RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hollywood’s favorite plotline is when the little guy (or girl) triumphs over the powerful. Whether it’s a curious secretary, an intrepid reporter, or a low-level government bureaucrat, Hollywood has made gazillions of dollars selling a narrative that anyone can take down the evil rich guy, his abettors, and the entire power structure around him.https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/12/the-nominees-for-best-hypocrite-in-a-documentary-are/

Well, lookie what we have here. It’s Hollywood’s favorite story, but this time, it’s a reality show. The craven villain is real and his victims are real. His accomplices are not nameless, faceless flunkies; they are some of the most powerful people in the entertainment industry, media, and politics. Most of these cowards have gone into hiding, playing the “babe-in-the-woods routine,” to borrow a line from a famous mob movie. When they do finally emerge, their scripted lines are delivered as convincingly as a hostage statement. They cleverly give short-shrift to Weinstein’s actions and pivot right to “how brave the women are” who’ve come forward. Others claim they never personally witnessed the misconduct (no duh) and are shocked, SHOCKED that a Hollywood titan would behave this way.

The audience is not cheering. Americans, for the most part, are disgusted by the Harvey Weinstein drama, which is worsening by the day. The outrage is well-placed and well-deserved; the celebrity-political class that yammers about empowering women and protecting the vulnerable are now fully exposed for the frauds they are.

Not like we deplorables didn’t have a clue. These are the same people who lecture us about global warming while they own private jets and multiple mansions, demand gun control while they employ armed security details, oppose border security while they live behind gates and walls. So, giving lip service to sexual harassment while they keep the secrets about a sexual predator who gave them jobs and political donations shouldn’t be any surprise.

If they give an award for Best Hypocrite in a Documentary during next year’s Oscars, it will be a very tight category with many deserving recipients. Let’s run down the competition so far, shall we? Hit it, orchestra:

Michelle Obama: The former first lady recently said, “any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against their own voice…to me that just says, you don’t like your voice. You like the thing you’re told to like.” Since the Weinstein accusations were published last week, Mrs. O has strangely lost her own voice. Her husband released a statement on Tuesday to speak on her behalf, saying the couple is “disgusted” at the allegations.
Jimmy Kimmel: The comedian-turned-Democratic-puppet hasn’t addressed the Weinstein affair on his late-night political platform, despite the fact he interviews celebrities for a living. Kimmel’s only mention was a twitter spar with Donald Trump, Jr. where he calls the “big story” from the New York Times “disgusting.” (Notice how he masterfully calls the story, not the person, disgusting.) Even more outrageous is the fact Kimmel had Matt Damon on his show Tuesday night; Damon has been accused of helping torpedo an article back in 2004 about Weinstein procuring young women in Italy (Damon denies the claim.) Kimmel also had Mark Ruffalo on his show; Ruffalo is prolific Trump-hater and self-proclaimed champion of women and who routinely tweets about his solidarity with the softer sex. (Ruffalo has sent out one tweet about Weinstein and could also be a nominee in this category.) Kimmel did not ask either one to comment on the Weinstein accusations.
Basically everyone at NBC News: In what could become the biggest Weinstein cover-up story, Ronan Farrow revealed this week how the media succumbed to pressure from Weinstein and others to not report on the accusers coming forward. In a jaw-dropping interview on MSNBC Tuesday night, Rachel Maddow asks Farrow, “you just said one of these women spoke on camera in back in January, why did you end up reporting this for the New Yorker and not for NBC News?” When Ronan told her to ask NBC executives why it wasn’t reported, Maddow responded that “NBC executives said the story wasn’t publishable, wasn’t ready to go by the time you brought it to them.” Ronan pushed back: “It is not accurate to say it was not reportable, in fact, there were multiple determinations that it was reportable at NBC.” Think about that. NBC said it wasn’t publishable. The same network that has pushed phony Russia-conspiracy stories non-stop for a year? The same network that claimed it had Donald Trump’s tax returns? The same network whose news coverage, according to a study published last spring, is 93 percent negative against Donald Trump? Suddenly the NBC higher-up became scrupulous vetters of news stories? Gimme a break.
Alyssa Milano: In a Marie Claire story published in March, Milano said this about the women’s movement resisting President Trump: “So, with powerful hearts and pussies, we began the fight. We realized the power of our collective voices and awakened a sleeping, feminist giant. She’s smart. She’s beautiful. She’s strong. She’s pissed.” In a post Monday, five days after the New York Times article appeared, Milano said she was “sickened over the disturbing allegations” but that her statement was “complicated for me” because “Georgina Chapman (Weinstein now-estranged wife) is my friend. It is because of my love for Georgina…that I haven’t publicly commented on this until now.” The next day, she tweeted out a year-old NPR article about allegations against Trump.
George Clooney: The husband of an international rights attorney has minced no words when it comes to his criticism of Donald Trump and his support for women’s causes. The actor admitted he started hearing rumors about Weinstein nearly 30 years ago but “took those rumors with a grain of salt.” He claims he never saw any of this behavior by Weinstein even though Clooney acknowledged the producer was a bully but “you just put up with certain bad behavior because, if he yells and screams but he gets ‘Pulp Fiction’ made, who cares if he yells and screams.” Clooney also subtly blames another female reporter for not breaking the story sooner and “if she did these interviews and this investigation, she didn’t run the story, and I and a lot of other people would have liked to have known it.” (Ouch, my sides. Must stop laughing.)

