Movie break (Quick Vu): A moving story with maybe misplaced emphasis: The Birth of a Nation (2016)

A first directorial effort by a young Black actor deserves a better hearing in these “racially tried” times

Seventeenth in a series: The Dawning of the Age of the ACA: Looking askance at pop and political culture of 2011–now

Subsections below:

An old court case was brought up; the responsive audience becomes anecdotally evident

Parker makes a Black-angled film but for the purposes of a larger historical consciousness; a special-audience textbook provides some context

Picking up the story more exclusively from the film; the racial angle

Interesting sides: Technical aspects

Nat Turner as a genius, and as a strategist

The film is generally tasteful in what it reveals

I have been dilly-dallying getting some crude review written for this film, and have no one but myself (and unusual circumstances in which I’ve been complexly creative) to blame. But as it happens, this film has strangely been subject to a societal obliviousness that is puzzling.

In the October 15 New York Times, a letter to the editor from the actor Hal Holbrook (no stranger to standing heartily for Americana, as he has portrayed Mark Twain) questioned why the film didn’t get more attention. Look up his letter if you can.

An old court case was brought up; the responsive audience becomes anecdotally evident

There was a lot of media kerfuffle (including a 60 Minutes piece in September anticipating the film’s release that touched on the sexual issue) about director and actor Nate Parker’s having been part of a situation (in the late 1990s) in which rape charges were filed and led to a trial, and Parker was acquitted. As it happened, his friend Jean McGianni Celestin, who had been in the same original situation that prompted the charges—and who is a cowriter of the original story for this film—was found guilty, but he was exonerated on appeal.

Many years later (2012, I think), the woman centered on whom the rape charges were made committed suicide. When media coverage focused on these parts of the story, which ranged over more than a decade, the implication seemed to be, maybe, that the old (alleged) rape had led to the woman’s suicide, and thus the “astute reporter” asks Parker, how does he feel about the old rape charges now? Which, of course, seems presumptuous, at best. Parker had been not found guilty (do due court decisions not mean anything anymore?). And the woman, as we can safely-enough hypothesize, may have had personality issues that went beyond the old alleged-rape event (and need not even have conditioned, insincerely, the rape charges), and that led to her suicide. So why blame Parker?

It was this personal-life situation that some media coverage suggested played a role in the film’s not doing well in its first week of release. I think this was debatable at best.

I went to see it on its first day of release, unusual for me for any film in recent years. I went to an early-afternoon showing, and for a time before the promo trailers started rolling, it seemed everyone else but myself in the theater was Black. I felt like a Black man entering a white neighborhood to suspicious looks (though I didn’t get specifically these from the people in the theater, in Rockaway Township, N.J., a mainly white area). As it happened, one or two other whites showed up, but the audience was overwhelmingly Black. I wonder how much this was the case across the country.

The film’s title, as is well known now, alludes to the 1915 silent epic The Birth of a Nation, directed by D.W. Griffith, who is known among film historians and the likes of American Civ professors as the father of the modern, feature-length movie. Though Griffith’s films were silents, they had sections and film techniques—like one visual situation immediately relatable to the following one (like a reaction shot)—that were new at the time, and became staples in feature films before long. Griffith was a Southerner, and the film addressed the American Civil War. One of its quaint features, and of course leading to cautionary “asterisks” given for this film in more recent times, is having a Ku Klux Klan group function as heroes in the film. Considering the time Griffith lived, this was not totally unexpected for a man of his background, though of course it makes the film solidly dated today (like old-time advertisements, from the 1880s or so, that may have racist content that seems strikingly in poor taste today). (End note 1)

Parker makes a Black-angled film but for the purposes of a larger historical consciousness; a special-audience textbook provides some context

Parker’s intent seems to be to update the (cinema-referenced) idea of the “birth of a nation,” and show how this nation—I think he meant the whole thing, not just the Black community—got its start, or went through a crucible of a dire condition that could only be reason to grow and mature beyond it, i.e., being in the throes of slavery and groping attempts to overthrow it. Parker, maybe, also felt that a film focusing on a part of Black history was a way to show American history as “of a range of races, not just whites” somewhat in the playfully-casting way that the Broadway hit Hamilton told a story of founding fathers of the U.S., but with Black, Hispanic, or otherwise-minority-group actors playing the famous roles of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, etc.

I should point out a couple things. In opting to cover Birth of a Nation, I wanted to refer to the old “African American textbook,” as it was called, that I did copy editing for, for Peoples Publishing Group, in 2000-01. This book, ostensibly authored by Molefi Kete Asante, a professor and prolific writer and editor, was being prepared for a second edition in 2000; a slim first edition had come out from Peoples a few years earlier, and now it was being expanded, and in fact would turn out looking like a typical inch-thick Prentice Hall or McGraw-Hill textbook, with colored pages and chock-full of info, including in typographically arty “sidebars” and such. (By the way, “Peoples” is the surname of one of the firm’s founders, Jim Peoples, not “peoples” as in some hokey name for a communist organization. The firm has since changed its name.) As it happened, numerous people wrote things for the book, the way other textbooks are also handled editorially; I, in fact, drafted some passages for sidebar stuff (I wrote on Thurgood Marshall and John Coltrane); and the whole experience—that book used a ton of “creative” people, though not as many as for the Prentice Hall H.S. lit textbooks I discussed on my two blogs last year—is worth a “fireside blog story,” but not in the foreseeable future.

