RUTHFULLY YOURS

The directors of the new movie don’t seem to realize that Bobby Riggs is the one viewers want to hang out with.

‘Billie Jean for President” reads the placard hoisted by an excitable fan at the climactic moment of Battle of the Sexes. Subtle! The story of an epic showdown between a feminist and a troglodyte is for Hollywood an unmissable opportunity to restage the 2016 election as a 1973 tennis match, the big attraction being that this time the woman wins.

Except the movie undermines its own point by not understanding who the real underdog is, nor why he’s ever so much more appealing than the dull, grinding standard-bearer for female equality. If this movie had an anthem, it would be “I Am Woman, Hear Me Bore.”

Bobby Riggs (played as pathetically needy by Steve Carell) is in 1973 a 55-year-old clubhouse hustler having problems with his rich wife (Elisabeth Shue), who throws him out of the house because of his gambling addiction. When a Rolls-Royce turns up in the driveway and he sheepishly admits he won it in a bet, she calls it the last straw. How dare he ruin her life by winning luxury automobiles? He’s the kind of guy who attends a Gamblers’ Anonymous meeting and urges the other attendees not to quit betting but to quit losing. There’s a difference, he explains, between gamblers and hustlers. It’s a glorious moment, sort of the country club version of General Patton telling the men that the goal isn’t to die for their country — it’s to make the other dumb sonofabitch die for his.

All that is mere background, though. In the foreground is Billie Jean King (a rabbity, withdrawn Emma Stone). Depending on the moment, she’s either the best or second-best female tennis player in the world, but the boys at the United States Lawn Tennis Association won’t pay her on par with the male players. They argue that women’s tennis is simply worth less in the marketplace. King huffs out the door and forms the Women’s Tennis Association along with a pushy promoter (Sarah Silverman, who tries hard for laughs that don’t quite materialize). The righteousness of their cause is somewhat muddled by their dependence on a sponsor selling a brand of women’s cigarettes that touted smoking as a dieting aid. Younger readers will not recall this, but there was once an era when it was considered unladylike to smoke. Feminists rejoiced when they broke down this barrier. You’ve come a long way, baby. Celebrate by giving yourself cancer.

King meanwhile strikes up a flirtation with a vixenish hairdresser (Andrea Riseborough), which is inconvenient because she has a husband. (His name is Larry King. Not the former CNN host and legendary USA Today columnist.) Her sexuality is presented as very dicey and dangerous stuff, but since we in 2016 know the outcome of her coming out — nobody much cared — there isn’t a lot of dramatic mileage here. This isn’t The Imitation Game. Gradually America learned King was gay, and America shrugged.

As if to present a Big Top version of her struggle for equality, Riggs starts making a nationwide spectacle of his boast that he could beat any woman in tennis, even giving himself the title “male chauvinist pig.” Long before Trump vs. Megyn Kelly, he becomes America’s favorite sexist troll, making such a ruckus that huge prize money flocks to his proposed matches. Then he goes out and beats Margaret Court, the top-ranked ladies’ tennis player at the moment. Not only does he beat her, he demolishes her, 6–2, 6–1.

The power of the Kennedy clan seems to be fading, no longer able to prevent the production of an indie film that no only tells the truth, but which has earned the praise of the show business bible, Variety. Steven Hayward of Powerline spotted the anomaly:

I paid no attention to the fact that Hollywood was producing a biopic of Ted Kennedy’s famous “accident” at Chappaquiddick in 1969, and would have assumed that it was a typical gauzy pro-Kennedy puff piece if I had known. But Variety magazine, the main trade journal of Hollywood, offers a review that not only says that the forthcoming movie Chappaquiddick is suitably harsh on Teddy, but that he—and the Kennedy reputation—deserve it:

The film says that what happened at Chappaquiddick was even worse than we think. Kopechne’s body was found in a position that implied that she was struggling to keep her head out of the water. And what the film suggests is that once the car turned upside down, she didn’t die; she was alive and then drowned, after a period of time, as the water seeped in. This makes Edward Kennedy’s decision not to report the crime a clear-cut act of criminal negligence — but in spirit (if not legally), it renders it something closer to an act of killing.

