Mailbox Film Festival #17: A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop (Zhang, 2009)

Over last Christmas break, I was talking to my dad about the Coen Brothers’ remake of True Grit. He made the comment that it didn’t feel like a typical Coen Brothers movie. I disagree, but I see where he was coming from. Mention the Coen Brothers and most people will think of Raising Arizona, Fargo, The Big Lebowski and Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, films populated by broad characters but tempered by a dry, often quite dark, sense of humor. But the brothers have also crafted a parallel filmography of relatively straight-faced, noir-tinged thrillers.  The precedent for True Grit can be found in past outings like Miller’s Crossing, No Country for Old Men, The Man Who Wasn’t There and Blood Simple.  Most of these pictures do have their little gags – True Grit has its Bear Man – but their relation to the brothers’ comedies is one of philosophy, not of tone.

Ah, but what if someone were to remake one of those serious crime dramas but, you know, Coens it up a bit? Thus A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop, Chinese director Zhang Yimou’s recasting of the Coens’ debut Blood Simple as a wacky farce. Zhang cranks the Laff-o-Meter so hard that the needle soars past the goofier likes of Burn After Reading and The Ladykillers and pings straight into Manic Jerry Lewis territory. Curiously, Zhang decided to reverse the Coens’ direction, making every performance larger than life except the one by M. Emmet Walsh’s analogue. One character’s eyes are permanently crossed; another’s overbite is so exaggerated that acrylic nails appear to have been glued to his front teeth. A husband cuts out the face of a picture of a baby and forces his wife to pretend to be the son they never had. What might sound deliciously weird on paper reads, in practice, as desperation.

I’m avoiding describing the plot, not because I want to avoid spoiling A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop but because I want to avoid spoiling Blood Simple.  It’s the premise that launched a thousand noirs – a man suspects his wife of cheating on him and hires a detective to prove it – but the Coens tossed a few wrenches that veer the story into unexpected directions.  Zhang may have broadened the tone and moved the setting to 19th Century China, but in terms of story, his take hews tediously close to the original. Noodle Shop romps perfunctorily from plot point to plot point, with none of the suspense or artistry that makes Blood Simple endlessly rewatchable. (Strangely, given his strict fidelity to the source material, the one scene Zhang doesn’t replicate is arguably the original’s most iconic.) If you’ve seen Blood Simple, you’ll be bored; if you haven’t, you owe it to yourself to see the story told with some style. As Blood Simple‘s Meurice might say, A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop is the same old song, but with a different (much less interesting) meaning.

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Mailbox Film Festival #16: Micmacs (Jeunet, 2009)

Micmacs isn’t a bad film at all. In fact, it’s got quite a lot of charm. The plot of Micmacs is as much a political wish-fulfillment fantasy as The Ghost Writer, but its outlandishness almost makes it more believable.  The actors ably toe the line between zany and overly twee, with the sorts of expressive faces and bodies usually found in the circus, not the cinema. Even the characters who threaten to be one-note (the contortionist, the calculator, the human cannonball) work precisely because there’s no emotional arc or complex characterizations to distract from the story or the visuals.  Micmacs also marks the return of director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and his distinctive visual style, a cross between a live-action cartoon and a shot-for-shot remake of an Old Hollywood picture. Jeunet stuffs the film with a dazzling number of ideas, regardless of whether they have anything to do with the story: a do-nothing machine, a pastiche of The Big Sleep, an animated sequence depicting famous weird deaths.

But why, then, does Micmacs fail to leave much of an impression? Perhaps because Jeunet, by making his films so singular, has constructed such a narrow universe that it becomes claustrophobically familiar. All the usual Jeunet trademarks are there, but they’re not as surprising if you’ve seen Delicatessen or Amélie before. That said, there’s something comforting about returning to Jeunet’s universe. Even if you know what you’re getting for Christmas, you can still enjoy the gift. Micmacs is a fun movie, if only to marvel at Jeunet’s ingenuity and skill. But will you remember it the next day? (I barely do.)

