Movie Quote of the Day (‘Out of Sight,’ As a Bank Robber and Marshal Chat About What Might Have Been)

Jack Foley [played by George Clooney]: “You sure are easy to talk to. I was thinkin', if we met under different circumstances...if you were in a bar and I came up and we started talkin'...I wonder what would happen.”

Karen Sisco [played by Jennifer Lopez]: “Nothing.”

Jack: “If you didn't know who I was….”

Karen: “You'd probably tell me.”

Jack: “Just saying, if we met under different circumstances...”

Karen: “You have got to be kidding.”— Out of Sight (1998), screenplay by Scott Frank, based on the novel by Elmore Leonard, directed by Steven Soderbergh

I try to stay on top of upcoming film, book, and music anniversaries for purposes of this blog, but this sly, really enjoyable heist film —which premiered 25 years ago this week—came to my attention again through Jason Bailey’s account in today’s New York Times.

There are some movies that you can’t believe succeeded at the box office, they’re so criminally stupid. On the other hand, it’s criminally stupid when a movie with such wickedly offbeat dialogue and great chemistry between Clooney and Lopez underperforms.

Well, that’s what cable, DVD and streaming are for: to allow you another crack at a movie that, for reasons best known to you, you never got around to before. As Bailey notes, the movie ultimately helped turn around the careers of the two stars and Steven Soderbergh.

As for me: I was one of the lucky ones, sitting in a movie theater a quarter century ago, trying to figure out what would happen next between Clooney’s smooth, smiling career criminal and Lopez’s tough federal marshal who takes a liking to the bad boy despite herself.

Twenty years ago, Lopez’s character was turned into the ongoing center of a TV series, Karen Sisco, starring Carla Gugino. I never got around to watching it, even though it was on TV for three seasons. I guess I couldn’t see how it could top what was on the big screen.

Quote of the Day (George Clooney, on Celebrities’ Twitter Presence)

“If you're famous, I don't—for the life of me—I don't understand why any famous person would ever be on Twitter. Why on God's green earth would you be on Twitter? Because first of all, the worst thing you can do is make yourself more available, right? Because you're going to be available to everybody. But also Twitter. So one drunken night, you come home and you've had two too many drinks and you're watching TV and somebody pisses you off, and you go 'Ehhhhh' and fight back. And you go to sleep, and you wake up in the morning and your career is over. Or you're an a--hole. Or all the things you might think in the quiet of your drunken evening are suddenly blasted around the entire world before you wake up.”—American actor-director George Clooney quoted in Tom Junod, “George Clooney's Rules for Living,” Esquire, December 2013

Well, I suppose that the publicist for George Clooney finally persuaded him to the contrary, because four years after this Esquire rant, the actor-director opened his own “George Clooney Official” Twitter page. Nevertheless, Mr. C. must have warned that he would strictly limit his involvement, because the tweets and retweets consist mostly of pictures of himself and his wife, with minimal commentary.

Every other day, if not more often, Clooney must nod his head over his foresight of nearly a decade ago. Though hardly shy about expressing his opinions, he knows that old-time movie stars loomed large for a reason other than the big screens of the Golden Age of Film: that overexposure removes the mystique invested by fans.

Moreover, as someone who admitted to Newsweek 10 years ago that his past life of substance and and womanizing precluded a life in politics, Clooney knows all too well the perils of going online and venting to the world before you’ve had time to think it over and calm down. Even if you’re not a party animal but simply love the sound of your own voice (an occupational hazard in the entertainment industry), you run a big risk of looking stupid.

Bette Midler, that means you.

You’d think that the singer-actress would have learned her lesson from three years ago, when she tweeted that women “are the n-word of the world,” or especially last year, when she mocked Melanie Trump’s accent and called her an “illegal alien”—in both cases, sparking a backlash that led the outspoken entertainer to issue uncharacteristic apologies.

But here she was at it again this week, when frustration over Joe Manchin’s opposition to the “Build Back Better” social spending plan of the Biden administration led her to lash out at the Democratic Senator from West Virginia for wanting to keep all Americans like his state: “Poor, illiterate and strung out."

Less than an hour later, Midler was backtracking with a tweeted apology to West Virginians (“Surely there’s someone there who has the state’s best interest at heart, not his own!”)

No matter. In politics, this would have been considered a gaffe, a statement that, for anyone not named Donald Trump, would have halted any possibility for further advancement.

