in the desert outside Goldfield, Nevada, Nevada being one of the few states where prize-fighting was legal at the time. You read right. Forty-two rounds. In the desert. In summer. The Old Master. In his day considered one of the best fighters of all time. To this day, considered the best lightweight of all time. Over a hundred years of champs, contenders, pugs, mugs, and palookas have come and gone and Gans is still said to be the best.

I must have heard of him!

What I figure is, of course I’ve heard of him.  He’s up there in my head, maybe not making his presence known like some other great fighters of lesser renown like Max Baer, the two Rockys, both Joe Walcotts, Gene Tunney---all heavyweights, notice. Heavyweights seem to get all the attention.---but there.  Only whenever I think back on his era and what he did and what he meant, Jack Johnson just steps up and takes over the stage.

Gans did it first.  Johnson did it bigger, broader, bolder, with more style and greater appetite and a lot less concern for what other people thought and more of a sense of himself as a celebrity and more determination to write a legend with himself as the hero-king.  Johnson got his story told (fictionalized) in a Pulitzer Prize winning play and Oscar nominated movie, The Great White Hope, both starring James Earl Jones.  He got a Ken Burns documentary. (Which I watched again before setting out to write this post. No mention of Gans.) Gans has his place in the Boxing Hall of Fame. He has a statue in an out of the way corner of Madison Square Garden. He has the painting above. Both Members of This Club by George Bellows.  Great painting.  Not the best-known of Bellows’ paintings of boxers, though.  That would be Dempsey and Firpo.  What else has he got to keep his memory alive and move it out of the shadow of Johnson’s legend?

This book now.

The Longest Fight by William Gildea.

As you can guess from the title, the book centers on that fight with Nelson.  And it was some fight.

Nelson charged from his corner, as he did every fight. Gans held his ground and ducked slightly as Nelson threw a big hook that swept above his head. Almost comically, as if pointing his opponent in the direction of his target, Gans tapped two lefts to Nelson’s head. He seemed to say, “I’m over here, friend,” in as civilized and introduction as a boxer could make. Then he got serious: He unleashed a hail of rights to Nelson’s face, landing punches repeatedly from a distance and close range. Nelson fell into a clinch.

Midway in the round, Gans doubled up with two rights to the jaw and a left to the face---a three-punch combination. All three punches hit hard. In the final moments of the round,the Associated Press reported that Gans “peppered Nelson’s face with triphammer rightsand lefts and kept this up until the gong rang…Gans went to his corner with a big lead. Blood flowed from Nelson’s ears.

Gans could take a pounding.  Nelson could take a pounding and like it.  The impression you get from Gildea’s account is you could’ve packed your glove with a horse shoe and hit Nelson in the mush and he’d have blinked, given his head a shake, and come right back at you, smiling.

And he fought dirty.

Nelson often seemed to get the worst of it. Gans was one of the hardest punchers ever.  Knocked opponents down with short, compact jabs thrown straight from the shoulder. And he was fast.  Not just with his fists. Fast on his feet. Fast to react. Throw a good one right at his head, think you’ve got him tagged on the chin, on the nose, in the eye, and at the last second he’d pull left, pull right, pull back, an inch or two, and your punch sailed right by. His counterpunch, though, had you reeling before you knew you’d missed. But it was no Sunday stroll for Gans either.

Nelson rallied in the ninth round, and he continued his comeback in the tenth and eleventh rounds.  His rage was obvious as he flailed away.  He landed four punches to Gans’ one. When one of his handlers shouted, “Stay with him don’t let him get away,” he practically overwhelmed Gans. In taking the momentum, Nelson, not surprisingly, held Gans and head-butted him. Siler, the referee, let it go.  He chose not to disqualify Nelson because he wanted the crowd to get its money’s worth.

But in the twelfth round, as Nelson drove Gans to the ropes, he lost his footing and slipped to the floor. Gans towered over him. Siler stood aside. The rules did not require Gans to step aside or for Siler to rub clean Nelson’s gloves. There were no niceties in boxing, and there are still few. Gans looked down at his opponent. Nelson’s unprotected jaw invited what would have been a legal punch. Gans had plenty of room to swing, more room by far than he ever needed.  Usually, he could find a space where one didn’t seem to be. Now, he could have swung any way he cared to, and driven his fist into Nelson’s mealy face.

But Gans restrained himself.  Instead, in a sportsmanlike gesture, a humble act, really, he put out his right hand to help Nelson to his feet. Nelson accepted Gans,s graciousness. He took Gans’s hand.

That was typical of Gans, a good-hearted and kindly and fair-dealing man, in and out of the ring. But no dope.  He didn’t expect Nelson to be grateful, and Nelson wasn’t.

Yet midway through the twelfth, Nelson extended his cranium, as A.J. Liebling would have put it. So much for graciousness. And later in the round, Nelson again lowered his head and rammed Gans’s face, bloodying his mouth. In the thirteenth round, Nelson did it again.

Detailed and gripping as it is, Gildea’s account of the fight isn’t the whole of his book. It’s the narrative thread on which, jumping backwards and forwards and laterally through time, he hangs other stories.  Stories of Gans’ other important fights. Stories about other fighters he faced, fought, befriended, learned from, and taught. Stories about the business of boxing at the end of the 19th and early goings of the 20th Centuries.  Stories about the characters who gathered around the rings and the training camps and in the backrooms of bars where fights were arranged and deals were cut.  Stories of what it was like for a black man trying to make his way, make his reputation, make his fortune in a nation run by white men for white men, although the only privilege many white men enjoyed was the privilege to push around and despise and lord it over people of color.  Even after he’d established himself as a champ, Gans had to deal with the humiliations doled out by white men determined to make him suffer for daring to be black and successful, some large and threatening---death threats were routine---some petty---Gans could have won many of his fights sooner and more decisively but his manager thought it prudent for Gans to carry opponents several rounds past their deserving so that the paying white customers didn’t feel they were paying to watch a black man humiliate a white man even a pug who, knowledgeable fans knew, shouldn’t have lasted past a round or two against a fighter as good as Gans.