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Mailbox Film Festival #15: Greenberg (Baumbach, 2010)

I’m a big fan of Noah Baumbach’s first film, Kicking and Screaming, probably because I saw it shortly after finishing grad school.  I’m not sure there’s another movie that so squarely gets that post-graduation combination of anxiety and ambivalence, where the freedom to do anything paralyzes you into doing nothing. Sure, The Graduate is a classic, but the kids in Kicking and Screaming are a bit more relatable than a guy having an affair with his girlfriend’s mom. The characters in Kicking and Screaming may be pretentious and self-pitying, but then, aren’t most college students?

Strangely, though, I’m pretty cold when it comes to the rest of Baumbach’s filmography. I found his previous film, the sub-Rohmer character study Margot at the Wedding, actively repellent in its savage navel-gazing, and The Squid and the Whale only slightly less so. Still, hope springs eternal. The trailer for Greenberg looked great. But was it the clips from the movie that had me excited, or just LCD Soundsystem’s anthemic “All My Friends”?

Luckily, Greenberg’s the best movie Baumbach’s directed since the ‘90s.  Although the film deals with heavy issues like depression and aging, Baumbach gives it a levity missing from his recent movies. Like Kicking and Screaming, Greenberg is funny, but it’s humor cut with sadness and desperation. Those character traits so endearing in a post-adolescent Chris Eigeman – aimlessness, insecurity, social anxiety – look near-psychotic on a fortyish Ben Stiller. The students in Kicking and Screaming wore their cynicism like they wore their chunky heels and flannel shirts, but Roger Greenberg’s (Stiller) had a few decades to really get bitter. At the film’s start, he has just completed a stay in a mental hospital. He returns to his hometown of Los Angeles to housesit for his wealthy brother’s family. There, he meets with people who remind him of who he could have been, from the girlfriend he should have married (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to the bandmates he let down by refusing to “sell out” (Rhys Ifans, Mark Duplass), all of whom have moved on with their lives in a way he hasn’t. He also strikes up an ambivalent affair with his brother’s much-younger personal assistant, Florence (Greta Gerwig), who’s so empty inside and afraid of being alone that she’s nearly as fragile as Greenberg himself. There are some painful moments in the film where Greenberg denigrates Florence just to make her feel as terrible as he does. Yet Florence continues to give him chances, partly because she’s lonely, but partly because she senses his reactions are a defense mechanism. It’s not pretty, but it’s believable.

Yet Greenberg doesn’t wallow in its depression. Baumbach has written some of his wittiest and most affecting dialogue in years, while the relationships between Stiller, Ifans and Leigh are so lived-in that their problems feel organic, not the product of a screenwriters’ agenda. While the film has a few missteps – Greenberg’s “conversion experience” in the last act is an overlong deus ex machina, and Gerwig’s range is a bit too limited to capture Florence’s emotional arc – at it’s best, it’s a reminder of how good Baumbach can be when he’s firing on all cylinders. Greenberg may still be a distant second to Kicking and Screaming, but try me again when I’m 40.

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Mailbox Film Festival #14: The Ghost Writer (Polanski, 2010)

Much has been made of how Pierce Brosnan’s character in The Ghost Writer is a blatant stand-in for Tony Blair.  Co-screenwriter Robert Harris (who also penned the novel The Ghost that the film is based on) was a former Blair supporter who became disillusioned with the prime minister’s enthusiasm for the Iraq War. Harris paints a sort of a wish-fulfillment scenario, where Adam Lang (Brosnan) is forced to account for his alleged war crimes, both through a formal trial at the Hague and by protesters congregating at the end of his private drive.  Harris also constructs an elaborate conspiracy to explicate how the United Kingdom got pulled into Iraq. After all, when someone you trust betrays you, it’s easier to believe that his hand was forced, not that he simply made a decision you didn’t agree with.

