This Year’s Hero

Hollywood traffics in heroes, and this season is no different, but the billboard of current events rising above all the other ones on Sunset Boulevard this month reminds us that the qualifications for heroism on the big screen are, as ever, subject to the whims of history, politics and popular culture.

It was bad enough when Kevin Costner unveiled his post-nuclear apocalyptic fable, “The Postman,” in 1997, but imagine releasing a movie with that title just now. It might not be the best of times for a reconsideration of “Lawrence of Arabia” either.

When the new Jim Carrey picture, “The Majestic,” opens Dec. 21, it will ask its audience to like and approve a character, a Hollywood screenwriter, who was blacklisted in the McCarthy era. Whether this is the right time for such a story the first weekend’s box-office receipts will begin to answer, but there’s no doubt this is a better time for such a story than the early 1950s, when fear of communism gripped the nation and the idea of punishing communist sympathizers was a virtue.

Furthermore, there is evidence that “The Majestic,” while touching on the blacklist, is otherwise a homage to the uncomplicated American goodness of what might be called “Jimmy Stewart’s America” and therefore well-positioned as a comforting escape from the international crisis.

The opposite might apply to “Ali,” the Michael Mann biopic of Muhammad Ali starring Will Smith as the beloved prizefighter who refused to serve in the U.S. Army during the flag-burning, Vietnam-afflicted 1960s and did so out of religious allegiance to the black separatist Nation of Islam. Context is everything, the filmmakers will argue. But with more than $100 million invested in a movie like “Ali”--which opens Dec. 25--if you are Sony Pictures, you would prefer not to have to rely on viewers’ deep understanding of history when history has been overshadowed by current events.

Such knowledge can’t be assumed. At test screenings of “Charlotte Gray,” a Warner Bros. movie opening Dec. 28 about a young Scottish woman (played by Cate Blanchett) in World War II who parachutes behind enemy lines to help the French Resistance, Australian director Gillian Armstrong discovered to her dismay that most American viewers younger than 25 didn’t know Great Britain was in WWII and under attack from the Nazis. (“Saving Private Ryan” apparently only went so far toward restoring our familiarity with what happened in Europe in the ‘40s.)

“Charlotte Gray,” “Ali,” and “The Majestic,” along with two contemporary military action sagas, “Behind Enemy Lines” (20th Century Fox) and “Black Hawk Down” (Sony/Revolution Studios), recently moved up for holiday release, all suggest in their different outlines how hero-making in Hollywood has followed a political cycle that remains in flux.

The Cold War made it hard for Hollywood to remember that the Soviet Union was our WWII ally (as Russia is in the assault on the Taliban in Afghanistan). It seemed almost a novelty earlier this year when Paramount’s release of Jean-Jacques Annaud’s “Enemy at the Gates” served up as a hero a Russian sharpshooter (Jude Law) helping beat the Germans in the battle of Stalingrad. Although it wasn’t a hit, such a scenario would have been hard to imagine before communism’s fall.

“I think that it’s good that as time goes by, people return to these periods to tell more truthful stories not colored by the politics of the time,” says Armstrong, whose “Charlotte Gray” deals with the collaboration of some of the French with occupying Nazis.

The director of such films as “My Brilliant Career” and “The Last Days of Chez Nous” once thought she would never make a World War II picture because “growing up, I felt I’d seen too many World War II stories.” She too learned about the war from Hollywood’s extensive output on the subject in the 1950s and ‘60s. “But in the end it was a great journey, learning about these agents....World War II is such a good period because it’s about people pushed to extremes, dealing with life and death every day.”

And with the future of the free world at stake, she might have added.

Indeed, Armstrong’s contemporaries in the baby boom (she was born in 1950) grew up with cinematic images of America as savior of the world and commander of an awesome force of jet-age warplanes piloted by unquestionable heroes. That reassuring, unifying mind-set splintered over Vietnam, a war that WWII veterans saw as another global threat worth dying for but that their sons and daughters (at least a good number of them) saw as an abuse of America’s power.

