PATRIOTS DAY: FRONT ROW AND BEYOND

I was on BBC Radio 4's Front Row a week ago discussing Patriots Day. It was my usual four-minute exercise in speed talking, in which Samira Ahmed raises great questions but we don't get to toss them back and forth as we ought to. You can find the show on Iplayer here, it's the lead item. Just before we went on, Samira asked the booth whether she should say 'Pay-triots Day' or 'Pat-riots Day'. I laughed and said the holiday commemorates the start of a war America fought to allow us to say Pay-triots. And so it was said.

As I suggested on the programme (note the British spelling!) Patriots Day is an odd mix of docudrama and thriller which sometimes works on each level, but doesn't quite seem to work completely as an amalgam. It's at times quite moving, and at times quite exciting, but it drifts in and out of focus. I thought the docudrama played best when it was acted; oddly enough the opening shots of the Boston Marathon don't really convey the atmosphere of community which marks the race. 

Similarly in the first coda to the film, when they show the ceremony at Fenway Park at which Red Sox star David Ortiz (ironically given the current Trumpian immigration crisis, a Dominican) says 'this is our fucking city', doesn't carry the impact it did in Boston. It might better have been reconstructed for the benefit of people who don't understand the importance of Ortiz to his adopted city. But the second coda, showing what happened to the victims and responders, is genuinely touching.

In a similar vein, the most moving scene in the film comes when, after Mark Wahlberg's fiery cop has complained about the eight-year-old victim whose body has to be left on the street where he died. Later, after everyone has cleared off, there is a shot of the body, with a state trooper who's been left to stand guard over it. It's a hugely powerful image. Still later, when they come for the body, the trooper salutes, which may be emotional overkill.

This docudrama is combined with an action movie with Wahlberg at its core (note the variant poster selling just this image). His character, unlike most of the others, is a construct, and it requires an opening sequence to establish his 'bad boy' status within the police department, his injury which he works through on the job, and, inadvertently, how small he really is (when he's breaking down a door they catch him next to two non-actor sized cops). Wahlberg is good in his role, because it is a classic Wahlberg part, but his presence is so awkward that during the Watertown shootout the film keeps cutting to him driving there, an unnecessary distraction from the action.

This is the third fact-based movie for Wahlberg and director Peter Berg. As it happened I had seen Deepwater Horizon, the second, on an airplane to Houston for the Super Bowl not long before seeing Patriots Day. Having also recently watched Sully, it seemed like a new sub-genre of what you might call Joe the Plumber movies, in which first responders can be the cavalry riding to the rescue, if not the centre of the films. Deepwater is a slighter film than Patriots Day; its structure, like Sully's, grows from the battle against the corporate villains, and the pyrotechnics dominate the action. Wahlberg is, however, better in this film: he seems to play better with a sympathetic lead (Kurt Russell) to play off.

In reality though, Wahlberg seems there because it is a Boston movie (and how will he ever live down leaving that Super Bowl game with the football Patriots down 28-3 in the third quarter?). There are all the usual Boston tropes: especially the obvious accents and Red Sox; which is a theme between Patrick Downes and Jessica Kensey, the wounded couple, throughout. Kevin Bacon playing the FBI chief, might have walked out of his role in Mystic River; the MIT flirtation seems right out of Good Will Hunting; the hospital scenes taken direct from St. Elsewhere, if not ER. At least we were spared Cheers bar, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

What works best in the film is the actual suspense and action. Waiting for the bombs which we know will explode to actually explode is the Hitchockian definition of suspense. The carjacking scene, with Jimmy O Yang terrific as the young Chinese who is taken. The shootout in Watertown is a tour de force, not least because of the real amateur hour feel to it. And some of the set pieces, like Wahlberg walking through the mockup of the crime scene to try and retrace the bombers' steps, are brilliant. All of it is leavened by humorous one-liners, not quite at Die Hard level but more effective because they don't come from the star.

