Judging ‘Baby’ by its politics is just artless

For years, conservative commentators of all stripes, led by critic-turned-radio host Michael Medved, have noisily bashed Hollywood for mocking religion or ignoring it entirely, contending -- and this is a big issue with Medved -- that the entertainment industry is largely made up of left-wing Beverly Hills dilettantes and unbelievers out of touch with the real moral values of the country.

So imagine my relief when I saw “Million Dollar Baby,” the critically lauded film that’s now a major contender for best picture and other Oscar accolades. Not only was the film made by Clint Eastwood, a longtime Republican, but the movie’s leading man, played by Eastwood, is a regular churchgoer who believes in hard work, rejects crass materialism, values honor and loyalty and wrestles with soul-wrenching spiritual issues in an honest, mature fashion. A tender, beautifully made movie about faith and hard-earned redemption -- surely this would be cause for celebration among conservatives and religious figures who see Hollywood as a cesspool of sex and sleaze, right?

Ah, what a fuzzy idealist I am. When it comes to hot-button issues, conservatives are just as guilty of knee-jerk political correctness as their liberal foes. By and large they’ve reacted to the movie as if it were a starry-eyed drama with Barbra Streisand and Sean Penn as Marxist history professors indoctrinating coeds in the theory of evolution. (Spoiler alert: If you want to avoid learning any “Million Dollar Baby” plot twists, read no further till you’ve seen the movie!)

Medved has led the charge, blasting the film (and to filmgoers’ horror, largely giving away its ending) on CNN, “The O’Reilly Factor” and “The 700 Club,” calling it “an insufferable manipulative right-to-die movie.” Rush Limbaugh chimed in, dubbing the film “a million-dollar euthanasia movie.” Debbie Schlussel, another conservative talk-show host, called the film a “left-wing diatribe,” claiming it supports “killing the handicapped, literally putting their lights out.” And Ted Baehr, head of the Christian Film and Television Commission, described the film to Sean Hannity as “very anti-Catholic and anti-Christian.”

It would be easy to write off these attacks as the ravings of people who probably think there are hidden North Korean missile plans embedded in “Shrek 2.” After all, Focus on the Family leader James Dobson recently accused SpongeBob SquarePants of being part of a pro-gay agenda. Claiming he was misquoted, he managed to make things worse by attacking the group using SpongeBob to promote tolerance and diversity with schoolkids, saying that tolerance and diversity “are almost always buzzwords for homosexual advocacy.”

But the assault on “Million Dollar Baby” by Medved is not as easy to dismiss. A self-described conservative whose new book, “Right Turns,” argues that conservatives are “both happier and nicer” than liberals and that “a more Christian America is good for the Jews,” Medved wields considerable clout, via his commentaries, which run in USA Today and the Wall Street Journal, and his popular radio show, which airs here weekdays on KRLA-AM (870) from noon to 3 p.m. The day we spoke last week, his show had an exclusive interview with Bush political guru Karl Rove.

Not surprisingly, Medved didn’t like a lot of the Oscar-nominated films. Writing in USA Today, he criticized “Vera Drake” as portraying abortion in a “positive, almost sacramental light.” “Kinsey,” he says, “ridicules the religious orthodoxy of the main character’s father.” As he put it, the Oscar nominations “illustrate Hollywood’s profound, almost pathological discomfort with the traditional religiosity embraced by most of its mass audience.”

But does he really believe “Million Dollar Baby” is a euthanasia movie, not a serious drama about the price people pay for their dreams? “I don’t see it as a serious movie that grapples with serious moral issues,” Medved told me. “Take the way it portrays the priest [that Eastwood banters with at church]. It’s totally one-sided. He’s portrayed as a bozo, as a shallow twit. I know Catholic priests, and if you’re a priest, you’re not thrown by basic questions about the Trinity.”

Medved said the film was “heavy-handed, clumsy and for the most part -- except for Hilary Swank -- badly acted and full of cliches.” A big part of his problem with the film was “that the studio has tried to hide the real story. They were afraid no one would come see it if they told you what it was really about.”

