Now we have The Hunger Games, a big film whose mere premise demands some serious thinking since the idea is too disturbing to accept by itself. Teenagers put in an arena to fight to their death? Watching violence only provides its thrill-ride fun when we have a clearly identified bad guy (as, for instance, a superhero fighting an evil mastermind to save the city from destruction). Adolescent children picked by lottery hardly qualify. So there’s some higher point being made, right? We hope? Or is this some kind of sicko splatter film?

It’s so weird that The Hunger Games starts out like a remake of Winter’s Bone, the very small film that catapulted Jennifer Lawrence into the consciousness of the film industry. It’s about a dirt-poor fatherless family in which the oldest daughter has to forage for food for the younger siblings because the mother has all but disappeared into some kind of depressed catatonia. I have to applaud the big film producers for recognizing Lawrence’s capabilities and I certainly can’t blame her for taking the part. But is this typecasting in its baldest form, or what?

Winter’s Bone is a film that gives loads to think about, portraying as it does a meth-making subculture in the Missouri Ozarks in which the men have devolved into bombs-waiting-to-explode and the women barely hold together the social ties through their maladapted caretaking. The violence in this film is not designed to give us a thrill. It is too real for that. And, in the end, a triumph is achieved in spite of it. But the genuine food for thought is in the emotional violence portrayed, perpetrated as often by the caretaking women as by the careless men. Even in such extremity of circumstance, or perhaps because of it, it’s not difficult to see echoes of our larger world being represented.

But back to The Hunger Games: my initial response was mixed. I wanted to like it, strong female lead struggling to prevail against political oppression and all. But whenever I’m confronted with an over-hyped film, I can’t help feeling resentful towards it. All the noise makes me want to not like it, so I can defy the bombarding messages telling me I must see it and I will like it. Perhaps I’m feeling the fine line between marketing hype and totalitarian mind control. Ironic, isn’t it.

Now that I have gotten some distance from the hype and have had time to reflect on the film itself, I have had to conclude that it’s a pretty poor representation of a not-half-bad book. When I was first hearing about the film, and reading all the complaining from critics about an unimaginative directing style, I thought, “I bet the director made a decision to be very faithful to the book, to do little more than illustrate it.” Maybe he was even told to by whoever hired him for the job. This would make good business sense. Book sales are a sure thing. Arty visual interpretation of a dystopian world is not.

But dystopian worlds demand highly conceived visual interpretation. That’s the gift that film has to bring to futuristic fiction. That’s the surprise and the delight of watching the story unfold on screen. It mustn’t be squandered. We know too well the degree to which it’s possible because we’ve seen it done so many times before – Blade Runner, Brazil, The Matrix for starters. That’s what we go see futuristic films for. But we didn’t get to see it here, at least not up to the standard we have been led to expect.

I would have loved to see Stanley Kubrick directing. But he wouldn’t have taken it on. He knew better than to adapt bestsellers. Then how about Alfonso Cuaron for that Children of Men-style treatment? Even Ridley Scott would be a good bet. Here’s a radical idea – Pier Paolo Pasolini. (Ever seen Salo?) But, sadly, he’s been gone longer than Kubrick. Okay, I see their problem. But did they really have to go with one whose record so clearly demonstrates such a squeaky clean aesthetic?

No doubt their nervousness about teenagers killing teenagers got the better of them. And they were right to be nervous. It’s one thing to pose such a conceit in words on paper. It’s quite another to make it visual on a larger-than-life screen. Here we have the ultimate illustration that a thousand words can pale next to the power of one picture.  But, with book sales through the roof, business dictates that it’s a risk worth taking.

I have read the book since seeing the movie and, thus, can confirm what so many others have said – It is gripping. But I also learned that the film was not as entirely faithful as I had assumed. The book is more political than the movie and it has more emotional content. Granted, it’s harder to communicate these on film – political content being somewhat abstract and emotional content being internal – but far from impossible. It’s simply a matter of finding a way to manifest the ideas and feelings in an externalized form that is visual and active. In fact, solving that puzzle is the fun part as far as I’m concerned. And neither did this movie have to create it all from scratch. The book dishes up at least a couple of great opportunities that the movie declined to utilize.

The most political character in the book – an “Avox” girl, which is some kind of servant class made up of former defectors – does not appear in the film. Katniss recognizes her from having witnessed her capture while hunting in the woods and causes a stir among her support team. This is the most direct indication that just under the surface of this society there is rebellion brewing and the government is putting considerable resources into keeping it down.

There is also a great scene in the book of Katniss, at the end of a brutal day of training, returning to her lavish room in a state of rage and smashing everything in sight. Such spontaneous mayhem and the resulting shambles would have been very satisfying to see on the screen. Fittingly, it is the Avox girl who then appears and helps her clean it up before anyone discovers her deviant outburst. But, no, they skipped over that, too.

What would motivate the producers to diminish the political and emotional content of this story? Here’s my guess: They wanted to make an action film. We got a bestselling book here, let’s make a blockbuster movie. In fact, we’ve got to be extra careful that it doesn’t go the way of Children of Men – all arty and gloomy. So we have to punch up the action as much as possible and weed out anything extraneous.

Problem is, relative to today’s action film standards, there is not that much action in the book. And the producers didn’t really have the option of adding more since that would only mean piling more abuse on these poor, hapless teenagers who are victims themselves of a larger evil. So they had to mine every little scrap of written action they could find, which was only barely enough for the film to succeed as an action vehicle.

What they skipped over in the process was any meaningful focus on Katniss’ internal state. If not for Lawrence’s smoldering performance, we would have nearly a blank slate before us.  The book, on the other hand, includes, as most books do, a ton of internal monologue – her deflating fears, her fuming resentments, her dips into faltering confidence, her aching desire to be home again. And she has a progression in the course of the story. The killing arena is a metaphorical backdrop used to provoke the beginnings of a political awakening. By the end of the book, Katniss is getting just the first few impulses not to passively accept the oppressive political system in which she lives. At the end of the movie, on the other hand, she is simply surprised to learn she has pissed off some highly placed people.

What I wish the producers had a better understanding of is that the many pages of printed words spent on deepening Katniss’ character needn’t translate into as many minutes of screen time. Remember the earlier ratio described? One thousand words/one picture? In fact, the book is so compact, it seems to me there may even have been room for the film to expand on it. But my sense is they had no confidence this could be done while maintaining the rhythm and pace of an action film. Either that or character depth just isn’t on their radar.

I want to believe that the success of this film demonstrates a readiness among today’s viewers for more substance in their action fare. I am not cynical enough to think that people are flocking to theaters for the thrill of seeing teenagers kill each other. I think they are drawn in by their awareness that the premise can’t stop there. They want to see what larger point is being made. But the producers underestimated the audience and, thereby, soft-pedaled the thematic elements. They didn’t lose much by doing so. The audience is hungry enough that even weak thematic content will satisfy them. And they’ll tell their friends to see it, too.

But the film lost a lot. It could have become an ominously reverberating dystopian classic adapted from a not-half-bad book. Instead, we’re stuck with a watered-down illustration of a gripping page-turner. I can only hope that at some point in the future someone will remake the film with enough courage and fortitude to do justice to its strong female lead character.

