Love and Hate and Fear and Death

One of my legion of unknown readers named Terry--Hi, Terry!--postscripted my recent jeremiad with a soothing reminder that soon the baseball season will be upon us. Actually he (she?) makes a good point; the pastoral reliability of baseball is a tonic to the woes of the age. I'm sure I will soon have postings deriding the World Baseball Classic as well as the prospects of the Bronx Cheers, Barry Bonds, the Milwaukee Brewers and other springtime hopefuls. But for the present there's that major local competition drawing the world's attention, the annual rite at the Kodak Theater, three blocks down Hollywood Boulevard from me. Once again the Oscars have clogged the highways and by-lines, and revved up the sale of guacamole, salsa and tostitoes as it did a month ago for Super Bowl Extra Large.

Pundits have predicted a lower Nielsen share for this Sunday's event, gauging that the Red Staters will have little interest in the generally liberal arty and political films that dominate the nominations. Well that may be, although ABC has the advantage that at least the Oscars will not be going up against new episodes of "Desperate Housewives" and "Grey's Anatomy," two mediocre entertainments that sunk NBC's Olympics ratings. And frankly, what movies would actually hype the interest of Red Staters? Would they have surged to the cause of "Walk the Line," the affable but uninspired biopic of two CW stars? I'm not sure what else could at all be characterized as a "Red State" movie. Even a powerhouse epic like "Revenge of the Sith" has liberal underpinnings, or at least an anti-imperialistic message. And "King Kong" reminds us to be kind to animals, or at least mammals.

Red Staters, most of whom have not seen any of the top-five nominated films, ought to pay more attention, because just as they have been motivated in their political choices by the powers of emotion, so are the designated movies largely investigations of the interplay of the most primal emotions we have.

"Brokeback Mountain," still the favorite, conveys the power of epic tragedy in its portrayal of how hate overwhelms love. Its only flaw, to my mind, is its lackadaisacal pace, an uncommercial approach bravely taken by Ang Lee, who figured that those most antagonized by a stately romantic story would be the same male heteros grossed out by the subject matter (though at least for the most heinously homophobic, the film has a happy righteous ending). Ang Lee is even more certain to garner his Oscar, though I think much of the credit for the film's success lies in the difficult, brilliant screenplay by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. Their task was to write dialogue for characters who were inarticulate to begin with and who were experiencing unmentionable feelings. Even the respective wives had to keep their secrets within themselves, for they couldn't reveal their angst to any confidants. The blending of seething longing with domestic discord produced a very powerful dramatic paradigm which Lee and his actors portrayed flawlessly. Good for them.

"Crash" is the only film with a chance to outpoll "Brokeback," and it wouldn't bother me if it did, because its searing emotional power really left me moved and thoughtful. It is very popular in Los Angeles, an artistic mea culpa for the Limousine Liberal set. It is also about hate, though mostly self-hate, and how that is rechanneled as racism. "Fear and Loathing in Los Angeles" might have been a better name for the movie. Its heavy reliance on coincidence and serendipity is both a strength and a weakness, especially for those who despise contrivance in a screenplay. I could also have done without some of the greater grandstanding scenes, such as the near shooting of a sweet Latina nina. But in the end writer/director Paul Haggis successfully proffers his main point, that we all have good and evil in us, and no one is pure, but everyone has recognizable needs. Take that, Bushie, with your simplistic world view of black and white. Be offended, very offended.

"Good Night and Good Luck" is too documentarian to ultimately win, and it wears its heart on its sleeve. Its emotional focus is on Fear, especially fear propelled by government fiat. It's as least as political as the attack on world oil cartels, "Syriana," and has the advantage of being coherent. This is perhaps its undoing award-wise, because the message of media compliance with corrupt political principles overwhelms the personal stories of its protagonists. Yes, one man kills himself over Red-baiting, and another couple is intimidated, but Edward R. Murrow seems somewhat above the fray. Neither McCarthyism or poor ratings do him in (the culprits in his demise are the cigarettes he chain-smokes, subjects of other past docudramas). Still, this is a worth film, beautifully shot, and an educational must for our clueless Gen Xers and Yers.

Steven Spielberg's "Munich" also deals with the major themes of hatred, fear and death, with very little love thrown in. It is a daring attempt to come to grips with the hopelessness of internecine fighting over religious differences (which are actually more territorial squabbles) whose universal ramifications have become so much greater than the actual Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In order to justify a manhunt of serialized assassinations, Spielberg and writer Tony Kushner had to do something to humanize the protagonists or else it would have been simply a Charles Bronson revenge movie. But rendering the Israeli hit squad as conscience-stricken not only antagonized partisans who see the revenge mission as entirely justified (even with its conceivably mistaken targets), as well as historians who believe that the hit squad was not conscious-stricken at all. This was a nice try for Spielberg, but in his ambiguous moralizing he merely leaves the viewer uncomfortable and depressed. No whistling the John Williams theme song as you exit this film. It will probably not win any awards.

Not so for "Capote," which has the shooest Oscar of all in Phillip Seymour Hoffman's impersonation of the author. He was aided by a thoughtful and articulate screenplay by Dan Futterman (boy, there were some terrific screenplays this year). Death is certainly a big player here, as is a sort of a squelched impulse to love (expressed by Capote for both his companion Harper Lee and his subject Perry Smith). In this case it is not hate, love, or fear, but Ambition that motivates our protagonist, in a seamy yet fascinating journey that is at least bookended by Deaths, first of the hapless Klutter and then of the woebegone murderers. Yet the ambiguous message of this film will be forgotten long before the stature of Hoffman's performance. But I do wish he would drop his middle name, already. It keeps on reminding me of that song from "Little Shop of Horrors," "Suddenly Seymour."