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Between the Lines
The year's sharpest political movies hid in plain sight. |
Between the Lines
The year's sharpest political movies hid in plain sight.
by Sam Adams, Philadelphia CityPaper.net
"Serious, serious, serious—why is everone so serious?" Patrick "Kitten" Braden, where are you when we need you most? The transvestite hero(ine) of Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto (opening Jan. 6) put his dainty finger right on it. With wars military and cultural raging on, movies like Good Night, And Good Luck. and Capote spared no quarter, mercilessly browbeating audiences until they looked like extras from Land of the Dead. George Clooney's tendentious paean to Edward R. Murrow turned its hero into a living waxwork, while Bennett Miller's backstabbing portrait exploited its subject's fame to attack celebrity arrogance. Preaching to the converted works when your sermon sings, but this was more like lecturing a captive audience. Still, the movies' po-faced self-seriousness achieved their intended purpose, capturing op-ed space and intriguing moviegoers who discern political content only when it's served up on a silver nitrate platter.
 Where, just for example, were they when Serenity was released? Joss Whedon called it "political but not partisan," but Buffy-watchers know how to read between the lines. A future in which a well-meaning conglomerate government has been seized by fundamentalist zealots who want to sedate their own populace into comatose complacency? Gee, what could that be about? Mal Reynolds, Nathan Fillion's disillusioned ex-revolutionary, was the soul of every whipped-dog leftist crushed by the country's tumble into trembling credulity and made-for-TV factionalism, his journey back from the darkness a reminder that secularists need faith, too. Mal's face-off with Chewitel Ejiofor's Rovian operative housed the year's most chilling exchange: When a disgusted Mal spits, "I don't murder children," the operative coolly responds, "I do—when I have to." In that instant, the moral fabric of the universe warps like Harry Potter's guts on a Floo-powder jaunt, and the audience comes face to face with a fanatical ideologue who will betray every one of his principles for a shot at victory. Next to him, Joe McCarthy looks like Marvin the Martian.
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