I think this stems from an implicit assumption: If you haven’t read the complete works of William Faulkner or seen all of Strindberg’s plays or listened to the entire oeuvre of Beethoven’s string quartets, well, that’s understandable. Such works require a considerable investment of time and energy. But if you haven’t even cracked an art history book to look at the color reproductions and learn the names captioned underneath, then what the hell’s wrong with you? Better still, for developing familiarity and fondness, is to sit in a darkened lecture hall and watch a series of slides pop up as a few contextualizing comments emanate from behind a lectern.

That art history class paid off once again, along with a few literature and film classes, while watching Woody Allen’s rumination on nostalgic fantasy, Midnight in Paris. Gil Pender, a “Hollywood hack” as he puts it, gets the art and literature seminar of your dreams when, while visiting Paris with his fiancé, Inez, he is mysteriously transported back to Paris in the 20s and gets to actually hang out with a few post-Impressionist painters, along with their friends the surrealist filmmakers, and a whole gang of ex-pat American writers.

Being female, I’m not much prone to romantic illusions about life being so much better in those earlier, simpler days. Just the thought of being born even ten years earlier than I was makes me shudder. If anything, I wish I could have been a young woman today. Nonetheless, I found Midnight in Paris to be a highly enjoyable film. Having watched it a few times already, I could, still, sit down and watch the whole thing again, an impulse I keep puzzling at since the plot is not exactly intricate, the characters not terribly complex and the overall meaning not particularly deep. So what is it about the film that gives it such appeal?

Here’s what I get from the film in overall meaning: Woody Allen is bemoaning the emphasis these days on unbridled materialism and information trivia, while yearning for an imagined past in which there was genuine concern about the function of art in people’s lives. The present-day intellectual Paul, Inez’s college friend, only spews facts, like a walking Wykipedia. He doesn’t bring any values, insight or context to the topics on which he holds forth.

Listening to Ernest Hemingway, on the other hand, every viewpoint he shares is informed by his own experience and every other word out of his mouth is “courage” or “truth”. Gertrude Stein speaks to the problem directly, “We all fear death and question our place in the universe. The artist’s job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.” If Stein had reason to feel emptiness in the 1920s, it’s hard to imagine how she would see today’s existence.

It is entirely possible that the problem of intellectual vacuity, as represented in Paul’s character, is so pervasive these days that a film need not go deep into it to capture the collective attention. We are all feeling at least a little bit starved by the lack of substance in contemporary discourse and thus can readily share in Woody Allen’s yearning. We don’t need elaboration of the problem. We live it daily. Maybe that’s at the core of the film’s appeal.

So what about Gil Pender’s yearning? He is a successful screenwriter who wants to be a novelist and he is about to marry the wrong woman. From pretty early in the story, we are rooting for him to come to his senses in these matters. By the end he has made the changes we want him to make. He has broken up with Inez and decided to stay in Paris to work on his novel. But how did he get there?

Try as I might, I can’t find an incremental character progression in this film. Throughout the story, Gil is pretty blindered to exactly what is wrong with his life. He doesn’t see that he is being valued by his fiancé and future in-laws for the bushels of money he brings in as a Hollywood hack. He only displays oblivious acceptance while Inez continually disrespects who he is.

Then, at the end, he has a sudden revelation when he enters into the nostalgic fantasy of Adrianna, his 1920’s lover, and travels with her, further back in time, to the Belle Epoque. Being there prompts an insight, albeit  “a minor one,” as he says. He tells Adrianna, “If I want to write something worthwhile, I have to get rid of my illusions. That I’d be happier in the past is one of them.”  Now he knows his biggest problem in life is not that he was born too late, but that he made a choice to be a screenwriter in Hollywood instead of staying in Paris to write novels as he wanted to.

This is what I call hanging the ending on a magical character transformation that has not really been manifested by the events of the story on the way through. Not that this makes it a bad film. I think it’s a very good film. It just means it falls somewhat short of being a great screenplay. We stay engaged because its fun hanging out with those people, and we enjoy the surprise element of each new historical figure who shows up – as we did long ago with the appearance of Marshall McLuhan stepping out from behind a movie theater display.

Speaking of Annie Hall, I keep thinking about how much more chest-baring honesty there was in that film. At the outset, Alvie Singer is in great pain about losing Annie. Then the rest of the film is his exhaustive examination of their relationship to figure out why it failed. We experience with him an incremental progression of insights about where he went wrong. By the end, he has come to a place of acceptance about it, and even gained a new perspective. Talk about truth and courage. That’s what makes that screenplay great.

Overall, Woody Allen’s screenplays are very rich, self-assured and internally consistent, with barely a wasted moment. They are also highly intelligent without being self-conscious. Their charm, rather, is in the self-deprecation they express. And this one is no exception.

I suspect, however, with this one he just wasn’t interested in going into a deep character study. At this point in his career, that is his prerogative. He was more interested in talking about bald materialism and empty information. I’m sure it was not unintentional on his part that, in the end, Gil decides he will have to live in Europe to be an artist.

While I love the film for the reminders that Woody Allen is using it to give us, Midnight in Paris is not among his best screenplays. Nor was it the best in its original screenplay category this year.  Oddly, the Oscar win in a way further supports the film’s premise that we live in a superficial time. If the academy were at all interested in rewarding truth and courage, they’d have given more weight to contenders such as Margin Call and A Separation.

But maybe the awarding of this film should really be attributed to all those academy-voting Hollywood screenwriters who wish they’d stayed in Paris to write novels, too.

On the one hand this could simply indicate a lovely cross-cultural salute, as if the two industries are bowing to each other in respect. But given the different natures of the two films, I don’t quite see it that way. I think what each film is saying to us stands in great contrast to each other as well.

In Hugo, what I see is Martin Scorcese, rather than Hollywood in general, bowing in respect to the early film innovators, as so thoroughly embodied by George Melies. The film impressed me as a very touching love letter to the energy, creativity, passion and innovation of not only Melies but also all those who pushed forward the infant art form. I don’t see Scorcese being all that interested in distinctions between national industries or that old tiresome debate about whether it was the French or the Americans who invented film in the first place.

Scorcese is a citizen of the Great Nation of Cinema and will pay homage to its founding fathers wherever they may be. He doesn’t care if the filmmaker is French, German, American or Japanese, as long as we are all serving the same bedrock principle of making great films. He is in awe of the forward thinking vision of George Melies, expressing gratitude for it, and wants the rest of us to pay respect as well.

Somehow, in The Artist, I don’t see the same kind of cross-cultural respect being expressed. I get that director Michel Hazanavicius has a fascination with silent cinema and early film melodrama. He elects to play out this interest in an old familiar story – the silent film screen idol ruined by the advent of sound – and follows a fairly conventional path with it. Silent star George Valentin “discovers” up-and-comer Peppy Miller, who rises to match him in star power just as sound film is introduced. Believing sound to be a fad, Valentin banks everything on his next silent film. But it flops and he is ruined. His fortunes spiral downward until he is rescued by Peppy, who convinces the studio head to let him star in a film with her. The end.

But here’s a question to consider: Would the film have the same kind of appeal if it didn’t end with the surprise reveal that the source of Valentin’s ruin was his French accent? Try, for a moment, to imagine viewing the film without this reveal and gauge the feeling it would leave you with. My guess is the impact would be considerably dulled. The film would likely come across as just a primitive style melodrama in which a heart wrenching series of events unfolds, and either good or evil prevails, but not much else happens.

