In PBS’ American Experience documentary Jimmy Carter, The New Yorker writer and former Carter speechwriter Henrik Hertzberg says:
Jimmy Carter was what the American people always SAY they want – above politics, determined to do the right thing regardless of political consequences, a simple person who doesn’t lie, a modest man, not someone with a lot of imperial pretenses. That’s what people say they want. And that’s what they got with Jimmy Carter.
And herein lies the rub.
In 1976, Americans were reacting to Watergate and wanted a President LEAST like Richard Nixon. We got him, in the form of Jimmy Carter; it turned out that Carter could deliver non-Nixon decency, but not the leadership that the era required.
Today, many – and the polls indicate, most – Americans seek a non-Trump. I share the view that ANYONE would be better then Trump, but Jimmy Carter is instructive that “anyone”, while better than Trump, might not be the best for the country.
In Jimmy Carter, we hear from those who know Carter best – including his wife Rosalynn Carter, his vice-president Walter Mondale, and right-from-the-start Carter insiders Jody Powell, Pat Caddell and Bert Lance. How the times made this man, then propelled him to such improbable electoral success and then finally doomed his Administration, is a great and cautionary story.
To stream Jimmy Carter from iTunes, search for “Jimmy Carter” under TV Episodes (not under Movies). Jimmy Carter is also available on DVD from American Experience.
The advocacy documentary Citizen Koch exposes the terrible effects of the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which allows the right-wing billionaire Koch brothers to anonymously spend unlimited treasure to promote political candidates, measures and legislation that I (The Movie Gourmet) abhor. Filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, who have worked with Michael Moore, share Moore’s use of documentary to persuade by observation: here are the facts that will lead you to agree with us.
The very best aspect of Citizen Koch is the core story of Governor Scott Walker’s assault on public employees and their unions in Wisconsin. Citizen Koch meticulously connects the dots between the Koch Brothers’ strategy of degrading the Democratic Party’s strength by weakening public employee unions and Walker’s machinations. It’s a conspiracy in plain sight. Citizen Koch is at its best when this thread is told from the perspective of a few Wisconsin public employees – who are themselves Republicans.
Unfortunately, what could have been a superb film on the political conflict in Wisconsin gets flabby and diluted with threads about Citizens United and Charles and David Koch. The worst part is a fourth thread about Buddy Roemer, a sleazy opportunist who has changed political parties three times but is held up as some sort of beacon of good government; it’s outrageously naive and potentially discredits the rest of the film.
And here’s a little controversy that is illustrative of the Koch Brothers political power. PBS was going to air Citizen Koch on its documentary series POV, but chickened out because David Koch sits on the board of PBS’ NYC affiliate WNET and is a huge contributor to PBS products like Nova.
Lee Daniels’ The Butler is an entertaining and satisfying epic that explores the issue of race in America as reflected in the experiences of two men – a man who escaped a Southern cotton farm to become a butler at the White House (Forest Whitaker) and his son (David Oyelowo), who becomes engaged with the racial justice movement from the 60s through the 90s.
What The Butler gets right is the overall sweep of history, and it shines as an accessible history lesson. We get a taste of American race relations from the 1920s onward, and we glimpse the key moments in Civil Rights history: Little Rock school desegregation, lunch counter sit-ins, Freedom Rides, the JFK and LBJ civil rights speeches and legislation, the King assassination, urban riots, Black Power and anti-apartheid activism. The perspectives of the two main characters mirror those of Booker T Washington and W.E.B. DuBois.
Most importantly, The Butler reveals the African-American community as not monolithic, but with different (and conflicting) personality types, political views and generational perspectives. This is not accomplished very often in popular culture. Indeed, The Butler is strongest in the family moments – breakfasts, parties, arguments, sending the kid off to college – that allow the cast to bring out the textures of their characters. (And The Butler is dead-on perfect with all the periods, including the unfortunate fashions of the 1970s.)
That being said, the implausibility of the protagonists’ Zelig-like personal presence at every key historical moment is distracting. Every time Whitaker’s character brings a cup of coffee into the Oval Office, the President du moment is deciding on sending federal troops into the South, sending a Civil Rights bill to the Hill or some-such. Oyelowo’s character is a lunch counter sitter, a Freedom Rider, a Selma marcher, a MLK aide at the Lorraine Motel, a Black Panther, a Congressional candidate and an anti-apartheid leader. The coincidences are so improbable that it’s too much of the audience to suspend disbelief.