In entertainment, plenty of people feel that she was right the first time. And therein lies the problem.

Statements like Ms. Midler’s only reinforce the conviction of many in Red America that liberal elites are condescending and unworthy of support (even someone like her, who has funded programs for neighborhood revitalization and wounded veterans). She made it that much harder to move back into the Democratic column a state that had once firmly backed the New Deal.

An additional history lesson might be in order here. Ms. Midler, like all non-indigenous Americans (including me), are descended from groups who, for the longest time after arriving on these shores, were “Poor, illiterate and strung out.” 

Maybe she should get a copy of Oscar Handlin’s The Uprooted so she can better understand how alienated and resentful the recipients of taunts such as hers felt in the 19th century—and how belittling those remarks remain to the underprivileged and marginalized of this country, whoever they are and wherever they live.

(The photo of George Clooney accompanying this post was taken at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 9, 2011, by Ed Van-West Garcia.)

'American Hustle’=Hollywood History

“Some of the following actually happened.” That preface to American Hustle might be the most truthful statement to come out of Hollywood in awhile. It has the singular virtue, unlike so many other film industry products for a mass audience over the years, of not pretending to be more than it is.

Among the many contenders for Oscars this season, American Hustle was the one I was most eager to see. It wasn’t only that David O. Russell (Flirting with Disaster, Silver Lining Playbook) has become one of my favorite contemporary directors, or that he had assembled as fine an ensemble cast as will likely be seen in any movie this year.

No, my eagerness derived from how much I related to the general era and particular events depicted in the film:

1) The mid-to-late ‘70s, you see, were the period when I came of age, as someone with an abiding interest in current events and an affinity for devouring what has become, sadly, an endangered species: the daily newspaper. 

      
      2) I’m a near-lifetime resident of New Jersey, the state with the lion’s share of politicians ensnared by the subject of the film, the Abscam scandal. Considering the prominent Garden State figures (U.S. Senator Harrison Williams, longtime Representative Frank Thompson, Camden Mayor Angelo Errichetti)
      involved in Abscam, the film could just as easily be called JERSEY HUSTLE. The '70s clothes and hairdos are practically characters in their own right! The events are somewhat fictionalized (many changed names, so the filmmakers won't get sued, I guess), but it is wildly funny. It amazed me a few weeks ago to hear David Letterman tell guest Rachel Maddow that the Chris Christie George Washington Bridge Brouhaha reminded him of Chicago politics. For all his ironic sophistication and decades of exposure to the tristate area, it was painfully obvious that the talk-show host knew little if anything about the indigenous rich, loamy history of Garden State political corruption. Let me roll off a few names besides the Abscam figures (you can look up their misdeeds on the Internet, if you dare): former mayors Frank “I am the Law” Hague, Hugh Addonizzio, Kenneth Gibson, Sharpe James, John V. Kenny and Peter Cammarano; former senator Robert Torricelli; former senate candidate Nelson Gross; former governors Jim McGreevey, Donald DiFrancesco, and Jon Corzine (disgraced, admittedly, for his reckless post-gubernatorial actions on Wall Street rather than his decisions in Trenton); and the real-estate developers who unsuccessfully tried to bribe Fort Lee Mayor Burt Ross in the 1970s. And I didn't even mention the councilman in my own city, Englewood, whose aspirations for higher office collapsed in the late 1970s after it was revealed he had funded a massage parlor! 

    

3    3) As longtime readers of this blog know, I am eternally fascinated by how Hollywood treats—or, even in the best of cases, mistreats—history. (See, for instance, my posts on Gone With the Wind and Lawrence of Arabia.)  And make no mistake about it: Abscam, exploding into the national consciousness in 1980, has settled into the muck of history for today’s high-school freshmen, as much as (unfortunately) Pearl Harbor had done for my high-school freshman class of 1974-75.  Inevitably, Tinseltown has tried to have it both ways: assuming the cloak of serious art while excusing their (often avoidable) factual errors and distortions on the questionable grounds of “entertainment.” I wanted to see where American Hustle fell on this often-ambiguous continuum.  

Hollywood’s treatment of history, often laughable, takes on serious dimensions at awards time. The film industry, which loves to trumpet its big-hearted progressivism in such ceremonies, has not been above engaging in old-fashioned political skullduggery in drumming up support for particular films—or, rather, undercutting the competition. This leads to the unedifying spectacle of filmmakers arguing from April to December that they shouldn’t be held to historical standards since Shakespeare never was, while promoting from January to March the notion that everyone else should be held to those same standards.