Anyway, the impression I got when working on the book, and I don’t think I was a super-good history student in grade school or college (though I have done interested reading of history in my post-schooling years), is that most, I would say, of the Black-history topics covered in the book I had heard about, or read about, in the course of my own history schooling. You know, Crispus Attucks, George Washington Carver, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglas, etc. So though Asante’s book aimed to provide a more Black-centric history account—nothing wrong with that in principle—I found that American history, at least as I was exposed to it in the “increasingly liberal 1970s,” included a lot of Black stories too. And I remember the name Nat Turner, and a rebellion associated with him, but I very recently opted to read the Asante textbook’s account to get more boned up. (And even then, memory stirred a bit, I couldn’t say how much I had learned about it in grade school.)

Here is some stuff from Asante’s book on Turner. The writing here is fairly typical of the textbook, presenting historical details with a sort of nonjudgmental narrating, making its subjects focused on to be credible, and spelling certain aspects out as for young minds:

“By the time he turned 12, he led a group of much older boys. They followed him because he seemed so naturally gifted with an understanding of how nature worked and how to plan any activity.

“Within his limited environment, Turner learned as much as was possible for an enslaved person [the book took rigorous pains not to refer to such people, derogatingly, as “slaves”]. He was fascinated by the chemistry of various substances and mastered the art of making gunpowder. Often alone, he saw himself as a mystic with great spiritual powers. A white reporter, Thomas R. Gray, recorded an interview with Nat Turner after his capture[,] in which Turner said:

“Having soon discovered to be great, I must appear so, and therefore studiously avoided mixing in society, and wrapped myself in mystery, devoting my time to prayer and fasting.” [quote marks in original]

[…]

“Turner was always in reflection. Soon he began to have visions that instructed him on what he must do to overcome enslavement. In his visions, he saw hieroglyphics, or sacred writings that had special meaning for him. He heard voices that told him of a great war between good and evil. He believed that the good represented Africans and the evil [represented] the system of enslavement practiced by the white slaveholders. He resolved to answer the divine call and made preparations for a long time. He then brought into his confidence four men whose names are recorded in history alongside his as men of courage.”   (p. 138)

The 1830s reporter quoted within this passage, Thomas Gray, is quoted epigraphically at the end: “He [Turner] certainly never had the advantages of education, but he can read and write, and for natural intelligence and quickness of apprehension, is surpassed by few men I have ever seen.” (p. 139)

The book, complete with map showing Turner’s group’s revolt route, says the revolt ran from August 21 to October 30, 1831.

Picking up the story more exclusively from the film; the racial angle

Anyway (prior to reading Asante), I went into this film quite foggy on the old Nat Turner story, whatever I’d learned of it. Actually, the film—to the extent it sticks to history—goes into it in far more detail than I, or any other classmates, would have been expected to absorb in our grade-school days.

The idea of having a smart, inspired slave lead a rebellion, even to a bad end, as a way to show how this country went through grubby birth pains with respect to civil rights, and in the process make it seem as if “a significant part of American history is Black history,” is not bad in principle, of course. I rather would like to have seen more white people attend this film. I wonder why it seemed to be a film that attracted a lot of Blacks and not whites. (End note 2)

I would quickly point out, too, that the film, by a presumably non-partisan Black man about a Black hero, tends to angle things so that the whites, even the more heroic ones, tend not to look so beautiful or respectable. The ones who are seedier—like racist sorts who might buy a female slave for sex purposes—are apt to look dubious; and even somewhat more reputable ones, like a local minister with curly hair who looks like a rather jaded slob, seem an “acquired taste” (for Blacks or whites). The female plantation owner who seems to have been an early, nice influence on Nat Turner is presented as generally honest/decent, but seems rather odd in appearance (slightly shoddily stagy). Even the young-man slave owner seems honest and “handsome” enough, as he helps Nat’s development (and inadvertently cultivates Nat’s capacity to be more leaderly by speaking publicly and developing his education-based skills) as an incidental of his shepherding Nat around after the curly-haired white minister has encouraged Nat’s owner to have Nat preach to various plantations’ slaves, for money—and Nat’s owner seems “one of the good guys” until, rather late in the film, he becomes a drink-addled lout.

In short, the film might seem “meant for Blacks” because it makes the main Black characters up front, neat, relatable, well-defined, marketing-wise, etc., while the whites seem somewhat like slightly-amateurish “heroes” or background decorations or quite-seedy types (and we remember how often, even when Black characters in white-audience films are meant to be honorable stand-outs, the whites in general may seem to look better and more prestigious than the Blacks). But this film isn’t simply a “genre exercise in catering to Blacks and making whites look second-rate,” somewhat like a reverse minstrel show of sorts. I mean, in the Deep South, if a heroic Black guy arises out of a white society that was as bent on keeping Blacks enslaved as that area virulently was, you’re going to see some version or other of this way the Blacks look better than the whites.

But I can go along with whites made shadier than Blacks (no pun intended). In fact, I’ve been amused when comedian Richard Pryor has imitated white voices, or when that film White Chicks (2004, starring Shawn and Marlon Wayans) came out, and it was amusing in its imitation of white society girls. If we in this country hope to bridge the divides between the races, seeing how your own race, including the white, can look in others’ eyes—as long as it isn’t too derogating—is healthy, and develops out “sense of humor muscles” as we learn to laugh at ourselves a bit.

Interesting sides: Technical aspects

I am trying to speak from enthusiasm for the film, but only saw it once, and will have to wait for it to come on DVD before I can study it closely.