So what does the reveal add that gives the film a more substantive ending? Interestingly, it does not heighten any emotional impact. Rather, it adds an intellectual statement. It tells us that Valentin is French, that silent film was egalitarian in scope and universal in reach, but that spoken language separates cultures, like the Tower of Babel, and foreigners will not make it in Hollywood any longer. In other words, the French are still moaning about the fact that the coming of sound shut them out of the Hollywood distribution system. Maybe that sounds harsh to say about a film with such bright faces, snappy dance steps and a cute little dog. But I just can’t help seeing a little bit of a grousing tone in it. I mean, look at the title – The Artist. Like Valentin was this great artist and Hollywood just stomped on him and squashed him out of existence over a mere trifle of a foreign accent. No respect.

Somehow I can’t see The Artist walking away with the Best Picture award tomorrow. Now, I am notoriously bad at making Oscar predictions, so don’t bank your vote on me. But I just want to state, for the record, my feeling that the contest is not sewn up. For one thing, the Academy has never, to my knowledge, honored a French film in this category before. For another, the film is so clearly thumbing its nose at Hollywood. What Hazanavicius has done is taken the genre that Hollywood excels at, designed to pull at heart strings, and, in typical French fashion, used it to make a theoretical statement about how mistreated the French have been by Hollywood hegemony. But Hollywood is too self-involved and self-congratulatory to see when it’s being jabbed. So maybe I’m wrong. Maybe The Artist will win after all.

Nonetheless, I understand its place in the world. Certain people, mostly men, have a competitive drive hardwired into them and they need an outlet for it. I’m reminded of that argument I’ve heard intellectually sophisticated men give to yawning women: “You have to understand, baseball’s not like football. It’s not just brute physicality. There’s actually a lot of strategy in it.” Okay, strategy makes it a little more interesting. But, still, what’s it all for?

This is the big advantage of making a movie about baseball over the game itself. Not only plenty of room for elucidating the strategy, but also the opportunity to make it all mean something. And this is why I like Moneyball, the story of Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane’s struggle to get his scouts, coaches and players on board with a game-changing strategy of using baseball statistics to capitalize on the hidden strengths of undervalued players.

Specifically, what I like about Moneyball is that it is not simply an underdog-coming-from-behind-to-triumph-over-adversity story. It is thematically rich, making resonant statements about things like, for instance, brains over brawn. And not just cold, calculating brains, but the human benefits of using a scientific approach to value people for their best capabilities. Neither is it posing brains against heart. It is putting thought and emotion together against mere physical strength and so-called “instinct” that mostly amounts to unconscious bias.

You could also say its about getting away from simply exploiting people to serve your own interests and, instead, evaluating them realistically to bring out their strengths. All of this is applicable to many more areas of life than just baseball. Imagine if our whole educational system were based on maximizing strengths rather than measuring weakness.

I also like how the filmmakers met the challenge of making statistics interesting to watch on screen. They used a bit of computer data, a bit of marker board, and some videotape playback to get across the basic information. But what we need to know most about the statistics they managed to embody in the character of Scott Hatteberg.

Due to an elbow injury, Hatteberg can’t throw the ball anymore, which, by the old way of measuring value, means he’s done. When we first see him, he’s sitting on the couch, depressed and demoralized, watching TV. I love the way the writers put Billy Beane on his cell outside the front door asking to be let in. In academic screenwriting terms, this might be considered the cheesiest move in the book since it’s clearly motivated by the need to avoid that thorny problem of having drama-filled events happen over the phone. The reality is that these deals are actually done in tedious phone calls between agents and lawyers. But we don’t care about reality. We want to see the emotional truth. We want to see Billy walk into a washed up player’s dark and dreary environs and bring a beam of rejuvenating light. And this is the main thing we need to know about these statistics – they have the power to renew life where all hope seems lost.

Then they use Hatteberg’s story to embody Billy’s struggle to get Oakland A’s  Manager, Art Howe, on board with the new plan. After under-utilizing Hatteberg for the entire season, finally, at the critical moment, Howe comes around and Hattie hits one out of the park, literally. Thus, we see the statistics pay off not only in winning the record-breaking game, but also in Hatteberg’s personal vindication after having been professionally dismissed.

Another thing I like is the way they used the Peter Brand character, who, as the only main character not based on a real person, is a composite of several who worked with Beane to put the statistical method into effect. In developing this character, it’s as if the writers set out to personify the statistics themselves, like a roly-poly muppet character on Sesame Street. Peter Brand is unsexy, nerdy and socially ill at ease, but cute in his own way and, when Beane finds him, he has been undervalued by his employers, just like the statistics.

But Peter Brand is also more than just a human computer. He carries a lot of heart for such a numbers nerd. The whole reason he’s in this business is that he’s passionate about baseball. He shudders and recoils at the idea of having to cut players and he works really hard at the end to get Billy Beane to accept that he has not lost at all. On the contrary, he has hit a (metaphorical) home run.

And I especially liked – no, I have to say I loved – the long, knuckle-biting build up of tension from Game 16 to the eleventh hour clincher of Game 20. This is not just any old tension sequence. This is tension that means something. See, for the fans cheering in the stands, it’s a big win, but it’s really just another win. For us watching in the movie theater, there is much more at stake. It’s the validation of everything Billy’s been doing for the last year. The tension is so much greater and the win is so much bigger because of knowing what it means.

But, even with so much that I like about this film, I can’t shake this gnawing feeling that it’s missing something. I have to admit, I am a little cowed at the idea of finding fault in the work of Aaron Sorkin since I am a big fan. But it’s that ending, with the daughter. It feels a little too convenient. I wish there were a little more character development to support it, a sense that something significant has happened internally for the main character in addition to the plot triumph and all the resonant themes.

I suppose one could argue that a story so intelligent in its thematic statements (which Sorkin excels at) doesn’t need a character transformation on top. My response to that is – Maybe. But it would be much better with one, especially if the character transformation further supports the theme.

I don’t know what the real story is, but the film is clearly leading us to believe that Beane passed up the $12.5 million offer from the Boston Red Sox so as not to be far away from his daughter. This is apparently the function of having the daughter in the film, so that she can provide us with that ending. What would be nice, though, is if we could experience his turning down the job in order to stay near his daughter as a personal triumph for him. Rather, it is posed as the generically right thing to do. By generic I mean it is not individual to that character. Part of what bugs me about the whole daughter thread is that we just keep seeing Billy Beane being the perfect parent. But imperfect parenting affords so many more dramatic opportunities. And it’s more true to life. What mother or father has the luxury of being the perfect parent 100% of the time?

Here’s where I see an opportunity missed: When we first learn he has a daughter, off-handedly in answer to Scott Hatteberg’s question, it’s a surprise because we’re pretty far into the story and there’s been no sign of her until this point. It’s clear right away that Casey doesn’t live with him and there’s even a hint of pain in him about it. Then we go to him picking her up at her mother’s house and we get the divorced Dad backstory. But the pain that was hinted at has disappeared and is never seen again. Thus, an opportunity is lost.

The cell phone discussion is also generic and, therefore, a lost opportunity. It’s a discussion that any two estranged parents could have. But what if it that little tension moment sitting in the living room waiting for Casey was around something more directly reflective of opposing parenting styles? Let’s say Beane’s ex-wife is a stage mom. By the looks of that house, she likely lives in Malibu. Maybe she’s in the music or entertainment business. Maybe she’s been pushing the daughter to sing and play guitar and tap dance for her friends at parties (I’m just making this stuff up). Maybe while he’s sitting in her living room waiting for Casey, the mother proudly announces that Casey won an audition. He joins in the celebratory mood until he learns that taking the job will cause her to miss school. What if he considers it his job to keep the mother’s influence in check. But this is an internal challenge for him because he has his own impulses to be over focused on winning. Maybe the statistical method teaches him something about how he can reward Casey’s strengths without fostering unrealistic fantasies.