The entire review is well worth reading here. It turns out that Variety has been following the progress of the movie for quite some time now. Recall that the family patriarch Joe Kennedy was a major force in Hollywood, and kept one of the biggest female stars, Gloria Swanson, as one of his mistresses, while sons Jack and Bobby enjoyed the favors of Marilyn Monroe, herself also the biggest female star. That is clout!

But the clout may be dissipating. The family was able to sideline a truthful miniseries on the family, relegating it from ABC to the Reelz cable network, where it made little impact. But would Variety go out on a limb this way if it felt any pressure?

We’ll be keeping an eye on the distribution this movie receives. But in today’s environment, theatrical distribution is not even necessary. Pay-per-view audiences are more than capable of bringing profit to independent films. But smart film distributors ought to realize that there is substantial audience out there hungering for truth about the Kennedys.

It’s not as if the Kennedy family bench is very impressive. Caroline’s plans to run for office were torpedoes by her own inarticulateness. Who’s political future is at stake in protecting the reputation of the man who was euphemized as “the lion of the Senate.”

If the Dardenne brothers were filming in English instead of French, it would be easier for critics to admit that The Unknown Girl is a Christian soap opera in which a young idealistic doctor discovers that everyone harbors a secret which is just another version of sin. Whether it’s jealousy, vanity, pride, lust, theft or murder, we’re all guilty and one sure way of atoning is to choose a life of service to the poor and downtrodden

In an early scene, we see Doctor Jenny tending to the infected foot of an overweight elderly diabetic – no gloves for this saintly woman, nor do we see her wash her hands before sitting down to have a snack with her patient. This is but a preamble to her taking on the role of detective to solve the mystery of a young murdered girl’s unknown identity. Jenny will venture into some rough places on her own; she will stand up to shady characters, she will put herself in harm’s way even when it makes little sense. Questioning a man who has procured a prostitute for oral sex as to whether he got her name would be instantly laughable in American English but gets a pass as a sub-title. Would Carmen have been as desirable or successful if her name had been Ms Sonia Perez?

At one point, I had hopes that the Dardenne boys were about to admit that the doctor’s naivete was more disruptive than helpful in a scene where the police complain that her treading on their turf complicated their own investigations and antagonized their inside stool pigeons. Unfortunately, they quickly reverted to some pat scenes of guilt and atonement and our heroine ends on the high note of helping an elderly patient negotiate some stairs. If you like your whodunnits garnished with piety and unlikely remorse, see The Unknown Girl. If you don’t need moralizing with your murder/mystery, especially in French, skip this one – c’est un dud.

This Monday marks the fifth anniversary of the Benghazi attack and, as Hillary Clinton would say, “What difference at this point does it make?” Which is why, presumably, she’s chosen the occasion for the release of her latest leaden tome. But it makes enough of a difference to us that we’ll be observing the date at SteynOnline. So I thought we’d start, for our Saturday movie date, with the major motion picture based on the events of that hellish night:

Michael (Transformers) Bay has now made two feature films about real-life military attacks on US sovereign territory – in 2001 Pearl Harbor, which was enough to have you rooting for the Japs, and fifteen years later 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. Happily, the latter does not have much in common with the former, save for a reprise of what evidently Mr Bay regards as his signature – a rocket falling from the skies to its target, but shot from the rocket’s point of view. If you object that a rocket is an inanimate object and can’t have a point of view, well, it’s all comparative: in Pearl Harbor, the rocket was a lot less inanimate than Ben Affleck. Here the director has a grittier and hairier cast than Pearl Harbor’s matinée idols, and makes a good-faith if not wholly successful effort to dial back the prettifying devices of blockbuster film-making.

As for the point of view, the rocket has one. But Bay doesn’t. This is a visceral, sensory, pulverizing, you-are-there slab of action – all twitchy cameras, sudden edits, jerky cross-cuts – in which the context of the fireballs all around is left for another day. The director describes 13 Hours as “my most real movie”, but it doesn’t have to be that real to be more real than the official version. Film-making and storytelling have been part of the Benghazi fiasco since the evening of September 11th 2012, when the US Government decided to tell its own story about a film-maker whose all but unseen video had, they insisted, led to the death of a US ambassador. In the Hillary Clinton version, four Americans died at the hands of (as I put it at the time) “a spontaneous class-action movie review”. Three days later, when the President, the Secretary of State and the US Ambassador to the United Nations were all still lying to the American people about what happened and why, my characterization of that night holds up better than the Government’s:

As Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey well know, the film has even less to do with anything than did the Danish cartoons or the schoolteacher’s teddy bear or any of the other innumerable grievances of Islam. The 400-strong assault force in Benghazi showed up with RPGs and mortars: That’s not a spontaneous movie protest; that’s an act of war, and better planned and executed than the dying superpower’s response to it. Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey are, to put it mildly, misleading the American people when they suggest otherwise.

