Bayside resident Mark Metcalf is an actor who has worked in movies, TV and on the stage. He is best known for his work in "Animal House," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Seinfeld."
In addition to his work on screen, Metcalf is involved with the Milwaukee International Film Festival, First Stage Children's Theater and a number of other projects.
He also finds time to write about movies for OnMilwaukee.com. This week, Metcalf weighs in on films inspired by the war in Iraq.
I continue to be concerned about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I suspect that is an understatement. According to the polls, most of the people in the United States are concerned about the wars and threatened wars throughout the Middle East. General Petraeus' recent report was not very comforting.
According to an article in Vanity Fair, it wasn't until three years after the fall of Saigon that the first films about Vietnam came out. I am discounting "Green Berets," John Wayne's 1968 recruitment commercial for the military.
And those first films were "The Deer Hunter" and "Coming Home," both nominated for Academy Awards in 1979. Even the Gulf War of 1991 had to settle into our unconsciousness for a while before "Three Kings" and then "Jarhead" came out.
It seems as though we are rushing things a little with the current war. Maybe that is because we are coming to believe that it will be with us for the 100 years that Sen. John McCain has projected as a possibility and we want to get to work imbedding it into the iconography now. And maybe it is just so puzzling as to what we are doing there and why, that we need to work it out in our literature now as we go along.
I had not seen any of the four or five latest films that seemed to come out in a bunch last year and early this year, so I thought I would see what Hollywood was thinking about it all. The first one I watched was "Home of the Brave."
Irwin Winkler, who is better known as the producer of all the "Rocky" movies, and some of the best, the middle period, of Martin Scorsese, including "Goodfellas," is the writer / director.
When he directs, he takes himself and his subject a lot more seriously, in that I'm-a-serious-intellectual kind of way, than when he produces.
Most of the films he has directed are very serious and what we used to call heavy, either driven by political concerns as in "Guilty by Suspicion," which is about Hollywood blacklisting, or the difficulty of mixing human relationships and small time crime in "Night and the City," with DeNiro and Jessica Lange. In "Home of the Brave" he returns to a political motivation.
In a very obvious, but unaccredited way, "Home of the Brave" is a remake of "The Best Years of Our Lives," which was made in 1946. The IMDB plot outline for "The Best Years..." is "Three WWII veterans return home to small-town America to find that they and their families have been irreparably changed."
If you changed the name of the war, "Home of the Brave" would have exactly the same plot outline. The small town is Spokane, Washington; the Fredrick March part is played by Samuel Jackson; Harold Russell, who really did lose both his hands in WWII, is played by Jessica Biel, who, either because she's pretty or a woman, only loses one hand; and Dana Andrews, is played by Brian Presley.
The film fails in so many ways; not just because it doesn't live up to the depth of character and the detail of life after a wartime experience for both the soldier and those who stayed home that William Wyler gives us in "The Best Years of Our Lives." The film fails because it doesn't really address this war, why we are there, what effect being there for six years, already longer than WWII lasted, has had on this country and on the Middle East, nor is it concerned with the kind of warfare that US troops are facing in Iraq.
The film exists in a vacuum. Rather, it tries to exist in the vacuum of memory, with a sad, weak lust for great films of the past. There is real concern for the men and women who are fighting the war, but it is so poorly articulated - and with no insight, except that which is clumsily borrowed from past films - that it becomes unreal. As an audience, we cease to care about the characters and, in the worst effect of bad cinema, we stop caring about the very real people that they represent.
Another movie I watched was "Lions for Lambs." I understand why no one went to see this movie -- even with Robert Redford, Meryl Steep and Tom Cruise above the title. It too follows three separate stories that intersect in only a cursory way.
In one of the stories, a college professor talks to a student in an office. In another, a reporter talks to a US Senator in an office. And in the third, two soldiers lie in the snow on a mountaintop in Afghanistan getting shot at and shooting back, barely talking at all, while being watched via satellite by superiors back at base. The superiors do a fair amount of talking.
So, there is a lot of sitting around and talking. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to make a movie about people sitting around talking. The talking is smart, and everyone is concerned about doing the right thing. The Senator and the reporter are talking about the history of the war in Afghanistan, and subsequently Iraq, and how to resolve that conflict, as well as how to be honest with the people of the United States about it and still retain some dignity and sell papers or whatever television news is selling (they are selling something).