George Clooney, undoubtedly a fine actor, is more problematic as a filmmaker. His argument below on the place of history in film, from a Hollywood Reporter “screenwriter roundtable” last fall, is broadly reflective of his industry’s attitude toward the past—and all the more worrisome for that:

“This [filmmakers’ responsibility to facts] is a new thing, by the way. This is all, like, bloggers -- if that existed when Lawrence of Arabia came out, believe me, Lawrence's own autobiography would not hold water. Patton wouldn't. You can go down the list of movies -- Gandhi -- these movies are entertainment. And that's what we have to get back to. A movie like 12 Years a Slave, somebody will go looking for something that doesn't jibe and they'll try to disenfranchise the whole film because of it. Because there's this weird competition thing that's going on now that didn't exist 10 years ago. That happened with us on Argo. It's bullshit because it's got nothing to do with the idea that these are movies. These are not documentaries. You're responsible for basic facts. But who the hell knows what Patton said to his guys in the tent?”

What got Clooney’s goat in this instance was, as he noted, the campaign against Argo, a film he produced last year. But that’s hardly the only case, over the years, when the Hollywood version of dirty tricks—i.e., a whispering campaign about a film’s lack of historical fidelity--has been employed against an Oscar contender.

A Beautiful Mind, for instance, was lambasted in some quarters for leaving out a rather important fact about the relationship between tormented genius John Nash  and long-suffering wife Alicia (i.e., their divorce and remarriage), while The King’s Speech was criticized for compressing the professional relationship between King George VI and his speech therapist from more than a decade to a few years in the late 1930s. Neither film ended up suffering when it came time to hand out the Best Picture Oscar. But one that did—and deservedly so—was JFK, for its manifold crimes against the historical record. (For an exhaustive summary of that, see Edward Jay Epstein's 1993 takedown in The Atlantic of crazed director Oliver Stone for having "organized a flight from reality.")
  
But Clooney’s comments on Patton are worth exploring in a bit more depth, both because the explanation is so patently self-serving and because that epic illustrates the promise and perils of even one of the better cases of history on film. 

While nobody in Patton’s headquarters was carrying around a tape recorder, enough is known from letters, diaries, oral histories, memoirs, Army memoranda, and biographies making use of these materials that Patton’s decision-making process and outcomes can be figured out with a large degree of certainty--so we have a pretty fair idea of "what Patton said to his guys in the tent."

In an essay on the George C. Scott 1970 biopic in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, the late critic Paul Fussell—himself a skeptical member of the general’s fabled army—takes the film to task for many omissions about Patton’s private conduct (e.g., the general’s incestuous affair with his niece), but still acknowledges that it “depicts his public behavior…with remarkable fidelity.”

One clever bit of editing, for instance, expands understanding of a complex sequence of events. The sequence, lasting no more than 30 seconds, features two vastly different commanders—Britain’s Bernard Montgomery and Germany’s Alfred Jodl—reading a telegram saying that Patton has captured Palermo. Each, whether English ally-rival or respectful German foe, is so caught off-guard that he can only exclaim, “Damn!” 

Did either commander respond with precisely that word? Highly unlikely. But the movie does capture the dread that the Germans came to feel for a commander constantly seizing the initiative from them, as well as the jostling for honors between those two Allied egomaniacs, Montgomery and Patton. (The American’s opinion of the Englishman was what you might expect: “I can outfight that little fart Monty anytime.”)

How Hollywood bends history to its purposes is all-important. If you need a rule to judge whether or not a film enhances understanding of history, remember this: the movie must not do violence to events or people depicted. It is not terribly important, for instance, that the voice of the real-life Patton could sound like a flute, quite unlike the famously gravelly George C. Scott, nor that a bespectacled, de-glammed Clooney still looked nothing like Edward R. Murrow’s producer Fred Friendly in Goodbye…And Good Luck. (The latter was, as Morley Safer noted, “a big man--big hands, big nose, big beefy face.”) 