But Gans was an extremely popular champ with large numbers of enthusiastic fans of all colors.

Many of his white admirers could only explain their liking for Gans by making an exception of him.  He was the right kind of colored man, they told themselves, which amounted to a way of seeing him as not colored at all, as an honorary white man, and they extended their compliments in expectedly racist and condescending terms and tones, diminishing his achievements and their own boxing judgment in the process.

But many others were simply too impressed to worry about defending their prejudices.  Gans was good, the best, in fact, better than any other fighter of the day, white or black, and if to see that and admit to it and enjoy it meant acknowledging that a black man could be not just the equal of any white man but the superior to many, well, that’s what it was.

It probably helped that Gans was quiet-spoken, modest---without being self-effacing, self-abasing, or apologetic for his talent and success---patient, even-tempered, decent-hearted, and forgiving or at least understanding. That manager he fired? The one who cheated him? Gans kept him as a friend.  Didn’t let him touch his money again, but still, bygones were bygones with Gans. Even Battling Nelson, viciously and loudmouthedly racist, who boasted of his successes against black fighters as special achievements, came to like and admire Gans.  Gans remained on such good terms with his first wife that when he was dying of tuberculosis he asked to be taken to her house so he could die there and she opened her doors to him and his second wife, the woman he had left her for.

About the only person Gildea reports as having harbored any sort of hard feelings towards Gans was Eubie Blake, the great jazz pianist who got his start at the hotel Gans opened with the money he made from the Nelson fight.  Blake held a grudge against Gans for getting between him and a girl he was in love with. Even so, Blake continued to work for Gans and when Gans died, although Blake said he wasn’t going to go to the funeral, his wife didn’t have to work very hard to guilt him into going to the church.

Some of Gans’ popularity was due to his character.  Some of it, though, may have been due to sports fans’ intrinsic sense of fairness.

Because he was a thinking fan's fighter and because he fought with precision and skill instead of coming on like a brawler, there was something of a David versus Goliath quality to his fights, even though he was usually the favorite, so decidedly the favorite that the smart money wasn’t on whether he would win a fight but on what round he would win it in. But it may have been the case that fans knew the real Goliath Gans was up against, the whole apparatus of a virulently racist society in which whites held all the power.

Gans went into that fight with Nelson guaranteed a cut of the $35,000 purse that was hardly chump change for 1906, but not a champ's fair share. Nelson, the challenger, got more, and Nelson and the promoter, Tex Rickard, at the beginning of his storied career as the essentially the founder of modern prizefighting, insisted on conditions for the fight that were far and away more favorable to Nelson. Gans needed the money. He didn't have a manager looking out for him, having recently fired his longtime manager who was worse with Gans’ money than Gans was himself, and Gans wasn’t exactly careful.  Gans was not the first pro athlete who couldn't trust the people he needed to trust with his money and to protect his interests. But as a black man he lived and worked within a system that gave him very little leverage to protect himself against whites determined to cheat him.

But some of Gans’ ability to win over fans may have been due to the way most sports fans got to know not just him but all their heroes and favorites at the time, by reading about them.

There were pretty much only two sports with national followings in America at the time. Baseball and boxing.  And both were extensively written about, because unless you lived close to a city with a major league baseball team---and there were only 7 before 1903---or in a state where prizefighting was legal---and there were only a few---you had to follow them through the newspapers and magazines. The Gans-Nelson fight was covered by reporters and writers from all over the country (Jack London was there.), witnessed and written about from every angle. 

This meant that for many fans boxing, and boxers, came to life through words, and Gans was good with words.  He was intelligent, witty, thoughtful, and could talk about his sport and his abilities knowledgeably and persuasively.  Which meant that Gans himself had control over how people “saw” him.  In a real way, he wrote himself into their heads as the man and professional he knew himself to be, over-writing their prejudices.  

Of course there were cameras. There were movie cameras. The Gans-Nelson fight was filmed and shown in theaters across the country and around the world. But Jack Johnson, coming along just a few years later, entered the public’s consciousness by way of mass media that had become more visual.  He had more cameras to play to and an audience that expected to see their heroes…and villains. And Johnson made sure the customers saw him.

What they saw was an undeniably black man, rich, famous, happy, having the time of his life and not caring what anybody thought about it, except to be more insistently himself to those who thought he should be someone lesser. And they hated him for it and rooted for his ruin.

The upshot is that this is another way Johnson upstaged Gans.  Johnson’s story is the more dramatic and more representative story of the ongoing tragedy of the history of race in the United States.

After the epic fight in Goldfield, Gans didn’t retire from boxing but he fought less and less often, for less money and less prestige.  He was aging, naturally. He was in his thirties. But there was more and worse to it.  He had developed tuberculosis. He may have had the beginnings of it when he took on Nelson the first time.  He definitely was feeling it when they fought for a second and then a third time.  It took four years, but death caught up with him in 1910, right around the time Johnson fought his epic championship fight in the desert.  Towards the end, he took a “vacation” out west where he’d hoped the clear, dry air would help restore his health.  It didn’t. Realizing he was dying, Gans asked his doctor to send him back east so he could die among friends and family.  At every stop along the way, the train carrying him first to Chicago, where his first wife lived, and then home to Baltimore was met by mobs of heartbroken fans there to say goodbye to their hero.  Seven thousand people came to his funeral.

How could I have not heard of this guy?

Oh well.

I have now. And from a very good source and in the best way to get to know a boxer, still. By reading about him.

The Longest Fight: In the Ring With Joe Gans, Boxing’s First African American Champion by William Gildea, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Available from Amazon in hardcover and for kindle.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Bond or The Spy Who Nurtured Me

“She sent you after me, knowing you’re not ready, knowing you would likely die. Mommy was very bad.” James Bond (Daniel Craig) and M (Judi Dench) attempt to repair their friendship while on the run from the madman out to get revenge on M as 007 returns to Ian Flemingesque form by way of John le Carre in the newest and maybe the best Bond movie, Skyfall.