Aside from seeming overall to be a kind of odyssey, or “big adventure story” (though it seems to have somewhat-disorienting jumps in time, opting for presumably-judicious editing rather than a smooth “long story” quality), the film has a strong sense of place—with greenery in a humid, wooded environment; stereo sound making farm-animal noises evocative; and varieties of picturesque old buildings conveying old times. Supposedly Parker worked with a tight budget, but the visual effects are generally pretty good.

As has been critically said, the growth of Turner from boyhood to young manhood is interesting, and, arguably, more continuously “processual” than later developments. Some sort of African-culture “mysticism” is implied (the holy marks on the boy are depicted)—I would have to watch again to get a better sense of this detail. Nat, beyond infancy, as helped early by his white owners, as a shy boy, is shown, but the fact that he has a talent for self-education that comports with potential leadership qualities (which is suggested by the Asante text above, too) also comes forth, but is arrayed over a series of episodes, which I think has an effect of showing how Turner developed over time, with a lot of patience. (I point out that I take a lot of the story details here on faith; I’ve not been able to look up details on the sober-history Turner story, and for this film, it doesn’t seem important to debate whether, or when, holy marks were noted on the boy, or such. If this is mythological, it doesn’t hurt the aims of the overall-historically-oriented story.)

It’s sometimes said (as in the context of Roman Polanski) that film directors who have also acted are better at handling actors than are directors who never acted. Parker seems to be good at showing personality qualities and subtle but significant interpersonal actions; notably, the film has a lot of medium shots with, often, two or more people in a shot; and such situations as Turner discreetly motioning to a fellow slave not to rise to assaulting a white man who has beaten Turner down is good at showing how Turner could provide quiet but ameliorating leadership—and holding off on tough action until the time is right.

Nat’s way of getting his owner to buy a female slave, who appeals to Nat, but while Nat also notices the subtle sexual interest of one white man who has a notion to buy the woman, is well depicted. Also, we see subtle issues such as the need for Black men to keep their eyes down while whites are addressing them.

Interestingly, the first good laugh the audience I was with got—in fact, maybe the only such laugh—was when the woman Nat saved (from being bought by a lascivious white) turns up at a meeting where he is preaching. He apparently is a little embarrassed to have her see him here in this capacity, if I recall rightly.

This woman, we find, is Cherie [sp?], who becomes his wife, and is present toward the end of the film.

Nat Turner as a genius, and as a strategist

The fact that Turner was educated, but in a narrow way, is brought forth in the film, as well as suggested rather strongly in the Asante text above. It is no surprise Blacks were not aimed toward wide education in those days, even with the smartest ones; but when a person evinces curiosity and talent, what he or she will educate him or herself in will be gravitated to, willy-nilly. For Nat, this was biblical study. And while the film makes a lot of reference to Old Testament text (I am much less familiar myself with the Old than the New Testament, and even then am not so strong in it as to be a good candidate for teaching others about the Bible), the average viewer can get the sense that both sides in the slave debate could cite chapter and verse of Scripture to back up their passionately-held positions.

The thing that I think many whites will find most objectionable about this film is that Turner eventually opts for violent action, and this isn’t merely the kind of quibble that was raised about the far more modern-issues-helped figure of Malcolm X. But this isn’t merely a racial issue: the same thing can be said about the abolistionist/fanatic John Brown. Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry has long been known as a precursor or “spring robin” for the U.S. Civil War; I have recently thought that the Nat Turner rebellion was a sort of early John Brown explosion, from a Black population. This shows what a painful mess of oppression slavery was. It took the Civil War, the biggest convulsion of the U.S.’s history, to finally start unlatching the shackles of slavery.

Brown and Turner were both, you could say, religious zealots, who were profoundly repulsed by slavery. It is also, of course, important in our history, remembering how bad slavery got, to recognize these men’s insurrections as “prodromes” for the Civil War. What kind of story of heroism, if any, does Turner’s specific story provide?

I don’t want to impute to Parker what the point of his film is supposed to be—as if (one theory) it took Turner, a sort of early awakening of the U.S. shucking off slavery, to get the ball to start rolling to the more purgative fight of the Civil War. As a portrait of a minor episode in the struggle to defeat slavery, it is interesting and rich with edifying cultural context. (Turner’s preacher role extending to his even baptizing a white man—this was interesting, but I would have to re-view the film to appreciate how this fit into the picture, aside from his merely being “used” by his associates for his preacher capacity.)

##

One way Turner’s story provides a level of relevant “moral disposition for today” is that it shows how a person can strategize to face down a condition that is both oppressive and coming from a societal echelon that does not level the playing field with him. Let me explain: whether it is Viet Cong fighters trying to defeat an American army that was superior weaponry and air power, or some other guerrilla insurgency, if the insurgency is “on the side of right,” as its adherents will believe anyway, it has to “level the playing field” in ways beyond having superior weapons, “air supremacy,” etc. You may have heard the saying that “Good strategy excuses bad tactics.” A sort of converse situation is when, on the strategic level, your enemy has a superior societal (or organizational) position, and is not playing by fair rules, and your own resources are limited (and yet you have the advantage of time), how, then, fight the enemy with some hope of winning some important ground (literal or figurative)? Here, superior, lesson-conveying tactics should counterbalance the strategic assets the other person has.

So, for instance, if your enemy is a manager, or lawyer, who is approaching you unfairly, trying to get you to agree to something not supported by facts or law, and “floating around like a stalking shyster,” you then have to face this person down, “call him into line with reality,” by some very pungent tactical move that will puncture (and herald reversing) the shyster’s delusional understanding of you and your position. This is a sort of situation you can be in in today’s U.S. economy. Well, the structural similarities to the guerrilla fighter are clear.