To hear a statement like that you have to assume that either Medved is ludicrously naive or simply disingenuous. Even if “MDB” were about euthanasia, which it surely is not, what studio marketer in their right mind would position their new release as a right-to-die movie instead of a soulful boxing drama? That’s not deception, that’s Publicity 101. But that sort of slippery reasoning infects nearly all of Medved’s critiques about the movie business. In numerous interviews, as well as his book “Hollywood vs. America,” he has promoted the idea that Hollywood follows its own dark obsessions instead of giving the public what it really wants -- good, wholesome entertainment. This leads to all sorts of wacky oversimplifications. Medved claims, for example, that movie attendance fell off precipitously from 1965 to 1969 not because film studios faced a complicated set of new economic challenges and were slow to adapt to a burgeoning youth market but because Jack Valenti introduced a voluntary ratings system that led to “the profligate use of obscene language, graphic sex scenes and more vivid, sadistic violence.”

He often makes the same claims about movies today -- that audiences reject dark subject matter foisted on them by the showbiz elite. It doesn’t hold water. People flock to see films and TV shows that are far more graphic than anything 35 years ago. Americans also support a $10-billion-a-year pornography business largely supplied by cable and satellite TV conglomerates owned by people like Rupert Murdoch who hardly fit the Hollywood lefty stereotype. When I asked Medved why millions have embraced the smarmy sexual innuendo of “Desperate Housewives” or “Meet the Fockers,” he explained: “It’s a big country -- America is not entirely populated with people with stable families who go to church every week.”

I hate to break the news, but people who don’t go to church are hardly the only people watching “Desperate Housewives” or downloading porn. Medved’s ideology often gets in the way of his better judgment, as in a recent Wall Street Journal piece when, in the midst of a discussion of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” and Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” he unleashed the whopper that Moore’s attacks on Paul Wolfowitz and other leading Jewish neoconservatives “reeks of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorizing.” This from the man who berated anyone who dared make the charge of anti-Semitism against the Gibson film.

For Medved, when it comes to Hollywood, there’s a wolf behind every door. But in his eagerness to further his brief against “Million Dollar Baby,” Medved betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about the purpose of art. It doesn’t exist solely to reinforce our faith. The most powerful art, from Sophocles to Shakespeare to Scorsese, seethes with provocation; it stirs our passion; pricks our conscience and tests our most firmly held beliefs. Medved seems to have forgotten that art isn’t fair and balanced -- it comes in shades of gray, and two sides of every argument are not always given equal weight.

What’s really depressing about Medved’s assault on “Million Dollar Baby” is that he’s judging the film on its politics, not its art. Hearing him complain about its secret agenda, I couldn’t help but imagine him in Shakespearean England, tugging on people’s sleeves at the Globe Theatre, complaining that “Hamlet” was simply a play that endorsed Oedipal urges.

If Medved and other conservatives think their attacks will hurt “Baby’s” Oscar chances, they’re in for a rude awakening. If anything, I suspect academy voters will go out of their way to show their respect for a gifted filmmaker under attack. After all, the academy ignored smears against “A Beautiful Mind” that accused it of whitewashing its hero’s sexuality. It also honored Roman Polanski for “The Pianist,” even when critics said he was unworthy of an award because he’d once had sex with a 13-year-old girl and fled the country to avoid prosecution. Elia Kazan may have been an informer during the blacklist, but that didn’t stop the academy from giving him a long-overdue lifetime achievement award.

So far Eastwood has kept his cool, saying his film is simply “supposed to make you think about the precariousness of life and how we handle it.” I’m with him. This probably isn’t a politically correct pipe dream, but I can’t help but fantasize about what might happen if Eastwood bumped into Medved, say at a chummy GOP fundraiser. Clint may not pack his fabled .44 magnum anymore, but that shouldn’t stop him from urging Medved to air his views by gently nudging him in the ribs and purring, “Make my day.”

The Big Picture appears Tuesdays in Calendar. Comments and suggestions can be e-mailed to patrick.goldstein @latimes.com.