There's another dichotomy at play here. Bacon, who is excellent, and John Goodman, who is just as good as the police commissioner, are realists who understand what labeling the attack terrorism will mean. When the politicians come aboard, we can almost see authoritarianism come to the fore: the lockdown of Watertown and environs is presented as if it were martial law; in reality it was only a request, one which the population followed gladly. And the quick trigger fingers of the police, which nearly killed the second suspect as he lay cowering inside a boat, should be frightening. The Tsarnev brothers seem to be as they were described to me by my cousins in Cambridge, whose kids knew them from high school; the younger, surviving brother Dzhokar a slacker of sort; the older, Tamerlan, the bitter, angry one. It was a bit off-putting that the actor playing Tamerlan, Themo Melikidze, looks so much like Elijah Wood playing a musclebound Frodo.

The real framing of the film is more basic than that. There is a fantastic scene where Khandi Alexander, as an FBI interrogator, enters in a hijab to question Tamerlan's wife. The battle between Alexander and Melissa Benoist, as Katharine, is chillingly brilliant, with both actresses flipping their characters' personalities. Alexander's always been undervalued; Benoist is someone to watch. But the moment points to the film's underlying theme: it is 'our' values against 'theirs'.

We have seen how Tamerlan can't be bothered to get milk for his infant son; how Dzhokar gets the wrong milk. This contrasts with JK Simmons, as a Watertown police sergeant (see yet another variant poster, part of a series themed 'True...'), going to Dunkin Donuts to get coffee for his invalid wife. Tamerlan threatens to kill his younger brother; Wahlberg shares brotherly faith in the good of people with his fellow officer. He is beside himself because he asked his wife to deliver a knee brace to the starting line; Tamerlan is abusive to his wife. Yet in the interrogation, Katherine, who has adopted Islam, refuses to turn on her husband, whom she had kissed affectionately when she realised he was the bomber. They worship death; we abhor it, that's the message. It's one which is reinforced by music that signals good and bad like silent movie accompaniment; although its belied by the camera work by Tobias Schliessler, which is especially good in setting human moods for action scenes.

I suspect this will be seen in different ways by different audiences: those who know Boston, those who know America, and those who don't. I suspect it will work best for the first of that group, but while a mixed bag, it has a lot to offer all three. But the overlying image is not so much 'Boston Strong' pace David Oritz, but America Strong because it's True Faith. See yet another poster for confirmation of that. 

ARGO: I.T.'S OSCAR WATCH

With its copping of best picture and best director masks at the Baftas, on top of the DGA award, Argo has become the front-runner for the Oscar, which is interesting given its opposition. Argo is a very likeable film, well-made, with real suspense in its last act, and an atmosphere of menace in Iran and Washington both, contrasted with an atmosphere of anarchic freedom and humour in Hollywood.

Which is why, call me cynical, I'd popped Argo as an Oscar favourite as soon as I saw it, for two connected reasons which both have to do with Hollywood's perception of itself. The first is obvious—as much as the movie shows the CIA saving the day, it is the Hollywood producer (in fact the film's only totally fictional western character) and make-up guy who actually come up with the goods, and in the process provide us with self-satirizing boffo yucks. The second is related: the Tehran rescue contrasts with the failed attempt at rescuing the hostages in the US embassy—the signal moment of Jimmy Carter's administration. Carter gets little credit for the Argo rescue (neither do the Canadians—more on that later) but the upshot of his failure was turn to the country over to Hollywood, in the person of Ronald Reagan, who was selling America fantasies they wanted to believe, as opposed to Carter's visions of grim reality. That we now know Reagan's people made an October Surprise deal with the Iranians, not to make any hostage-releasing deal until after the 1980 elections merely reinforces the point. Reagan's election saw the US enter a post-reality based world, in which it is still entrapped, and Argo may best be viewed, depending on your political perspective, as a reminder of what the real world was like, or, more likely, a reminder that the people who brought you the world of fantasy are the only ones to trust.

Or you might perceive Argo as a 'feel-good' version of Zero Dark Thirty, in which the CIA are heroes and the interrogations are mostly John Goodman's John Chambers torturing Ben Affleck's Tony Mendez with Hollywood insider info. Or you might see it as a positive nod to a can-do America that, despite its thriller-matic finish, is actually accomplished more easily than, say, Lincoln's emancipation of black slaves was via American democratic process.