One can understand why they might do this, given the fiasco in Libya. The men who organized this attack knew the ambassador would be at the consulate in Benghazi rather than at the embassy in Tripoli. How did that happen? They knew when he had been moved from the consulate to a “safe house,” and switched their attentions accordingly. How did that happen? The United States government lost track of its ambassador for ten hours. How did that happen? Perhaps, when they’ve investigated Mitt Romney’s press release for another three or four weeks, the court eunuchs of the American media might like to look into some of these fascinating questions, instead of leaving the only interesting reporting on an American story to the foreign press.

In the end, the court eunuchs chose to continue fanning Sultan Barack. Three years later, based on a book by five of the survivors, Bay’s film belatedly provided answers to some of the basic questions the media never asked. It’s not a political film at all: Hillary is never mentioned by name, and for the whole 13 hours the Government of the United States – indeed, in a more basic sense, the entire global hyperpower – is an unseen character confined to the end of a telephone that no one ever picks up. There are occasional glimpses of nearby assets – a US air base across the Med in Italy – but in this western the cavalry never come. Five years ago we were told that they couldn’t have got there “in time” – so, in Hillary’s words, what difference would it have made?

Not content with harassing white people who wear their hair in cornrows and branding as “cultural appropriation” everything from college cafés serving sushi to Beyoncé donning a sari, now the new racial purists are coming for film director Kathryn Bigelow. Her crime? She’s a white woman. More specifically, she’s a white woman who dared to tell the story of the 1967 Detroit riots in her latest movie. It’s wrong for whites to tell black stories, apparently, because they can never truly understand those stories. It’s a profoundly philistine argument that exposes the misanthropy of the racial thinking that passes for radical commentary these days.

Bigelow’s Detroit is a blistering movie. It focuses on one incident in those crazy days of July 1967: the stand-off in the Algiers Motel between a group of young African Americans (and a couple of white girls) and the Detroit police and the National Guard. Through distilling the Detroit disturbance into one bloody clash, with a huge bulk of the film’s action taking place in a single motel corridor, Bigelow captures the racial and social tensions of the ’60s in a way few other filmmakers could. It’s both taut and expansive; part thriller, part social commentary. In that corridor, in those black heads pressed in fear against the wall, and in the jitteriness and hatefulness of certain of the cops (not all of them, though), the audience is given a stirring picture of a nation on the edge.

But Bigelow’s artistic achievement with Detroit, alongside that of her longstanding screenwriter Mark Boal, counts for little in the face of her racial heritage, it seems. Her whiteness apparently voids her artistic vision. No sooner had Detroit hit theater screens than she was being “called out” — PC for publicly shamed — for her cultural arrogance.

A Variety cover story asked: “How could Bigelow — a white woman raised just outside San Francisco by middle-class parents and educated at Columbia University — understand and illuminate [this] kind of raw experience?” This movie speaks to “the problem with watching black pain through a white lens,” said a writer for the Huffington Post, as if Bigelow were reducible to her whiteness; as if she turned up to work on Detroit every morning thinking and behaving as a white woman, a racial creature, rather than as a storyteller. This is a “white filmmaker [using] the spectacle of black pain as an educational tool,” says the HuffPost, which is bizarre, since Detroit doesn’t feel educational at all: It invites both emotional and intellectual responses, but it never once feels like a lecture.