As much as The Ghost Writer can be read as reflecting Harris’s real-life experiences, though, the movie is just as much a product of director and co-writer Roman Polanski. Polanski, probably the most controversial filmmaker whose films aren’t particularly controversial, is one of the last of his generation of auteurs who can still make movies that are both commercially successful and deeply personal. At first blush, a film about a former British prime minister and his ghostwriter seems to have little to do with the Polish director’s checkered history. But Lang and Polanski are both great men in exile, neither of whom quite comprehends the accusations against him. Both have supporters too eager to give them a pass for their crimes, and detractors who refuse to see their good points. Polanski, arrested after leaving the safe haven of France, edited The Ghost Writer while under house arrest in Switzerland. And while Lang isn’t formally accused of a crime until well into the movie, he has nevertheless spent his post-ministerial days in a mansion on Martha’s Vineyard. The US, not so coincidentally, doesn’t extradite people accused by the International Criminal Court.

Polanski gives the film an unusual flat appearance to emphasize the claustrophobia and paranoia of living in a mansion with all modern conveniences, except for real freedom. Yet that distinctive look is also the product of a necessary process, in which the director used green screens to substitute for Massachusetts and London, places where he couldn’t set foot without being arrested. But does The Ghost Writer have anything to say about Polanski’s mental state as a fugitive convict? I’m hesitant to play armchair (or movie theater seat) psychiatrist. I’ll note only that Lang seems to think of himself as an innocent man – not because he didn’t do the things he was accused of doing, but because he doesn’t see them as crimes. I’d have trouble believing Polanski didn’t intend the audience to recognize some shared ground between him and Lang. After all, a major plot twist in The Ghost Writer hinges on Ewan MacGregor’s character discovering a secret message that’s been in his hands the whole time. All he had to do was read in between the lines.

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Mailbox Film Festival #13: A Film Unfinished (Hersonski, 2010)

No other time or place in history has been as well documented as America in the early 21^st Century, at least in terms of number of keystrokes. But how much of it will survive the endless cycles of format obsolescence? Even if the Library of Congress still stands a thousand years from now, could future generations decipher our endless Tweeting? Would they want to – would we want them to? Whatever record do leave behind will paint a distorted, incomplete picture – and that’s with us living in a free society in the age of WordPress. Now shift the setting of this hypothetical exercise to a place where the government actively suppressed a group of people and attempted to rewrite their public narrative. Even once this regime was overthrown, its version of history became unwittingly perpetuated for decades.

These circumstances form the background of Yael Hersonski’s documentary, A Film Unfinished. In the early ’40s, the Nazi propaganda department sent a group of filmmakers to shoot footage in Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto. The intended film was never completed, for reasons still unknown. After the war, the Soviets discovered over an hour of the raw film (labeled “Ghetto”) in a Nazi vault. Historians and filmmakers seized on the footage, and clips turned up in Holocaust museums and documentaries as visual evidence of life in the Warsaw ghetto.

One problem: not everything in “Ghetto” was what it seemed. In 1998, two more reels of outtakes turned up that cast aspersion on the film’s validity. Some of the original footage captured genuine horrors of a society where death was ubiquitous and the luckiest residents ate a few crumbs a day. But the new footage also proved that much of “Ghetto” had been carefully stage-managed and choreographed. The outtakes reveal take after take of involuntary actors forced to repeat scenes until they got it “right.”  Alternate angles show guns pointed at women to force them into a ritual bath, or fired in the air to incite a riot. Hersonski examines the film reel by reel, using the outtakes footage and historical documents to illuminate the inaccuracies. Hersonski then shows the footage to survivors of the Warsaw ghetto, who recoil at the blatant falsehoods onscreen. One survivor recalls the filmmakers bringing horsemeat into the ghetto to create the illusion of a plentiful food supply. Another scoffs at a floral centerpiece on a table, remarking, “We would have eaten the flowers.” In between these scenes, Hersonski includes a reenactment of an interview with German cameraman Willy Wist, the only person ever successfully identified as having worked on “Ghetto.” Wist admits the filmmakers’ deception, but claims not to have understood the purpose of the propaganda film, or to have known that the ghetto’s residents would be evacuated to the Treblinka extermination camp a few months later.

