I’m hoping to post now and then to talk about movies in some fashion – not reviews so much as musings.  Here are some thoughts about three current movies that tell the stories of real people, with varying success.

MILK

(NOTE:  I already blogged about Milk on a “meta” level in my blog post “People I Know Are in Movies” but didn’t talk about the film itself.)

While this Oscar nominee has its flaws (like many movies these days, it would have been better if it was edited more tightly), I found it incredibly moving as a document not just of a life, or of a public tragedy, but of an entire movement.

Harvey Milk’s story, and the larger story that it’s a synecdoche for (of gay rights and gay pain) is powerfully conveyed, without the usual gross manipulation you find in most “message movies”.  For me, the most emotional scene was not the candlelight parade at the end, but when Penn as Milk almost casually discloses that he’s had two lovers kill themselves (and at that point, another suicide is still to come).  The high rate of despair among gays is presented in a matter-of-fact fashion that should stop every straight person in their tracks.  (It’s too much to hope that homophobic conservatives would watch it and feel ashamed of their absurd accusations that gays are powerful people pushing their social agenda on straights.)

Watching Milk, which ends about a year before I moved here to the Bay Area, I felt relieved at how much progress we’ve made on gay rights during those 30 years, and yet I know that I live in a bubble where there are not just legal protections but social acceptance far beyond what most gay people still experience.  And even here, there are still many pockets of homophobia and violence, as the Gwen Araujo tragedy showed.

Milk works mostly because of the strong performances of Josh Brolin and Sean Penn.  For me, Penn is one of those love-hate actors – I often dislike him as a person, even though I think he’s incredibly talented.  But I’d gotten tired of seeing him in too many roles as the sinister, sneering bad guy.  He’s terrific in them, but I always have a sneaking suspicion that it’s partly because they cut all too close to the tough, cynical and at times nasty guy that he is in real life.  

So it was refreshing to see him do what felt like real acting, transforming himself into not a gay man (that wasn’t the impressive part) but a believable character who was positive, who seemed to find joy even in situations that should generate hatred or despair.  I hope that Penn absorbed a bit of the character – as the old ad slogan goes, “Milk – it does a body good.”

(No matter what else he does, I’ll always love Penn for what he said during his Actor’s Studio interview, which is that he hates it when people excuse crappy mainstream movies by saying “they’re just entertainment.”   He said that movies are too powerful a medium to be dismissed that way, and “If you want entertainment, get yourself two hookers and an eight-ball.”  Classic Penn, and even if I have no taste for hookers, I agree with him that movies and other visual media are among the most powerful forces for affecting human beings that have ever been invented, and that we should respect what they can do.  But that, as they say, is another blog post.)

FROST/NIXON

(I also mentioned this film in my "People I Know" blog post.)

Other than Frank Langella’s foxy performance as Nixon, I found this movie very disappointing (and not just because the person I used to know ended up having no dialogue!).  Perhaps it’s the problem of adapting a stage play to screen, or perhaps it’s knowing the real history, but to me, this movie tried very hard to build up suspense where none could be mustered.  

The contrast to Milk is helpful, because we also know what’s going to happen in that film, but the director (Gus Van Sant) still builds up an anxious suspense before the inevitable occurs.  Perhaps the difference is that after 2 hours, we’ve fallen a little in love with Harvey Milk and hate to see him die, whereas we don’t care what happens to either Nixon or Frost.  Or perhaps the problem is that we do care, and want Nixon to have more of a comeuppance.  All this suspense for just a tiny little admission?  How little we got in satisfaction from that man, after all he did to the country! (Although after 8 years of Bush/Cheney, Nixon begins to look more like someone’s rascally old uncle than the former most-hated ex-President.)  

I actually had to fight to stay awake during Frost/Nixon, which is very rare for me in movies.  I managed it only by waiting to see if Ken Khachigian had any lines and also noting stuff like the use of an entirely different location for Nixon’s house, since the real one would have had Catalina Island on the horizon in the shots with an ocean background.  (Having lived in the town and seen that same ocean view every day, I know the outline of Catalina on the horizon like I know my own face.  I once saw it pop up in a movie that was supposedly set on the Riviera.  These things tend to break your suspension of disbelief.)  Finding yourself focusing on such minutiae argues against a movie being a compelling viewing experience.

Not long after seeing Frost/Nixon, I was about to turn off the TV and go to bed when I stumbled onto the last hour of an American Experience documentary about Nixon, coming in just in time for the Watergate portion.  And I was so mesmerized by the real story that I had to force myself turn it off and go to bed.  So if you want a Nixon saga, go for reality – or at least rent All the President’s Men.

MAN ON WIRE

To complete my round-up of movies about real people, I just saw this on DVD and highly recommend it.  Like a poorly rigged wire (something that will have more meaning after you see this), the movie sags a bit in the middle, but it’s an engrossing and cleverly made documentary about Philippe Petit’s amazing wire walk between the tops of the two World Trade Center towers in 1974 (shortly before Nixon’s resignation, as it happens). 

I was 16 when this made headlines around the world and the film does more than bring it all back for those of us who saw it then – it takes us deep inside the stunt (deliciously called “Le Coup” by the perpetrators) by interviewing the still-living participants, as well as showing both re-enactments and actual film of Petit in the 1970’s as he prepared.   So, for example, we learn that Le Coup was something Petit had dreamed about since he was 17 and read about the buildings in the planning stages.  The back story is intriguing, although I would have preferred hearing less about the inter-team tensions and more about how a man becomes able to walk with complete nonchalance a quarter mile above the ground on a wire about half an inch wide (on which, among other things, he actually lies down in the middle of making 8 crossings).  That is the question we mere mortals boggle at.

Petit’s feat was so extreme that it’s still unparalleled, and in case you can’t imagine enjoying watching such a thing, even knowing he survived, I’ll say that even someone as acrophobic as I am was able to enjoy it, just as his friends on the ground said they were so stunned by the beauty of the act that they forgot to be afraid for him.

Petit is at times almost a parody combination of an excitable Frenchman and a daredevil artist with grandiose interpretations of even the most mundane aspects of life, but what most impressed me was his extreme determination and courage.  My memory of the event was that it was fairly improvisational and that Petit was astoundingly lucky in even surviving it, but Man on Wire (that wonderfully succinct phrase is how the complaint appears on the police report afterward) shows us that years of serious planning went into the stunt.  (Although some admittedly wacky characters ended up aiding and abetting Petit in his “crime,” which they eventually pleaded down to “trespassing”. Uh, yeah, that’s one word for it.)

Seeing the twin towers is always a sad moment and it’s amazing how many movies and TV shows feature them.  You can be in the midst of a breezy romantic comedy only to feel your heart sink when they appear suddenly in the background of a shot of New York, and it took me a while to get past that feeling as I watched Man on Wire, which includes footage of them in the construction stage as well as during Le Coup.

Having seen their destruction happen on TV, it was amazingly moving to see them going up again in the old footage.  In a way the movie rebuilds the fallen towers by showing us that, and eventually I started seeing them as Petit did, and was able to enter into their history, the feeling of them as they once were, rather than how they ended.  It was rather like the point at which you can think about someone who died without bursting into tears anymore but instead just fondly remembering who they were.  In a way, Man on Wire celebrates not just Petit’s shining moment, but theirs -- when they were new and represented all the opportunity in the world.  

It’s stunning after watching this film to realize that Petit survived and they did not.  Sometimes a fragile human being is stronger than a colossus of steel.