The movie itself skips between genres cleverly—and is most effective for its reconstruction of the period—not just sets and costumes but also the dirty grainy look of the film itself, which is pure 70s, and encourages the audience old enough to remember films you didn't download to transport itself back to the days of those sorts of political thrillers. In fact, there are shots of Mendez in the CIA HQ which straightforwardly evoke All The President's Men, in case you're old enough and missed the point. Ben Affleck doesn't ignore facts—the CIA's role in installing the Shah as dictator is set out right at the top—but the trope is an old one of maverick within a flawed system who eventually gets that system to do the right thing. In this contxt, Affleck the director is very good with actors in ensemble roles, much like Clint Eastwood. Affleck's ensemble contains many faces in familiar roles, faces who espcially shone in such parts on quality TV: Titus Welliver, Zeljko Ivanek , Clea DuVall (Carnivale), Tate Donovan, and Kyle Chandler (as Hamilton Jordan). Less like Clint is also good at minimising his own part, which is good because Ben Affleck the actor still has limitations when it comes to carrying a film—I think he works best as a straight man. I still believe George Reeves was Affleck's best role, and that may be at least partly because he sensed a kindred talent.

There were, however, moments that left me feeling uneasy, that I was being manipulated, particularly in the rousing end sequence at Tehran airport. It struck me as odd that the children would have put together the right photo at just the wrong time; that the guards would chase a Swiss Air commercial flight down the runaway, firing at it; that the pilot would not notice any of that, and that the tower would not simply stop the plane's takeoff, if they thought spies were escaping. As it happens, none of those things are true: the departure from the airport went off without a hitch (for reasons described below). But you couldn't have the suspense without tampering with the facts. I was even more sceptical of the guard making a phone call to the film's production office in LA, for two reasons: one being long-distance calling and time zones, and the other being why would a Canadian film crew not have a Canadian office number, and why would a phone number in the Babylon of America not arouse suspicion?

There has been a lot of discussion in this year's Oscar run-up about historical fact—what with Zero Dark Thirty trying to have it both ways about torture, and Lincoln being accused of being Caucacentric, and also gilding the lily of remembrance by anointing its hero prematurely, or Django inventing sunglasses and a pre-Civil War Ku Klux Klan. Much of the criticism is unjustified, in the sense that film scripts will inevitable consolidate multiple characters and re-order events to serve their own purpose. Thus, the fact that most of the hostages stayed not with the Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor (played very well by the Candian actor Victor Garber) but with one of his assistants, John Shearwood, is hardly crucial; it makes dramatic sense to keep them all together. The scene in which the Brits and Kiwis turn the refugees away is also apparently false: the Brits took them in and Kiwis transferred them to the Canadians, where it was thought they would fit in more naturally and be safer. The jibe,if gratuitous, does serve to emphasize the plight of the Americans, and obviously the Bafta voters didn't hold it against Argo.

But it should be pointed out that the Canadians did far more than simply sit back and wait for the CIA cavalry to arrive (shades of Independence Day!). In fact, Ambassador Taylor manipulated his staff's travel to help create the necessary visas, and it was the Canadians who got the airplane tickets—thus the whole cancellation and restoration by the CIA sub-plot is fiction.

I was also put off a bit by the separated husband/lonely father sub-plot for Tony Mendez; Affleck plays it with suitable moroseness, but as it turns out, it too is a fictional construct. The reason for it is obvious and familiar—Mendez not only has to redeem himself at the CIA but he has to conquer personal adversity along the way; this is the arc that dominates Hollywood—though they just couldn't figure out a way to have Abe Lincoln reunited with Mary Todd at movie's end.

Complaining that Alan Arkin's Lester Siegel didn't really exist would be silly—they need him to carry those sections, and his double-act with Goodman is one of the high points of the film. In reality, another special-effects genius, Robert Siddel, who did ET, was announced as the co-producer with Chambers when the ads went into the trades. Interesting, the original screenplay was based on Roger Zelazny's Lord Of Light, one of the key sf novels of the Sixties, and the film was intended for use in an sf theme park that never happened. Michael Parks has a cameo as comics genius Jack Kirby, who actually did draw the storyboards for the fake film, which also had Ray Harryhausen and Buckminster Fuller attached to it (!). Which ought to be enough to get Lord Of Light made, after all these years. I'm sure they could get Lester Siegel to produce. He could make the 'argo fuck yourself' joke another twenty times, and get a laugh every time.