The message “Ghetto” intended to convey is not readily clear, which is likely why it was never finished. Staged scenes of well-dressed Jews at a dinner party are juxtaposed with beggars and corpses littering the sidewalks. Most likely it was meant to show the contempt that “better-off” Jews felt for their suffering counterparts – even though everyone in the ghetto struggled to meet their basic needs. Fortunately for the film, a few elderly survivors are still around to refute the footage. But what if the Holocaust weren’t in living memory, or what if the Nazis had triumphed in World War II? At its most basic, A Film Unfinished serves as further proof of the old adage “don’t believe everything you see.” More disturbingly, though, the film is also a dark reminder of how unstable our concept of “history” really is.

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Fresh Celluloid #4: Insidious (Wan, 2010)

Saw (the first) tends to be remembered for two things: launching a seemingly unkillable movie franchise, and kicking off the fad for “torture porn” in the horror genre as a whole. But the original Saw isn’t just about watching a guy cut off his own foot any more than 127 Hours is just about watching a guy cut off his own arm. The true terror in Saw is the mental warfare between Jigsaw and his captives, inciting a Lord of the Flies-style blurring of the line between human civilization and animal instincts. The movie is also an ingenious example of how to make a horror film with no budget: keep it confined to one or two sets, use low-key lighting to mask makeup and effects, and extract as much fear as you can from the anticipation of terrible things to come. If the Saw sequels seem more concerned with upping the gore and sadism, well, blame Hollywood. But that first Saw is remarkably effective at creating a tense psychological atmosphere.

Saw director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell’s latest, Insidious, is a more traditional take on the horror genre. In fact, Insidious is retro to its core, drawing from haunted house pictures of the late ’70s and early ’80s like The Amityville Horror, The Shining and Poltergeist. The special effects are mostly practical rather than computer generated, and the spirits are portrayed by actual people in makeup and costumes. One of the major plot devices even involves astral projection, which I’d wager no one outside of a commune has thought about in decades. Yet Insidious is also remarkably scary for a PG-13 movie. Wan and Whannell have honed their psych horror skills to such a point that they don’t even need gore. A few too many of the frights come from things suddenly jumping out and the like, but for the most part they effectively sustain a base level of dread that at times verges on unbearable.  There’s a matter-of-factness about Insidious that anchors it in the real world, making it even creepier. The medium isn’t a Zelda Rubinstein-type eccentric, she’s a middle-aged woman in a cardigan and ballet flats. She’s accompanied by a pair of employees who check the house for faulty wiring before launching their paranormal investigation. The character most resistant to the idea of supernatural influence comes around fairly quickly, rather than raging absurdly against evidence to the contrary. Wan and Whannell do draw a few too many pulls from the well of horror movie clichés (marionettes and Tiny Tim records?), but they have good instincts for what scares people. Unlike Saw, Insidious is a bit too familiar to inspire leagues of imitators and sequels. Still, there’s a lot of pleasure to be drawn from an old-school horror movie that hits its marks in a genuinely frightening manner.

 

Insidious is in theaters April 1.

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Mailbox Film Festival #11: Jack Goes Boating (Hoffman, 2010)

Few character actors have done as well in modern Hollywood as Philip Seymour Hoffman. Only Paul Giamatti and maybe Steve Buscemi have broken out of the hey-it’s-that-guy ghetto without losing artistic credibility to the degree that Hoffman has. Hoffman’s mainstream success (relatively speaking) can be chalked up to a combination of talent, an eye for choosing good roles, and strong working relationships with filmmakers such as Paul Thomas Anderson. Even when punching the clock on studio fare like Mission: Impossible III and Along Came Polly, he’s maintained his repuation. For every successful movie he makes, Hoffman stars in another that’s decidedly uncommercial, but which lets him to prove his Serious Actor bona fides.  Jack Goes Boating, Hoffman’s directorial debut, falls into the latter category. Like Love Liza and Owning Mahowny before it, Jack Goes Boating is a character sketch of a sad sap sucker who’s lost more than he ever had. Actors like these kind of roles because they can unload a magazine of “real-people” characterizations from their arsenal. Unfortunately, as movies, they’re superficial and miserablist.

