VAN SANT AND DAMON’S PROMISED PROPAGANDA

Gus Van Sant must really be out of imagination (or horniness) to make the drab, politically slanted Promised Land. That’s two phony films in a row for Gus, following the 2010 Restless. Promised Land takes on the fracking controversy about drilling for gas in underground shale deposits, using Gus’ Good Will Hunting star Matt Damon as a gas company stooge trying to trick Pennsylvania farmers into leasing their land. As an exposé of the fashionable dilemma, the film is unconvincing politically and fraudulently sentimental about the average American’s skeptical response to technological progress.

When Damon, as corporate shill Steve Butler, tries hoodwinking rural folk (“‘Fuck you money’ is the ultimate liberator” he tells a landowner), his dishonesty recalls George Clooney’s self-pity in Up in the Air. Damon’s a shrewder actor, so he eschews Clooney’s false empathy and portrays a man who corrupts the American Dream while refusing to lose the American rat race. This frick-or-frack quandary turns Promised Land into a reverse-Capra movie in which the little people convert the bad protagonist—reviving his buried good instincts.

But Steve’s transformation is half-ass; his heart isn’t in the job anyway, only his contempt—the phony common-folk stance the Environmental Left prefers. In Promised Land, the anti-fracking controversy seems to be about class superiority as much as about the environment.

Van Sant, Damon and co-screenwriter, co-producer and co-star John Krasinski (portraying Dustin Noble, an antagonistic environmentalist) pretend that political position is more important than complicated truth. Using pretzeled logic, these filmmakers twist their story into unbelievable shapes to make the self-righteous point that Americans’ greed outweighs their truest values. Easy for millionaire filmmakers to say.

The love triangle between Steve, Dustin and local schoolteacher Alice (Rosemarie Dewitt) lacks the gay sexual tension typical of Van Sant; this is just a propagandistic gimmick relying on the sentimentality of white-picket-fence heterosexual normalcy. (You can hear sheep bleating behind Steve’s confidence game, and an American flag is used as backdrop.) Van Sant, Damon and Krasinski present what amounts to anti-fracking propaganda without deciding which side they are on. It’s as if the industrial revolution—and unbiased cinema—never happened.

Too bad the trailer for Hereafter doesn’t reveal how grindingly torpid this movie is. It opens with a CGI action scene in which Marie (Cécile de France), a French woman vacationing in South East Asia, is killed when her resort is swamped by a tidal wave. After she revives, the death experience leaves her freaked out. I think most viewers will experience the remaining two-plus hours as something like stillbirth.

Matt Damon stars in Clint Eastwood’s new film Hereafter.

Director Clint Eastwood stages that out-of-the-blue tsunami so that it moves like a glacier. (His F/X team devises an apocalyptic tableau in which people attempt out-running the giant wave.) Its creeping pace and gruesome details are just the beginning of Eastwood’s crushingly dull fatuousness. He gives a drab, realistic tone to the next plot strand—the central story of George (Matt Damon), a reluctant clairvoyant in San Francisco who shirks his ability to talk to the dead. Very slowly, Eastwood alternates between scenes of George’s skepticism and Marie’s bewilderment. He then adds a high-pathos third plot: Marcus (George McLaren), an inarticulate English boy who longs to communicate with his dead twin brother.

Between George’s religious doubt, Marie’s befuddlement and Marcus’ despair, Hereafter takes its characters’ spiritual confusion about what’s on the other side of life and uses it to wax sentimental about loneliness and grief. As freaky-creepy as Changeling—in which Eastwood combined mother-love with serial killing—it’s a lugubrious version of that old Saturday Night Live routine “Deep Thoughts.”