“Who is Harvey Weinstein?” is a perfectly acceptable question in light of a bombshell story The New York Times broke Thursday that reports decades of his alleged serial sexual harassment and settlements with women in Hollywood.
Putting it bluntly, Harvey Weinstein, for a time, was the most powerful producer and studio head in Hollywood. He is almost singlehandedly responsible for the indie-to-mainstream film explosion in the 90’s (backing “Pulp Fiction,” “Good Will Hunting” and “Shakespeare in Love” to name just a few examples). His influence in Hollywood is unparalleled.

But it’s his influence out of Hollywood that has parts of media and the political left flummoxed to the point of silence. Weinstein, fresh off producing a media-hailed documentary titled “The Hunting Ground,” about sexual assault on college campuses, has also taken a leave from his production company, The Weinstein Company. Who would have guessed the only real hunting ground, according to women interviews by the newspaper, was Harvey Weinstein’s casting couch?

Actress and dedicated liberal women’s rights activist Ashley Judd went on record for the New York Times story, which states: ‘Two decades ago, the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein invited Ashley Judd to the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel for what the young actress expected to be a business breakfast meeting. Instead, he had her sent up to his room, where he appeared in a bathrobe and asked if he could give her a massage or she could watch him shower, she recalled in an interview.

“ ‘How do I get out of the room as fast as possible without alienating Harvey Weinstein?’ Ms. Judd said she remembers thinking.”

Weinstein has amassed a small army of professional political spin doctors, image consultants and PR wizards to help blunt any damage from the allegations of settled lawsuits involving several actresses. He has even gone so far as threatening legal action against the Times for its report, calling in favors from the highest ranks of Democratic party operatives.

After fundraising almost $650,000 for Barack Obama and a few thousand more for Hillary Clinton, Weinstein was bound to earn some favors, including advice to blame the NRA for his transgressions.

Lawyer Lanny Davis is defending Weinstein, which is great because Davis has experience in defending important people from sexual abuse allegations – most prominently President Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Also advising Weinstein is Democratic powerhouse PR firm SKDKnickerbocker Managing Director and former Obama White House Communications Director Anita Dunn.

SKDK ran interference for Planned Parenthood when undercover videos inside the organization hit the media last year. SKDK also ran promotions for the Women’s March against Donald Trump’s inauguration this past January, where Ashley Judd was a prominent speaker. SKDK insists Weinstein is not a client in any capacity, which is technically true, as Dunn has stated she is advising Weinstein pro-bono. That’s neat.

Another attorney advising Weinstein is Lisa Bloom. If that name sounds familiar it’s because Bloom has made waves recently both organizing the campaign against Bill O’Reilly when he was at Fox News and representing victims against comedian and actor Bill Cosby.