Our hero Jack (Hoffman) is less a person than a list of character traits. He drives a cab. He’s never been in a long-term relationship. He clears his throat a lot. He smokes pot, has itty-bitty dreadlocks and likes reggae. (Well, he says he does; we just see him listen to “Rivers of Babylon” over and over.) Amy Ryan plays Connie, Jack’s female counterpart who is equally uncomfortable interacting with other human beings. If Ryan’s performance seems overly mannered, perhaps it’s because she is saddled with delivering such unfortunate lines as “I don’t think I’m ready yet for penis penetration.” John Ortiz and Daphne Rubin-Vega reprise their roles from Jack Goes Boating’s original off-Broadway production as the couple whose fraying marriage provides the foil for Jack and Connie’s budding romance. Both actors are clearly more comfortable on stage, but Ortiz transcends his shallowly-written character to become the film’s most human presence. With Jack, he’s a sounding board and motivational coach; at home, he’s a heartbroken cuckold who loves his wife too much to leave.

Jack Goes Boating’s theatrical origins bleed through every frame. It’s not that the setting is stagy – Hoffman varies the locations and moves the camera enough to make it look like a proper movie. The main issue is the overfidelity to playwright Bob Glaudini’s words. Like much modern theatre, Jack Goes Boating attempts to transform vernacular phrasing into a kind of street poetry, but instead comes across as stilted and artificial. The heavy-handed rhythms of a line like “Charismatic, she said.  She only kissed him, she said. In the elevator, helping him move a body. ‘I only kissed him,’ she said” might work better on stage, where the sets are minimal and audiences expect heightened dialogue. On film, though, it’s at odds with the supposedly realistic milieu. Even the core quartet of actors can’t elevate the material into the realm of believability. That the usually great Hoffman leans so heavily on shtick in his portrayal of Jack only exacerbates the problem. Hollywood is littered with great screenplays that producers, directors and actors trampled into mediocrity. But Jack Goes Boating proves that reverence to the text can be equally debilitating.

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Mailbox Film Festival #10: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (Stone, 2010)

There’s something sort of refreshing about a filmmaker with absolutely no interest in subtlety.  Oliver Stone has yet to make a film I love*, but it’s sort of fun to sit down with his movies and know who’ll be the villains (capitalists, the government) and who’ll be the heroes (anyone going up against capitalists and the government).  This black-and-white view of morality is ridiculous if taken at face value, but it can also be entertaining at a primal level.  Everyone likes a story where the good guys beat the bad guys – who needs all that moral shading stuff to get in the way?

So if you’ve seen the original 1987 Wall Street, you know what to expect from Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.  On the plus side, everyone in the sequel out-acts Daryl Hannah (even Shia LaBeouf, although that’s a low bar to clear).  And the idea of revisiting Gordon Gekko and his ilk in the wake out the recent global financial crisis has the potential to be fascinating.  So it’s a bit disappointing that the resulting film is as empty as a stockbroker’s soul (boom! Roasted!).  A week after watching Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, this is what I remember:

-Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas, of course) comes the closest to being a morally complex figure: sometimes he’s a terrible, evil dude, and sometimes he’s a slightly less terrible, less evil dude.
-The unfortunately-named Winnie Gekko (Gordon’s daughter) is played by Carey Mulligan, who has nice hair and is the living embodiment of the word “winsome.”
-Shia LaBeouf does, in fact, appear in this movie.
-The only fake accent in this film worse than Carey Mulligan’s is Shia LaBeouf’s.
-Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf) criticizes his mother (Susan Sarandon) for being a real estate agent (boo! hiss!) rather than someone who actually helps people.  Jake is a proprietary trader.  No one notes the irony.
-Likewise, Winnie Gekko is a muckraking blogger.  Apparently only the women in this film need to worry about having “morally positive” jobs.
-Eli Wallach, looking every one of his 937 years, makes bird noises.
-Louis Zabel (Frank Langella) commits suicide by 6 train, which seems awfully inconsiderate of commuters and MTA personnel. (But that’s a banker for ya! Always leaving their mess to be cleaned up by the little people! Zing!)
-Were it not for a certain motorcycle race (to be discussed below), I probably would have forgotten Josh Brolin was even in this movie – and he’s the main baddie. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if Brolin himself forgot he was in this movie.
-In Wall Street, Charlie Sheen plays Bud Fox. In Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Bud Fox plays Charlie Sheen.