But Hereafter is really full of half-thoughts. As with Woody Allen’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, it’s difficult to tell if this film confronts belief or if disbelief is simply being given the upper hand. Clint and Woody are not wide-eyed, hopeful zealots; they both ridicule occult practitioners and seem to share fashionable, anti-religious cynicism. And it spreads to their misuse of actors. George’s doubt about his special ability (“It’s not a gift; it’s a curse!”) merely seems ornery; playing a common, blue-collar man’s crisis of faith brings out the most condescending acting of Damon’s career so far. Marie’s career woman chic recalls Julie Christie’s exotic alertness, yet every scene knocks her about physically or emotionally punishes de France’s beauty. Little Marcus must be the saddest- looking child in the history of movies: He has droopy eyes and a perpetual pallor. There’s no spark of childhood sensitivity or longing; McLaren simply mopes.

Pretending profundity, Eastwood piles on bleak thoughts. His solemn heavy-handed method is so artless and inexpressive it’s almost primitive. The English twin brother’s death scene repeats the same crane-rising camera movement and forlorn look to the sky that turned Mystic River’s funeral scene into a joke. Eastwood’s self-composed tinkly piano score (not subtle, just amateurish) embarrassingly accompanies Marcus’ separation from his drug-addict mom. Scenes of Marie’s adultery with her married TV producer (Thierry Neuvic) imply a moral judgment, yet Peter Morgan’s script neglects her spiritual awakening; she’s more lost than ever—until a depressed cupid effects a hoary Hollywood ending. All these calculated convergences—showing everyone’s common fate—suggests Claude Lelouch without charm.

There’s no mystical quality to Eastwood’s drab depiction of spiritual searching—its emptiness is deliberate. Despite the global storyline, Eastwood and cinematographer Tom Stern make Asia, England, France and America all glum-looking. It’s that unvaried, bland realism of Eastwood’s other hackneyed, unimaginative films (especially the war diptych Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima); that same green-plus-shadow visual scheme: color photography so lackluster it looks black and white. Only the brief opening shot, containing the image of a pink tropical flower, has any bit of liveliness. Eastwood’s such an unimaginative hack, in love with his own obstinacy, that he keeps this pretense at exploring higher consciousness horror-movie dark.

Have critics forgotten everything they valued in movies—pace, beauty, cogency, feeling—when it comes to Eastwood? Treating this dirge as a profound event demonstrates the cinema establishment’s willingness to stunt their own expectations and dreams by accepting Eastwood’s paltry clichés, his secular piety. George’s visions, like Marie’s experience of the afterlife, resemble cartoon metaphysics: bright light clouded by fuzzy silhouettes. It looks like a Ron Howard imitation of Spielberg. Given a subject that should be thrilling and full of awe, Hereafter is cornball whenever it isn’t plain dull.
_

Hereafter
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Runtime: 129 min.

For those who missed that unexpected satirical graphics lecture on the current recession that capped Adam McKay’s The Other Guys, Inside Job is the next best thing. With entertaining clarity, writer-director Charles Ferguson explains what caused the recession that began September 15, 2008. Not a comic like McKay, Ferguson seriously chronicles the twisty financial dealings and recondite legislative details of deregulation that started back in the Reagan administration and eventually let the banks go wild with subprime loans and kickback benefits. He traces more recent government history that led to the current economic meltdown, but then Ferguson gets caught up in satisfying the “Gotcha!” urge that ruins most recent docs—like his 2008 anti-Bush, Iraq War screed No End in Sight.

Spitzer had his own inside job.

This time, as Ferguson comes close to Gotcha—uncovering the family tree of government appointments and greedy corporate privilege that led to lost jobs, foreclosed homes and banking bailouts—he backs down. He not only drops his entertaining intelligibility, he loses the deeper subject that would give this documentary power.

It isn’t enough that Inside Job ends on a muckraking note—“Some things are worth fighting for”—which calls for what? Revolution? Putsch? Anarchy? Narrator Matt Damon mouths Ferguson’s glib sentiments, appealing to populist anger (rubber-stamped by an ad-blurb promising the film “will get you boiling mad”). Simplifying the complex of establishment corruption prevents Ferguson from being the Patrick Henry of the digital age. His true interest is subtler than pamphleteering: He likes examining the structure of America’s power elite like Lewis Lapham’s The American Ruling Class.