Skyfall is the only Bond film I can think of that presents us with a character besides Bond who isn’t a villain or a love interest that we’re meant to care about as a character.

M.

Skyfall is Judi Dench’s movie almost as much as it’s Daniel Craig’s.  In fact, their relationship, M and Bond’s, is what Skyfall is about.  The spectacular opening chase, Javier Bardem’s beautifully weird turn as the villain, the sneaky build-up of in-jokes towards the best in-joke of all, the re-introduction of Q in the form of Ben Wishlaw auditioning to be the next Doctor Who, the stunts, crashes, chases, fights, and Peckinpagh-esque gun battle at the end, and the delicious Naomie Harris as Eve (last name withheld, but it’s not a double-entendre), the most all-around competent Bond Girl since Honor Blackman---Not quite as good as Bond but better than the average 00- at whatever she puts her hand to, Eve is an expert stunt driver, field agent, bureaucrat and office politician, barber, and wearer of gold-lame dresses as in-joke.  She’s not the crack shot she needs to be at one point, but in her defense, she’s being rushed.---all that’s for fun and show, giftwrapping on a story about a pair of good friends whose unusual occupation is destroying their friendship.

Fans of the Craig Bonds who like Craig’s more realistic 007 will take note that what’s real about his Bond in Skyfall is that he has things on his mind besides sex, violence, his mission, and how to get from Plot Point A to Plot Point B alive.  It’s more than that he hurts and suffers and emotes.  He feels. And he thinks.  And he thinks about what he feels and feels things in reaction to what he thinks.  He has an inner life.

He has a life.

But what grounds Craig’s Bond in reality is Bond’s relationship with M (and Craig’s work with Dench. They make a good team.).  M is real.  And she makes Bond real. Dench’s performance is realistic enough that she could take it as it is, walk it into a very different sort of spy movie, and it would fit right in  Her M would get along well with George Smiley.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Dame.

In Bond’s relationship with M, when can see glimmers of what it would have been like between Control and “scalp-hunter” Jim Prideaux or Smiley and Ricky Tarr, the original jumped-up thug Craig’s Bond appears to be at the beginning of Casino Royale, if John le Carre had gone in for conventional spy stories, just as before Skyfall we could see glimmers in those relationships of a more realistic Bond.

Skyfall, more than any other Bond, is about how spies are people before and while they are busy being spies.  And not particularly interesting people, at that. At least not any more interesting than lawyers or chartered accountants and therefore they are subject to the same kind of novelistic treatment.  In other words, Skyfall is the first Bond to acknowledge the alternative universe of espionage created by le Carre, whose writing career began as a critique of Ian Fleming’s, and concede he may have a point.

Director Sam Mendes doesn’t take us into the world of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.  M’s people aren’t Smiley’s people. But he’s scouted the territory and is reporting back that things there are similar to how they are here.  The spy game is grubby, soul-deadening work when it’s not boring and routine.  Espionage is on the whole a bureaucratic and political endeavor.  And spies have feelings about what they do and about each other that aren’t always high-minded or noble but aren’t necessarily the opposites.  Spies (with one exception, and he’s less an exception than he’s been previously shown to be) are basically ordinary men and women, and like other ordinary men and women their professional relationships are often, sadly and messily, personal, as well.

At the beginning of Skyfall, M is losing on the political and bureaucratic side and is failing right before our eyes on the professional and personal levels.  She’s in trouble with the Prime Minister for overseeing a bungled mission that got several agents killed, including (apparently) MI6’s very best agent, without achieving its intended result.  And that best agent is angry at her for making the decision that would have gotten him killed if he wasn’t James Bond and not blessed with a supernatural amount of luck.  He’s punishing her by pretending to be as dead as he should be, leaving her hurt, guilty, and afraid, with no one to turn to for help.

And she needs help.

Not just to save her career.

To save her life.

She’s been targeted.  A former agent (Bardem) from her field days as head of the Hong Kong bureau, one who in his time may have been as good as Bond is in his, and like Bond something of a personal favorite of M’s, has returned from his apparent death, which, like Bond’s, was caused by her decision to sacrifice him for the sake of a mission.  The agent, who now goes by the name of Silva, intends to get revenge on M for leaving him to die in despair in a Chinese prison.

M can be ruthless.

We’ve seen this side of her before, when she burned Bond in the guise of Pierce Brosnan in Die Another Day, doing to him when he was captured by the North Koreans what she did to Silva when he was captured by the Chinese, leaving him in prison to rot.  That was in a different universe and in that universe M’s ruthlessness was official.  Bond had to be sacrificed for Queen and Country.  Her coldness was her strength.  In this universe, it’s a sign of weakness.  Under intense pressure with the clock ticking down, she’s prone to flinching at the last second.  She opts for the ruthless decision as the easier decision, knowing she can rationalize it to herself and to her superiors and her agents later. She does it right at the top of Skyfall to Bond and another agent.

This is a good place to stop for a reminder that the move to reboot the Bond franchise in a more serious vein began with the Timothy Dalton Bonds, The Living Daylights and License to Kill, and it was meant to accelerate in the Pierce Brosnan years.  It got untracked because the producers kept losing their nerve and retreating into Roger Moore territory and because, until Halle Berry showed up in Die Another Day, Brosnan was never given a real actress to work with as a leading lady and, after Sean Bean in GoldenEye, all his villains were just cackling madmen so obsessed with their schemes for world domination they hardly seemed to notice Bond even while monologuing at him.  Even the good actors, Jonathan Pryce in Tomorrow Never Dies and Robert Carlyle in The World is Not Enough, were too wrapped up in their characters’ megalomania to give Brosnan anything to work with.  So he was usually left standing in his own bubble of reality alone, except when he was joined in there by Judi Dench.

Carrying Dench over into the Craig films was one of the best decisions the producers made and she, as much as Craig, has been responsible for what’s real in these realistic Bonds.

But Casino Royale didn’t succeed at making a more serious Bond just by changing the tone.  It succeeded by taking itself seriously as a movie as opposed to the entertainments, spectacles, and amusement park rides so many past Bond films had been.