Obviously, this may be taking the story pretty far afield from the real story. I’m only offering it as a way to illustrate the blandness of the existing Billy/Casey scenes. In fact, Casey’s character seems to exist purely to serve the convenience of the writers. She doesn’t have a lot of character of her own.

What if by the time he is faced with the offer from the Red Sox, we have a clear understanding of his internal conflict between wanting to win and wanting to make sure his daughter doesn’t make the same mistake he did? He is telling his daughter not to chase the money, but to stay focused on school. Then he gets caught up in the lure of the $12.5 million Red Sox offer. He is at risk of contradicting himself. This makes his decision to decline a much clearer commitment to his daughter’s future. It is an action that proves the truth of what he’s claiming to believe.

But it’s not a play. It’s 100% movie.

For my money, the measure of it’s fundamental movie-ness is if you were to take a scene, any scene, from the film and analyze it the way I demonstrate in my article on The Ides of March, I would bet you’d find that every line of dialogue is being driven by an action and each line follows the other with an action/reaction logic. But you have to read that article to know what I’m saying here.

What else makes it a movie? It has the ticking clock tension of an action film: Late one night, a young risk assessor at an investment trading firm, Peter Sullivan, discovers the company is so over-leveraged that their recent investment losses add up to considerably more than the value of the company. Word travels up to the CEO, John Tuld, who wants to do a massive sell off of what are now understood to be worthless assets. The plan must be launched by 9:30 a.m. when the markets open. But he needs sales executive Sam Rogers on board to motivate the sales staff. Rogers is against knowingly selling worthless debt because it will destroy their business relationships. In the end, though, he adheres to company loyalty. When the day is over, the company is still intact, Tuld is looking to make his next bundle, Sullivan has been promoted and Rogers goes home to bury his beloved dog.

See? The plot structure is just like a disaster movie: A young scientist discovers that a meteor is headed straight for earth. The news is sent up the chain of command to the President of the United States, who endeavors to save as many of the nation’s assets as possible, at the expense of millions of lives, under the protests of his first lieutenant, who favors saving lives over assets. But the president’s plan prevails and in the end the nation is still intact and the president, the lieutenant and the young scientist are all still alive. The president is already at the work of rebuilding. The scientist is the new brain trust. And the lieutenant goes off to mourn the dead.

But the difference between this film and a disaster film is that the writer/director of this film, J.C. Chandor, has more to say than simply,  “Watch out! We’re all gonna die!” As the son of a Merrill Lynch trader, Chandor was intimately acquainted with the financial industry at the time of the economic collapse, which gave him a somewhat unique perspective on it.

Remember back in ‘08/’09, when we all learned we had become dependent on an economy not based on building rockets, or building bridges or even digging holes in the ground, but instead on the continual buying and selling of debt that was of little worth to begin with? While the rest of us were stunned and aghast at the short-sighted, self-serving mentality amongst the stewards of our mortgages and retirement accounts, and calling for the monsters to be drawn and quartered in the town square, Chandor had a more nuanced view. What he saw was human beings playing out their human nature in a collective ethic that encouraged them to do so. Thus, to elucidate a more realistically complex picture and bring the monster down to human size, Chandor set out to make a film that would reveal, with neither judgment nor varnish, the inner workings and driving personalities of an investment trading firm as it wakes up to and then copes with the approaching financial Armageddon.

Chandor has a very specific viewer experience in mind. He doesn’t want us to come away with the thrill of having triumphed (as in the plot-based story described above) or the false reassurance of seeing a flawed individual be redeemed (as in a character-transformation story). He also doesn’t want to condone or excuse any of his characters’ behavior. He just wants to paint a picture of a contained culture and he wants us to understand the individuals in that culture as human beings.

However, he has to get us involved with these characters, which is no small task since, as far we’re concerned, they’re the big bad guys in this whole financial mess. We hate them. So what does he do? He begins the film with a Black Friday. It’s not a Friday, but the H.R. people are marching in (who, happily for Chandor, we can immediately recognize thanks to Up in the Air) and the masters-of-the-universe on the trading floor are consumed with anxiety. Thus, these people who we think of as having inordinate power over our lives are right away put at a power disadvantage. They’re afraid of being fired. This is the first step towards making sympathetic a set of characters we are predisposed not to like.

Then we see our main guy, Peter Sullivan, dodge a bullet when the H.R. “counselor” mistakes him for his boss. For the moment, Peter is safe. But seeing an executive being targeted also drives home the point that, actually, no one is safe. We are then introduced to his boss’ boss, Will Emerson, who has run out of Nicorette gum and may soon kill somebody if he doesn’t get more, and then Emerson’s boss, Sam Rogers, who is visibly distraught at having just learned his dog is beyond hope and must be put down. So we have a busload of sympathy creating elements (fearing the loss of a job, parting with a pet, trying to quit smoking) carefully designed to pose these characters as human and get us on board with them.

These sympathy-creating techniques are standard in any well-written screenplay. What is not so standard is having two main characters, Peter Sullivan and Sam Rogers. I usually advise against doing so since, in the great majority of cases, it will only diffuse the focus of the story. But, as with any departure from convention, it can also be used to great effect when done with a purpose.

Clearly, Sullivan is the more sympathetic character at the story’s outset. He is new to the firm, comparatively young, relatively innocent, extremely earnest and he sounds the clarion call of imminent danger. His boy-next-door character is essential for helping us enter into this strange and alienating world.

But he can’t carry us all the way through since he is really just a cog in the wheel of the financial services industry. To give him a heroic triumph would undermine the story since we aren’t going for a music-swelling happy ending. We are going for a this-is-the-truth-and-the-problem-still-exists ending. Sullivan’s personal happy ending is that he still has a job and, indeed, is promoted. But, from the film’s point of view, promoted for what? So he can keep coming up with rocket science formulas with which to play around with our money? This is why we don’t see him getting promoted, it is only reported to us in dialogue and when we do see him, he even looks a little embarrassed by it.

We do get an external triumph at the end of the film in that CEO John Tuld’s plan works and the firm has survived. But I would call it an inverted triumph that brings with it no cause for celebration since it only supports the continuation of our money-shuffling, debt-trading economic house of cards.

So we do need a character transformation, after all, to satisfy the viewer’s need to see that at least something worthwhile has happened in the course of the story, even if it is amidst a pile of wreckage. Thus, we need a second main character who can give us a transformation that will matter in this context. And that’s what we get from Sam Rogers. In fact, the way it’s done here is a nice illustration of my frequent assertion that character transformation doesn’t have to be an “I’ve seen the light!” 180-degree flip. It can be tiny, as it is in this film, and still fulfill its structural purpose.

But rather than feed it to you wholesale (and give it away for those who haven’t seen the film yet), I think I will challenge the reader to view the film with this question in mind: What does Sam do at the end that we can be pretty sure he would never have imagined himself doing at the beginning that indicates a (small) internal shift? And here’s a way to test the answer you come up with: Try imagining the film without that element and see how you would feel differently at the end. (Feel free to e-mail me your answer if you want my feedback on it.)