The New York Times on Thursday published a withering expose of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s long history of sexual harassment against women. No one in Hollywood is shocked. He’s tried to get out in front of the story by stating, “I appreciate the way I’ve behaved with colleagues in the past has caused a lot of pain, and I sincerely apologize for it.”https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/06/casting-stones-from-casting-couches/

Well there you have it. Done.
Of course he only came forward after hiring a phalanx of attorneys in what I can only imagine was an attempt to stop the story from appearing in the first place. In Weinstein’s bizarre non-apology apology, he blamed the 1960s and ’70s—as if every man who came of age during that time turned out to be a lecher or a rapist.

But don’t worry. Weinstein, a huge supporter of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, was “With Her” and, despite making movie after movie glorifying gun violence, plans to spend the rest of his days going after the real enemy in all this, the NRA. So it’s all good.

Nice one Harvey. And here I thought you might spend the rest of your days learning the difficult and subtle art of how to not use your power to extort young women into having sex with you.
In other entertainment news, brilliant director and fugitive rapist Roman Polanski is “over it.” Polanski, a man to whom none other than the conscience of Hollywood, Meryl Streep, gave a standing ovation and who many Hollywood luminaries—including Weinstein himself and the ethically challenged Woody Allen—want “freed,” is “over” the nuisance of being reminded of his rape in 1977 of a 13-year-old girl.

He’s over having plied her with Quaaludes; he’s over having invited her into a bedroom “to take pictures.” And he’s definitely over repeatedly sodomizing her, despite her continued vocal objections.

Ironically, news of Polanski’s ability to move on breaks at the same time as yet another woman—the fourth—steps forward to accuse him of underage rape.
I wonder if Whoopi Goldberg will consider this one rape-rape.

If these weren’t enough, let’s take a moment to reflect on the pharmacological stylings of Bill Cosby or the complicated family life of Woody Allen. Then there’s Jeffrey Jones, the actor who played principal from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” who, like Weinstein, apparently came of age in the ’60s and ‘70s, which must have been what led him to pay a 14-year-old boy to pose for nude photos. Former child actors complain that the industry is full of pedophilia and child grooming, yet the industry takes no notice. As if to ensure that the trend remains current, Glee Star Mark Salling, who most definitely did not come of age in the 60 and 70’s, recently pleaded guilty to possession of 50,000 images and videos of child pornography—with victims as young as 3 to 5 years old.

But not to worry, as Harvey Weinstein himself proclaimed, “Hollywood has the best Moral Compass.”

And if we need to know anything about the way in which the powerful in the industry view those at the bottom, we need only to look at what George Clooney said of Steven Bannon’s attempt at screenwriting. You don’t have to like Bannon to see very clearly how Clooney views the artists below him who struggle to get their work made: “Steve Bannon is a failed fucking screenwriter,” spat Clooney. “Now, if he’d somehow managed miraculously to get that thing produced, he’d still be in Hollywood, still making movies and licking my ass to get me to do one of his stupid-ass screenplays.”

That’s right. They expect people to “lick their asses.” I’m assuming, of course, that Clooney meant that figuratively, but considering the culture of the industry outlined above, who can really say? Regardless, the powerful in Hollywood relish obsequiousness at every level. They are all too happy to let everyone in their orbit know about the power dynamic between struggling artists who are moved to create and those who have landed at the top. And what’s more is the unspoken understanding, even the expectation, that they might use that power for lecherous ends.

Harvey Weinstein isn’t an aberration, he’s just the most prominent and current example.

I’ve worked in this industry for more than 20 years. This isn’t easy for me to write and I’m pretty sure it won’t help my career. But it must be said. I bristle at the nerve of an industry that tolerates and even praises the likes of Polanski and Weinstein having the temerity to lecture the rest of the country about morality and the meaning of a good life. It’s beyond chutzpah or hypocrisy. It beggars belief.

So when prominent entertainers and Hollywood executives stand there and lecture the rest of the country about any moral issue, it’s good to take a step back and realize who it is doing the talking.