Forest Whitaker is a great actor. Here he perfectly plays a man who has strong feelings that he expresses among Blacks and that he conceals (sometimes stoically, sometimes charmingly) among Whites. We’ve been watching Whitaker since 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High and his searing Charlie Parker in 1986’s Bird, right through to his Oscar win for The Last King of Scotland. My personal favorite Forest Whitaker performances are in The Crying Game and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.
Oyelowo is an actor who has come on strong in the past two years (The Help,The Paperboy, Lincoln), and here delivers a perfect performance of a man with youthful strong-headedness, self-possessed whether on the right side of history or not. He’s that brave man who does dangerous things without impetuosity.
The African-American cast is a marvel. Oprah Winfrey is outstanding as the wife/mom, and an Oscar nod is likely. Terence Howard is marvelous as the shady neighbor. Clarence Williams III (yes, from The Mod Squad) is superb as the butler’s first mentor. Cuba Gooding Jr and Lenny Kravitz are excellent as White House co-workers with very different personalities. Mariah Carey, who was unbelievably good as the social worker in Daniel’s Precious, is equally good here as the butler’s tortured mother.
The cast playing the White House’s upstairs residents do not fare so well. In the movie’s funniest turn, Liev Schreiber captures LBJ’s frenetic energy but not his imposing and sinister physicality. John Cusack has Nixon’s creepiness but not his painful social awkwardness. Robin Williams plays Ike without any military bearing or snap. James Marsden plays a pretty, but wimpy JFK. And is that Alan Rickman as Ronnie? The one impeccable performance in this category (and Daniels’ sly joke on the Reagans) is Jane Fonda as Nancy.
Overall, it’s an important, if imperfect work by director Lee Daniels (Precious, The Paperboy). (BTW – the title is not because of his ego – but because of the silly refusal by another movie studio to grant the title rights.) At times profound and at times ridiculously improbable, The Butler gets the basic truths profoundly right.
At the moment of Abraham Lincoln’s death, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, standing at the foot of Lincoln’s bed, said “Now he belongs to the ages”. Indeed, Lincoln became immortalized as moral icon, martyr and master of language (all of which he was). But, because we didn’t see Lincoln campaign and govern on the nightly television news (or even on newsreels), there has been no popular familiarity with Lincoln in the flesh. With Lincoln, Steven Spielberg has pushed aside the marble statue and re-introduced us Lincoln the man.
The great actor Daniel Day-Lewis becomes the man Lincoln. We see him as the genius of political strategy who is always several moves ahead of the other players. We see him as the pragmatist who will do what is necessary to accomplish his goals. We see him fondly cajoling his wife but gingerly avoiding her outbursts. We see him as a complex father – grieving one son, doting to a second, distant to another. And we see Lincoln as a very funny guy – both a master communicator who tells anecdotes to make his point and a raconteur who enjoys laughing at his own bawdy stories. Day-Lewis brings all of these aspects to life in a great performance.
Besides Day-Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, as a key Congressional leader, and James Spader, as a political fixer, get the best lines. Sally Field is perfectly cast as Mary Todd Lincoln. Bruce McGill, David Straithern, Hal Holbrook, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jared Harris (Mad Men) and Jackie Earle Haley (Little Children) are all excellent, too.
Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner chose to focus on the few months at the end of the Civil War when Lincoln was trying to get Congress to pass the 13th Amendment to ban slavery. Lincoln knew that, once the Civil War ended, his earlier Emancipation Proclamation was unlikely to withstand legal and political challenges and act to permanently ban slavery. He also gauged that passage of the 13th Amendment was only viable before the end of the war, which was within sight. His only recourse was to try to rush a successful vote over both the obstructionism of the opposing party and attempted sabotage by the Confederacy while both wings of his own party refused to join in collaboration. It’s a horse race.
So we have a political thriller – one of the best depictions of American legislative politics ever on film. Lincoln retains a team of lobbyists played by Tim Blake Nelson, John Hawkes and Spader. These guys know that appealing to the principles of the targeted Congressmen is not going to get enough votes, so they enthusiastically plunge into less high minded tactics. Spader’s character operates with unmatched gusto and is one of the highlights of the movie. Lincoln’s lawyerly parsing of a note to Congress would put Bill Clinton to shame.