So Turner, presumably, is acting on the only standing he has to fight the evil he clearly sees oppressing him and his fellow Blacks: aiming for an armed insurrection. The net result is that this shows how desperate, and seethingly angry, the Blacks have become in this film’s world. The result in the audience—and this may depend on who you are—can be sadness, similar to how a film about the Holocaust, even Schindler’s List (1993), which may be built solidly on a sense of moral outrage, can spur a strong sense of sadness in the viewer, and this is not for the viewer’s lack of rich moral understanding of the matter depicted. The sadness isn’t one of stoicism, or of “What are you going to do?” It is one of morally responding to the monumental grimmess depicted.

The film shows how Turner’s experience was only one step in a process when we see a young man, watching with a kind of admiration, as Turner is about to be hanged. A CIG-type changing of the image has the young man shown as older, when among a group of Black soldiers with Civil War uniforms on, wielding weapons with passion. This might be taken to say that Blacks as helping forcefully dislodge slavery had their more progress-making turn when they participated in the Civil War. This may be true, but still the largest numbers to die in the Civil War were whites. But if Parker’s idea is to say, “Blacks didn’t just suffer and cave in to slavery but tried to stand up, like any good soldiers, and fight it,” then the film has a point it delivers. But how well the larger society—and this doesn’t just mean whites along with Blacks—embraces the film as that kind of history lesson remains to be seen.

The film is generally tasteful in what it reveals

With such a story, some might fear the film is too free with depicting awful events. And while violence of various sorts is shown to get its points across, this is often handled with restraint. One image that was downright gruesome to me was two slaves being in a sort of holding cell—I think they had started staging a hunger strike—so a slave owner (or “cracker,” whoever it is among the whites) starts to force-feed one of the men by knocking out his teeth first and then pouring food down his throat. This is easily as awful as anything you might see in Schindler’s List, and the image is returned to briefly later when Nat remembers the various horrors he’s seen to help justify his insurrection, or the like.

Another detail I never had a chance to fit in elsewhere is that a slave-of-sorts who acts as a butler for a plantation owner looks so much like a white man that I wondered whether he (as the actor) was white or not. Then I decided he was probably Black. But this makes another astute observation of Parker’s—that Blacks who were given higher-level roles in Southern society—and ended up being Uncle Tom types, despite their best motivation—were ones who looked more like whites than many other Blacks in the same context did. (More generally, it is true that, as an irony of discrimination based on skin color, among some Black populations, there is further subdivision, by their own hand, into lighter-colored and darker-colored Blacks, as connoting who gets more favorable standing, or such.)

A quickie review, to do right by a film that should be seen by more people.

##

End note 1. Incidentally, I think it’s unfortunate people aren’t more attuned to history when discussing the racial-bias-suggestive sides of certain, less-objectionable old art. Some months back, there was a reference to the Mark Twain novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on the New York area CBS local news, and the novel was summed as “controversial” for a long time, or ever since it was published. This is misleading. The book, obviously, would have been controversial for different reasons in, say, the 1880s than in 1950 or today. Today, what causes most unease with it for modern readers is its 117, or whatever number someone counted to, uses of the word “n*gg*r.” To me, though that word may be obnoxious enough for young Black students, the point must be remembered that when the book came out, it was downright liberal, if not radical, for depicting, for white audiences, a somewhat punky, neglected young boy floating on a raft on the Mississippi with an escaped slave, Jim, who acts as a sort of surrogate father for him at times.

Though the word “n*gg*r” is used, including by Huck, it was a typically used term of the time—Twain was big on imitating local and dialect-type speech in his characters, so it meant Twain was opting for art-as-mirror fidelity to what behaviors were on the street, not trying to keep Blacks down, or the like. His having Jim berate Huck for doing something bad (Jim says some kind of behavior Huck engaged in was “trash[y]”), at which point Huck learns something, shows Twain wasn’t being racist with the book. But alas, abandoned old usages can get more objectionable with time (floating in their conspicuousness like grease we didn’t realize was in food we were eating). This is like the term “Jew’s harp” for a certain mouth-held folk-music instrument: it was accepted up to a few decades ago, maybe, and today is not liked, with another term put in its place.

End note 2. Throughout my blogs, I follow the rule—using some of my own rules amid using others that are more standard—of initial-capitalizing the B in Black for the race, while I leave white lower-cased. I follow two “guiding stars” for the cap-B: (1) in the 1970s, Black for the race had a cap-B, and as playful help, I also think, “What would James Brown have done? He would have had a cap-B”; and (2) Black as for the race makes it clear I am talking about the race, not the color of skin; there could theoretically be a confusion (even though the vast majority of Black people’s skin is some shade of brown, and truly black-looking skin is rare). I.e., there may be situations where you might want to distinguish, “That Black person’s skin doesn’t look so black,” in which, obviously, the color versus the race are different concepts. The same sort of confusion doesn’t come up much at all with whites, so I leave white lowercased for the race. Hope I haven’t offended anyone for this latter.

