The Iron Lady: Rust from the Inside Out

If it seems strange to make a film about someone you hate and then give the movie the respectful tag line "NEVER COMPROMISE," you're right. It is strange.

But that's Hollywood: torn between the basic economics of filmmaking (you need to coax the great unwashed to voluntarily pay to watch your movie) and your own "artistic" mores (you live in an echo chamber populated with people exactly like yourself: uneducated, overpaid, frightfully inexperienced men-children who, like all adolescents, are still angry at their parents (read: society's grown-ups) for making them eat their broccoli.) I don't fear a nuclear Iran as much as I do a teenager who's just been denied the car who has his finger on the button.

So why make a movie about Margaret Thatcher at all? The facts (those damned, rascally things) all line up behind her: she turned the British economy around, reformed its health care system (lamentably reversed later), faced down overreaching unions, protected British citizens and property by going to war in the Falklands, and, along with a wise pope and a "cowboy" American president, tossed the Soviet Union on the "ash-heap of history."

Now how are you gonna hammer an authority monger (she looks like your mean 9th grade English teacher, doesn't she?) who's been proven right time after time?

You use a theatrical flashback device to put it all in "perspective." Instead of just simply following her through her storied (and flat-out fascinating) eleven years at No. 10 Downing Street, why not view everything she ever did through the distorted lens of largely invented mental decline?

But don't stop there! Make her loving, uber-supportive husband, who had the misfortune to predecease her, into a sad buffoon who comes back from the dead to mock her and to gainsay the choices she made in life that he, when he was alive, fully supported, like, oh say, running for Parliament?

That's it! Now you've got the hang of it! What else can you do to diminish the second greatest Prime Minister of the 20th century?

I've got it! While you're spending precious minutes focusing on a fictional, distorted present, artfully gloss over the past: misplace a garbage strike by five years (hey, so what if Columbus sailed in 1492, who cares?), show her constantly at battle with her own party members (the same ones who voted their support for her year after year as PM), and, best of all, reduce her signal accomplishment to a long shot of her dancing with Ronald Reagan and a brief newsreel of the Berlin Wall toppling.

Margaret Thatcher was a prime mover in the freeing of almost 300 million people, not counting Britain.

That's 300,000,000, kids. If you piled 300,000,000 pennies one atop the other . . .

But let's just ignore that, shall we?

Here, I must give the obligatory hat tip to Meryl Streep's marvelous mimicry of Mrs. Thatcher. She is amazing, but would have been even more amazing had she had a script that allowed her to play the woman in her prime for more than a third of the movie. Not allowing Streep to stretch her considerable talents for a full 120 minutes as the Iron Lady she indisputably was and instead constricting her to heavy makeup and doddering about in her dreary flat arguing with her dead husband is simply shameful, not only to Margaret, but to Meryl.

But a ray of sunshine: At least I know now how they'll treat Ronald Reagan in his inevitable biopic. After all, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease in his latter years. I can see it now: there will be a scene in which Reagan, after joking at a press conference (joking!) that "the bombing of the Soviet Union will begin in five minutes," will sit in the darkened Situation Room, surrounded by his generals, and his hand will tremble (early onset, you know) as he reaches out for a Dr. Strangelove nuke box with a huge, glowing red button on top, cackling evilly, his eyes wild with stupidity and hatred, ready to destroy the entire world, except . . .

. . . some Leftie general will prevent him and save the day. Call Woodstein, stat!

Count on it.

(And they'll wonder why we won't go see the movie.)

Paul: Alienating Religion

Paul is such a trifle, such a mindless mess, that it’s almost not worth parsing, except for the fact that its sins are so representative of Hollywood religion-bashing that they bear scrutiny.

The film itself is mildly funny, a comic take on Starman and E.T. Two British nerds attend ComiCon in SoCal and then hit the road to visit various extraterrestrial landmarks such as Area 51 and the Black Mailbox.

On the road, they encounter a pot-smoking, potty-mouth slacker alien named Paul, who crash-landed on earth in 1947. (Funny how aliens can negotiate interstellar space but always seem to crash-land here. Maybe they are smoking something up there.) Paul is a great missed comic opportunity. He could have been wry, subtle, insightful, and even genuinely funny. Instead he is coarse, profane, hedonistic, and shallow.

Oh, and he’s Jesus Christ if you get rid of all that moral ethos crap.

Heroes need foils, and the film casts about for a proper enemy. At first, it seems, it might be a comic version of “Keys” from E.T. or the SETI researcher from Starman. But the moment he appears onscreen, the Bible-thumping (yes, actually thumping, that’s how lazy the writers are) father of the young female love interest gives it all away. He’s a born-again, rifle-toting (a must, along with Bible-thumping), pick-up driving, drooling moron who is so threatened by the existence of Paul that he must kill him on sight.

Of course, none of the writers of this dreck has an even glancing understanding of “intelligent design,” the theory (yes, Virginia, they’re all theories, now, aren’t they?) that the world is the result of planning by superior beings. It’s fascinating that the people who refuse to believe in an alien who made the world nevertheless find it easy to believe in aliens who stop by to heal our seas and souls before returning home.