At Slate, Dana Stevens argues that film directors — and surely by extension, all artists — cannot escape their origins when telling stories: “The people behind the camera . . . will create a different film from a different perspective depending on the lives they’ve led and the bodies they inhabit.” Bodies — here we get to the ironically dehumanizing element of PC racial thinking, where people are mere skin, driven, sometimes without realizing it, by their bodies, their biology. “The fact of the filmmakers’ whiteness can’t help but inflect their depiction [of racial history],” says Stevens. Can’t help. This resuscitates the very fatalism that lay at the heart of older varieties of racial thinking — namely, that we are prisoners of race, that our racial origins shape how we view and act in the world.

Wind River is a movie where the scenery chews up the actors. Filmed in Utah, substituting for Wyoming, the snow-covered mountain ranges are so monumental that ordinary human interaction is no competition for the natural landscape. As the film begins, Jeremy Renner is called upon to track some mountain lions that are killing cattle. He plays Corey Lambert, an employee of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, whose job is to track and capture (kill) predators. As such, he is experienced at observing and interpreting the details of how predators arrive and depart the scene of their carnage We rapidly become aware that he is also suffering from double G syndrome of guilt and grief over the murder of his teenage half-breed daughter.

Wind River is an Indian reservation and we soon see the larger guilt we are meant to experience at the squalid conditions of native Americans whose sons turn to drugs out of despair. But even worse fates await their daughters – another lesson the movie will hammer home. This will be learned once Corey finds the body of Natalie, another beautiful young native American teen who lies dead in the snow. Jenner is joined by Elizabeth Olsen – this year’s Jessica Chastain – an actress who suddenly appears in too many movies at once – without being noticeably unique. She plays Jane Banner, an FBI agent who hails from Florida, important because it signifies that she hasn’t been hardened by the unforgiving climate and tough living of the west. Never mind – she’s a quicker study than you imagined of a young woman with perfect hair, and engages Corey to help her solve the puzzle of an oil rigger who has gone missing but will unsurprisingly turn out to be implicated in the same event that resulted in two other deaths on the mountain.

You will discover that white men are as predatory as lions and wolves, that native American girls are beautiful and gentle, that the racist American govt doesn’t keep track of how many of them disappear each year, presumably at the hands of drunk, malicious white men. Now that I’ve told you the plot, you can see the movie for the extreme violence of the rape and murder scene plus the bonus of the vicious shoot em up that restores proper justice and order to our woebegone west. I failed to mention that you have to listen hard to hear what Jeremy Renner is mumbling along with the low voices of ancient native American men chanting sorrowfully and inaudibly, perhaps for being included in this film.

It was sophomore year of college when Absurd Feminist burst into our English-department seminar room with steam puffing out her ears. “Are there any WOMEN in this book?” she demanded, to no one in particular, slamming a paperback on the table. I happened to be nearest to her blast zone of accusation, so I replied: “Not really.” The book in question was Dispatches, Michael Herr’s account of life among infantry grunts in Vietnam. “Then I CAN’T GET INTO IT!” she exclaimed.

In a moment of clarity I understood what the two main imperatives of higher education were to Absurd Feminist and to so many of her peers: First, instead of broadening her horizons and taking her outside herself to discover the world, she demanded the educators filter all knowledge through her own experience to make it relatable to her. Second, all learning was to be valued in proportion to how effectively it could be made into a cudgel in the identity-politics war. Dispatches, with its virtually all-male cast, represented a pernicious advance for the patriarchy, even if it was about the agonies suffered by men.

Fast forward a few years, and another absurd feminist is here to tell us what’s wrong with Dunkirk: It’s about men. Why couldn’t it have been about women? No, really, Marie Claire’s reviewer wants to know:

Dunkirk felt like an excuse for men to celebrate maleness — which apparently they don’t get to do enough. Fine, great, go forth, but if [director Christopher] Nolan’s entire purpose is breaking the established war movie mold and doing something different — why not make a movie about women in World War II? Or — because I know that will illicit [sic] cries of “ugh, not everything has to be about feminism, ugh!” — how about any other marginalized group? These stories shouldn’t be relegated to indie films and Oscar season. It’s up to giant powerhouse directors like Nolan to tell them, which is why Dunkirk feels so basic.

“Basic,” you may or may not know, is the current term of derision used by young women and gay men to indicate feeble, unimaginative taste. Oh, you’re wearing a Ralph Lauren Polo shirt? You’re so basic.