Movie break (Quick Vu): Portrait of the computer whiz as a conscientious objector: Snowden (2016), Part 1 of 2

Stone’s portrait of a controversial figure highlights the good-faith and civil-rights–oriented side of a young man who, in real life, is accused of endangering national security interests

Sixteenth in a series: The Dawning of the Age of the ACA: Looking askance at pop and political culture of 2011–now

Subsections below:

A mini director’s dossier on Oliver Stone

Snowden’s story as grist for Stone’s mill

Stone’s treatment is brought to a subject with a modest side

Ed and his personal life, along with his work

Ed’s girl as a sweetening element

Ed’s shadowy last employer

[Edits 11/28/16. Edits 12/30/16; Part 2 will not be presented; see the December 30 entry on my other blog for an explanation.]

In this season of “creepy clowns” conducting their business all around the U.S., including one running for president, I don’t want to add to unease with any sense that this entry is saying something political or subversive. I am reviewing a film, in a deliberately narrowed way, for its largely esthetic/story side, as I will make clear again below. In a way, I am like someone in a roomful of female millennials where the charge is to speak about Woody Allen, and I am choosing only to speak about his cologne.

##

I was heartened to see that there was success on 9/11 weekend for Clint Eastwood’s latest film, Sully, starring Tom Hanks as the airline pilot Chesley Sullenberger who, in January 2009, shepherded the “Miracle on the Hudson” where he managed to land a jet on the Hudson River after its engines had failed on sucking in birds. It seems that, on this past 9/11 weekend, people—at least older ones—were in the mood for a gripping tale about good, old-fashioned heroic behavior.

I wasn’t going to see Sully, in part because I felt I knew the story well enough and in part because my resources for film-theater-going in recent times are slim, but I had another film in mind to see at the multiplex in Rockaway Township, N.J., that I’ve gone to in recent years (where I have seen the last three films that I’ve seen in the theater since summer 2015). As before, I will be a bit sketchy and impressionistic here, but want to give at least a cursory look so as to interest probably-select viewers in it before it has disappeared from theaters (if it hasn’t already).

A mini director’s dossier on Oliver Stone

Oliver Stone is an interesting director, and I covered his Nixon (1995) on this blog in 2012. If you don’t mind my early (2012) blog attempts (mostly on this blog), which are a bit rough in execution, you can see the first part of that review here and the second here.

Stone, in some vague way, has long struck me as if he was among the big Baby Boomer directors who came of professional age in the 1970s (e.g., Coppola [actually a bit older than a Boomer], Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman [also older than a Boomer], and others, some less talked about today), but he actually only started to flourish in the 1980s. He had written the adapted screenplay (for which he won an Oscar) for Midnight Express (1978), and had written the screenplay for Scarface (1983), directed by Brian De Palma; then his first major feature film as a director was Salvador (1986). His first major hit, both a box-office success and as winning critical acclaim, was Platoon (1986), which he made all the more convincing since he is the only film director of his ilk who had served in Vietnam, and as a footsoldier at that. (I’m pretty sure I saw Platoon in the theater in late 1986 or early 1987.)

He followed Platoon up with Wall Street (1987), with its famous character of law-unto-himself Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas. Central characters in both films were played by the actor Charlie Sheen (adding the irony that he was the son of Martin Sheen, a central actor in Apocalypse Now [1979], meaning that two family members had central roles in some of the most noteworthy American films on the Vietnam War). Both films had Sheen as a sort of earnest, young up-and-comer who gets indoctrinated into a larger system that is ambiguous at best.

It didn’t take Stone long to start accumulating an oeuvre and critical esteem that put him on an exalted echelon, though he about as quickly became regarded as a sort of ideological maverick. He became quite recognizable for his style of work, which included a sort of visual flashiness that could make for excitement; but he was often controversial, when he could present works like JFK (1991), which contained some discredited crackpot theorizing on the source of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He would also, less politically tendentious, make The Doors (1991), a sort of labor of love for him, I guess. This latter film was never going to be a hit with the likes of me, because though that rock group seems to have especially entranced those who lived through the late ’60s and early ’70s enough to feel it exemplified central bearings of modern civilization (Coppola, even, had originally considered scoring all, or most of, Apocalypse Now to Doors music), I always felt the group was a little pretentious and flimsy. (End note 1)

In any event, Stone gave the group a psychedelic treatment in the film, which would have appealed to exponents of late ’60s “epistemology and ontology.” (My skepticism is rather based on this sort of idea: in an obituary years ago of one of the members of the group the Mamas and the Papas, in I think The New York Times, it was noted that the group had an “acid trip” together at some point, and that this marked a historical watershed point for them, or such. It’s only the older Baby Boomers who would find this kind of thing of news-worthy significance.)

In case it seems that Stone was mainly an old cultural curator of the “takings of stands” of the late ’60s and early ’70s, he embraced a range of topics/themes in his films, which included Natural Born Killers (1994), which seemed to critique one strain of modern celebrity culture; and even, well along in his career, he made Alexander (2004), a sort of historical treatment of the ancient figure Alexander the Great. The latter film was financed by foreign money, and it had an air of being of strange taste for something that would be released in the U.S. (I saw it in the theater), and I saw it had Stone’s trademark touches (such as a gliding-camera look at a bacchanal) without seeming just like a weird sellout. (Both of these films were critically panned, at least by Leonard Maltin. I’m not recommending them—just suggesting Stone’s range [or capacity for missteps].)