Quantum of Solace almost threw all this good work away. It wasn’t a good movie. It wasn’t even a good Bond movie.  It was a routine revenge thriller not as compelling as either of the first two Bourne movies or half as much fun as Taken with tired and uninspired stunts and routine special effects that made me nostalgic for the days when John Glen was directing the Bonds.

Skyfall will wipe away any lingering memories you may have of Quantum of Solace.  It’s a better Bond and a better movie than Casino Royale.  Mendes even stakes his claim that it’s as good a movie as or at least deserves to be judged alongside highly regarded films of very different sorts by alluding to or quoting directly from:  Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (of course), The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, The Thomas Crown Affair (Pierce Brosnan Edition), Silence of the Lambs, No Country for Old Men, Rear Window, Blade Runner, Straw Dogs (I think), and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The reference to Harry Potter I thought I caught might just have been my fevered imagination at work.

But there are probably others I’ll pick up on when I see it again.

Mendes has also included tributes to the other Bonds, mainly Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan, but Sean Connery above all.

And…

I’m pretty sure Mendes was being deliberately cheeky risking self-parody with nods to Rowan Atkinson’s Johnny English movies.

Think I’m stretching?

Ask yourself what’s with Bardem’s ridiculous hair and fey, bordering on camp performance?

Here’s Bardem as Silva in Skyfall.

 

And here’s John Malkovich as the villain in Johnny English.

Coincidence?

Ok.  Skyfall’s screenplay is by John Logan and Neal Purvis and Robert Wade.

Johnny English was written by William Davies and Neal Purvis and Robert Wade.

I even think Purvis and Wade, with Mendes’ help, were getting some of their own back from Atkinson.  If you haven’t seen Johnny English Reborn you should if only for Atkinson’s send up of the literally over the top (and under and around and through everything else) parkour chase at the beginning of Casino Royale. The chase that opens Skyfall is a challenge to Atkinson if he makes a third Johnny English, Mendes, Purvis, and Wade saying: “Ok, wiseguy. Let’s see how you handle this one.”

By the way, both Johnny English and Johnny English Reborn are very good Bond movies the way Galaxy Quest is a very good Star Trek movie.  Which figures. Purvis and Wade know their Bond, having written or had a hand in all the Bonds going back to the Pierce Brosnan days and The World is not Enough.

There are also borrowings from some TV shows, like Leverage and Sherlock, and it appears Purvis and Wade familiar with Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

So…is it a good movie?  Yes. How good? Pretty darn good. Is it a good Bond? Definitely. One of the best. Is it the best?  That depends.

It depends on when and how you got to know Bond and became a fan.

Anyone answering the question What’s the best Bond? is probably actually answering two other questions: Who’s your favorite Bond and Which is your favorite of his movies?

Seems most people prefer Sean Connery’s Bond.  But I have a soft spot for Roger Moore because he was the first Bond I got to know and Live and Let Die was the first Bond movie I saw on a big screen. I saw the Connery Bonds after that, cut up for TV.  It’s hard to take Moore seriously anymore because we look back at his Bond through his later outings, the execrable View to a Kill and the ridiculous Octopussy and the wacky Moonraker, all three made when Moore was too for Bond, too boot. (For Your Eyes Only isn’t so bad, but it actually shows Moore’s age more than the others.)  But his first three are good, and The Spy Who Loved Me still has the best opening gambit of all time, and if Moore had started with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Diamonds Are Forever, which almost happened, and quit while he was ahead after The Spy Who Loved Me, then I think, although he may not have been the best Bond, he’d have made the best series of Bond movies to date.

Timothy Dalton didn’t make enough Bonds to establish himself in my mind, but if he had started when he might have, with Diamonds Are Forever or Live and Let Die, and continued through GoldenEye, he might have rivaled Connery.

I’m a Pierce Brosnan fan and enjoyed his Bond, but except for GoldenEye and the first third of Die Another Day, his series of movies were kind of dull.  And he always seemed to be Pierce Brosnan doing Bond.  His best Bondian turns were actually in The Tailor of Panama and The Thomas Crown Affair.  But suppose he had started where he almost did with The Living Daylights and License to Kill.

I like Craig’s Bond, but he’s not yet my favorite.  My sense is that he’s the favorite Bond of fans who really wish Sean Connery was still young and toupeed and of people who never cared much for Bond in any incarnation before Casino Royale.  If either’s the case with you, then the fun or the joke is on you in Skyfall.  One of the themes of Skyfall is that in the years since we last saw him at the end of Quantum of Solace (or at the end of Casino Royale, if you prefer to pretend Quantum Solace never happened), this Bond has grown more like the Bond we know of old and he’s only going to grow more so over the coming movies. He’s more suave now, more relaxed in a tux, more amused by himself and by what’s going on around him, and more cold.  More callous towards women too, more likely to treat the death of a bad girl Bond Girl as he treats the death of anyone out to kill him or get him killed, as the occasion for a cruel joke.

And he’s more of a company man.  More of a patriot.  More the kind of Doing It For Queen and Country hero who would have a Union Jack for a parachute.

The point is driven home by something appearing at the end that’s conspicuously missing at the beginning.  Leading up to it are those in-jokes and some surprises that you’ll probably see coming if you call yourself a true fan.  But taken together they add up to this.  The reboot is over.  Now, Bond, James Bond, is back in business.

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As usual, a title card appears in the closing credits announcing that James Bond Will Return.  But it doesn’t say what the name of the next movie will be.  The producers haven’t decided yet.  There are only three authentic Ian Fleming titles left and all resound with a thud.  But I know what the title should be.

I won’t say it here because it’s something of a spoiler. But I proud of the joke and can’t resist, so I’m putting it in the comments.

Reminder: Although I hope people will be considerate, the comment section is not a spoiler-free zone.

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From the files, For Your Eyes Only: Dame Judi Dench as the the ultimate Bond Girl.

And, from January, here’s my review of the movie (not the novel or the TV series) Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

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The Blonde’s Bond Blurb: “Very English, and I don’t mean Johnny.”