All of this really happened. Lincoln, based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s absorbing Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, is utterly historically accurate. Lincoln buffs will especially appreciate small touches like Lincoln’s pet name for his wife, Stanton’s aversion to Lincoln’s endless stream of anecdotes, Thaddeus Stevens’ wig, Ben Wade’s scowl, Lincoln’s secretaries (the White House staff) sharing a bed and the never ending flood of favor-seekers outside the door of the President’s White House office. I think that Mary Lincoln is portrayed a bit too sympathetically, but that’s a tiny quibble. One more fun note: the 1860s were to male facial hair what the 1970s were to apparel – a period when everyone could make the most flamboyant fashion choices, mostly for the worse.
Lincoln is one of the year’s best films, and like Lincoln himself, timeless.
Mitt Romney has been formally nominated by this week’s Republican Convention in Tampa. Imagine if Michael Moore directed a profile of Mitt’s career as co-founder of Bain Capital. Well, the 28-minute short film When Mitt Romney Comes to Town is an even more devastating critique of Romney than a Moore film would be.
The storyline of When Mitt Romney Comes to Town is essentially 1) you are happily living in Middle America, working in a factory and paying your mortgage and your taxes; 2) Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital buys and then loots your company; 3) you lose your job and then your home; and 4) repeat several times.
Amazingly, the film was directed by Jason Killian Meath, a Republican media consultant and culture warrior. During the GOP primary season, it was shilled by a Newt Gingrich-friendly SuperPAC.
Meath’s film is heavy-handed and manipulative (as a Michael Moore film would be). Meath doesn’t have Moore’s sense of humor, but also doesn’t have Moore’s abrasiveness and self-righteousness, which makes his film smoother, more broadly accessible and ultimately more persuasive. In an appeal to Republican primary voters, Meath uses Reaganesque “Morning in America” music and imagery, and I don’t think that it’s an accident that most of Bain Capital’s victims in the film are White.
The oddest thing about When Mitt Romney Comes to Town is that it is not just an attack on Mitt Romney, but against the type of Vulture Capitalism tolerated or even promoted by all recent Republican Congressional leaders and presidential candidates. This is a major thread of the Obama narrative against Romney.
Today we remember a great TV star who left us with one of the great performances in movie history – Andy Griffith.
During every year of the 1960s, Griffith entered the living rooms of most Baby Boomers as Sheriff Andy Taylor on The Andy Griffith Show and in guest appearances on Mayberry R.F.D. Younger folks knew him from another ten seasons on television starring as Matlock.
But, in his very first feature film, Griffith shed the likeability and decency that made him a TV megastar and became a searingly unforgettable villain. In the 1957 Elia Kazan classic A Face in the Crowd, Griffith plays Lonesome Rhodes, a failed country guitar picker who is hauled out of an Arkansas drunk tank by talent scout Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal). It turns out that he has a folksy charm that is dynamite in the new medium of television. He quickly rises in the infotainment universe until he is an A List celeb and a political power broker. To Jeffries’ horror, Rhodes reveals himself to be an evil, power hungry megalomaniac. Jeffries made him – can she break him? The seduction of a gullible public by a good timin’ charmer predicts the careers of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, although Lonesome Rhodes is meaner than Reagan and less ideological than Bush.
Amazingly, A Face in the Crowd did not garner even a nomination for an Academy Award for Griffith – or for any of the other filmmakers. Today, it is well-regarded, having been added to the library of Congress’ preservation list in the US National Film Registry and rating 91% in critical reviews tallied by Rotten Tomatoes. It is one of the greatest political films.
It being Super Tuesday and all, let’s go with a film about electoral politics, The Ides of March. George Clooney directed, co-wrote and stars in this contemporary political drama. It’s an engrossing story about ambition, loyalty and betrayal. The story revolves around an up-and-coming political consultant (Ryan Gosling). He is working under a veteran campaign manager (Philip Seymour Hoffman) in a Democratic Presidential primary. He is wooed by the campaign manager (Paul Giamatti) for the opposing candidate, and the intrigue begins.
Two performances stand out. Philip Seymour Hoffman perfectly captures the old school politico, now jaded, but able to access the idealism that first drove him into politics. Ryan Gosling can soar in any kind of role. Here he is smart, but is he smart enough? He is well-intentioned, but can it overcome his ambition? Gosling keeps us on the edge of our seats as he navigates a snake pit of betrayals.
The rest of the cast is good, too: Giamatti, Evan Rachel Wood as an ambitious intern and Marisa Tomei as a hard-nosed reporter.