I’m glad I saw and reviewed Stone’s Nixon, though for a better historical education I would definitely advise reading on that old president from varied, more-scholarly sources (or even, for another, fairly sober cinematic taste, seeing the Ron Howard–directed Frost/Nixon [2008], which I reviewed on this blog in fall 2013). Some of what weaves its way through Stone’s film (not in a voluminous amount) is his tendentious philosophizing about the source of cultural/political evil, originating in about World War II, that reached its full bloom in the corpse flower of Nixon (and this was the sort of arcane [or playfully putative] theorizing that the likes of Thomas Pynchon would add as a sort of amusing accent to his encyclopedic novel Gravity’s Rainbow [1973], such as when he talks about the Combine [I think it is] and the Furies). Such theorizing in Stone’s film struck me as marring an otherwise often-worthy try at getting stuffed into a navigable film the odyssey-like life of the history-making man (played by the hardworking Anthony Hopkins) whom satirical fiction writer Robert Coover, in The Public Burning, called the Fighting Quaker.

Snowden’s story as grist for Stone’s mill

In terms of being a writer/director who both has embraced the idea of critiquing, in archetypal-story fashion, what the U.S. is doing when it comes to falling away from its ideals (from the “better angels of its nature,” so to speak) and has presented the sort of now-old-fashioned odyssey-like story about real-life individuals that could marry brave action with subjective/altered-states phases in life, Stone seemed a good choice for doing a film on the controversial (and not-fully-understood) Edward Snowden, if anyone had to.

That is, not just due to his politics, Stone seemed apt for this project because he could bring to it the kind of story that seems increasingly fading within the mist created by superhero franchises and other fantasy fare: Stone knew what people liked in the 1960s and ’70s, and figured it was still the “language” to put some stories in: a lone man up against a morally alien system who could rely on little more than his own wits, back, and strength, and sometimes may be sent reeling into altered-senses conditions by the extreme challenges that he as a non-fantasy individual was facing.

Snowden, of course, when he is lauded, is known for having pointed out that the National Security Agency, for which he had worked as a contractor and from which he was now a sort of defector, was routinely able to access complete information on phone calls of any average Americans (in its overall mission to comb for national-security threats; I’m not an expert on this area at all, so for some additional info, see here). As it happened, the relevant bulk-information program was ruled illegal by a court subsequent to Snowden’s disclosure (particularly regarding how Verizon had been assisting the NSA) (see here for more on many details of the issue; I can’t vouch for this article, as it is more than I want to fully read), and hence the program was modified in some significant way. Thus Snowden could be said to have alerted the general public to a federal program that was in need of, and received, important reform.

Snowden also is a figure who is polarizing enough—indeed, a sort of wanted man (for violations of espionage laws) in federal eyes—that the U.S. had steadfastly produced statements timed with the release of this film to remind that Snowden unjustifiably put national security and related individuals at grave risk with his release of the huge fund of electronic files that he stole from his job for the NSA (which he presumably took to prove his points as a conscientious objector). Since June 2013 he has been in a sort of odd exile in Russia, after he has benefited from a three-year grant by the Russian government to stay in that country (after he ended up stranded there following the U.S.’s revoking his passport in mid-2013 before he could receive asylum in a South American country, following his stay in Hong Kong). (By the way, the Wikipedia article on him has a large amount of information on his life, more than I ever hoped or wanted to square with when opting to review this film.) But apparently this Russian asylum has run out, leaving him awaiting asylum elsewhere for which he has presumably applied. Of course, he would be tried under an espionage law if he returned to the U.S. (absent his being granted amnesty).

A story in The New York Times Magazine several weekends back looked at how Stone got the film made; there not only was some dicey-ness about whether director would do it, but once Stone was committed to it, he handled the logistics—shipping the script around to collaborators in preproduction; communicating during production work—as if he was afraid (perhaps rightly) that the U.S. could spy on his work, as if the project posed valid grounds for federal suspicion (which it may have). Also, a small-scale distributor (Open Road) was signed up for the film prior to production, the limited-auspices quality of which disappointed Stone at first; but as a result, with the film opening widely in its first days of release, which would be atypical of a major-marquee film effort (the sort that would have a prior limited city-focused engagement), the potential to release the film to a wide audience before much could be done to blunt its business potential meant that the story could be exposed to sunlight quickly, preventing “unfriendly forces in power” from trying to undermine it. (My theory.)

As I hinted at the outset, I do not want to have it thought I have a firm opinion about Snowden as to his culpability, or not, for stealing various documents; I don’t want to state an opinion directly in line with the “amnesty for Snowden” movement. I do want to look at him from the narrow viewpoint of how he is portrayed, assuming his relative innocence, as a sort of whistleblower, which is how the film generally approaches him. I also don’t want to try to tease out much of what may be fictional liberties the film takes as it generally presents itself as a nonfiction introduction to the man.

Stone’s treatment is brought to a subject with a modest side

For a major-Hollywood-type film on a controversial, still-hot-potato figure (made after studios like Sony had passed on it), with an esteemed storytelling writer/director at the helm, I think Stone rises to the occasion of his thrust’s largely being just to explain (at least in main respects) who Edward Snowden is, and why—with how much conscience—he “defected” from the NSA and released what he did.

Here, we don’t get much woolly national-cultural-decline theory as you might find in Nixon or JFK. Stone assumes that Snowden is the sort of assiduously-rising, pretty-average person who would appeal to the millennials, and/or the Occupy Wall Street types, and/or those who felt Bernie Sanders had “the right stuff” and had a chance. So Stone apparently felt he need not weave various story/theory-spouting “signposts” to show how the U.S., in its most recent history, has gone grievously astray; that, as a sort of muted piece of “receive wisdom,” is somewhat assumed. Instead, he uses his storytelling talents in the more elemental and unpretentious way he could, first flowering in the sorts of bildungsromans that were Platoon and Wall Street.

