Getting 'Lucky'

David Halbfinger has a nice piece in today's New York Times about the marketing challenges faced by Lionsgate w/r/t The Lucky Ones, the new film by Neil Burger, who had such a gratifying sleeper hit in 2006 with The Illusionist. One of the things that makes it nice, for me at least, is that I'm quoted therein, as an authority of sorts, having seen and very much enjoyed the film back in...good golly, was it September? My Lovely Wife (who also enjoyed the picture) and I are trying to cast our minds back.

Whenever it was, it was before movie marketers were convinced that any film that even mentioned a country whose name began with an "I" and ended with a "Q," or any military action occurring within said country, was box-office poison. And admitedly, the returns on such pictures as Grace is Gone and Redacted are enough to strike terror in the heart of even the most artistically pure motion-picture distributor. And the box-office on Stop-Loss, while not quite as flat-out disastrous, doesn't have anybody at Paramount jumping for joy.

But Burger's film is not like any of the above-mentioned pictures. As Halbfinger's article notes, the "I" word isn't even mentioned in this story of three soldiers—played beautifully by Tim Robbins, Michael Pena, and Rachel McAdams—whose homecoming throws them together for a series of adventures and encounters as they trek across the country. It's a road movie; another friend who saw and admired it calls it a "fable."

Pena, McAdams and Robbins in The Lucky Ones.

It is indeed that as well. "But what," some might ask, "is its ideology?"

Online critical thinking about even the most peripherally Iraq-themed movie, as far as I can glean, falls into two more or less equally belligerent camps. First, the scores of right-leaning or blatantly right-wing bloggers who'll attack any such film on the basis of nothing so much as a tagline (Jarhead's "Welcome to the suck" was vigorously tut-tutted, despite the line itself deriving directly from contemporary military slang) or a trailer. These guys (mostly) have only two questions for a contemporary war movie: 1) Does it support the troops? and 2) does it portray jihadis as The Bad Guys? Okay, they have maybe one or two more questions, but those are the big ones. If anything they glean about the picture—few of these commentators can be bothered to actually see the picture, mind you—then they're all over it, complete with sneers about "Hollyweird" being "out of touch" with the "real America" and near-endless gloats when the films tank. (I noticed recently that a couple of my fellow bloggers were intrigued by a recent piece by Ross Douthat in The Atlantic that iterates the standard "where are the dusky, Koran-reciting villains in contemporary American cinema?" whinge, albeit in a slightly more rhetorically sophisticated form than your average teeth-gnashing dispatch over at Libertas. To which I can only say, "Feh.") The other camp maintains that "Gorilla America," to use the phrase often deployed by Jeffrey Wells, is to be thoroughly deplored for closing its eyes and ears to the Highly Important Cinematic Statements About What A Clusterfuck The Iraq War Is.

I am not particularly sympathetic to either camp (I am proud to be both an American and a gorilla, although my doctors have been advising me to reduce my dimensions), but I've sometimes wondered just which camp The Lucky Ones will please. If you're Terry Eagleton (and I bet a lot of you out there are real happy that you're not), you believe that no work of art can ever completely transcend ideology—that is, that ideology is part of the DNA of all our opinions and pronouncements. It's an idea worth exploring, but for the purposes of this dispatch I'm gonna note that Burger, and co-writer Dirk Wittenborn, work very hard to put ideology on the back burner. One couldn't even say that the film is out-and-out antiwar, except in the sense that it's a deeply—to use an unfashionable term—humanist film. In the Times article, Burger cites The Last Detail as an inspiration, and while The Lucky Ones is quite a bit less raw, content-wise, than the great Hal Ashby film, one can see what he's talking about. Is this to say that Iraq merely serves as the pretext for The Lucky Ones? Not quite.

The thing is, while The Lucky Ones doesn't wear politics on its sleeve, one of its stars, Robbins, certainly does, and its entirely possible that some guilt-by-association, um, meme will pop up as the film approaches its release date. I sure hope not. Because whichever ideological camp this movie does or does not please, it has more than enough wit and insight to please "regular" movie lovers of all persuasions.

Comments

[Christian Toto]

Conservative film reviewers (talk about a tiny subset!) come by their cynicism about these projects the hard way ... they watch one after another which paint the troops in an unflattering light while Hollywood ignores an enemy that makes Hitler's goons look like school children. And these films are often prefaced with comments from those involved saying, "we didn't come into this with an ideology," or "this film doesn't take sides" - only to find that these films do, indeed, take sides.

While some righty film types do jump on these issues with too little finesse, others do so with intelligence and wit. Please don't lump them all together into one mangy group.

[Mike De Luca]

Christian, it seems to me, the films you say "paint the troops in an unflattering light" only do so in attempt to suggest war puts some men(and women) in uniform under such stress that real life rapes("Redacted") and real life murders("In the Valley of Elah") may result. If the filmmakers wanted to demonize the troops, they would not communicate any sort of empathy with their plight. Also, "Hitler's goons look like school children"? Yet another tired attempt to link the areligious nature of Nazism with the conflicting fervor of religious extremism, along with the built-in moral justification that comes with the mention of WW2. That is hardly the definition of "finesse".

[bill]

"Christian, it seems to me, the films you say 'paint the troops in an unflattering light' only do so in attempt to suggest war puts some men(and women) in uniform under such stress that real life rapes("Redacted") and real life murders("In the Valley of Elah") may result."

Yes, but why is it that, according to these films, those are the ONLY things that may result? Why do no American films acknowledge that -- whether or not you think we should be there -- the vast majority of soldiers do very good deeds?

[bgn]

"Why do no American films acknowledge that -- whether or not you think we should be there -- the vast majority of soldiers do very good deeds?"

For the same reason that films about bad marriages don't acknowledge that the vast majority of marriages are good. It's generally the exceptions to the rule that make drama.

[bill]

You don't think depicting good deeds being done in wartime can make for good drama?

Also, are you saying that filmmakers NOT showing these good deeds for the reason you indicate is somehow a good thing? And I'm just asking here; I don't know if that's what you're saying or not.

[Glenn Kenny]

In something like "Elah," portraying soldiers doing good deeds would have gone completely against the specific point that Haggis was making, which is that there's something so specifically wrong with THIS war—the one in Iraq—that it's turning soldiers who were once, or could have been, good, into these monstrous beings. Hence the contrast with Tommy Lee Jones' character and the shock he registers at what he learns, and of course the awful "distress signal" final scene. I'm not pointing this out to necessarily justify it—I think the point is at the very least kind of facile—but there you have it.

As for the soldiers in "The Lucky Ones," they're seen for the most part outside of their war deployment, but each of the characters portrayed is decent and likeable—quite far from the freaked-out f--kups of "Stop Loss." So there's that.

[Campaspe]

Excellent and thought-provoking post, one of the first that made me actually want to see one of these Iraq movies. I've done quite a bit of mocking Libertas in my time but here is one thing they often get right: there's an awful lot of predictability in the way certain subjects are handled. Hollywood has always had a tendency to get boilerplate characters and plots and then ringing variations on them. I'm not interested in seeing Iraqis played like the Japanese in So Proudly We Hail!, which is the only thing that would please someone like Debbie Schlussel. But it does tend to dull the moviegoing experience if, the very second an American officer pops up on screen, I am just sitting there waiting for him to lie his ass off. Or, if I am watching a movie about American suburbia, and the second a character is identified as ex-military I know that's my cue to think he's crazy and/or a closet case.

Robbins may be a down-the-line liberal in real life but he has a history of picking projects with a great deal of nuance. So I hope when I see this movie, it manages to surprise me AND conservative critics.