Skyfall, directed by Sam Mendes, screenplay by John Logan and Neal Purvis & Robert Wade, starring Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, Berenice Marlohe, Ben Wishaw, Rory Kincaid, Helen McCory, and Albert Finney. Rated PG-13. Now in theaters.

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This week’s feature for Mannion Family Movie Night is the Mannion Guys’ introduction to Sean Connery’s Bond, You Only Live Twice, which Tony Dayoub says, “is instructive in explaining why Connery was getting fed up with the series and how the Bond movies would eventually stray quite far from their source material before its triumphant reboot decades later.” In other words, it’s the movie in which things began to go a little nutty. But, hey, it’s got the volcano hide-out and ninjas!

Read Tony’s whole post at Cinema Viewfinder.

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The deserted island city where Silva has his lair isn’t a set or the work of elaborate cgi. It’s a real place, abandoned forty years ago for economic reasons.

Hat tip to Kathryn Schulz.

The painting Q and Bond discuss at their first meeting is also real.  The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up by J.M.W. Turner.

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If you’ve got time: The parkour chase from Casino Royale:

And the parody from Johnny English Reborn:

Johnny English 2 Rooftop chase by teasertrailer

Don’t Drink and Fly: A Public Service Announcement from the Makers of Flight

Whip surveys the wreckage: Denzel Washington is very good as a hero pilot who saves the passengers on his broken airliner but in the process exposes himself as an alcoholic and drug addict in Robert Zemeckis’ earnest and at times preachy melodrama, Flight.

John Goodman bursts onto the screen, shaded, goateed, trailing a long, braided ponytail, the even longer cord on the earjack of his iPod, the improbable name of Harling Mays, and the promise of some comic relief, which we sorely need after the harrowing plane crash that opens Robert Zemeckis’ overly earnest, over-long, and over-done drama Flight, starring Denzel Washington as a hero pilot with six Jack Lemmons’, three Ray Millands’, and at least one Nicolas Cage’s worth of an Oscar-baiting drinking problem that he balances out with a Michael J. Fox level of an addiction to coke and pills.

As Washington’s drug and booze connection and personal anti-nutritionist and unfitness guru, Goodman arrives as if blown in from another movie, patly accompanied on the soundtrack by Sympathy for the Devil, raising hopes (my hopes, at any rate) that he is the devil or at least one of the devil’s human avatars and he’s about to turn Flight into a very different sort of movie.  A satire on the media and the nature of heroism, maybe, which is what I was expecting, because, really, who needs another earnest morality tale about the fall, recovery, and redemption of a drunk?

It turns out Goodman might as well be in another movie for all his character and his performance have to do with what Zemeckis is up to in Flight. Washington and the actress playing his nurse in the hospital where he's recuperating from the crash seem not to know what to make of Goodman either, as if they weren't expecting him ---Goodman not Mayes---to show up, at least not like this. I can't recall ever seeing actors in a movie just stop acting and stare in complete bewilderment at a co-star's performance. It's almost as if Goodman had said to himself, Screw this! and thrown his script away just before the camera started to roll. (I know. Cameras don't roll anymore. Give me time. I'll catch up.) what I suspect was actually going on is that Zemeckis couldn't reconcile what he had them doing with what he had Goodman doing, which is a general weakness throughout flight.

Goodman isn't the only one who seems to be in a different movie from the one---the ones---everyone else is in.

Kelly Reilly is in a gender-switched version of The Basketball Diaries cleaned up and made more family-friendly for a showing on Lifetime. Don Cheadle's starring in a courtroom drama a la A Civil Action.  Washington's acting up a storm in an update of  The Lost Weekend.  And Zemeckis hasn't found a way to blend them all tonally, structurally, thematically, or stylistically. He leaves it up to Washington to pull it all together with the magnetism of his charisma and the binding force of his performance.

It's one heck of a performance. As Whip Whitaker a commercial airline pilot who hasn't lost the swagger or the the recklessness of his days as a Navy fighter pilot and who just to keep himself sharp flies his jetliner as if he was still in the cockpit of an F-14, when he's not so hungover or drunk or high he has to leave all the work to his co-pilot and take a nap in the cockpit, Washington is very good. He's very good a lot.   John Gatins’ screenplay makes sure that he doesn’t lack for opportunities to be very good.  The script will give him a chance to be very good in a scene and one scene later he'll be called on to be very good again.  Sometimes he gets to be very good twice in the same scene.

You're getting the picture, right?

Flight is a showcase for Denzel Washington to the point that his being very good becomes the point of the movie.

What Flight isn't is a coherent story about a pilot who happens to be an alcoholic becoming a hero despite himself and having his sudden fame threatening to expose his secrets and many flaws to the world.  Instead it's the story of an alcoholic who incidentally is a pilot but might as well be a lawyer or a doctor or a politician or an insurance agent for all it really matters to who he is as a character or to the story he's in. The crash and the investigation that follows are plot devices that drive him towards choosing between confronting the truth about his drinking problem or continuing along his current path of self-destruction.

Now here’s where a critic like me can get himself in trouble. And by “a critic like me” I mean me.  When I start to review the movie I wish the director had made instead of the one he did make.  And clearly I wish Zemeckis had made a different kind of movie.  One more like Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe or Preston Sturges’ Hail the Conquering Hero or Stephen Frears’ 1992’s Hero, in which Dustin Hoffman plays an obnoxious and selfish little nudnik who despite himself acts heroically to save the lives of passengers of an airplane that has crashed in an icy river only to have the credit for the rescue go to a more conventionally heroic sort played by Andy Garcia.  Flight sets up the same questions as those films---What happens when the public’s perception of a hero is very different from the hero’s own perception of himself? What happens if the hero is in fact not a hero? What if the hero doesn’t deserve the acclaim and the love and the rewards being bestowed on him?---but Zemeckis and Gatins not only don’t try to answer them, they don’t even address them.  A pilot who pulled off in real life what Whip pulls off in the movie would be revered by the public and worshiped by the media.  Ask Captain Sully Sullenberger.

