Bob Hope would have turned 106 this week, and his birthday and the upcoming Father’s Day reminded me of one of my favorite of his films. It’s also one of the least characteristic because he is playing a real-life character (as he would again two years later in “Beau James”) and even though the character was a performer and he does manage to get off some wisecracks, it is as close to a dramatic performance as he ever gave. He also said that the dance number was the hardest work he ever did, because he had to keep up with James Cagney reprising his portrayal of George M. Cohan of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
Hope plays Eddie Foy, Sr., a vaudevillian whose only way to care for his seven children is to put them into his act and take them on the road. The fact that he barely knew the kids was of no more relevance than the fact that they had no talent.
Foy, as played by Hope, was not a great father. But he was devoted to his children in his own way, and I have special affection for this film. A couple of other points worth noting: fans of the old “Father Knows Best” series will recognize Billy Gray as one of the kids. And take a look at “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” too — you will see the real-life Eddie Foy, Jr. appearing as his father opposite James Cagney as his long-time friendly rival Cohan, and as the bookie in “Bells are Ringing.”
More than 30 years after he resigned from office, Richard M. Nixon has transcended politics and history and become epic. He has been portrayed on film by Anthony Hopkins, the man who won an Oscar playing Hannibal the Cannibal. And his trip to China has been the subject of an opera, the art form most suited for larger-than-life stories of melodrama and scope. Nixon is like a Shakespearean character, the ability and ambition and the tragic flaws of Richard III, Lear, or Othello.
No one work of art or history will ever contain this man of extraordinary contradictions, but in one of this year’s best films, based on the Tony award-winning play, writer Peter Morgan, director Ron Howard, and actors Frank Langella and Michael Sheen take a pivotal moment in Nixon’s life and make it into a gripping story of the craving of two very different men for power and acceptance and how it plays into a contest of wit and will that becomes a larger story of accountability and meaning.
Richard Nixon was all but exiled to his house on the ocean in San Clemente following his resignation from the Presidency in 1974, relegated to working on his memoirs and finding excuses not to play golf. British broadcaster David Frost was also in a kind of an exile following cancellation of his New York-based talk show, relegated to lightweight celebrity interviews and presiding over televised stunts. Both were desperate for a way to get back into a position of influence. Frost proposed a series of interviews, even though he had no background as a journalist or historian. And Nixon accepted, in part because Frost had not background as a journalist or historian and in part because he would get paid $600,000 and a percentage of the profits. Negotiated by uber-agent Swifty Lazar (a shrewd Toby Jones) and widely criticized as “checkbook journalism,” the payment may have been unorthodox but it was most likely one of the most important factors in eliciting the unprecedented level of candor from the former President, not because of the incentives but because it shifted the balance of power from the subject to the interviewer.
It was also a stunning example of the precise conflict at the heart of so many of Nixon’s failures — his desperate need for approval. He accepted the interview as a way to try to regain his reputation as an elder statesman and remind America of his accomplishments and value. But once again, as it did in 1960 in the first televised Presidential debate, he was defeated by television, but what a character refers to as the power of the close-up. In yet another of this film’s infinite regression of paradoxes, the close-up that most exposes Nixon comes closest to creating sympathy for him. It is one thing to read about the evasions and cover-ups and corruption. It is another to see his face, the desperation, the soul-destroying awareness of how far he was from what he wanted to be.
Staged like a boxing match between the aging champ and the upstart, Howard and Morgan show us the combatants in training, sparring, retreating to their corners for some splashes of water, and then back into it, each going for the knock-out punch. They manage to create sympathy for both men without any shyness about their flaws. Both have some monstrous qualities but neither is a monster.
Sheen and Langella, after months performing together on stage, fully inhabit the roles and are exquisitely attuned to each other. Langella has the more showy character, but Sheen is every bit as precise. Watch the way he orders his lunch. In a millisecond he conveys all of his skills and all of his vulnerabilities. Even in the middle of an important conversation with his producer he stops and gives his full attention to the person behind the counter at the cafeteria and he orders in a way that perfectly demonstrates his charm, his showy self-deprecation, and his need to be noticed and approved of by every person on the planet.
And then there is Nixon, that infinitely interesting jumble of contradictions. Langella shows us his glimmers of self-awareness that cannot add up to meaningful insight. Morgan has taken the privilege of a writer to make it truthful without being accurate in every detail. For one thing, it has better dialogue. Morgan’s “The Queen” was another story of politics, celebrity, history, and conflict between two strong public characters (the younger one played by Michael Sheen) . As he did there, his selection of the elements of the story he wants to highlight and explore allows him to make this men not just historical figures but symbols of duality and contradiction and ultimately to deliver some over-arching messages about what it means to be human.
