Co-pilots Soderbergh + Cusack: Your left wing is burning!
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This has been one of those weeks when you could hardly deny that Hollywood is a giant fleshpot of liberal zealotry. HBO is debuting ‘Recount,’ Danny Strong’s vivid account of how the nasty turmoil in Florida during the 2000 presidential election allowed the Republican forces supporting George W. Bush to make off with the state’s key electoral votes. The HBO drama has earned largely favorable notices--see Mary McNamera’s especially perceptive review here. But the buzz has not been so kind--in fact, it’s been downright awful--for a couple of other lefty offerings, notably John Cusack’s ‘War, Inc.’ which arrived in theaters Friday and Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Che,’ which debuted earlier in the week as a four-hour plus work-in-progress at the Cannes FIlm Festival.
Cusack’s film, a blistering satire of war profiteers and political corruption, has taken it on the chin nearly everywhere, with the Wall Street Journal’s respected Joe Morgenstern calling it a ‘sorry excuse for political satire.’ Landing with a thud on Metacritic, where it’s 34 rating actually put it a lower state of critical hell than ‘Alvin and the Chipmunks’ or ‘Speed Racer,’ it took a withering ding from the usually reliably liberal LA Weekly, which called the film ‘not half as funny as the ‘Harold and Kumar’ sequel.’ Soderbergh’s ‘Che,’ which stars Benicio Del Toro in what was intended as a two-film portrait of the much-lionized Cuban revolutionary, took such flack at Cannes that it will probably need a big overhaul and re-edit before it surfaces again. The critics were not kind.
As Variety’s Todd McCarthy put it: ‘If the director has gone out of his way to avoid the usual Hollywood biopic conventions, he has also withheld any suggestion of why the charismatic doctor, fighter, diplomat, diarist and intellectual theorist became and remains such a legendary figure; if anything, Che seems diminished by the way he’s portrayed here.’
Fox News columnist Roger Friedman called the film ‘a mess,’ with no real storyline, no close-ups and no context adding, ‘We haven’t seen so much genius and tedium in one place since ‘Heaven’s Gate.’
What went wrong?
‘War, Inc.’’s problem is pretty obvious: Making a political satire is like hitting a curveball--it’s harder than it looks. There’s always the example of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Doctor Strangelove,’ which hit the bulls-eye. But most movie parodies only work is they approach the target from an oblique, side view instead of head-on. ‘American Dreamz,’ Paul Weitz’s 2006 spoof of George Bush and the sorry state of state-managed American politics had the right idea, marrying its political jabs to a clever stoyrline where a would-be Islamic terrorist ends up as a finalist on a popular ‘American Idol’-style TV extravaganza (guest hosted by a Bush-style non-newspaper-reading president). But even its cagy comedy failed to woo much of an audience.
Soderbergh’s ‘Che’ problems are far bigger, and perhaps insurmountable. First off, biopics as a genre are pretty tedious stuff. For every ‘Ray’ and ‘Walk the Line,’ there’s a hundred films like ‘Fur,’ ‘Factory Girl,’ ‘Talk to Me’ or ‘Mighty Heart,’ where the filmmaker has found a fabulous subject, but been unable to breathe much life--or offer the audience any emotional insight--into the subject at hand. Biopics rarely do justice to all the strange twists and turns in a real life; that goes double for ‘Che,’ a fascinating, flawed man whose real-life revolutionary exploits have long been overwhelmed by an iconic t-shirt-laden pop culture mythology. He’s become the cuddly Bob Marley of the Cuban Revolution.
Questioned at Cannes, Soderbergh admitted that he gave Che a pass when it came to his failings, which were many, starting with persecution of gays, political dissidents and a profound distrust of pure democracy. As Anne Thompson noted in her blog, Soderbergh seems to have taken the peculiar stance that Che could be such a cold-blooded thug that none of his blunders and transgressions were worth including in the film. Or as he put it: ‘I’ve read the anti-Che literature out there. I get the arguments. I feel there’s no amount of barbarity I could put on the screen that would satisfy them.’
That’s sort of like saying: Geez, Johnny Cash guzzled so much booze and popped so many pills, why even bother to show the empties. I’m a proud lefty myself, but if you have the guts to be the one filmmaker willing to offer up an epic portrait of Che, you should have the cajones to show him, warts and all.