It seems unlikely that Marie Claire’s reviewer, Mehera Bonner, has before her an exceptionally bright career of writing about film. As for a career of writing about feminism, though, the sky, for Bonner, is the limit. Her essay could plausibly have appeared on any number of bristling feminist sites. What is her reasoning except feminism taken to its logical extreme? Feminists often declare to the world that they stand merely for an entirely reasonable proposition — say, that women’s lives are as important as men’s. Who would dispute that? Yet feminist writing usually continues far past this point into a need to prove women and men have been equally important in every context, even in history. If women turn out to be mostly irrelevant to an incident, then it is the moral duty of socially conscious creative artists to ignore the matter. They should retrain their sights on something that will give absurd feminists something they can relate to, something that will advance the cause of feminism in general.

Feminists have a habit of obsessively dividing the world into teams — us, them. Ideas and even facts get considered in the light of whether they are good for Team Woman or not. Instead of seeing men and women as close collaborators in the human project, feminists often suppose that the sexes are rivals, opponents. This is sheer tribalism. Bonner looks at Dunkirk and is irritated that men like the film. She sees it as a celebration of manly courage and bravado, or at least manly endurance and grit, and this repulses her. Feminism means constant maintenance of an imaginary set of scales, and she fears Dunkirk adds weight to the masculine side, tipping the culture away from women. If Dunkirk — “Christopher Nolan’s new directorial gift to men,” she calls it — shows men at their best, it must therefore be bad for women.

The reason we can’t have a Dunkirk that’s about women and “marginalized” people is because there weren’t a lot of them on the beach in June 1940. The only Dunkirk that would satisfy Bonner would be a Dunkirk that simply didn’t exist. Can’t men just shut up about all the stuff men have done? Their sense of history is so . . . basic.

— Kyle Smith is National Review Online’s critic-at-large.

AFTER LOVE

Directed by Joachim Lafosse

A film for devotees of dense, moody relationship dramas, After Love is a searing exploration of the post happily-ever-after time, when you share kids you both love, but unfortunately — because of financial exigencies — still cohabit in the same space. Uncoupling, in case we forgot, is complicated.

Berenice Bejo, so amusing in the prize-winning silent, The Artist (2011), a fetching presence, is in constant motion as the film progresses, cooking, making her twin daughters Margaux and Jade brush their teeth, wash up, and do their homework. It is as if she wants to outwalk the sadness and annoyances of having run out of love with her handsome but unreliable architect husband, Boris (Cédric Khan, director of the French Red Lights), who does not seem to respect the boundaries of divorce, as he flouts the legal strictures of the divorce judgment, comes and goes at all hours. He loves his children, we see as he cooks for them and tries to maintain some sort of foodie integrity (“Don’t let them eat ice cream: They should eat their stewed fruit cup…”) And as someone commented in the vestibule when we were discussing the film’s merits or de-, No matter that he’s a gambler and an uncertain provider, “…it’s still so rare to find a man so good with kids…” So all is forgiven, kiddies?

No. Lots of divorced men love their children but don’t invite themselves to parties they are told to leave, or owe massive debts to shady guys who visit without warning.

Still, although the subject area is rich with possibility, is it the first or even the 10th filmic treatment of nasty matrimonial detritus to come along?

It is well scripted and photographed, the translations from the French are, for a change, quite accurate and timely, and the two daughters are, thank goodness, not angelic, giving some verisimilitude to the taut grimace-inducing interchanges between the principals. Marthe Keller, not seen for many years on the silver screen on these shores, plays the frustrated mother of Bejo — but the years have taken their toll of the lissome lovely seen opposite Dustin Hoffman in 1976’s Marathon Man.

Though redemption — spoiler alert — does not come over the transom by the closing credits, should you be curious about how divorced people still sharing the same domicile get through the week, this is the ticket.

In French with English subtitles

Official selection: Directors’ Fortnight, Cannes Film Festival

INGRID GOES WEST

Directed by Matt Spicer

Set in sunny California amid the sandy dunes and the palm trees, Ingrid Goes West is a dark picture. Watching it, colleagues felt disturbed throughout the length of the picture. Ingrid Thorburn is a woman with clear esteem issues verging on the stalkerazzoid who follows her instagram and FB muse to the West Coast, using every tool at her disposal to ingratiate herself with the goddess-like figure she admires (Elizabeth Olsen plays the sunlight-radiating, image-idealizing Taylor Sloane) on her various branded posts. The film devolves greatly on the cell phone and the instant messaging and pic posting so beloved of millions.

