Two movies that entered the fray this holiday season have gathered a lot of controversy without benefit of a sexual censorship battle or a major divorce by one of the stars. This is really revolutionary.
The first is about Selma, the Martin Luther King biopic revolving around that famous march for equality. It goes without saying that everyone associated with the film should be applauded for even making it. While shot as a feature film, it is a historical document and as such, has a permanent place in our cinematic historical archives. That situation also burdens it with certain requirements, the first of which is historical accuracy.
Its historical content and position is what has generated most of the controversy. There is a scene before the march where King confronts LBJ, a fierce supporter of equal rights, in which LBJ tells King that he has to wait because he, LBJ has other plans that must be completed first. This, according to such intimate sources as Andrew Young, who was in attendance when the real meeting actually took place, is historically inaccurate. The film’s director Ava DuVernay, has dismissed this criticism based on her concept of the film as dramatic fiction, not a documentary film. It seems to this writer that Ms DuVernay wants it both ways. She wants to take advantage of the notoriety of the Selma March and Dr. King and she wants to be free to tell any story she likes or feels is dramatically effective regardless of its historical accuracy.
If a filmmaker wants to tell a real life story involving characters of no great historical significance and wants to color the facts for dramatic effect, that’s one thing. It only affects the real people the characters are based on but when that same director wants to tell a story of historical significance, the significant historical details must be adhered to assiduously.
If Ms DuVernay wanted to tell any story that appealed to her she should have called it Baluga, and had Joe Smith as her fictional lead character. But she wanted Selma and Dr. King because they would sell tickets, or maybe she wanted them because she thought, correctly, that it was an important story to tell. She got them and with them came the responsibility to be historically accurate.
Thousands of kids are seeing this movie. Schools are taking them in droves. Those kids must be exposed to the truth of what actually happened. There was enough drama going on in the real situation that a good director should have found something to substitute for the lie that is told in the film. There is no excuse for this. It’s just bad filmmaking. There are enough lies in the way history is told in the world that we don’t have to add to it in our entertainment.
There are so many versions of what happened to and with Custer that we will never know what really happened. We still have people alive who were in that room with LBJ and King and they all agree on what was the truth of that meeting. We didn’t need Ms DuVernay to create her own version of history.
All the noise being made over Chris Kyle and the movie American Sniper seems to be about why we are making a sniper into a hero. In this case the principal question is who are “we”? I don’t think that most Americans think of Kyle as more of a hero than any other soldier who risked his life in combat. The media loves heroes because they sell papers but the media isn’t real. The media is a figment of an advertising genius’ imagination.
Dennis Jett of the New Republic attacks the film because based in the trailer, Kyle calls the enemy savages and evil. I think you have to feel that way about someone if you are going to kill him. What the film does do is give us a new and different view of combat, one in which the enemy comes up close, in a moment frozen in time, and we, as well as the sniper, see him or her in a much more personal light than is depicted in normal combat films. To zone in tight on an individual, the way the sniper does and kill him takes a POV that is far different than that of a normal combat fighter who sprays death in every direction and hopes he hits something.
Here again we are dealing with a fictionalized true story and again it is about someone and some events that are already revealed in their entirety in the book that inspired the film. Because of this, director Clint Eastwood should be applauded for showing Kyle to be a person who is not a hero but something of a real killer, and possibly a little off kilter. It would have been so easy and so good for the box office to make Kyle the successful poster boy that Pat Tillman was before he was killed. That he did not do that, but stuck to the picture that was painted by both Kyle’s book and those that contributed to the film, is to his credit.
I’m a big fan of Michael Moore, and I am sorry that his uncle was shot by a sniper, but that doesn’t, as Moore claims, make snipers cowards. They are just soldiers doing the job to which they are assigned. And that’s probably the point. Soldiers aren’t responsible for war. Our politicians take care of that job. They are usually patriotic Americans that think they are doing a job that will help their country. They are not usually heroes and they are not cowards, they are just American kids, doing a job that most of us don’t wasn’t any part of.
Moore is wrong in one more of his comments. When he says that Eastwood gets Vietnam and Iraq confused in his storytelling, Mike’s wrong. Nam and Iraq are the same war with the same problems created by the same stupidity. The only difference is the motivation. Nam was supposed to be about Communism and Iraq, regardless of the excuse, is about greed in the form of oil.
It seems that whether or not you like American Sniper, Eastwood has made a film that is true to its subject. Whether or not you like that subject, is relevant only in whether or not you go to see the film. The man in Eastwood’s film is neither hero nor coward but a pretty real person with the faults that we all possess and one skill that many of us do not. We need people like Kyle to win wars. What we don’t need is the wars themselves.
The biggest problem with the criticism of American Sniper is that it comes from people like Dennis Jett, who, incredibly, admits that he hasn’t seen the film. A self-condemnation of his own stupidity that is hard to believe. He reminds one of the 1950’s censors who also hadn’t seen the films they were condemning, but who proudly and idiotically stated that they didn’t have to see porn to know it.