But while we’re told Whip’s a national hero, we never see or hear anybody treating him as one.  As soon as Whip’s recovered enough to leave the hospital, he retreats to his family farm way out in the country to hide and from there on out nobody seems much interested in him as a hero.  Whip has reasons to feel as guilty about what happened as proud and of course he has an excellent reason not to want the public get to know who and what he is in addition to being the best goddamn pilot in the world.  But it turns out that everybody he comes in contact with---and Whip keeps forgetting he’s trying to hide and wandering away from the farm, usually to go buy more beer and booze (Why he doesn’t call on Harling Mays to bring it to him, I don’t know.)---seems privy to his secrets and dedicated to making him feel more guilty while the reporters and TV crews on his trail seem intent not on exploiting his heroism for ratings and page views but exposing him as a fraud, which if they were part of the Washington political press corps and Whip was a Democrat running for office might happen, but in the case of hero pilot who saved ninety-six people with his skill and derring-do?  Not likely. It’s as if Zemeckis and Gatins have never seen The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Melodramas about characters confronting their demons in the form of various addictions have a venerable and even illustrious tradition. They’re not my favorite sort of movies and I was disappointed that Flight turned out to be one of those.  But if Zemeckis had wanted to make one of those, the crash wouldn’t have been necessary.  The possibility of a crash would have been enough.  It doesn’t matter that this one time Whip has the skill and the courage to save his broken plane even while drunk.  It matters that one of these days when he climbs into the cockpit drunk or high he will make a mistake he can’t recover from and rack up the plane. By including the crash, which makes for spectacular cinema, by the way, although, as I’ve been saying, the by-the-wayness of it is a problem, Zemeckis raises questions and expectations that that he spends the rest of the movie ignoring.  That’s not a good thing for a director to do. 

Beyond that, though, there’s Zemeckis’ failure to bring together the different types of movies his characters are in.

Cheadle never gets to show off the impressive legal skills his character boasts of.  Reilly follows her own road to redemption right out of the movie. Nothing really gets going with Goodman. All these separate subplots do is add length to a movie that clocking in at two hours and eighteen minutes is half an hour too long. But Zemeckis also draws things out through a lack of economy.  He rarely does with one shot what he can do with three or lets a character say with a look or a gesture what they can say with a long speech.  He repeats himself.  He lets his actors repeat themselves.

And never mind that Flight isn’t the satire I’d have preferred.  Except for the scenes with Goodman, this a movie strikingly low on humor or wit or any sense of irony.

Also, it’s preachy. In fact, at times, it borders on the out and out Christian. Not quite in the way of redemptive, uplifting, and overtly religious movies like Soul Surfer, Fireproof, and Facing the Giants.  More in the tradition of old-fashioned, homilitic Hollywood tearjerkers, just without any kindly priests of the Pat O’Brien/Spencer Tracy mold and no late night, lonely visits to church, although Whip is dragged to an AA meeting at one point.

Most damaging of all is that Flight is a realistic movie that never feels real.  It’s not just that the Media don’t behave like the Media or that people don’t react to Whip as they did to Sully Sullenberger.  It’s not just that the script seems to be inventing rules and regulations, practices and procedures for the airline industry for the convenience of the plot. It’s that the movie misses the implications of one of its own major plot points.

Whip’s plane goes into a nose dive mid-flight because an vital component of the hydraulic system snaps.  That component, we’re told, had been identified in an inspection as past due for replacement a year before this flight!

I don’t believe that if the news came out that an airline was putting defective planes in the air anybody would care that the pilot who saved the passengers on one of those planes that came apart in midair might have been a little the worse for a few drinks.

Well, actually, the movie presents us with one person who does care.  I didn’t mention another member of the cast who’s stuck in her own movie.

Melissa Leo has a delicious and devilish (though a very different sort of devil than Goodman’s) cameo as an inspector for the National Transportation Safety Board who is on to Whip from the beginning and seems determined to expose him and send him to jail.  In her apparent lack of interest in the real crime---the airline’s negligence---and obsession with bringing Whip to her idea of justice, she’s like a more well-intentioned Javert to Whip’s much less noble Jean Valjean.

Now that’s a movie I would have liked to see.

Of course I’ll have my chance in December.

But to get back to the movie I did see.

Flight annoyed and disappointed me but it’s not terrible.  And there’s one compelling reason to see it.

Denzel Washington is very good.

Did I mention that?

Very, very good.

The Blonde’s Blurb: “Denzel! Wow!”

Flight, directed by Robert Zemeckis, screenplay by John Gatins. Starring Denzel Washington, Don Cheadle, Kelly Reilly, John Goodman, Bruce Greenwood, Melissa Leo, Brian Geraghty, Tamara Tunie, and Nadine Valazquez.  Rated R. Now in theaters.

Don’t Drink and Fly: A Public Service Announcement from the Makers of Flight was originally published at LanceMannion.com.

“The best bad idea we have.”

Lost in the bazaar:  Ben Affleck as CIA operative Tony Mendez leads the six American diplomats he’s come to rescue down a street in Tehran during the Iranian Hostage Crisis in Argo, an Affleck-directed political thriller based on an actual covert mission that involved putting a fake movie into pretended production and having the diplomats pose as members of a Canadian film crew scouting locations for their non-existent Star Wars rip-off.

If you sit still when the lights come on and the credits start to roll at the end of Argo---which you should do because 1. It’s a good movie and you should be sitting all the way through it anyway and 2. These days filmmakers are in the habit of opening up audience-rewarding Easter eggs during and after the credits of their movies and you should still be kicking yourself if you didn’t wait until the very, very last credit of The Avengers---you’ll see how proud Argo’s director and star Ben Affleck is of his movie’s visual historical accuracy. And you can’t blame him.

Affleck juxtaposes scenes from Argo with pictures of the real people and events that show how closely he’s captured the look and feel and sense of those long, terrible 444 days from November 1979 until January 1981 when Iranian revolutionaries held fifty-two American diplomats hostage within the seized U.S. embassy in Tehran and with them our national pride and, I’d argue, our collective mental balance.