Every time a talk-show host, actor, producer, director, or executive opens his mouth and pontificates on this or that national moral failure, we ought to respond loudly and with one voice:

Enough!

You stand there and you lecture us about morality? You tell us how to vote? Or who deserves generational and cultural praise? You give standing ovations to admitted rapists, to men that would do harm to children and women—and you would indict the rest of the country as immoral?

We’ve heard of 12-step programs to cure addiction, but the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein is counting on a remarkable one-step plan to gain absolution for what is reported to be decades of harassing young women in his employ—his progressive politics.

Mr. Weinstein’s astonishing response to a long report in the New York Times includes an apology for having “caused a lot of pain,” without admitting or denying any specific transgression. There’s also some psycho-babble about his “demons,” and he told the New York Post separately that he’s going to sue the Times for defamation. But he saves his main defense, his Johnnie Cochran, for the final paragraph of his statement when he plays the progressive card:

“I am going to need a place to channel that anger so I’ve decided that I’m going to give the NRA my full attention. I hope Wayne LaPierre [the National Rifle Association executive] will enjoy his retirement party. I’m going to do it at the same place I had my Bar Mitzvah. I’m making a movie about our President, perhaps we can make it a joint retirement party. One year ago, I began organizing a $5 million foundation to give scholarships to women directors at USC. While this might seem coincidental, it has been in the works for a year. It will be named after my mom and I won’t disappoint her.”

As long as he declares his opposition to the gun lobby and Donald Trump, he figures he’ll be forgiven for charges of dirty-old-man tricks that would get a CEO of any publicly traded company run out of business. And as long as he writes a big enough check to the cause of gender equity, he assumes everyone will soon forget that he is alleged to have subjected young women who worked for him to a casting couch out of the 1930s.

Harvey didn’t make it in Hollywood without knowing his audience.

For the past several years, American and South Vietnamese veterans awaited Ken Burns’s “The Vietnam War” series with gnawing fear. Would Mr. Burns use his talent and prestige to rehash the antiwar narrative, which casts veterans as hapless victims of a senseless war? The program’s final episode has aired, and it is safe to say that worries about the portrayal of veterans were somewhat misplaced, while those concerning the war itself proved justified.

Mr. Burns and co-producer Lynn Novick should be commended for giving veterans a central role in the series. In the interviews, American veterans explain they were driven to serve mainly out of patriotism and admiration of veterans in their communities. They denounce the caricature of veterans as deranged baby-killers. Several South Vietnamese veterans are featured as well, a welcome change from earlier productions.

The treatment of the war itself is much less evenhanded. The documentary corrects a few of the mistakes that have been common to popular accounts, for instance acknowledging that Ho Chi Minh was a full-blooded communist, who pulled the strings of the ostensibly independent southern Viet Cong. Yet the show mostly follows the same story line as the last PBS megaseries, “Vietnam: A Television History,” which aired in 1983.

The documentary’s 18 hours highlight the worst military setbacks incurred by the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies, while spending little time on the far more numerous battles in which the North Vietnamese suffered decisive defeat. Most of the combat scenes involve one or two Americans speaking somberly over gloomy music while the screen displays images of American troops who are dead, wounded or under fire. The interviewees then explain how the trauma and futility of battle led to their disillusionment with the war. On the few occasions when we hear of the excitement, camaraderie and pride that are as much a part of war as the fear and sorrow, the words usually come from the mouths of North Vietnamese veterans.

Some American troops did become disenchanted, joining the likes of John Kerry and Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and they deserve to be heard. But they do not merit the disproportionate airtime they are given in this series. Even by the most generous estimates, Vietnam Veterans Against the War never represented more than 1% of Vietnam veterans, whereas 90% of Vietnam combat veterans said they were glad to have served, and 69% said they enjoyed their time there, according to a 1980 survey conducted by the Veterans Administration. Yet about one-third of the American military veterans in the show otherwise espoused antiwar views, and few of the other interviewees expressed pride or satisfaction in their service.