It took awhile for Hollywood to catch up with the general sense of rebellion ignited by the antiwar movement, but once that rebellion reached the mainstream, the American soldier dropped off movie billboards, along with police and other authority figures. Memories of WWII and its noble mission receded as the nation and its moviegoing young saluted the new heroes of the anti-establishment in pictures as diverse as “Easy Rider,” “Five Easy Pieces,” “The Graduate” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Disaffection reigned and, with it, disaffected heroes.

Kids who had played cowboys and Indians in the ‘50s and ‘60s, reflecting what they saw on TV and at the movies, now questioned how their government had treated the newly designated Native Americans. The face of the enemy changed, and the effect of that change on the movies was profound, beginning with Dustin Hoffman’s performance as an Indian sympathizer in “Little Big Man” (1970) up through Kevin Costner’s Oscar for directing himself as a Civil War soldier gone native in “Dances With Wolves” (1990). What would have been hard to imagine in John Ford’s Old West of the 1940s and ‘50s was multiculturally cool in America in 1990.

The same might be said for movies such as “Missing,” “Under Fire” and “Salvador” in the early 1980s, which located a point of view in Americans’ bearing witness to their government’s misguided support for treacherous regimes in Latin America, a continuation of the flight from the political verities of WWII. These were not movies that sent people out of the theater to buy American flags. Nor did Warren Beatty’s “Reds,” a 1981 film that made a hero of the early 20th century American communist John Reed, albeit in the guise of a love story. Nor did the later Vietnam films such as “Platoon,” “Full Metal Jacket,” “Casualties of War” and “Born on the Fourth of July.”

But as the late producer Don Simpson and his partner, Jerry Bruckheimer, might have said when they released “Top Gun” in 1986, that was then and this is now. Hollywood began to get back to old-fashioned patriotism with their adrenaline-pumping fighter-pilot rock video that made it cool to be a red, white and blue warrior again. Eventually would come the return to the big screen of the honorable American GI in the person of Tom Hanks in “Saving Private Ryan.”

Introspection, like all things, passes. The ‘60s are now more than 30 years distant, but their earth-shaking realignment of values, role models and ethics remains a line drawn in the sand between World War II and the present. (Vietnam veteran Oliver Stone, who made the harshly elegiac “Platoon,” once observed that he saw the division of the country in the ‘60s not as unique, but as a continuation of the Civil War.) With the smell of “Top Gun” very much in the air again, Hollywood bottom-liners no doubt wonder if the shelf life of 1960s pop culture hasn’t expired.

The question must be very much on the minds of the makers of “Ali,” whose title character was a warrior but hardly a red, white and blue one. Born in pre-civil rights-era Louisville, Ky., the former Cassius Clay in some ways embodied the me-first narcissism of America’s affluent postwar children, but he was also a symbol of political irreverence and black pride. Not long after he beat Sonny Liston in 1964 to become heavyweight champion of the world at age 22, he joined the Nation of Islam, shed his “slave” name and took a new one that sounded anything but patriotic.

“It was a scary sect, ultra-militant,” says screenwriter Gregory Allen Howard, who wrote the first draft of “Ali” as well as the recent drama “Remember the Titans,” about the integration of a high school football team in Alexandria, Va., in 1971. “But people have to understand the context of Ali. The year he joined the Muslims was the same year those girls were blown up in that church in Alabama. No doubt the studio is a little wigged out about the association with Islam at the moment, but I give people credit for understanding all that was going on.

“He [Ali] went from being an antihero to being a hero. He was the first prominent person to speak out against the war. He made black people brave at a time when we needed courage. He stood on principle. As far as his name, it was the principle of self-determination.”As biographies of Ali have hinted or stated, the champ was far from a saint, and Mann has promised that he is pulling no punches over Ali’s tempestuous marriages and sometimes shabby treatment of friends and associates. But chances are he will not go as far as former Sports Illustrated boxing writer Mark Kram did in his new book, “The Ghosts of Manila,” about Ali’s blood feud in and out of the ring with Joe Frazier, in debunking Ali as social leader and hero.

Kram claims Ali’s famous street poetry was written for him, that he had “the political insight of an infant,” was personally cruel and selfish, and was used by the Nation of Islam. At one point, Kram compares Ali with Chauncey, the Peter Sellers character in 1979’s “Being There,” someone who merely played a role fashioned for him by others.