I could go on and on about this film. I haven’t even talked about the thematic content yet. One thing I love is that, with no triumph, there is no simplified thumbs up or thumbs down proclamation on things. Rather, the film reveals numerous complicated, and sometimes contradictory, facets of the culture it portrays. It tells us, for example, that firms like this demand complete loyalty from their employees but show absolutely no loyalty to them. It tells us that you don’t have to be a “cheater” to be an enthusiastic participant in a set of so-called legitimate practices that will deprive people of their assets. It also tells us that responsibility for this crisis spreads far and wide, including to those who have passively benefited from those practices. And it reminds us that everyone, on some level, needs to believe that whatever they are doing for themselves is also somehow benefitting the greater good.

And then there’s my favorite line of dialogue, which I think sums up much of the film’s intended meaning:

John Tuld, CEO: “It’s just money!”

What makes this a great line is not its particular combination of words in one sentence. By itself, the line is meaningless and trite. What makes the line great is all that has happened before it is uttered. Knowing what we know, the line creates a wah-wah-wah-wah expanding insight into the skewed mentality behind the economic collapse. Here’s man about to provoke a massive financial crisis that will devastate millions of lives through lay offs, bankruptcies and foreclosures, not to mention seriously compromising his own business relationships, and this is the best justification he can come up with for doing it.

So that’s how we ended up in this financial mess. We are at the mercy of a bunch of guys who are unstoppably possessed by their passion for playing do-or-die games with money (or maybe “compulsion” is a better word, or even “primordial, testosterone-driven need”) and they think it’s a perfectly legitimate competition because no wars are being started and no one’s getting killed. Or so they have lead themselves to believe.

Despite great actors, a good director and many, many good intentions, the film is dull and confused because the script is just not that good. And the biggest clue to what’s wrong with the script lies in this fact: It was adapted from a play . . . badly.

I hate plays. Well, no, that’s not exactly true. I can definitely love them and celebrate them when they are happening live on stage in front of me. What I hate is watching a play on screen. I really hate that, like I want to get down on the floor and pound my fists into the rug. I hate it that much.

Of course, watching an adapted play doesn’t have to be watching a play on screen. But in order for that to happen, whoever is doing the adapting needs to understand what films can do that plays cannot, and what plays can get away with on stage that will not translate to the screen. Sadly, I didn’t see that understanding at work here. I really wanted to like this film.

The problem lies in how the two mediums communicate. Plays communicate through dialogue first, action second and visuals a distant third. Movies communicate through action and visuals first and dialogue second with, I guess, nothing coming third. These different communication methods provide different intellectual and emotional experiences. Not that either one is better or worse. It’s just in the nature of the thing.

To elucidate further, I will venture a broad generalization some may have a problem with: As an overall tendency, plays are absorbed consciously through intellect and movies are absorbed unconsciously through emotions. NOT to say that either can’t have plenty of the other at work. They can and should. But, generally speaking, a play that is aimed at the viewer through emotion is called a musical. A film that wants to communicate with the viewer purely through intellect I would be inclined to call pretentious. It’s just not in the nature of the thing.

But this is not the sin of The Ides of March. This film is simply making a mistake. There is an ethic among progressive-minded writers and directors that says, “We will distinguish ourselves from Hollywood dribble by making it our priority not to insult the audience’s intelligence.” They think the way to do this is to avoid, at all costs, spoon-feeding the audience with information. I am also in favor of not spoon-feeding, but their ideological fervor makes them go too far. The saddest case of this is Syrianna, which was so obscure and indirect that most intelligent people I know felt more tormented by the film than challenged by it.

My guess is the writers of The Ides of March thought that maintaining the cryptic, fragmented, elliptical dialogue style of the original play would be a way of respecting their audience’s intelligence. They wanted to keep the playness of the play so as not to lose that intellectual appeal. But what this does instead is it forces the viewer to think in order to know what’s going on. It also misses out on film’s great strength, which is the ability to communicate unconsciously.

You like a character on screen without fully knowing why. I know why. It’s because you saw them do something that enabled you to become emotionally invested in them without having to evaluate them with your conscious mind. The character’s action embodies information about them and your emotional response is the channel through which that information is delivered into your unconscious. This is how you become invested in all of what goes on in the film. The film’s intellectual content, then, is in the ideas being metaphorically represented in the action. The viewer’s intellect is engaged by their willingness to reflect on those ideas.

When I first saw A Clockwork Orange at age 17, I knew it was a great film. I knew nothing about film in general and I wasn’t even too clear on what this film was about. But, in the powerful effect it had on me, I could feel the deep layers of meaning lurking under the surface. Last year, preparing a lecture on it, I applied my analytical brain to peel away all the layers and uncover those elements that had added up to such a powerful effect, and I was astonished at all the complex meanings that I found. A Clockwork Orange is a perfect example of speaking ideas to our conscious intelligence by embedding them in action and visuals that are delivered to our unconscious through emotion. (Likely, this film comes to mind because it also comments on election manipulation.)

Now, I could show you, scene by scene, all the mistakes that were made in the writing of The Ides of March – all the on-the-nose dialogue, all the clunky background exposition, and all the reporting of action rather than showing it happening. But that would take way more blog-inches than you likely want to invest.

So I’ll just give one example.

The story is about Stephen Meyers, an idealistic media strategist on a presidential campaign, who ultimately becomes corrupted by the dirty tricks he is surrounded with. Here’s a scene near the start of the film in which the opposing candidate’s campaign manager, Tom Duffy, is trying to get Stephen to come work for him. He has put his offer on the table and been rejected.

DUFFY: You are going to lose Ohio.

STEPHEN: I am not.

DUFFY: You’re sitting on about a six percent lead in both polls. Six percent of all Democrats polled.

STEPHEN: Eight.

DUFFY: No, six. Doesn’t matter. Ohio’s an open primary, right? Independents and Republicans get to vote for the Democratic candidate.

STEPHEN: You think they like your guy? A pro-choice, tax and spend liberal?

DUFFY: No. Fuck no. They hate him. They think they can beat my guy. But they’re very worried about yours. So starting tomorrow morning you’re gonna see a fucking blitz. Limbaugh, Hannity, all those right wing blogs are starting a “Get out the vote campaign.” They’ve started already. Every fucking conservative in Ohio is gonna line up around the block and punch my guy’s ticket. And that’s just one step. Ohio is gone. The polls don’t mean shit. Tomorrow morning everybody’s gonna know. That’s why I want you to handle the fallout that we’ll have in the press.

The problem here is that this is a very important piece of information. It’s a bombshell, and it figures big in the rest of the story. But it’s not getting the proper weight by being reported to us in dialogue. We need to learn about it through action. But how do you do that with something that will happen in the future? Here’s how: You do it by treating the dialogue as action. You write dialogue that communicates what the characters are doing to each other. This is the big distinction between screenwriting dialogue and playwriting dialogue.

Let’s go back to this scene to see what these characters are doing to each other through their dialogue.

DUFFY: You are going to lose Ohio. [What is Duffy doing? He is challenging Stephen.]

STEPHEN: I am not. [What is Stephen doing? Defending himself, although rather weakly.]

DUFFY: You’re sitting on about a six percent lead in both polls. [Duffy is beginning to build his case, but it’s confusing because it doesn’t sound like evidence to support losing a primary.] Six percent of the Democrats polled. [This sounds like he’s either repeating himself or correcting himself because we don’t have the proper context to understand what he’s really trying to say.]