It’s not just that many of the key players are the spitting images of their real-life counterparts (with one notable exception).  That’s the easy part.  It’s that the movie’s recreations of the scenes outside and inside the embassy and in the streets of Tehran more than look like the pictures on TV and in newspapers and magazines at the time---they have the same energy and evoke the same sense of something terrible, terrifying, and tragic happening right before our eyes and the same sense of frustration and helplessness that follows that godawful despairing realization that There’s nothing we can do!

If you’re old enough to remember the Hostage Crisis, though, you won’t need the pictures at the end to tell you how exactly Affleck and his cinematographer and designers got that right.  You’ll have felt it right from the start.

That’s one of the very good things about Argo but it’s not the best thing.  It makes the best things possible.  If Affleck had been content with historical evocations, Argo would be a simple costume drama with blocky polyesters and bad facial hair choices in place of bustles and stovepipe hats.

Of course, the history doesn’t just drive the plot. The history is the plot. But it also provides Argo with its look, its feel, its mood, and one of its important themes.

On November 4, 1979, as the crowds of Iranian protesters and militants stormed the embassy, six members of the station slipped out the back and found sanctuary at the home of the Canadian ambassador and his wife, who hid them out for three months until the situation became dire and untenable.  The Canadians were recalling the ambassador.  The Iranians were on the hunt.  There was nowhere else safe for them to hide.  The fear back in Washington was that if they were caught they’d be treated as spies but if the U.S. tried to rescue them, the Iranians would take revenge on the fifty-two hostages at the embassy.

CIA agent Tony Mendez (played by Affleck), who specialized in sneaking operatives, assets, and defectors out from under the noses of hostile governments, was tasked with developing a plan to get the six out.  Inspired by his son’s love of Star Wars and Planet of the Apes, he came up with the idea of passing the six off as members of a Canadian film crew scouting desert locations for a science-fiction movie.

In real life the movie was called Lord of Light for which an actual script existed, based on the novel by Roger Zelazny.  In Argo the movie is a Star Wars rip-off called…Argo.  In order to fool any Iranians who might go looking for physical evidence that a movie is in production, Mendez makes a side-trip to Hollywood where with the help of an Oscar-winning make-up artist named John Chambers (a real person played by a lookalike John Goodman) and Lester Siegel, an irascible producer with a World War II secret service background and a patriotic streak that he forgot he had (Alan Arkin playing a composite of four actual people), he sets up a phony production company, secures “financing”, and generates public relations campaign that results in puff pieces in the trades.

As evocative of the period as it is, it’s just as evocative of the movies of the period, particularly the political thrillers like Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men.

Affleck and his director of photography Rodrigo Prieto have given Argo the gloomy and gritty texture of those films, conjuring up the same look and feel of a society that had given up on itself, of a world literally crumbling from neglect---summed up by an anachronistic shot of the iconic Hollywood sign falling to pieces, which really had happened, although by the time of the Hostage Crisis it had been put back together.  and nobody seemed interested in putting it back together---the same mood of reasonable paranoia, the same sense of people taking shelter in lonely, little groups, hiding out from an almost sourceless menace. Mendez’s apartment in Virginia, his hotel room in Tehran, the kitchen of the Canadian Ambassador’s house reminded me of Faye Dunaway’s basement apartment in Three Days of the Condor and Jane Alexander’s character’s sister’s house in All the President’s Men.  And I couldn’t help thinking of President Carter looking lost and alone in his self-imposed imprisonment in the White House.  Throughout the movie, Carter is mostly seen on television sets in the background in real news footage, looking shrunken, isolated, trapped, and ignored.  In those ‘70s political thrillers, the threat comes from a secret source inside the government, if not from the government itself. In Argo, the government is as threatened and baffled as everyone else.

I feel like I’m making Argo sound unremittingly grim and didactic as well.  It’s neither.  It’s not exactly light-hearted but it is full of humor and not all of it of the gallows kind.  The movie has a satirical edge, although the edge is of a blade fingered behind the back rather than drawn and pointed.  Its targets are Hollywood, of course, but the government, politics, bureaucracy, and the spy game come in for it and, to a darker and more circumspect degree, so does the Iranian Revolution, which produced its own absurd bureaucracies and brand of politicians.

But in all cases the humors arises not from the institutions or systems being satirized but from the people who make them up. Argo’s Hollywood is a collection of lunatics among whom eccentrics like Chambers and Siegel connive to thrive and survive.  Mendez, Chambers, and Siegel have no trouble setting up their phony production company.  The easy joke would be that that’s because one way or another everybody in the business is a phony and the whole industry depends on all these phonies pretending not to notice each other’s phoniness. But in Argo it’s more the case of everyone being too caught up in their own problems to pay close attention to what others are up to.  It turns out to be a similar case among the Iranians, with the difference being that people’s individual problems are often matters of life and death.  Revolutionary Iran is a scary place even for revolutionaries.  But Mendez’s plan depends on individual Iranians having too much else to worry about besides whether or not he might be a spy.

Affleck takes the view that no matter how dire the circumstances get, people will be people and that means that they’re often ridiculous. We’re funny that way.  But it’s one of the things that makes us strong and resilient. We just can’t take it all in in.  Our egos and vanities and misperceptions get in the way.  Our best defense is that we aren’t aware enough to realize how much trouble we’re in.  It’s a likable trait, even admirable in its way, and it’s the root of our commonality.  Before we’re anything else, an American spy or an Iranian revolutionary, we are ourselves. We just can’t help it.

To illustrate this point, Aflleck fills Argo with characters being themselves despite themselves. All of them, from the leads and supports, and cameos to the nameless bureaucrats and spies in Washington and at Langley, to the bit players, stagehands, suits, and hangers-on in Hollywood, to the Iranian citizens, soldiers, shopkeepers, low-level government officials, and airport workers, are given dialog, even if only a line or two, or a shot in a scene that reveals them as distinct individuals with feelings and thoughts that transcend their function in the plot.

