An Inoffensive Movie Is a Rare Thing, Indeed

The other day, in her syndicated newspaper column “Talking It Over,” Hillary Rodham Clinton so criticized the movie “My Best Friend’s Wedding” for glamorizing smoking that I had to run right out and see it.

“In the film,” wrote the first lady, “Julia Roberts, portraying a beautiful and successful career woman, smokes when she’s upset. She smokes when she’s tired. She smokes when she’s happy. In fact, she seems to smoke throughout the movie.”

Now if I’ve said this once, I’ve said it a million times: I just hate it when columnists exaggerate. Julia Roberts does not smoke throughout the movie, nor does she have a cigarette for every mood. She smokes in exactly four very brief scenes and for very specific, negative reasons.

“This portrayal of a modern woman so reliant on cigarettes is particularly troubling given that more young women are taking up the deadly habit,” wrote Clinton, who also addresses the evils of cigars but not her husband’s fondness for them. “The movie only adds to smoking’s allure.”

Actually, not. Roberts’ character smokes only when she is intensely anxious, full of self-loathing or both. Her smoking style is spastic, unattractive and is a metaphor for the full-blown sociopathic behavior in which she will engage: “I am a dangerous, criminal person,” she says, puffing her fourth and last cigarette while slumped in romantic defeat in a hotel hallway. “I do bad things to good people.”

Yes, she is a bad, bad person. An emotional toxic waste pit. And she smokes. Yeccch.

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Movies make such lovely canvases against which to hurl political graffiti. And the benefits seem mutual: Angry group holds news conference denouncing movie. Movie gets ink. Angry group and “good” cause get ink.

So many movies are released each year that eventually, every interest group will find one that works as a publicity vehicle. (Does this sound cynical? I don’t mean it to. After all, you can be genuinely offended by a movie and still reap the benefits of saying so.) But movie makers often deserve the criticism since they want it both ways: They want to charge millions of dollars for product placements and then deny that what they show exerts a powerful pull on our psyches. They want to have their Muslim extremists and deny that they are reinforcing Western prejudices against Muslims.

And so, it’s getting to be the rare movie that opens without someone, somewhere taking offense.

Last year, “Kazaam,” the Shaquille O’Neal “vehicle,” ticked off Arab Americans with its tired stereotype of Arab-ish bad guys. Likewise, the nasty neighbor Habib in “Father of the Bride II” was perceived by some as nothing more than a cheap exploitation of a negative--and wildly popular--ethnic stereotype.

“Evita” prompted dramatic protests by Eva Peron loyalists when it opened in Buenos Aires. “Rising Sun” was criticized for its depiction of Japanese businessmen as ruthless.

“Basic Instinct” became famous for the protests gay activists led at its San Francisco locations. (This one was hard to take--are celluloid psychotic killers supposed to be heterosexual only?)

The National Stuttering Project was none too pleased with the character Ken in 1989’s “A Fish Called Wanda,” even though one of the group’s representatives conceded that Ken was actually a pretty good role model since he stuttered openly and without fear.

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The most recent dust-up centers on the hero of a Disney live-action movie to be released at Christmas: “Mr. Magoo.”

Mr. Magoo, you recall, is the irascible, severely myopic rich guy who stumbles through life quite unaware that he mistakes fire plugs for children and so on. As a child, I loved the cartoon. Despite the perils encountered by Magoo, things always turned out fine. Never was I inspired to mock the blind.

Last month, however, the National Federation of the Blind declared war on Magoo, passing a resolution asking Disney to abandon the movie, which stars Leslie Nielsen.

Magoo, declared the group, “is an insult to the millions of blind or visually impaired Americans . . . as offensive and stereotypical to us today as Little Black Sambo and Amos ‘n’ Andy are to Americans of every race.”

Disney, for its part, hopes to imbue Magoo with a “Forrest Gump”-ish charm, and post-production continues, according to the movie’s executive producer.

I do not belittle those who feel wounded by the crude stereotypes, especially the ethnic ones, they see on screen. (It’s worth noting that Cholly, Magoo’s bucktoothed, pigtailed Chinese manservant, has deservedly bitten the dust.) I’ve been stung myself, suffering lots of bad playground jokes when Batman and the idiotic Boy Wonder with whom I share a name became TV heroes. And come to think of it, Woody Allen slammed my ethnicity when he depicted an Armenian who’d fallen in love with a sheep--or worse, a lamb--in “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex.”

There’s something to offend almost everyone in the movies. Sort of like life.

* Robin Abcarian co-hosts a morning talk show on radio station KTZN-AM (710). Her column appears on Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is Rabcarian@aol.com.