Also, there’s a lot of talk about stocks and hedge funds and stuff like that? As my understanding of/interest in money doesn’t go beyond my personal savings account, I found the financial intrigue difficult to follow.  So I, like Josh Brolin, ended up mentally checking out about halfway through the film.  But the personal relationships don’t work much better. Dramatic events come to light – the tragedy involving Gordon’s wife and son; Winnie’s pregnancy – only to fizzle out after checking off the box marked “emotional depth.”  Where Bud Fox in Wall Street goes from being “good” to “bad” to “good,” Jake Moore is a static hero (or at least as much of a hero as a trader can be! Thank you, tip your waitress).

Stone is clearly condemning the “greed is good” mentality as responsible for the crisis. At the same time, though, he relishes depicting all the material goods bought with the filthy lucre: the penthouse apartments, the Savile Row suits, the Italian racing motorcycles. About midway through the film, Bretton James (Brolin) and Jake race through the forest on their bikes.   The scene is meant to symbolize their competitive streaks, but it’s also clearly a “Whoa! Don’t you wish you were as rich as them so you could be that awesome!” moment.  I wasn’t going into Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps expecting a nuanced portrait of the global financial crisis.  But this lack of consistency makes Stone’s message ring hollow.  It’s the same problem he had with Wall Street, which is why Gordon Gekko became an icon to a generation of young stockbrokers despite his abhorrent personal ethics.  But questionable politics can be easily overlooked if a film is entertaining.  Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is a muddled movie that leans heavily on clichés and lazy characterization.  But I have to give it some credit: thanks to Douglas’s performance and Stone’s force of personality, at least it isn’t generic.

 

*Admittedly, I haven’t seen Salvador or any of the Vietnam trilogy.

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Mailbox Film Festival #9: The Tillman Story (Bar-Lev, 2010)

Director Amir Bar-Lev’s wanted to name this documentary “I’m Pat F—ing Tillman,” after the Army Ranger’s last words before dying. For obvious reasons, the title was changed to the more neutral The Tillman Story.  But the replacement title, seemingly anodyne and generic, actually reveals more about the documentary’s subject.  The film explores three definitions of the word “story” in regards to Tillman’s death: first, a biography or history; second, a constructed narrative, often with the intent of supporting a moral or ideology; and third, a lie.

Arizona Cardinals safety Pat Tillman was arguably the most famous person to enlist in the U.S. Army after September 11, turning down a multimillion-dollar football contract in the process.  After completing a tour of duty in Iraq, he was redeployed to Afghanistan in 2004.  There, Tillman was killed in what the Army initially claimed was an ambush by enemy forces.  The military posthumously awarded him the Silver Star, allegedly for saving the lives of his fellow Rangers during the attack.  Only later was it revealed that the Army had covered up the truth: Tillman was killed by friendly fire (aka fratricide), attacked by men from his own unit.

Much of Bar-Lev’s documentary is devoted to the Tillman family’s struggle uncover the truth about Pat’s death against the military’s resistance and outright lies.  Tillman’s mother Mary sifted through over 3000 pages of documents relating to her son’s death, piecing together the redacted parts with the help of writer and Army special-ops veteran Stan Goff.  Frustrated by the military’s caginess, the Tillmans pressured Congress to launch an investigation into the conspiracy.  The results were somewhat unsatisfying: lower-level members of the military hierarchy received the brunt of the punishment, even though the evidence suggested the cover-up extended to the top reaches of the government.  

The Tillman Story also delves into how Pat Tillman became appropriated after his death by right-wing politicians and the media, people who never knew him yet made assumptions about who he was and what he believed.  Tillman had suspected that his celebrity would make him attractive as a symbol, particularly if he were to die in combat.  As a result, he resisted drawing attention to his Army career.  Publically, he refused to discuss his reasons for enlisting and asked to be treated like any other soldier; privately, he requested a civilian burial instead of a military one.  After his death, these requests were ignored.  He became a poster child for the pro-war movement, an all-American super-soldier.  Never mind that the real Pat Tillman wasn’t so easy to pin down.  In contrast with the “meathead” football player stereotype, Tillman read widely, admired Noam Chomsky and earned a 3.8 GPA at Arizona State.  Despite his enlistment, he disagreed with President Bush and opposed the war in Iraq – but he also turned down an arrangement between the military and the NFL that would have let him out of his Army commitment early.  When strangers lined up at the memorial service to assure the Tillmans that Pat was with God, his brother Richard’s eulogy bluntly informed them that Pat was an atheist.