STEPHEN: Eight. [Now Stephen is correcting Duffy but it’s not clear why since Duffy already seems to be conceding that Stephen’s guy has a significant lead.]

DUFFY: No, six. [Okay, it’s a pissing contest.] Doesn’t matter. [Changing the subject.] Ohio’s an open primary, right? Independents and Republicans get to vote for the Democratic candidate. [He’s starting to build his case with facts, but the information is a little lost on me because, again, I don’t have enough context. So I have to stop and think about it to understand his point.]

STEPHEN: You think they like your guy? A pro choice, tax and spend liberal? [Wait, I thought Stephen’s guy was also a pro-choice, tax and spend liberal. Now I’m confused.]

Oh, hell, it’s much easier to illustrate dialogue-as-doing by just rewriting the scene. (Suggestion: First read it through without the italicized comments, then read it with them) Here’s my version:

DUFFY: You are going to lose Ohio. [What is Duffy doing? Challenging Stephen.]

STEPHEN: With an eight point lead? Don’t think so. [What is Stephen doing? Countering Duffy’s challenge, with confidence.]

DUFFY: Six percent. [Hitting back.] But that doesn’t even matter. [Changing his approach.] The poll numbers don’t mean anything. They’re only polling Democrats and Ohio is an open primary. [Beginning to build his case for why Stephen’s candidate will lose.]

STEPHEN: You think Independents are going to turn out and give it to your man? [Trying to shoot holes in Duffy’s case.]

DUFFY: Yes, I do. And Republicans. [Standing firm and continuing to build.]

STEPHEN: How are you going to get Republicans to vote for a tax and spend liberal? [Challenging Duffy to prove his case.]

DUFFY: I’m not. They’re doing it for me. [Still building.]

STEPHEN: Who? [Still looking for proof.]

DUFFY: The Republicans. [Playing his trump card.]

STEPHEN: What are you talking about? They hate your guy worse than they hate mine. [Challenging the trump card.]

DUFFY: But they think they can beat my guy. They’re very worried about yours. [Offering the logic behind it.]

STEPHEN: So you think the Republicans are going to mobilize their voters to turn out for your guy on the 15^th. [Questioning Duffy’s grip on reality.]

DUFFY: I don’t think. I know. Starting tomorrow morning, you’re gonna see a fucking blitz. Limbaugh, Hannity, all those right wing blogs are gonna start a “Get out the vote campaign.” [Laying it all on the line.]

STEPHEN: Where are you getting this? [Challenging his sources.]

DUFFY: They’ve started already. [Giving his final proof.] Every fucking conservative in Ohio is gonna line up around the block and punch my guy’s ticket. [Filling out the picture.] The polls don’t mean shit. [Hammering it home.] And tomorrow morning everyone’s gonna know. [Leaving Stephen’s problem and coming back to his own problem.] That’s why I want you with us, to handle the fallout we’ll get in the press. [Making his final appeal to Stephen to come work for him.]

Now go back and read it with the italics to see what they are doing to each other (if you haven’t already).

Hopefully, my little illustration makes the benefits of this approach self-evident. I’m only trying to help. I really want George Clooney to be successful with his political films.

Hark! Rejoice! Good news is at hand! The dramatized discussion on the realities of sexual violence, begun 20 years ago by Callie Khouri in Thelma & Louise, is not, after all, dead. But in this showing, the glamorous, ass-kicking, newly empowered female is not an eponymous fiction on screen. She is, rather, in the director’s chair.  What does appear on screen is a visually spare, verbally muted, blue-grey toned Bosnian war drama that shines a light on rape as a military weapon as it explores what happens when two people in love find themselves on opposing sides of a conflict.

Now I wonder why so many critics can’t find it within themselves to uphold this well-considered and compassionate work. Few of them seem able to discuss the film apart from the person who made it, which brings up an unfortunate Catch 22 of beauty, glamor, sex appeal, wealth and fame: Jolie’s film might have been judged more fairly had she kept her authorship under wraps, but then no one would have bothered to see it.

I don’t want to dwell too much on these critic ravings, but I do have to muse aloud on two of their frequent slurs: that the film is, on the one hand, an “activist film” and, on the other, a “vanity project.” These strike me as somewhat mutually exclusive, although there was one critic who cleverly managed to bypass that contradiction by accusing Jolie of being motivated by a desire to serve her vanity as an activist.

What I’d like to know is: When did it become a sin to hope your film will have an impact on society? And, how did being behind the camera of a film with no stars, in a foreign culture and a foreign language, confronting the viewer with uncomfortable truths become part of the definition of a vanity project?

Here’s what I have to say about In the Land of Blood and Honey: It is not only a very good film, it is a remarkably good directorial debut, as well as an impressive first-time screenwriting effort. And the critics, whatever their motivations, are missing the point.

Here’s the point, as I see it: Having, by now, in her humanitarian work, witnessed untold horrors around the world, Jolie became gripped by an impulse to tell a story reflecting some fraction of the totality of what she has seen. She could have chosen the story of child warriors in Africa, or Pol Pot survivors in Cambodia, or women living under the Taliban in Afghanistan or any number of other human tragedies she has visited. But she chose the systematic rape and ethnic cleansing of the Bosnian War.

This was a sensible choice for two reasons: one, given that the audience she most wants to impact with a revealing picture of aggressive conflict is the comfortable, sheltered western audience, to focus on a European tragedy brings it sufficiently close to home for those viewers to connect with. And, two, being that she is, herself, female, choosing to focus on the use of rape as a weapon in these conflicts makes it personal, which is the strongest place from which to undertake the telling of a story. These are the kinds of responsible choices any mature writer would make who feels compelled to say something meaningful in their creative work.

However, given who Jolie is in the world, her creative work is bound to attract a percentage of viewers who are simply the wrong ones for it. “Our favorite bombshell action star has directed a war film? Oh boy! Can’t wait! Katherine Bigelow, watch out!” But this is not a war film. The Bosnian War is raging somewhere in the background. What is being foregrounded here are the civilian by-products of war: the persecution of ethnic muslims, the massacre of men suspected to be soldiers and, most of all, the systematic rape of women. That last one is key because, when endeavoring to gain dominance over a population, it actually isn’t necessary to kill all the women. Rape will do the trick just fine. This is what makes it such an effective weapon of war. And this is the statement Jolie felt compelled to put forth.

But how does one do that in a filmed drama? Do you show the literal experience of a Bosnian muslim woman being taken hostage, put in an encampment and raped over and over again? That would be kind of hard to watch. And, more important, how do you end that story? The war ends. She goes back to her husband (if he’s still alive) who, entrenched in cultural prejudice, can’t help seeing her as tainted and therefore rejects her. As much as this may be the truth, such a harsh delivery doesn’t help the audience take it in. A compassionate storyteller must have a certain amount of compassion for the viewer, as well.

Okay, so how bout if all the women in the encampment band together and carry out a plan to poison their persecutors through the food they are forced to cook them everyday? With the men writhing in pain on the floor, the women grab their guns and form a guerilla force not to be reckoned with, ultimately winning the day. Hooray! Hooray! But, wait,  . . . that’s not what we’re trying to say here. We’re trying to shed light on an under-acknowledged crime that persists all over the world, to this day. The reality is that women don’t win in this fight and won’t win until both men and women acknowledge it enough to want to stop it. To end with an outlandish Hollywood triumph is only to support our collective denial of how unending the problem still is.