Everything about this movie looks good and is well intentioned and smart, and tries to be fair and unbiased. But all it amounts to is a dinner party conversation about a war that is out of our control and, while not likely to upend our culture and civilization, is certainly slowing down it's positive growth. It is a conversation that will be satisfying to some and not to others and will likely end when someone turns the topic to how well the Brewers are playing right now.
"Redacted" was written, produced and directed by Brian DePalma. Stylistically it attempts to look like a documentary shot by a soldier deployed in Samara to chronicle his life in Iraq intercut with some footage from an Al-jezeera type television news program.
It's kind of like "The Blair Witch Project," only in Iraq. It is also based on a real event. By imitating an amateur production, DePalma abdicates any responsibility to have the picture look good. He also seems to have surrendered any obligation to represent real human beings with any respect for them at all. No doubt some of the people involved in Abu Ghraib, and the men who perpetrated the crime that this film is based on -- the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl -- behaved like imbecilic morons driven by nothing other than a lifetime of fear and it's even smaller brothers: hatred, video games, junk food, and a stupidity that seems to be coded in their DNA.
But, I can't believe that all of them are as inane as DePalma has depicted them here. There is no analysis. There is no attempt to understand the forces at work. He seems to thinks it's enough to throw a bunch of boobs up on screen, have them commit a truly horrendous crime, and not even bother to look at what might have driven them to that point, or what price might be paid for that crime. He has reduced the war in Iraq to a video on You Tube. "Redacted" has no depth, no insight, no compassion and no wit.
And then there's "Rendition." It broadens the war theme to the now over generalized marketing phrase "The War on Terror."
A family man, an Egyptian who has lived in the States for 20 years, is taken from the airport in New York when he arrives home from a business trip to South Africa. There has been a bombing in Egypt and his cell phone received some calls from a number that is linked to the Bin Laden type terrorist cell claiming responsibility for the bombing.
He receives "extraordinary rendition" and ends up in a prison in Northern Africa being tortured to gain more information about the terrorist cell. It all sounds familiar. We've been told this is happening. They do some water boarding, some electric shock, and lots of deprivation. He is kept naked and humiliated, and Habeas Corpus does not hold because he is in another country. Not the way the United States does business? Well, the CIA sees it differently. At least in this movie they do. Meryl Streep is the CIA. She is the reporter in "Lions for Lambs." She's brilliant and transformed in each. But, it's not enough to make either film work.
I think it is good to see, made corporeal, even in that attractive, movie-way that they make things "real," it's good to see what is being done to people in the name of the war on terror.
The disservice that "Rendition" does is that it serves up a story that is probably very, very real and it does it with slick Hollywood images and then it puts a happy, highly improbable ending on it and catapults the whole thing into the realm of fantasy.
This way, we can feel safe and secure because truth will win out. So if the end is a fantasy, then maybe the whole thing is a fantasy and the stories about Guantanamo and the satellite holding prisons throughout the world, and the torture of suspected terrorists are a fantasy too, and we can live with that.
And maybe evolution is a hoax perpetrated by scientists. And the Grand Canyon is only 6,000 years old. I don't really know, but I chose to believe that I have ancestors who climbed up out of Olduvai Gorge in Africa and that there are inhumane means being used to get information from people who are innocent and some who are probably very guilty.
That's four films about aspects of the wars in the Middle East. Four films that range from being bad to being well intentioned but unsuccessful. I haven't gotten to see "In the Valley of Elah," or "Stop-Loss," which is in theatres now.
The war in Iraq is progressing slowly with no end in sight, which happens to be the title of a very good documentary about the war. I will review it soon. So I imagine that we will see many more films that try to understand or make statements about this period in our history. There may be some made that are seminal, the way "Apocalypse Now" or "Full Metal Jacket" are about Vietnam, the way "The Best Years of Our Lives" is about World War II.
Obviously, films are entertainment. But, if they are an art form, and I believe that they can be, then they must also ask questions and elucidate elements of our reality. They must hold a mirror up to our very nature, so that we can understand who and what we are and perhaps be that in a better way.
That may be too much to ask, but, as I said before, these are messy times and one of the things that works of art are meant to do is to tidy up the mess, organize it a little, so that we can see it more clearly.
I hope that the premise of the article in Vanity Fair is not correct. I hope we don't have to wait until well after the event to get an accurate and important look at it, because I don't think I can wait that long.
Mark Metcalf is an actor and owner of Libby Montana restaurant in Mequon. Still active in Milwaukee theater, he's best known for his roles as Neidermeyer in "Animal House" and as The Maestro on "Seinfeld."
Originally from New Jersey, Metcalf now lives in Bayside.