Among those surveyed by the Veterans Administration, 92% agreed with the statement that “the trouble in Vietnam was that our troops were asked to fight in a war which our political leaders in Washington would not let them win.” This subject seldom arises in the on-camera interviews or in the narration, presumably because it doesn’t fit the narrative of an unwinnable war. The audience does not hear of the bitter disputes in Washington over the use of U.S. ground forces in Laos or North Vietnam. Nor does it mention revelations from North Vietnamese officials acknowledging that such measures would have thwarted Hanoi’s strategy.

The documentary disregards most of the positive achievements of America’s South Vietnamese allies. Viewers are told that South Vietnam’s strategic hamlet program—which sought to stem communist influence in the countryside—destroyed itself by alienating the rural population. Never mind that numerous North Vietnamese communists have admitted the program hurt them until it was disbanded after the American-sponsored coup of November 1963. The remarkable improvement of the South Vietnamese armed forces after the Tet Offensive receives less attention from the filmmakers than the Woodstock Festival.

Talk about synchronicity – there are two pivotal scenes in Stronger in which the national anthem and the flag are integral to the importance of patriotism and heroism in the healing of wounded bodies and souls. One takes place at the baseball game at Fenway Park and I wondered what effect this movie would have on the healthy athletes of the NFL who have treated both these symbols of our nation’s freedom as convenient photo-ops for publicizing their own cause. Seeing this movie about Jeff Bauman who lost both legs in the terrorist bombing of the Boston Marathon, highlights the world of difference between our country after 9/11 and after Boston and our country since the surprise upset of our last election. We have lost the sincere appreciation for the bravery of men in uniform and have exaggerated the numbers of miscreants who pop up in police forces in our country. We have just learned that current homicide rates have gone up significantly, possibly due to police hesitancy to take forceful action now that they have been singled out as marks by disgruntled loners and activist groups.

Stronger is a searing and heartbreaking look at the random nature of terrorist acts and the long, painful process of recovery. It deals with one victim and his family but the implications for all other victims are obvious. It’s a movie that doesn’t shy away from the complications of damaged personalities who drink till they are blotto, manipulate each other in direct and subtle ways and yet, try falteringly to help and relate to each other. It’s a movie that shows you the stumps resulting from amputation as well as the blind self-indulgence of caregivers and the paralyzing self-pity and aftershock of PTSD The characters are believable because of these honest imperfections and their courage to persevere is more uplifting precisely because it comes after repeated failures. Jake Gyllenhaal and Miranda Richardson are exceptional as the double amputee and his mother and so is Tatiana Maslany who gives a quiet and intuitive performance as his ex and current girlfriend. The director, David Gordon Green juggles the various elements of plot and character in a straightforward manner, relying on the drama inherent to this story to do its job. It’s a movie that succeeds in keeping you in your seat for some time after it ends, waiting to recover from a powerful and emotional experience.

What’s missing from Battle of the Sexes is the lively exuberance that we see in the promotional picture of Emma Stone as Billie Jean King jumping three feet off the ground with her tennis racket ready to whack that ball to victory over Bobby Riggs in a match played in 1973. Instead, we get the Billie Jean who’s tongue-tied by the attention of a hairdresser who comes on to her by telling her how pretty she is, capturing her heart as well as her libido at an inconvenient time when she was married to a man and when being openly gay would eventually cost her dearly in the cancellation of her endorsements.

Hindered further by oppressive background music that sounds as if it was scored in the fifties, the movie never finds its pace and hangs precariously between a biopic of a great female athlete and that of a moonstruck lesbian uncertain of how to live her life. Complicating this dilemma for the viewer is the fact that Billie Jean’s husband Larry looks more gay than she is and has none of the predictable reactions of a husband finding another woman’s bra in his wife’s hotel room. We never witness a scene in which he gets to air his devastation at her betrayal of their marriage, leaving us with a lingering question of whether she was mainly his meal-ticket or someone he loved passionately who broke his heart.