No End in Sight disappointed because Ferguson settled for Bush-bashing as an end-all, blame-all explanation and absolved the workings of the government bureaucracy (whistle-blowers) he had discovered. Inside Job, as its title suggests, is more clear-headed about white-collar guilt, perhaps because financial misdeeds are so common—so implicitly understood—that Ferguson doesn’t immediately go into high-dudgeon. Instead, he gets right to the source of political and managerial arrogance. He begins with the folly of politicians, using the example of Iceland privatizing its own banks then destroying its economy. It is both a warning and an allegory. After all, what really offends Ferguson and drives his filmmaking is officialdom: the workings of egotistical authority from the Ivy League to Wall Street to Washington, D.C.

This linkage is fascinating beyond the recession itself (John Kirby and Lapham got at it definitively in the little-seen The American Ruling Class). Ferguson might deal with it exclusively some day, given that Inside Job shows improvement, avoiding No End in Sight’s partisanship. The financial mismanagement shared by Democrat and Republican administrations over the past three decades suggests Ferguson’s viewpoint is growing, getting closer to what most recent docs lack: understanding.

Inside Job provides financial summaries and information that most mainstream newsmedia haven’t. Still, the despair and anger and suspicion it arouses needs a place to go if this is going to be better than McKay’s lark or a feel-righteous Daily Show episode. Ferguson’s explication requires even greater feeling than the sarcasm of Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time” that opens the film; it requires art such as Oliver Stone provided in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, where stock market megalomania was put in human, rather than tabloid, terms. Critics disparaged Stone’s thrilling exposé because it didn’t provide them with easy castigation. (They always expect Stone to be a less conscientious, imaginative and skillful director than he turns out to be.) Money Never Sleeps understands the characteristics of bureaucracy that Ferguson glosses in Inside Job, yet struggles to comprehend.

Ferguson’s method (he’s a political science doctorate from M.I.T. and Brookings Institute fellow) is to follow the career paths of bureaucrats and government appointees like Charles Keating, Henry Paulson, Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, Ben Bernanke and the lofty fiats of Reagan, Clinton, Bush and, briefly, Obama. He outlines the culprits who de-regulated the banks long before Bush took office and currently have come back to justify their earlier mistakes. This clarity opposes the fat cats’ sleight-of-highhandedness—as when quoting Greenspan’s contemptuous evasion, “If you had a PhD in mathematics, you couldn’t understand whether de-regulation was good for you.”

Inside Job becomes rousing when Ferguson gets a bureaucrat in his crosshairs, like disingenuous lobbyist Scott Talbot, fumbling Fred Mishkin, hard-nosed David McCormick or short-tempered academic-factotum Glenn Hubbard, who dares him, “Take your best shot.” Ferguson counters them with a series of exclamations: “For me that’s clearly not true!” “You must be joking!” “You can’t be serious!” Ferguson’s querulous tone departs from the film’s cool, five-part structure because he can’t hide his ire which comes from his distaste (same as No End in Sight) for the temperament of these prevaricating pols—such as economist and former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, shown reclining with a glass of scotch in his hand. And the best part of Inside Job tracks these guys to their lairs.

“Does Columbia Business School have a conflict-of-interest problem?” Ferguson asks, hunting down the strange, suspicious connection between academic sponsorship and government promotion. He comes close to revealing how academic elitism and privilege facilitates Wall Street’s personal interests and the government’s collusion. When Ferguson details the history of Treasury Secretary and Federal Reserve positions, he’s on fascinating, dangerous ground—meekly exposing Obama’s elitist agenda. But this calls for something more than a Gotcha movie.