Kram is well aware his view of Ali is not a popular one. He says, “Most of what’s been written about Ali is hagiography. I can’t see how the movie will be any different. People became very comfortable with the legend, and they don’t want that legend changed.”

Movies have their own internal logic dictating who to root for and who to boo, but they also trade on mythology and play to an audience’s contemporary ideas and prejudices--something filmmakers can ignore only if they are not eyeing the line at the box office.

“Charlotte Gray” will no doubt elicit different reactions in Paris than in Los Angeles. One assumes the Coen brothers’ loopy redneck cartoon “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (2000) played differently in Mississippi than it did in New York. How hard would it be to market a film today in the U.S. about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the Palestinians portrayed as freedom fighters and heroes?

Indeed, it’s a challenge to assemble a hero from the shards of a damaged reputation, although Stone tried to do it in “Nixon” (1995), casting Anthony Hopkins as the greatest of the Cold Warriors. Danny DeVito tried to do it when he cast Jack Nicholson as Jimmy Hoffa in “Hoffa”(1992). Good dramatists work with character flaws, even welcome them. Armstrong found that “war itself is not black and white. There are a lot of grays. Lots of things go wrong.”

“Charlotte Gray” illustrates how difficult it was for the French under siege, ordinary people trying to survive any way they could. “You get that question,” says the director, “of who is going to collaborate?”

“The Majestic,” directed by Frank Darabont, will also take audiences back in time, to 1951, “an immensely paranoid time,” in the words of its screenwriter, Michael Sloane, who found in it a crucible for drawing out essential American values.

“The Rosenbergs were on trial,” he points out. “There was Korea. The Soviets had been our pals in the ‘40s, and seven years later the country has taken a severe 180-degree turn. ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ probably couldn’t have been made in 1951,” he says of the 1940 John Ford adaptation of Steinbeck’s Depression-era ode to the community of man and the communal experience.

“The Majestic,” Sloane says, is “not a movie about the blacklist, but about the effect of it.” The main character, played by Carrey, is a B-list screenwriter wrongly accused of being a Communist but “who never saw the odds in being a hero.” After he wakes up with amnesia following a car accident, and discovers the local townsfolk believe him to be a native son come back after disappearing in combat in WWII, Carrey must live up to expectations more humble but more powerful than those previously governing his life.

The 1st Amendment, Sloane says, plays a key role “as the underlying principle that allows us to be Americans.”

There is an important scene involving an American flag. “I know that blatant patriotism is very fashionable right now,” the writer says, “but it would be wrong to think that we have made an attempt to capitalize on that.”

Still, he admits that seeing the film after Sept. 11, he was affected in a way he hadn’t expected. “I realized I was reacting to things in my own movie differently because of what had happened.”

If “The Grapes of Wrath” could not have been made in 1951, “The Majestic,” Sloane believes, could not have been made in the bell-bottomed 1970s. “It’s too old-fashioned,” he says.

Which is another way of saying, everything old is new again in Hollywood. It’s too early to measure the full effect of the events of Sept. 11 on the movies, but already some new releases have been nervously postponed, while others perceived to be in sync with the spirit of the moment are being pushed up in the calendar. One example appears to be “Black Hawk Down,” another Bruckheimer military saga, this one directed by Ridley Scott, about a U.S. commando raid in Somalia, now set for release Dec. 28. Another is “Behind Enemy Lines,” about a rescue mission to save a U.S. pilot downed in Bosnia, which now is scheduled to open Nov. 30. Both films had been scheduled for release in 2002.

The heroic march continues early next year with “We Were Soldiers,” the story of an elite U.S. combat team in Vietnam surrounded and outnumbered by a greater force of North Vietnamese and doomed to a savage battle.

Written and directed by Randall Wallace, who wrote “Pearl Harbor,” “We Were Soldiers” is described officially as “a tribute to the nobility of those men under fire, their common acts of uncommon valor, and their loyalty to and love for one another.”

It doesn’t sound like “Platoon.” Is it possible that in Hollywood we have already entered an era where “Platoon” will be regarded as a relic?