Steve Carell plays Bobby Riggs with the requisite clownishness that viewers of a certain age will remember but not enough of the charm that would occasion a wealthy heiress to marry him twice. Nor do we understand why his adult son who has acted as his manager in staging the battle of the sexes decides to stay away from the match. Sarah Silverman turns in a stereotypical performance as a Jewish manager as played by Rosalind Russell auditioning for Auntie Mame. For reasons beyond my comprehension, this movie starring two box-office favorite was directed by two people whose names are unfamiliar to me and probably to most readers – Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton. Their heavy hands are all too obvious in a production that is leaden and missing both the carnival quality of that famous match or the gravitas of Billie Jean changing the world of professional tennis and being the harbinger of a rapidly changing acceptance of gay behavior and rights. I saw this film in an appropriate setting where the woman in front of me had her phone lit up throughout and two senior couples on either side of me had simultaneous explanation of the action and missed dialogue to each other. I was annoyed at first but quickly realized that it hardly mattered.

Battle of the Sexes is unconcerned with equity in life, sports, or art. This overlong, half-comic rewriting of the history of the 1973 tennis stunt between Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell) and Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) is so heavily slanted toward the goal of advancing feminism that it neglects to offer a humanely balanced portrait of the players.

Directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, a husband-wife team, were also behind the trite Little Miss Sunshine, and they continue their heinous, calculated exploitation of trendy, sentimental gender politics here. Riggs’s avuncular brashness is overplayed in the depiction of his gambling addiction and chauvinist clowning, but King is portrayed as a noble, closeted lesbian. Their eventual tennis match — controversial mostly because it is now suspected that Riggs threw it (unshown in the movie) — was less predictable than the filmmakers’ ideological con game: Faris, Dayton, and screenwriter Sean Beaufoy all but canonize King, romanticizing her homosexual identity (King opens up during a relationship with a TV hairdresser, played by Andrea Reisborough). Why isn’t Meryl Streep mimicking this part?

Storytelling like that in Battle of the Sexes isn’t “crowd-pleasing” in the sense of uplifting people; instead, it’s stridently agenda-driven. While pretending to balance Stone’s toothy grin with Carell’s goofish boyishness, the filmmakers forego evenhanded humanism. They’re really unthinking cynics who take insultingly obvious positions on male privilege and female oppression. Over-obviousness was also the major fault when screenwriter Beaufoy simultaneously glamorized poverty and greed in Slumdog Millionaire, the worst film ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture until Spotlight.

Watching recent Oscar-winner Stone bring her unprepossessing tomboy persona to King’s plucky, bespectacled homeliness, while Carell continues to mistake foolish caricature for characterization (as in the vile Foxcatcher) creates a battle of oddballs. It epitomizes Hollywood’s Left-warped, identity-politics reduction of what is human. Though giving lip-service to the idea of pay equity in the scene where King argues about money with sports entrepreneur Jack Kramer (Bill Pullman), the scheme degrades men as testosterone-loaded boors. This isn’t even an ideological battle. Women are heroized; men demeaned as doofuses. The two sexes are set in the cement of progressive ideology.

*****

Victoria & Abdul offers a more interesting match-up between England’s longest-ruling monarch and an Indian clerk dragooned to present the royal with tributes from the colony. They don’t become maudlin besties as in Driving Miss Daisy but are ready-made symbols of the confounding relations between the British empire and its colonized subjects. Their mutual respect and admiration feel outdated, yet the lead actors Judi Dench and Ali Fazal both impart a humane consciousness that challenges the usual post-colonial blame game.

Their equalizing exchange (Abdul’s cultural knowledge trades with Victoria’s noblesse oblige) returns them both to their peoples’ roots and to the essence of human sympathy. That is, until the film indulges in political gestures as mechanical as a rigged tennis match: Special emphasis is put on Abdul’s religious identity; he’s a Muslim begging acceptance by the West. This over-obvious metaphor ruins the film’s momentarily fable-like vision — what Spielberg hinted at during the diverting Buckingham palace sequence of The BFG.