So, if these options are unworkable, how do we tell a story that is grounded in devastating literal truth while also pointing to a larger human Truth? One way this is done is by making the main character’s plight both individual and universal, which then allows it a metaphoric resonance. Okay, so let’s try placing in the middle of this rape-as-a-weapon-of-war story two people from opposing sides who are in love. What does that do? It takes the extreme broken end of human connection, second only to murder (or, arguably, equal to it), which is rape, and puts it up against the far other end of human connection, from which rape is so horribly disconnected, which is love. To specify our characters as experiencing romantic love is simply giving them the most intensified manifestation of the greater universal love that has reached complete breakdown in any state of war.

This is what Jolie chose to do, and to great effect. As the relationship between Danijel, a Serbian military officer, and Ajla, a Bosnian muslim civilian, progresses, in the midst of surrounding horror, we see the potential that exists between them while also seeing the obstacles they are up against. The emotions they feel are reflective of all human connection and provide a fuller picture of how much is being lost in the perpetuation of brutality, rape and war.

Their story also reminds us that, where sex is concerned, context is everything. The wartime context brings us right up to that delicate edge between lovemaking and rape. On the one hand, violent aggression fosters sexual aggression. But, on the other, being surrounded with death triggers a need for life affirming love-making. How can all these opposing impulses be resolved? Jolie takes a light touch as she endeavors to do so, very much in the European filmmaking tradition, but perhaps too light for some of her American viewing public.

A post-script to the film offers a supporting fact: In the Serbian ethnic cleansing campaign against Bosnian Muslims, an estimated 50,000 women were raped. Fifty thousand? Statistics of this magnitude are too often a side note in news reports on war. I encountered a similar example just the other day when a headline caught my eye, “Active-Duty Army Suicides Reach Record High.” My concern for veterans drew me in and I learned that, indeed, there were two more suicides in 2011 than in the previous years’ high. Then, well into the article, I read that 2011 showed a 30% increase in reported rapes among the ranks. Thirty percent? Why was that not the headline? Our own society is still a long way from showing an appropriate moral outrage about sexual violence.

That Jolie is clearly ahead of her society on this subject makes me think of the popular 19^th century British actress Fanny Kemble who left her southern slave-owning husband because she couldn’t stomach her complicity as a slave-owner’s wife. Kemble already knew that which her society would stay determinedly blind to for a while yet — slavery is a crime against humanity. Nothing forced her to give up her comfortable life other than a grinding moral discomfort.

Likewise, Jolie used her position to speak out loud about the horrifying reality of sexual violence perpetrated against women in war, another crime against humanity. Nothing in her surroundings demanded that she do this. Only her grinding moral discomfort. I think she deserves high praise for making this film. And I hope to God she makes another one.

Khouri has said in interviews that her original idea was “two women on a crime spree.” No doubt this image appealed to her for its challenge to conventional notions of what women can and should do. She toiled with it for a while, going down some dead end paths (at one point Louise was an oil company executive from Dallas), but nothing was quite clicking, until she had a chance encounter:

“One day I was walking down the street,” says Khouri, “minding my business, when this old guy in a car starts talking to me. He’s old enough to be my grandfather. I’m ignoring him, which is what you’re supposed to do in that situation; you know, I can’t hear you, I can’t see you, you can say whatever you want, I’m not a human being. Then he said, ‘I’d like to see you suck my dick,’ and I just lost it for a second. I pulled my sunglasses off and I walked over to the car and said, ‘and I’d like to shoot you in the fucking face.’”

Thus was born Thelma & Louise.

Khouri knew that she would never really shoot the man in the face. For two reasons. One, her internal moral code does not allow her to go around killing people for insulting her. And, two, even if her moral code did allow it, she knew that her society would not consider a lifetime’s build up of verbal assaults a valid justification for violent retribution against a last-straw incident.

Nonetheless, the anger behind her impulse was real. It needed to be expressed, which brings up the question, How does a woman channel her anger without hurting someone or getting herself in trouble? As all women know, in such a situation, there is no protection. The old man is free to verbally assault her and never be held to account for it. No police officer would arrest him. Neither is it likely another man in earshot would take action in her defense. And to take action in her own defense entails risk. She could have unleashed a far worse attack from the old man by confronting him the way she did.

She was already seeking expression of her anger in her story of two women on a crime spree. But that was about what it means, more generally, to be a woman in this world. This incident zeroed in on a much more specific anger, sparking an Aha! moment. I got it! The two women are on the lam because they killed a man for assaulting them! Now we have Louise shooting Harlan in the roadhouse parking lot as a perfect metaphoric outlet for Khouri’s anger at the old man in the car, giving her a much better revenge than actually shooting him in the face.

But that’s not all. If Khouri had actually shot the man in the face, she would have been villified. She wants people to know this, too. So with her two-women-on-the-lam story, she is also saying: Men are allowed to act out all their base impulses towards women, whether verbally or physically, with little to no accountability. If, on the other hand, a woman were to lose control and assault a man in response, there would be no mercy. This is the picture she wants to portray. As if she is saying, If I actually did this, they would hunt me from here to the Grand Canyon and then call out an army to make sure I didn’t get away.

Which brings us to that ending at the edge of the Grand Canyon.

First, let’s take a look at a couple of possible alternate endings. Here’s one: Trapped at the edge of the canyon, they give themselves up and are taken into custody, and we know they are sure to go to jail. In drama, this is a time-honored tragic ending that confronts the viewer with a stark social reality to open their blindered eyes, as was done to great effect in The Bicycle Thief. But for Khouri’s purposes, this choice would have been too dispiriting and disempowering.

Another option is seeing them simply gunned down at the edge of the Grand Canyon by an overwhelming disproportion of force, as was indicated by the freeze frame at the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But there is an element of fate in Butch and Sundance’s demise. It’s actually a classic life-of-crime comeuppace ending. In Thelma and Louise, we are not falling in league with a couple of crime professionals. Rather, we are swept along with average citizens through previously unknown fields of power imbalance and injustice. This would have made such a violent ending unbearably harsh to witness.

Besides, Khouri wasn’t out to tell a story of victimhood, whether of fate or social blightedness. She wanted her women to be empowered by their experiences. And they were. Thelma, especially, undergoes a complete transformation from a ditzy dependent housewife to a self-directed woman. And this liberating process of transformation is triggered, so to speak, by Louise’s empowering act of revenge. So why, with so much positive transformation and empowerment going on, do they have to die in the end? Why not just have them escape to Mexico with a last shot on a beach drinking Margaritas?

When questioned about the ending, Khouri says this: “Women who are completely free from all the shackles that restrain them have no place in this world. The world is not big enough to support them. They will be brought down if they stay here.” Note that Khouri is describing individual empowerment (women who are free from shackles) in the midst of social oppression (a world not big enough for them). (Note also that she says such women have “no place in this world.” She doesn’t say “no place in the U.S., but they could have a nice life in Mexico.”) These are the two images that Khouri wants to leave you with. She wants you to feel the thrill of liberation, but she also wants to make sure you understand that such liberation cannot survive in the world as it currently exists.