Maybe it is just too soon, maybe we are just too used to the high-gloss satire of “Saturday Night Live” and “The Daily Show,” maybe it’s the kaleidoscopic structure, but this movie feels like a rough draft. Director Oliver Stone throws almost-randomly arranged scenes from the 43rd President’s life up on screen in an attempt at insight but too often it dissolves into caricature.
It begins promisingly with a defining moment for the George W. Bush presidency, or at least a moment intended to be defining. In an Oval Office meeting, W. (Josh Brolin) and his top advisors are debating the terminology they will use to explain the President’s view — literally — of the world in his first State of the Union address in January 2002, just months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. How to describe our enemies? They settle on “axis of evil.” And we get acquainted with the cast of characters who will be portraying the headline names — Jeffrey Wright as Secretary of State Colin Powell, Scott Glen as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Thandie Newton as Condoleezza Rice, Toby Jones as Senior Advisor and political strategist Karl Rove, and Richard Dreyfuss as Vice President Dick Cheney. A strong beginning is diminished as the characters are introduced because the audience is distracted by the effort of determining which actors do the best job of look and sound like the real-life characters they portray (that would be Newton and Dreyfuss) and which look and sound nothing whatsoever like their characters (Glen).
Then we get some flashbacks to unroll the well-known story of President Bush’s misspent youth, the drinking, the partying, the series of failed careers. Brolin gives a thoughtful performance, but the superficiality of the assessment of Bush as a man (trying to both please and do better than his father) and as a leader (there is not enough here to understand his policies or priorities) give the film an uncertain tone, sometimes verging on satire, sometimes sinking to melodrama, sometimes showing flashes of farce, especially when almost every scene shows him chomping on a sandwich or when Rice murmurs support for everything the President says. Why give us Bush choking on a pretzel? Then why have it a second time?
Elizabeth Banks gives a warm and appealing performance as Laura Bush, Ellen Burstyn is fiery as Barbara Bush, and Dreyfuss has Cheney’s steely purr down perfectly. The movie ambitiously tries to make President Bush appear more overmatched than cynical or incompetent. There are hints of hubris but Stone does not doubt the sincerity of Bush’s intentions or the merits of his aspirations. But there are too many characters and the events are glossed over too quickly. It’s very tempting to make it a metaphor for the Bush Presidency — unclear in direction and suffering from attention deficit disorder. But ultimately, it is just a movie, and despite moments of value finally an unsuccessful one.
This week we observe one of the great strengths of the system created by the founding fathers, the orderly transition to a new administration. In honor of the outgoing and incoming Presidents of the United States, take a look at this eight-part series from the History Channel about the Presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush, their careers and their lives, their triumphs and their disappointments.
Rated R for pervasive language, some strong sexuality including dialogue, nudity, and for drug content
Profanity:
Constant extremely strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:
Drinking, smoking, characters sell drugs, reference to drug use
Violence/ Scariness:
Gang-related violence, characters shot and killed
Diversity Issues:
A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:
January 16, 2009
Christopher George Latore Wallace lived fast, died young, and left a very big corpse. He started dealing drugs as a young kid in Brooklyn, went to prison, and was killed at age 24 in a gang-style shooting that is still unsolved. What makes him worthy of a biopic is that in between all of this he made two rap albums as Biggie Smalls/Notorious B.I.G. that were and continue to be enormously successful.
This movie will inevitably come up short when compared to documentaries like the one about the similarly brief life of the far more prolific rapper Tupac Shakur or full-scale Hollywood biopics like “Ray” and “Walk the Line.” It is produced by Wallace’s biggest promoters, his mother and impresario Sean Combs, who was then known as Puff Daddy and it has the soft edges of a hagiography. And its star, newcomer Jamal Woolard, evokes Biggie’s flattish affect without making the story’s main character particularly dynamic. The film benefits from very strong performances by the supporting cast, including Angela Bassett as Wallace’s mother, Derek Luke as Combs, Naturi Naughton as protege/girlfriend Li’l Kim, Anthony Makie as Shakur, and Antonique Smith as his wife, Faith Evans. But there is not enough in it to engage anyone who is not already a knowledgeable fan. It does not provide any context about why Wallace was different or important or how his experience informed his lyrics or what it was about his performances that connected with such a wide audience. It does not explore the notion of authenticity and “keeping it real” and the inability to understand how legitimate success was different by almost everyone but Puff Daddy that made the tragic outcomes almost inevitable. It is superficial and overly commercial, something the really Biggie never was.