It is far more of a problem when a film has a real person say or do something that someone else did, as in the case of the 1936 film The Gorgeous Hussy, in which Andrew Jackson (played by Lionel Barrymore) delivers a ringing address actually given by a fierce opponent, Daniel Webster. It’s also more of a problem when Clooney presents Murrow’s clash with Senator Joseph McCarthy as a simple-minded parable of journalism speaking truth to power, as Jack Shafer noted several years ago in a two-part essay for Slate.

Which brings me back to American Hustle. At least it has the decency to change the names of most of the principal characters. It has to, since it alters so much about the major players in Abscam:

*Amy Adams’ sexy con woman Sydney Prosser, for instance, diverges pretty significantly from real-life counterpart Evelyn Knight. Knight didn’t impersonate an Englishwoman; she was English. While she helped her boyfriend (Irving Rosenfeld onscreen, Mel Weinberg in real life) with his scams, she was not engaged in a love triangle with him and the FBI agent assigned to the case.

*Jennifer Lawrence is considerably younger than the woman she played, the wife of the con man at the heart of Abscam, Rosenfeld/Weinberg. Also, the real Marie Weinberg was found dead a couple of years after the scam, an apparent suicide.

*Jeremy Renner’s Carmine Polito was a rather cleaned-up version of the actual mayor of Camden, Angelo Errichetti. While Polito is depicted as the most honorable person in this group, Errichetti was an undisputed boss of South Jersey.

(For more along these lines, see Evan Hughes' Slate piece, "How Much of 'American Hustle' Actually Happened?")

It is unfortunate that Hollywood still has such problems in depicting history. Both historians and filmmakers, after all, share a common purpose: telling stories. I would bet that a number of academic historians share a love of movies just as pronounced, and perhaps more so, than the rest of the population. (Historian Arthur Schlesinger, for instance, even moonlighted as a film reviewer for some publications.) Whether they like it or not, filmmakers have a responsibility to fact, as the wide audience to which they appeal are unlikely to watch a documentary, visit a historic site, read an article or--God forbid!--read a book on the subject. As Ripon College President Zach P. Messitte noted in a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece last month: 

"It is imperative that Hollywood's best pictures continue to get these stories right, because they lay the groundwork for the next generation's understanding of the world and help inform a basic narrative of our politics and policies for years to come."

Movie Quote of the Day (George Clooney, on Loyalty)

"There's nothing cheap about loyalty.”—Ryan Bingham (played by George Clooney), in Up in the Air, written by Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner, based on the novel by Walter Kirn, directed by Jason Reitman

Nearly 40 years ago, pop sociologist Vance Packard’s A Nation of Strangers examined the negative consequences of a mobile American workforce, prominent among them being destroyed communities, eroded family life, and individual alienation.

Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, which I saw yesterday, takes stock of an America that, having ignored Packard’s prescient warnings, finds itself not only in the midst of an economic emergency but also a prolonged dark night of the soul. The surprise here is that the latter belongs mostly to the film’s main character, Clooney’s Bingham, a consultant who flies all across the country to do the firing that company heads are too cowardly (and incompetent) to perform themselves.

The bulk of the movie is taken up with a question fired at Bingham in one of the early sequences by a terminated employee: “Who the f--- are you, anyway?” All smooth charm, Bingham, like America, has embraced rootlessness as a form of freedom.

His life’s treasures are not measured in blood (burn family albums, he glibly tells audiences) but in plastic (e.g., frequent-flyer miles he’s amassed). The form of commitment he knows best is brand loyalty—what a weightless corporate America owes fickle consumers, the magic elements that allow him to breeze through airlines, hotels, and car-rental agencies—not what companies owe longtime employees nor what family members owe each other.

“How much does your life weigh?” Bingham asks audiences in his well-paid motivational speeches. Eventually, two women—a fellow business traveler who could practically be his spiritual twin and maybe his soulmate, and a young college grad with a plan to make his jet-setting work a thing of the past—compel him to confront his life choices. Does weight provide an anchor after all? Bingham asks.

Clooney (in the accompanying post with co-star Vera Farmiga) does some of his finest, most subtle work in this film, as Terrence Rafferty noted perceptively in yesterday’s New York Times. Yet one hopes that the Oscar gods will also take note of writer-director Jason Reitman. He has grown in confidence and sophistication with each of his films to date (Thank You for Smoking and Juno before this).

Reitman had this project on his plate since 2002, but only got to it now. The years have only deepened what could have been merely a by-the-numbers romantic comedy into an unsentimental, surprisingly searching dramedy about American values. He does not hold his audience cheaply.