As Tillman brother Kevin states in the film, “a terrible tragedy was transformed into an inspirational message that served instead to support the nation’s foreign policy wars.” But Bar-Lev refrains from taking the opposite tack and making Pat Tillman into a liberal martyr.  Only Pat and his closest friends and family can understand the person he really was and why he chose to fight.  Bar-Lev instead focuses on how the Tillman family had to deal with the fallout of his death.  All families suffer when they lose a member to war; the Tillmans also had to confront a government conspiracy and a constant barrage of propaganda asserting Pat was something he wasn’t.  “He was a human being,” Mary Tillman says in the film. “And by putting this kind of heroic, saintly quality to him, you’re taking away the struggle of being a human being.”  With The Tillman Story, Pat’s family and fellow Rangers at least have the chance to set the record straight and reclaim his life.

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Mailbox Film Festival #8: Waiting for “Superman” (Guggenheim, 2010)

Perhaps I’m just defensive of the public school system.  I attended public schools for entirety of my educational career, and I think I turned out OK (at least fine enough to get admitted to a public university!).  Growing up in Louisiana, I knew a lot of people who went to Catholic schools, and I certainly didn’t find them smarter, better educated or more intellectually curious than my classmates. Then again, I was fortunate enough to have a number of advantages: the Gifted and Talented program, a magnet high school, and college-educated parents.  But what about all those kids who aren’t so lucky?

Davis Guggenheim’s documentary Waiting for “Superman” explores why bad schools become “dropout factories” and what can be done to ensure all American kids are sufficiently educated to compete in the global job market. The film cuts between interviews with experts like activist Geoffrey Canada and controversial DC public schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, and with stories about five cute kids and their families hoping to be admitted into the limited-capacity charter schools they believe will give them a running start in life.

Guggenheim largely places the blame for underperforming students on bad teachers and the unions that protect them.  True, the film illuminates some unsavory aspects of union contracts, including automatic tenure and bans on merit-based pay, that seem to remove much incentive for teachers to do their jobs well.  But Guggenheim ignores all of the other factors that contribute to why a student may do poorly in school.  The film’s stars are children with a drive to learn and supportive parents who value education – otherwise, they wouldn’t be trying to get their kids into charter schools or paying private school tuition they can’t afford.  But frankly, many if not most of the kids who do poorly in school and drop out just don’t care.  Even the most inspiring teacher faces an uphill battle against apathetic parents, crime-ridden neighborhoods and a peer group that looks down on anyone who studies too much.  And just as there are teachers who shouldn’t be teaching, there are also students who just aren’t wired to do well in school.  Guggenheim shows how American students’ test scores rank toward the bottom of the developed world, ignoring the fact that in many of the other countries, the less academically-minded kids get tracked off into technical school, agriculture or blue collar jobs much earlier on.  America is the exception for pressing the same academically-focused curriculum on all students, and for perceiving college as a universal necessity.

Which isn’t to say that the American educational system doesn’t have serious problems.  It takes a stony heart to watch Waiting for “Superman” and not feel for the children left behind (Acts of Congress notwithstanding).  Guggenheim positions charter schools as a possible answer, but even he acknowledges that only one in five charter schools outperform neighborhood public schools.  The documentary’s message seems to be the near-impossibility of changing the school system on a grand scale, due to both political and sociological factors.  As the film’s title indicates, only a superhero would have the power to swoop in and save the day.  But at the same time, Guggenheim tries to put an idealistic spin on an overwhelming situation, imploring viewers over the end credits to visit a particular website or send an SMS text to a dedicated number. Waiting for “Superman” succeeds as a call to action to change America’s failing educational system.  However, it also frustrates by not offering viable solutions to such a crushing, overarching problem.

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