Khouri is acutely aware that in this world (even these 20 years later), Thelma and Louise would have no hope of escape because the male-powered system is so overwhelmingly stacked against them, having both the motive (we can’t let women get away with this sort of behavior) and the means (the technology, the man power, the global reach). Then they would be put through the criminal justice system, which would simply chew them up and spit them out to a hostile, sensationalizing media, with neither showing any particular interest in uncovering actual Truth, despite their reputed purpose.

Thus, while this film is often referred to as a revenge fantasy, this is not quite accurate. A revenge fantasy is just that – a fantasy, like Inglourious Basterds. Khouri is not interested in that kind of fantasy. She knows too well there is no happy ending (in this world) to a story of female retribution, no matter how justified, or trauma-based, or just plain human that impulse is. So she has carefully avoided the margheritas-by-the-sea ending, although she makes reference to it in dialogue a few scenes earlier.

However, she still wants them to have at least some kind of triumph. “After all they went through,” she says, “I didn’t want anybody to be able to touch them.” So she had them soar off into heaven. “They flew away, out of this world and into the mass unconscious,” she says. This is a fantasy ending of another kind. One that requires a degree of imagination and the ability to read onscreen events as metaphor.

Khouri points out that people who complain about the ending being a suicide are reading the film very literally. I would like to add that they are also looking for a revenge fantasy that ends with a literal, real world triumph. They want the smug, self-satisfied margheritas-by-the-sea ending. Khouri’s choice is more sophisticated than that. She is effectively saying, “The way things are now, there is no chance at real world triumph for these women and I don’t want to sugar coat that reality. But neither do I want them brought down by this unjust world. I want them to achieve a higher triumph.” So she gives them the only triumph avaiable to them, in the form of transcendance to a purely spiritual realm, what she calls flying into the mass unconscious.

Indeed, the passing of time has shown her words were apt. It seems the film did fly into our mass unconscious, because now, 20 years later, the spirit of Thelma and Louise yet lives, urging us to keep at the task of making a world big enough to support women who are free.

Apparently, this is “record-breaking” in the festival’s 64-year history. It also stands in stark contrast to last year’s competition, which tallied zero films in this category. Although I’m all for recognizing progress, I feel the need to note that, taken together, these stats add up to a pretty poor record. One might be tempted to think this year’s festival programmers were going out of their way to atone for past sins. I’m all for that, too. Progress should be welcomed, regardless of the motivation that prompts it.

Let’s keep in mind though that the larger goal in this accounting is to bring more women’s voices into the cultural conversation, both for the empowerment of women and for achieving greater balance in the world overall. Progress in this is not measured by percentages of women directors alone. Even films directed by men can be positively influenced in this regard by women producers, women editors, cinematographers, composers, and, not the least among these, women writers.

In that light, this year’s festival would have been a perfect opportunity to celebrate the longevity of a loud and lively female-generated film that remains unsurpassed in its cultural impact. It was 20 years ago this week at Cannes that Thelma & Louise first unspooled before audiences. Next week, May 24^th, marks the 20^th anniversary of its theatrical release in the United States.

Of course, for the festival programmers to gain points from this against their female director shut out last year, they would have to recognize the female screenwriter, Callie Khouri, as the primary creative force behind its vision, rather than the male director, Ridley Scott. And we know how those French love their “Auteur Theory.” (Sorry for the grousing tone here, but the Auteur Theory is a sore point among screenwriters.)

This film – Thelma & Louise – represents a breed unto itself on so many levels. Let’s pretend for a moment that it was written by a man. Let’s say this young man is a novice screenwriter with a burning statement he wants to make about his place in this world. His message is out-of-the-box of conventional thinking and challenging to comfortable assumptions. He promotes his screenplay to a few contacts in the industry and ultimately finds himself with Ridley Scott and two A-list actors who “get” his message and treat it with utmost respect. In short, this is a screenplay by a first time screenwriter with a socially startling message that was manifested as a big budget film almost exactly as written. How often does that happen? That’s the first thing.

Then the film goes out into the world and gains both critical and commercial success. But the success is not from having an A-list director and stars, an exciting story with good production values, or sufficient helpings of sex and violence served up to distract from whatever substance might be buried underneath. The success of this film is exactly because people can’t stop talking about its deeply felt and furious message. That’s the second thing.

Then this first-time screenwriter of the film with the irate point of view wins an Academy Award. That’s the third thing.

And then, for one more thing, 20 years later, this angry film is still being talked about and written about. As recently as 2007, two entire books were published still examining the film’s cultural impact (Thelma & Louise Live! The Cultural Afterlife of an American Film and Thelma & Louise and Women in Hollywood). It’s the film that won’t die, despite what happened to the characters in it.

Now add to all the aforementioned the fact that this shocking, challenging message was the singular vision of a female first-time screenwriter pouring out her feelings about what it means to be a woman in this world and you have, as far as I’m concerned, a film of nearly unparalleled historical import. Especially because it’s not just all about the message. In screenwriting terms, the film has great artistic significance as well.

Oh, how I lament the lack of notice this 20^th anniversary is being given. All I’ve seen on the internet so far is a new edition of the DVD and a screening with Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon in Toronto. To do my part in filling this void, I’m going to devote my next few posts to the artistic significance of the Thelma & Louise screenplay. Stay tuned.

One reason I make sure not to miss these films is that I’m a big-picture person (I like to find the larger meaning in things) and this is where one can get the big picture on an issue as it has developed over time. Otherwise, at best I’m only getting fragments flying out at me in isolation amidst all the other noise I must integrate in the course of a day.

Sometimes these films tell me what I already kinda know but don’t want to think about. And sometimes they reveal heinous abuses I had no idea of, and that the great majority of decent, thoughtful people would not stand for if only they knew about them, too.

The latest issue-oriented feature documentary to expand my worldview is about two subjects very close to me: women and the media. It is aptly called Miss Representation. The big picture this film presents gives much context to inform the Christine Vachon/Miranda July discussion I recounted a couple of posts back.

Basically, it all boils down to this: the media has two objectives in its portrayals of women. One, to pose their worth entirely as a measure of physical appearance. And, two, to abuse and discredit any woman in a position of power or leadership. This second objective appears to be paying off quite well since the U.S. is way down the list of industrialized nations when it comes to female representation in elected positions.

Here are a few bare statistics I learned. Among the 250 top-grossing films last year, 16% of the protagonists were female. (One of the film’s commentators had a catchy name for such “girl power” protagonists as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. She called them, “the fighting fuck toy.”). Among writers of those top-250 films, 10% were female and among directors, 7% were female. The power continues to diminish the further up you go. Among film industry executives with any kind of clout, 3% were women. You’ve come a long way, baby.

The big picture I saw emerging from this film is of an issue that goes beyond being simply a grievance about equal rights for women. The apparently deliberate and calculated misrepresentation of women in the media is a crisis for humanity. It is well known by now among reasonably informed people that the world has devolved to a place of tremendous imbalance in the economic, humanitarian and environmental spheres. This film tells us that gender imbalance must be taken very seriously as a critical ingredient for maintaining all other imbalances. If we want more balance in the world, we must begin with balanced gender representation.

The film urges viewers to take action. Here’s an action I will take: until further notice, I am offering my story consultation services to women for half my usual fee. Actually, I think I’ll take this another step: I am also offering my services to men telling a woman’s story for three-quarters my usual fee. (My usual fee is $200 per hour.)

See the film. Here’s the trailer:

watch?v=W2UZZV3xU6Q&feature=channel_video_title