You get visuals that punch up a story about people who are largely computer geeks, and special effects that show just what it means that so much unexpected spying can be going on that you suddenly fastidiously see reason to put a Band-Aid over your computer’s camera lest you be watched while your attractive girlfriend is having sex with you on a summer night. When Snowden, whose epilepsy I didn’t know about, has a grand mal seizure, Stone shows the phantasmagoric sense with which this sort of experience could visually be depicted.

Apparently this story does weave fictional elements into the stew of real-life stuff, and I say right now (as deliberately limits this review’s incisiveness) I don’t want to spend a lot of time parsing this out, the way I did—with good reason—with the 2015 film Truth back in August. I don’t think Stone is being creatively mischievous (or hairy-theory-bolstering) with this so much as just trying to sweeten up a story to get the points about exposing unbridled spying by the federal government on its own citizens made more intuitively.

So, for example, there is a preceptor in the CIA for Snowden, Corbin O’Brien (Rhys Ifans), who seems suitably ambiguous as a veteran true-believer spy (who gives off a scent of being a career-jaded, worldly-wise lizard) who feels he can and should cultivate a spook in his own image in Snowden. This figure seems, to me on two viewings of the film, convincingly-enough real (i.e., enough “part of the real-life source material”) in how he weaves into the film (though the way he seems to slot into expositional functions may raise suspicions); he even becomes more menacing later on, as we might expect story-wise (when he is aware of Snowden being less trustworthy than before). Anyway, a review in The Star-Ledger pointed out O’Brien is a fictional device. (End note 2)

I don’t think this, in particular, means Stone is taking too much of a liberty or being a crank with this device, but I also want to limit my considerations of this film to what seems true (enough) and what works.

Ed and his personal life, along with his work

I’ve never seen actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a film before, and I thought he was pretty good as Edward Snowden (and he made the character simpatico enough that I turned to noting him familiarly as “Ed” in my during-the-film notes). In fact, the two lead actors, the other being Shailene Woodley as Ed’s girlfriend Lindsay Mills, etch their characters pretty well—enough that you can identify with them, and they carry you through what else in the film may take more work to “identify with.” Gordon-Levitt presents Ed as nothing so much as an up-and-coming computer whiz—I didn’t realize that, if the film has this right, Snowden never finished high school [update 12/30/16: According to a recent New York Times article, Snowden got an HS equivalency diploma]—who tried for the Army in 2004, and received an administrative discharge because his legs were accumulating fractures from basic training, and one morning he fell in his barracks and broke a leg further. End of Army career.

Ed, still intent on serving his country, then opted to join the CIA in 2006, and here is where he meets Corbin O’Brien, in an intriguing interview session where, suitably enough, the discriminating, rather dour O’Brien seems to reject Ed at first, then accepts him. The film then follows Ed through his multi-phase career from 2006 through 2013, from the relatively gung-ho George W. Bush years to the more ambiguous, Internet-wracked modern years: as a matter of narrative strategy (i.e., a flashback structure), the story weaves between (1) the “present-day” tense situation, the sort of “frame” of the story, of Ed being about to release his secrets to a bevy of journalists, including some from the U.K. publication The Guardian, in a hotel in Hong Kong, and (2) sequential phases in his career from 2004 up to then.

I hope to look in more detail at Ed’s career, and the nature of his employment, in Part 2, but I will first take a look at Lindsay Mills, his girlfriend.

Ed’s girl as a sweetening element

Critics in different publications (e.g., Time magazine) have remarked as if the film isn’t too exciting, or as if Stone punted, or something. I think he did well enough, in terms of providing enlightenment, to the extent cinema can do this, on the “industry” of computer geeks in positions of potential spying (and access to what would be considered top-secret government doings). Stone, as you know, is the kind of director who can photo someone vacuuming a living room and make it look exciting. Then you will stop and say, “But this is still someone vacuuming a living room.” Well, computer geeks huddled over flat-screen computers, and Ed’s engaging in a sort of young-person’s hugger-mugger with a more wise-assed geek (like a character named, I think, Gabriel Sole [supposed to be a biblical allusion??]) is not exactly some Spandex-bedecked superhero flying through the city air on a spider-silk thread. Who expected this here? If you did, puh-lease.

(And by the way, I am not a geek working in a basement and living on Ramen noodles and caffeine. I’m an old editor. There is a difference—not much, but a significant enough amount.)

So Stone’s challenge is not just to show what it means for cloistered geeks in Hawaii, maybe, to be able to listen in (or know surprisingly much about) your phone conversations with your BFF Ashleigh, but to show what kind of man we have here. A big-souled hero? Turns out, except for his computer-apt high IQ, he’s a fairly average millennial, it seems.

Shailene Woodley as the girlfriend I think provides a lot of help to this film. I had remarked somewhat critically about her in my 2013 review of Alexander Payne’s The Descendants (2011) (see my review here); I thought she came across there as a thin-voiced brat to an extent, but I didn’t dismiss the actress completely, out of hand. I am happy to say, and want to supplement that review with this, that her delivery of her Lindsay character is good, well-rounded, and hearty.

Lindsay is the liberal young woman posing a counterpoint to Ed’s conservative Army-apt striver (OK, so the dichotomy of political types is schematic). They met on a dating website, it seems, but love is so often blind (but well-meaning), and except for one or two pauses in their relationship through the years of the story here, they remain an item. She wants to be his wife (or steadfast companion), and in the different hopeful homes they set up for themselves, she wants the stability of a normal life, while (rather like an Army careerist) he has to move to different locations from time to time.