The ugliness of character that is blatant in the protagonist, played by an unnerving Aubrey Plaza, throughout the two hours is, unfortunately, echoed by millions of tweens and teens, for whom followers and going viral is all important. She may be unhinged, but the characters she interacts with seem not to notice for far too long.

A key problem with the script is that events proceed far too swiftly without logical script underpinning. She’s taken in by a sweet, hunky local guy — the only relatable person in the cast, Dan Pinko, played by the extremely likable O’Shea Jackson, Jr. — without a single document or checkup of her references — even if she does, because of an inheritance, pay cash upfront. She escapes arrest too easily. She insinuates herself into being her landlord’s “girlfriend” without a second thought — or regard of his being already taken.

Implausible at it increasingly becomes, you can’t tear your attention away, though you are engulfed in discomfort over her counterfeit life. She’s an instant friend of people who don’t know the smallest thing about her. She is able to stay off the grid for far longer than her initial stash would seem to have covered. The easy druggy, drinky, hard-partying life exuded by Taylor and her husband Ezra (a Kris Kristofferson-the-younger look-alike, Wyatt Russell) and nasty brother, Nicky (Billy Magnuson), looks somewhat, sometime, seductive. But it’s just a glossy easily erased photo on Instagram, when you think about it.

No special effects. No ‘language’ issues. Some expected violence and pushback. But lots of up-to-the-minute unapologetic psychoneurotic disorder.

The audience does laugh at those points where insane talk or behavior (or foodie absurdities) would be laughed out of the room in the East, but where La La Land goofiness covers every gold-plated nuttiness with a cozy effusion of acceptance and “Whatever, dude.”

In “Dunkirk,” an astonishing evocation of a crucial event during the first year of World War II, Christopher Nolan has created something new in the annals of war films—an intimate epic. The scale is immense, and all the more so in the IMAX format that shows the action to best advantage. The density of detail is breathtaking; it’s as if the camera can barely keep up with what’s happening inside and outside the frame. Yet the central concern is steadfastly human. Whether we’re watching a huge Allied army encircled by Nazi forces on a beach in France or tracking the progress of their would-be rescuers, the drama turns on individuals and their feelings—of terror, excruciating vulnerability and fragile hope that they will make it back home, only 26 miles across the English Channel.

What the film excludes is historical context. It is not, and wasn’t meant to be, an explanation of the circumstances that led, in the spring of 1940, to the entrapment of some 400,000 British, French, Belgian and Canadian troops, including what Prime Minister Winston Churchill called “the whole root and core and brain of the British Army.” Instead, “Dunkirk,” which Mr. Nolan directed from his own screenplay, is a fictionalized, impressionistic account of a calamity that culminated in a near-miracle, although many lives were lost in the process—the rescue of 338,000 of those soldiers by shallow-draft naval vessels plus a large civilian flotilla of fishing boats and yachts.

With sparse dialogue, a minimum of digital simulations and an emphasis on spectacular images, the production follows, among others, a young British enlisted man, Fionn Whitehead’s Tommy, from the moment he emerges from the streets of Dunkirk to join vast throngs of other men, most of them young and all of them frightened, on the sands of what was formerly a vacation resort. They have no more idea than he does what’s in store for them. All they know is that they’re totally vulnerable to German tanks and planes, and unlikely to survive. (The cast includes Harry Styles, of One Direction, making his acting debut.)“Dunkirk” is hardly the first film to depict the mad chaos of modern war. The champion in that category remains “Apocalypse Now,” with “Black Hawk Down” and “Saving Private Ryan” as strong contenders. Still, Mr. Nolan has spoken of his own list of influences being topped by “The Wages of Fear,” Henri-Georges Clouzot’s peerless thriller, made in 1953, about desperate men in South America driving nitroglycerin-laden trucks over primitive roads. What’s the common denominator? Existential terror, for sure, an awareness that one’s life may be snuffed out at any moment, but also classic suspense. CONTINUE AT SITE