The odd exceptions are the six diplomats Mendez is trying to rescue who are differentiated mainly by their their hairstyles and shirt collar widths.  One of the six is given more lines and screen time than any of the others but for the most part he’s the spokesmen for their collective fears, doubts, and regrets.  Except for one scene, and it’s a redeeming exception, he doesn’t speak for himself or, rather, he doesn’t speak as a particular self we get to know and understand on his own terms.  I’m guessing Affleck and his screenwriter, Chris Terrio, were being tactful and taking into consideration the feelings of the of the real people all of whom are still alive and probably still haunted by their ordeal and Affleck may have been too careful about not seeming to exploit it or them they wouldn’t like to see it or them for dramatic effect.

But while this weakness may be deliberate and understandable, it’s all the more glaring because of how vividly almost all the other characters in the movie are portrayed.

Argo is an ensemble piece.  Affleck is undoubtedly the star and his character is the hero, but although it’s a star’s part, it requires him not to do a star turn.  The job he’s given himself is to be the calm center around which the craziness swirls.  He builds a sheltered space where we can stand with him and watch and think along with him.  In fact, much of his performance is watching and thinking.  The showier work is left to others, with Goodman and Arkin getting the best of it and having the most obvious fun.

As Chambers and Siegel, they make a dueling but amusingly complementary pair of cynics.  Different types of cynics.  Chambers is the good-natured, forgiving type, amused by other people’s foolishness but grateful for it because it allows him to lead his two lives as artist and spy.  Goodman plays him with an almost permanent grin as if he’s on the brink of bursting into a hearty laugh that will give away the whole game. Siegel is a cynic of the self-loathing kind whose disdain for humanity in general begins with disdain for himself in particular.  Siegel has himself convinced that he’s not doing anything worthwhile with his life. It’s a feeling leftover from his glory days an intelligence officer in World War II.  Making movies, even award-winning ones, just doesn’t compare to fighting Nazis.  But like most movie cynics he’s a closet romantic and an idealist and, while profanely and grumpily expressing reluctance, he jumps at the chance to get back to meaningful work.  Since he’s played by Alan Arkin, however, he’s even grumpier and more profane in his idealism than in his cynicism.

Bryan Cranston and Chris Messina, as Mendez’s immediate superior at the CIA and the agent in charge of operations in the control room at Langley, have almost as much to do as Affleck in roles that allow them to be more active and show more range than the star’s own.  Bob Gunton as Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Philip Baker Hall in an uncredited appearance as Vance’s unnamed deputy who almost certainly is meant to be Warren Christopher have one brief scene together that apart from its effectiveness in its own right serves up one of the best Muppet jokes ever not made by the Muppets themselves.  Richard Kind turns up as a shark of a Hollywood agent who is almost a match in cynicism and irascibility for Arkin’s Siegel. Adrienne Barbeau turns up an a fiery cameo as one of Siegel’s ex-wives.  Zeljko Ivanek and Keith Szarabajka bluster and storm as State Department officials and capture the frustration and desperate need to do something, anything, but what? that gripped not just the administration but much of the entire country.

Compelling in quieter roles are Kyle Chandler as Carter’s Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan, Victor Garber and Page Leong as Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor and his wife Pat, Sheila Vand as their young Iranian housekeeper Sahar whose loyalties are a mystery even to herself, Ali Saam as a member of the Revolutionary guard who comes calling at the Canadian embassy and tests Sahar’s loyalties, and Hooshang Tooze as the Deputy Minister of Islamic Guidance who is probably something more than the simple bureaucrat he presents himself to Mendez as being.

The last three along with other actors playing Iranians of all sorts and conditions are important to Affleck’s determination to individualize the Iranians and make us see the Revolution through their eyes and not as the angry mobs we saw on TV at the time.  This doesn’t mean that he wants us to sympathize with the revolution.  The Iranians are shown as dangerous and implacable enemies of the United States, which, although Affleck doesn’t shy away from our transgressions and mistakes and crimes in the Middle East, is still us to the Iranians them.  But sorting out the good guys from the bad guys isn’t the issue. and the question of who’s right and who’s wrong---or who’s more right or less wrong---is irrelevant because it’s irrelevant to the characters in the movie.  They can’t do anything about it and figuring out an answer won’t help them solve their problem at the moment.

Which brings me back to the way Affleck uses history in Argo.

Affleck and Terrio grant themselves a good deal of dramatic license, naturally. It wouldn’t be a Hollywood movie without the filmmakers taking liberties with the facts.  And Argo is a movie, a thriller not a docudrama.  But Affleck never lets us forget the reality behind his story.  As I said, it does more than drive the plot.  It gives Argo its mood and its tension.  And it’s vital thematically. 

Affleck lets us know from the beginning and keeps reminding us that we’re not to expect a sense of triumph if Mendez pulls this off.  At best we’ll feel relieved.  Then he keeps the pressure on so that intensely that relief, if it comes, will be enough.  We’re not allowed to see the operation as a potential surrogate victory over the Iranians or even a moral one.  This is a job that has to be done for its own sake.  It will have no effect on the larger crisis except in that if the mission fails it might make things worse.

There are times when there really isn’t anything we can do.  There are problems that can’t be solved.  There are situations where even someone as powerful as the President of the United States has no control.  Under those circumstances, when success isn’t an option, despair and surrender are temptations that must still be resisted.  The best thing we can do is do our jobs, to exercise what little control we have in the little sphere in which we still have it, and instead of holing up by ourselves, reach out to those nearest whom we can help.  We have to take care of each other.

“I’ve never left anyone behind,” Mendez tells the six people he’s come to rescue.

He’s not boasting. He’s not merely trying to be encouraging.  He’s stating a simple fact.  This is his job, to make sure no one gets left behind.

That’s all our jobs.

No matter what else, we’re here to make sure none of us gets left behind.

Argo, directed by Ben Affleck, screenplay by Chris Terrio, based on a Wired article by Joshuah Bearman.  Starring Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston, John Goodman, Alan Arkin, Victor Garber, Kyle Chandler, and Chris Messina.  Rated R. Now in theaters.

“The Best Bad Idea We Have” originally posted at LanceMannion.com.