It’s a movie that MOSTLY gets the politics right. The fundamental truth of the movie is that an utterly cynical veteran politico can still fall in love with candidate, as Hoffman’s campaign manager does with Clooney’s candidate.
In another dead on accurate touch, Hoffman and Gosling need a room to privately pass on some bad news to Clooney. Instead of finding a cramped office, the three men sit on folding chairs knee-to-knee in a room that could accommodate 200. That stuff really happens.
Unfortunately, Ides gets some things wrong. Would never happen: A veteran strategist like Hoffman would never be surprised by the possibility of “mischief voting” in an open primary. Real life campaign consultants would never discuss policy positions with a candidate in a room full of thirty 20-somethings, all itching to leak what they know. And no veteran politico worth his salt would tell a reporter about a deal that is not done.
In late December, we’ll see a movie about perhaps the greatest American made by perhaps our greatest filmmaker. Steven Spielberg is directing Lincoln, based on Doris Kearn Goodwin’s absorbing Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.
Daniel Day-Lewis and Sally Field play the Lincolns. The dazzling cast includes Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Jared Harris, Jackie Earle Haley, Hal Holbrook, John Hawkes, James Spader, Bruce McGill, David Straithern, Tim Blake Nelson, Walton Goggins (Justified) and Dakin Mathews (the horse trader in True Grit).
Imagine if Michael Moore directed a profile of Mitt Romney’s career as co-founder of Bain Capital. Well, the 28-minute short film When Mitt Romney Comes to Town is an even more devastating critique of Romney than a Moore film would be.
The storyline of When Mitt Romney Comes to Town is essentially 1) you are happily living in Middle America, working in a factory and paying your mortgage and your taxes; 2) Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital buys and then loots your company; 3) you lose your job and then your home; and 4) repeat several times.
Amazingly, the film was directed by Jason Killian Meath, a Republican media consultant and culture warrior. It is being shilled by a Newt Gingrich-friendly SuperPAC.
Meath’s film is heavy-handed and manipulative (as a Michael Moore film would be). Meath doesn’t have Moore’s sense of humor, but also doesn’t have Moore’s abrasiveness and self-righteousness, which makes his film smoother, more broadly accessible and ultimately more persuausive. In an appeal to Republican primary voters, Meath uses Reaganesque “Morning in America” music and imagery, and I don’t think that it’s an accident that most of Bain Capital’s victims in the film are White.
The oddest thing about When Mitt Romney Comes to Town is that it is not just an attack on Mitt Romney, but against the type of Vulture Capitalism tolerated or even promoted by all four of the current Republican presidential candidates. It’s sure to constitute a major thread of the Obama narrative against Romney or any other GOP candidate.
Here’s a belated comment on The Ides of March, released earlier this fall. George Clooney directed, co-wrote and stars in this contemporary political drama. It’s an engrossing story about ambition, loyalty and betrayal. The story revolves around an up-and-coming political consultant (Ryan Gosling). He is working under a veteran campaign manager (Philip Seymour Hoffman) in a Democratic Presidential primary. He is wooed by the campaign manager (Paul Giamatti) for the opposing candidate, and the intrigue begins.
Two performances stand out. Philip Seymour Hoffman perfectly captures the old school politico, now jaded, but able to access the idealism that first drove him into politics. Ryan Gosling can soar in any kind of role. Here he is smart, but is he smart enough? He is well-intentioned, but can it overcome his ambition? Gosling keeps us on the edge of our seats as he navigates a snake pit of betrayals.
The rest of the cast is good, too: Giamatti, Evan Rachel Wood as an ambitious intern and Marisa Tomei as a hard-nosed reporter.
It’s a movie that MOSTLY gets the politics right. The fundamental truth of the movie is that an utterly cynical veteran politico can still fall in love with candidate, as Hoffman’s campaign manager does with Clooney’s candidate.
In another dead on accurate touch, Hoffman and Gosling need a room to privately pass on some bad news to Clooney. Instead of finding a cramped office, the three men sit on folding chairs knee-to-knee in a room that could accommodate 200. That stuff really happens.
Unfortunately, Ides gets some things wrong. Would never happen: A veteran strategist like Hoffman would never be surprised by the possibility of “mischief voting” in an open primary. Real life campaign consultants would never discuss policy positions with a candidate in a room full of thirty 20-somethings, all itching to leak what they know. And no veteran politico worth his salt would tell a reporter about a deal that is not done.