She sticks with him through much; when he has the first epileptic seizure seen in the film, she obviously wants to help him as a steady “rock.” (We never hear a lot about his birth family. One of the few things is that his mother was on a number of meds for something, he says, which we suspect helps explain his epilepsy—so Mom was epileptic too? But other than that, we hear [I think] next to nothing about his parents. [The Wikipedia article on him has a lot to fill out the picture of his birth family.])

Lindsay seems rather privileged; there is actually a set of parents she goes home to, we find (the father seems rather old for her dad, doesn’t he?). But as Ed’s companion, she seems to be some kind of artist. She takes photos, and does some kind of visual art. We find some work or two of hers to feature her own image. We might wonder, is she some kind of (today’s pop-critical obsession) narcissist? Why art featuring herself?

Then we have to remember, presumably when Stone sat with some producing personages and heard the demands he had to meet in order to get this film adequate distribution (and he thought to himself, “Oh, shit!,” because in the old days of Platoon it wasn’t like this), he realized that not only did he need a palatable female actress who would bring in the young male Turks—whether yuppie working in digital-media shit, or tattooed beer-drinker getting off work at the construction site—but someone whose pretty visage would be seen in numerous shots, and who—yes, how else explain it?—would also turn out to depict a woman with a (transient) career of seeming to teach pole-dancing, so we can see her lithe figure writhing around a pole.

I’m not making this up. I’m following the movie.

Woodley with her big, brown eyes, slender nose, rather thin body, and warm manner seems fine as an eminent millennial girlfriend of a computer whiz here. (Geeks in the audience could enjoy some wish-fulfillment suggestions: “This could happen to me, too!!”) And as I suggested, her performance traces the rather rounded nature of Lindsay here, complete with being rather at the end of her rope, sometimes, with Ed’s situation regarding his work (with stark changes including quitting on principle, or a need to move a great distance because of the type of remotely located opportunities inherent in his line of work).

(At the end of the film, titles explain what is up with the real Ed, who appears in a small set of shots at the end of the film—his face is what emerges [as the last face seen in the film] to the right of the computer entity at the mass computer conference near the end, while Gordon-Levitt’s face has previously emerged to the left. Ed is still in Russia, and it turns out Lindsay Mills moved there to join him. Wouldn’t it be funny if the last title said Lindsay Mills didn’t go to join him, but actress Shailene Woodley did?)

Ed’s shadowy last employer

Who was Ed’s employer when he defected from his job in 2013? Was it the NSA? No, it was a contractor—Booz Allen Hamilton, which today is (alternatively?) called Strategy& (yes, that’s not a typo). What is Booz Allen Hamilton? A sort of temp agency for big-league geeks? A consulting firm that provides dubious managing consulting?

I’m not suggesting that if Booz Allen Hamilton is questionable, this then helps explain that Ed was “a bad apple not caught in time, by an erratic consulting company” or that this somehow “necessarily” explains that, or how, Ed was “bad to leak government secrets as he did.” Perhaps Ed was one of the few sterling professionals to work for that firm. We need to know more about the firm. (60 Minutes, what do you have on Booz Allen Hamilton?)

Is it a place that, with all else, has branched out from years of federal work to now serving smaller-time private companies, and offering managerial consultants who don’t know the first thing about the industry they are meddling in, and bollix things up there big-time?

Maybe we’ll see in Part 2, which may not be available for several weeks.

End note 1. Some of the Doors’ songs, like the bouncy “Peace Frog,” the workmanlike “Roadhouse Blues,” and a few others that frequently turn up on old-hits radio, I liked and/or found memorable (I even had a cassette tape of their music in 1980, which I played on a car stereo). But it always seemed it was older Baby Boomers who were impressed enough by the Doors to see them as a sort of infectious rock on the musical surface and a kind of shadowy Rimbaud poetry in Jim Morrison’s lyrics (I never warmed to Morrison). The song “The End,” which famously underscores the hypnotic beginning of Apocalypse Now, I remember feeling, when I first saw the film in September 1979, as the kind of music choice that was “a director’s misstep in trying to be cool and not making it.” (Just because I had a tape of their music in 1980 didn’t mean I would admire how the music was used in the film in 1979.) But I’ve seen the film so many times in years since, and have grown to love it so much—and the film has more widely come to be an “artifact reflecting an old time” 30+ years later—that the song seems the kind of 1967-era period piece, even with its mild pretentiousness, that suits the film well enough (the film is set in about 1970); and of course those of us who were sentient in the 1970s can see that (though this would seem trivial to millennials) there are certain little mid-1970s cultural values in the doings depicted in the film that were anachronistic to ascribe to the earlier Vietnam period that the film is set in: such was cultural change in those days that even about six years could mean a relative sea change in middle-class cultural bearings.

End note 2. The review, by Stephen Whitty in The Star-Ledger (September 16, arts/weekend section, p. 7)—while not indicating his sources for being able to tell who is fictional in this film—also notes that the Nicolas Cage character is not fully convincing (though I don’t know if Whitty means he’s fictional). This character, Ed Forrester, is a veteran CIA type who is a sort of “uncle” in passing to Ed Snowden, having invented some mechanism for the CIA that then was, for arcane but typical reasons, canceled as a project (which would turn out to be a lesson to Snowden later). I don’t see, as Whitty seems to, that Forrester is especially distracting for being fictional (or played in an off-hand manner), other than having some recognizable Nic Cage flavor, complete with insouciantly smoked cigarette.