Abdul’s colleague issues predictable political rationales: “These people are the exploiters of a quarter of mankind,” and “they are oppressors of the entire subcontinent.” And the Queen insists, “I can take a Muslim wherever I like.” These cynical statements limit appreciation of the ambiguous cross-cultural complexity in this fact-based tale.

When Victoria’s friendship with Abdul upsets protocol and faces pushback, a startling modern parallel occurs: This resistance stems from an outwitted group’s inveterate classism and racism, and from their desperation to maintain the status quo. Victoria loses the allegiance of her holdover staff. She’s called crazy. Revolt is plotted, even initiating a household coup. The lessons in Victoria & Abdul could be cautionary.

The contempt that universities now teach about colonialism is designed to ignore a complicated response between ruler and subjugated. Director Stephen Frears and screenwriter Lee Hall (adapting the Shrabani Basu novel) only half encourage the normalized class relations that modern progressives abhor. Interesting ironies of political domination are smothered by the harsh reality of unbridled racism, expressed by Victoria’s staff and her son Bertie (Eddie Izzard), and by such insultingly pointed irony as Victoria’s marveling at Abdul’s wife wearing a burqa: “I think it’s rather dignified.”

Rummaging through the files of history to find a useful analogue for today’s propaganda wars is an old sport in the movie business. In 1940, for instance, British producer Alexander Korda, who was in New York reporting to the British spy agency MI5 about anti-war and pro-German sentiment in the U.S., put Laurence Olivier in Admiral Nelson’s epaulettes for That Hamilton Woman, in which the Napoleonic menace to Britain and to Europe was meant to evoke the spreading evil of Nazism. Winston Churchill declared it his favorite film.

Thirty years later, as the Vietnam War appeared to be going badly but Hollywood was reluctant to say so directly, M*A*S*H appeared in theaters, disguising its satire of the then-current Asian conflict by pretending it was targeting the previous generation’s Korean War.

Today’s filmmakers, eager to present a plea for tolerance across ethnicities, cultures, races, and religions, have found an unlikely new spokeswoman for the cause: Queen Victoria. Points must be awarded for audacity to Victoria & Abdul, in which the octogenarian empress (Judi Dench) takes on the spirit of a college diversity coordinator after 1887 thanks to her unlikely friendship with a dashing young Indian servant, Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal), who, though presented to her by courtiers as one of “the Hindus,” turns out to be a Muslim. There’s a scene where we meet Abdul’s wife, fully covered by a burka and veil. Victoria, rebuffing the advisers who find this a bit disturbing (as indeed it was, and is), tells them — really, us — how splendid and beautiful she looks.

There turns out to be more than a grain of truth to this story, directed by Stephen Frears (who also made The Queen with Helen Mirren as Elizabeth II). Abdul had a job in a prison in Agra when he and another man were almost randomly summoned to England to stand in for all imperial subjects in presenting a ceremonial coin to the monarch, after which the two were expected to get right back on the boat. Instead, the queen took a liking to Abdul, asking him about customs back in India, which she had never visited, and encouraged him to teach her Urdu. The two became so close that she began calling him her “Munshi,” or spiritual teacher, as the rest of the royal household stewed in disbelief.

The entire staff of Buckingham Palace, presented without exception as racist and xenophobic, threatened to resign en masse, very much in agreement with “Bertie,” the then Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII (Eddie Izzard), who couldn’t stand Abdul. He schemed to find a way to get rid of the interloper and even threatened to have the queen declared mentally incapacitated, in tandem with the royal doctor.

Victoria & Abdul is a sort of sequel to 1997’s Mrs. Brown, in which Dench played Victoria in the 1860s, shortly after the death of her husband, Prince Albert, when she found some solace in her friendship with a Scottish servant named John Brown (Billy Connolly), with whom it was rumored she had an affair. (Brown died in 1883.) She has great fun reprising the role here, playing the queen as a bored old wretch who hates to get out of bed and rushes through state dinners so quickly that guests don’t have the chance to finish their soup before the bowls are ordered taken away. For all she commands, the poor woman has never had a curry in her life. Abdul, though, is the human equivalent of a bright burst of spice in her otherwise bland daily diet of official papers and monotonous pomp.