Consider that Inside Job’s one clear villain, Larry Summers (recent Obama Cabinet resignee, past Harvard University president and former Department of Treasury Secretary from 1999 to 2001) is also a hero in The Social Network. The only way to escape this hall of mirrors is for Ferguson to abandon Michael Moore-style denunciation and get closer to the human propensity for power and self-interest. If Inside Job were a great movie it would rebuke the asinine class/ethnic games of The Social Network, in which Summers is used to humiliate the CGI Winklevoss Twins. Ferguson hasn’t gotten there yet. His poli-sci fascination still needs to attain Oliver Stone’s insight or even the depth that Marcel Ophüls brought to his 1970s documentaries, where humanity was more important than political stance. If Ferguson means to surpass the purely topical snark of The Other Guys, he needs to realize this: Compassion can also be a clarifying tool.
_
Inside Job
Directed by Charles Ferguson
Runtime: 108 min.

Matt Damon is Bourne again in Greengrass’ Green Zone.

Damon portrays Sgt. Ray Miller—essentially Bourne in army fatigues—chosen to find WMD in the first days of the U.S. invasion of Baghdad. When his first assignment comes up empty, Miller is instantly skeptical—like a reader of The Nation. He immediately concentrates his efforts on undermining his commanders. He uses a disgruntled local (Ayad Hamsa) to track down a devious Sunni leader while abetting a rogue CIA agent (Brendan Gleeson)—essentially spying against the U.S. campaign.

Miller’s a phantom figure with neither personal background nor political motivation. He’s simply correct; the kind of protagonist that could only arise from the Left’s Bush-era sense of resentment and self-righteousness. Damon converts his over-aged boy scout, tow-headed zeal into a practiced air of moral superiority. The script deprives Miller of the complex, soulful disillusionment which marked Richard Burton’s great performance in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but Damon has perfected looking down his nose at his superiors, fellow grunts, shifty-swarthy Iraqis—and us. It is an insidious, racist, fascist characterization.

Obviously, Damon would rather play a soldier than be one; and he’d much rather be a propagandist. Green Zone follows the Bourne pattern of escapist violence, yet it argues against Operation Iraqi Freedom with the same smugness as Syriana and the documentary No End In Sight. Stuck in Bush-era cynicism, Greengrass and Damon ignore the success of the military surge but question the legitimacy of WMD claims (“The intel is a problem”), critique the dissolution of the Iraqi army and discredit torture as interrogation. Yet, the Bourne team loves violence: There’s more gunfire and bone crunching than political discussion.

Instead of offering political discussion, Greengrass and Damon play post-Vietnam cops-and-robbers. Despite his enlistment, Miller’s a military dissident. His seditious actions are meant to flatter anti-war sentiments. Miller appeals to those hung up on WMDs yet complacent about Saddam Hussein’s treachery and willfully naive about American political interests. The big problem Green Zone (named after safe territory in Iraq) represents is that these filmmakers, like the makers of The Hurt Locker, no longer know how to characterize heroism. The Hurt Locker’s psychotic G.I. now proves his moral superiority in Green Zone by becoming a traitorous/valorous spy.

Damon has flipped the script of his scrupulous performance in De Niro’s complex CIA drama The Good Shepherd. Apparently, when Damon and George Clooney aren’t robbing Las Vegas, they’re most comfortable impugning the U.S. government. Only the privilege of democracy allows such hypocrisy. (Green Zone’s finale is another Three Days of the Condor imitation where the media justifies citizen disloyalty.) And Greengrass, whose United 93 reduced 9/11 into Airport 75, again displays trite technique. Half the film is whip-pans, stuff you can’t see. It’s for those who mistake blur and noise for action. Greengrass’ pseudo-doc style is as unprincipled as Michael Winterbottom’s. Ironically, when Miller rats on the Pentagon about “false assertion” and “manufactured intelligence” he could as well be describing how Green Zone itself uses action-movie myths to counter political myths.

–
Green Zone
Directed by Paul Greengrass
Runtime: 115 min.