Paul’s very existence makes the young woman, suffering from birth with a defective eye, insane. She, like the writers who invented her, cannot possibly find middle ground between belief and atheism. Paul could not possibly be created by the same god who created us—he looks so different! When the Bible says we were made in God’s image, it means literal image, right? Well, if you haven’t set foot inside a church your entire life, I guess you’d think that.

All well and good; attack belief. But why Christian belief?  The answer is simple: Can you imagine replacing Christianity with Islam in the film? More to the point: would they have made a film about a bomb-toting, Koran-thumping father and his veiled, emotionally abused daughter?

Of course not.

And the reason they get away with libeling Christianity is that even though Christians make up more than 90% of America, unlike Islam, they are not prone to murdering those who offend them. So not only are the filmmakers uninformed, they’re also cowards.

When Paul predictably heals the young woman’s bad eye, we’re meant to draw a crayon line between him and Jesus, reducing Jesus to a punch line and elevating the healing powers of aliens—in which, ironically, the environmentalist left actually believe! Their god, the earth mother Gaia, will heal our wicked souls if we just choose paper instead of plastic.

Looked at this way, the religion of the left, statist/environmentalism, is far kookier than that of the right, Christianity has positively impacted hearts and lives for two thousand years, while its modern pagan alternative leaves its scattered, few adherents alienated, angry, bitter, and stupid.

Kind of the way they depict us.

The Conspirator: Redford's Autobiography

Robert Redford obtained superstar status in the early 70s with crowd-pleasing hits like Butch Cassidy and The Sting. But after All the President's Men and Three Days of the Condor, he turned into the most handsome scold in Hollywood, only occasionally reverting to satisfying films like Ordinary People and Quiz Show.

His latest film, The Conspirator, is the most egregious example of his liberal hectoring: Government is evil, except when it's enforcing liberal policies. In this movie, the evil government card is personified by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline), who chews the scenery as a rabid, Constitution-be-damned-we're-saving-the-Union martinet who sees to it that Mary Surratt (Robin Wright), the landlady of several of the conspirators, is tried as a co-conspirator by military tribunal as opposed to civilian trial.

That much is indeed true. In fact, much of the film is historically accurate, though much of it is not. The costumes, hair, carriages, streets, and interiors are all historically correct, but the bigger question is: Of all the films one could make about the Civil War in general and Lincoln's assasination in particular, why make this one?

There has not been a major feature film about Lincoln's demise during my lifetime, which is strange, considering that Americans esteem Lincoln only slightly less than George Washington. The best film about Lincoln was directed by John Ford and starred Henry Fonda (Young Mr. Lincoln, 1939), though it focuses on Lincoln's early trial lawyer career. Though many documentaries have considered the life and death of our 16th president, no feature films in recent memory have mined this rich vein of historical truth, compelling drama, and tragic end of a great figure.

Redford has the clout to make such a sorely-needed film, but instead opted for the one story that makes the Lincoln administration look corrupt, fearful, and willing to shred the very document hundreds of thousands of Americans died for.

I cannot imagine a bigger insult to the memory of Abraham Lincoln.

I imagine Redford would assert that the little-known story of Mary Surratt begs our attention, but the film cannot hide the fact that she was as guilty as she was found by the (gasp!) military tribunal. Given Redford's public opposition to the military trials of Al Queda suspects, the reasons for his making this movie start to come into focus.

Like an inept grad student trying to ineffectively sway his undergrad lecture class, Redford tries to draw a connection between the Surratt trial and that of modern terrorist suspects. Unfortunately, we can dismiss his overeager analogy with a wave of the hand: Mary Surratt was an American citizen and had every right to a civil trial. Khalid Sheik Mohammed is not, and therefore does not.

The audience knew this intuitively, which is why the movie grossed less than half of its $25 million dollar budget.

As a long-time resident of Utah, I've seen Redford's politics up close. After his first films made him a millionaire, he bought up the backside of one of the highest peaks in America and created his Sundance ski resort, reserving thousands of acres therein for his own private use, which he surrounded by high chain-link fences, warning signs, and restrictions on others who might wish to build nearby.

Route 189 is the main canyon road that leads from Utah Valley to the branch canyon that connects to Sundance. It has long been a dangerously winding two-lane road where many fatalities occurred over the years. When the state and county wished to widen the road to reduce the carnage, Redford vigorously opposed it. In fact, he even ran for sewer commissioner in order to prevent any development, public or private, anywhere near his precious Sundance. It took many years and more deaths before the road was finally widened over Redford's objections. Since then, traffic fatalities have been rare.

Redford is everything he no doubt decries: a greedy one-percenter who, having obtained his mountain view, seeks to deprive everyone else of it. He despises the government except when he can twist its aims and outcomes to his own selfishness; when he cannot, he decries it like a self-righteous Jeremiah.

In fine, Robert Redford is a capable director, but an awful human being, and wasted a wonderful opportunity to tell one of the most important stories in American history: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

In so doing, he tells us everything about himself.