Return of Innocence Signals a Switch in Hollywood’s Focus

There are signs, not much brighter than the gleam in a writer’s eye, that innocence could be making a comeback as a viable film commodity.

Innocence and goodness were staples of the movies from the start. Chaplin’s tramp could be sly and even mischievous, but his targets were always the bullies and the stuffed shirts and there was never any doubt that his heart was utterly pure.

As you thrilled to the silver screen, you knew--and it was comforting--that as bad as things got the good people would win; the guys in the white hats might be outnumbered but they had righteousness on their side. The results were only temporarily in doubt.

Even if the innocent suffered casualties along the way, you also knew that the bad people wouldn’t get away with it in the end; there would be retribution, from the law or from the hand of divine Providence.

The happy, justice-is-served ending was practically mandated by the Hays Code that shaped mainstream American movies for more than 30 years. It was all very simple and it had more to do with dreams than with reality. Hollywood was not called the Dream Factory for nothing.

In the postwar years, there was increasing resistance among film makers as well as audiences to the arbitrary presumption that goodness had to win on screen. The gulf between ideal life as the movies portrayed it and life as it was lived was often a yawning chasm. “The Grapes of Wrath” is still awesome not only for its artistry but for its unvarnished social realism.

One of the consequences of the new latitudes possible under the so-called Valenti ratings adopted late in 1968 was that the old presumptions about the inevitable triumph of virtue were cast aside.

For a while, all you could be sure of was that the good guys probably wouldn’t win, that even John Wayne would get shot down by the bad guy halfway into the film, as he was in “The Cowboys.”

In other genres, the bad guys would pull off the caper and fly happily away to Majorca or Maui, leaving the cops shaking their fists impotently at the airport gate.

A knowing cynicism replaced innocence as an operative tone in a lot of film writing. As I once noted, the movies spent 50 years saying they lived happily ever after, and then began saying the couple would be lucky to make it through the weekend.

It was a refreshing change, especially in the first years, from the pat and artificial tidying-up of the imposed happy endings. The astringency was like uncut lemon juice, and it gave movies a new sharpness.

But cynicism is its own kind of artifice, and in time it can be as wearying as the final clinch and the walk into the sunset.

Not only that, cynicism goes against what most moviegoers still hope or subconsciously expect to find at their neighborhood cinema. The wide audience presumes to have an uncommon and diverting experience, but--at one level or another--to have a reassuring and satisfying experience.

The reassurance is either that things really can work out OK or, if something went tragically wrong, that it was because certain agreed rules of behavior were broken.

It’s easy enough to paint a convincingly real world in which guile, cynicism, betrayal and all the deadly sins are prevalent. What is not so easy is to portray a convincing innocence (or goodness, honesty or any combination of heroic traditional virtues) and not have it seem a combination of stupidity and naivete.

But there is more innocence around than the movies have been eager to admit in recent times, more of a wish for real love than passing fancies.

The recent English film, “Getting It Right,” looks at a contemporary London world that is anything but innocent. It seems, if anything, feverishly amoral, though with only the most fleeting pleasure derived from the soiled goings-on. Hypocrisy runs through this small segment of society like wall-to-wall carpeting.

Yet, in Randal Kleiser’s film, written by Elizabeth Jane Howard from her own novel, the relatively innocent protagonist makes the absolutely right choice among the available ladies, picking the relatively innocent young mother, a single parent who, like the hero, has survived a disillusioning world with her hopes intact. And there are intimations in another character’s life that the absence of love is a formula for despair.

“Field of Dreams” is the most explicit encounter of innocence versus cynicism in recent movies. The cynics might argue that the only way you can show innocence is to create a fantasy, as “Field of Dreams” undoubtedly was.

Yet Kevin Costner’s act of faith in turning his corn field into a ball diamond is not a great deal more visionary than Preston Tucker’s search for the perfect car. It’s just that the Costner character listened to a different voice. The faith is the point.

The appeals of “Rain Man” are various, and it continues to be one of the best-attended films in the country. But part of the appeal (felt if not consciously thought about) may just be that Dustin Hoffman’s autistic savant is really the perfect innocent--the diametrical opposite of his worldly, cynical and conniving brother. The savant is so completely true to himself that his innocence is inviolable.

For all the excesses that have come along with it, the freeing-up of the screen over the last 20 years has been invaluable to film as an art form. The movies can see life as it is, without the necessity of softly diffusing filters or the handcuffs of a very specific code.

But innocence is as much a part of life as a cynical worldliness. The pendulum having swung far into the smoggy airs of cynicism, it may be dropping back a little, to a more balanced position, where the movies can rediscover that there’s another way to tell it.