Movie Review

Suddenly, Questions of Values in Four New Movies

A Movie Review By Susan Frome
Thinking already of Oscars seems rather early, but perhaps Hollywood and independent producers have decided that now is the right time. Four new movies have recently been released which raise questions of values and similar interconnecting themes: Michael Clayton; Into the Wild; Lions for Lambs; Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.

Lions for Lambs is clearly about Iraq and talks blatantly about the war, while showing that a pompous senator (Tom Cruise) can help cause a terrible “mistake” on the slopes of the Afghanistan northern mountains. He was hoping his new military plan would win him the presidency. Like Lumet’s Before the Devil, scenes go back and forth between three settings much like arguments in a stage play. The first “setting” is in the senator’s well-appointed office. The second is in a college professor’s (Robert Redford) office, talking with a promising student about “doing something for the world,” and the third “scene” takes place on the very Afghanistan mountain that the senator is describing to reporter Meryl Streep. Except, of course, things go horribly wrong there. This is definitely Mr. Redford’s film, unfortunately a polemic for him to sell to the audience.

Michael Clayton, Into the Wild, and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead are also involved with values and morals but in more unusual ways. Although Clayton is generally about high class corruption in the insurance/law world, it is really about choice and new awareness. Clayton (George Clooney) has fallen quite low in the law firm he works for; he has been “cleaning up” the dirty jobs the other prominent lawyers have gotten themselves into. At one point, he finds himself in a field outside of New York. He makes friends with three horses who are grazing there, looks in their eyes and finds himself lost in their inner wisdom. At the end of the movie, he runs away from everything modern, perhaps trying to find the horses again and a new life.

Into the Wild is about going deeply into the frozen forests of Alaska – actually going too deeply to get away from this world. Here is a true Thoreauvian story based on the book In the Wild by Jon Krakauer about a young man, Christopher McCandless (Emile Hersch), who leaves his parents’ home after college, gives up his place at law school (shades of Michael Clayton), and renounces all that is considered success and normal life. He decides to go to Alaska to find the perfect world in nature, to live off the land. He discovers an old decaying bus which he makes into his home. However, he has not planned well. In fact, he has made no plans at all on how to live in the wild. It’s a difficult lifestyle but others have done it like Richard Proenneke (the book One Man’s Wilderness was written about him). You have to be an excellent carpenter and engineer to build a comfortable log cabin, let alone a very good hunter and perform well in many other aspects. Christopher does not have a clue about any of these requirements. After a while, coming upon the wrong kind of herb, the poisonous kind, we see him slowly die away in the frozen bus.

But we have to respect his indomitable spirit to break away from the modern world’s insanity. Even Thoreau saw it all coming in the 1850s in New England. Here again is a current film about values.

The screenwriter, Kelly Masterson, of Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead has this tale’s set of values laid out clearly, when we learn that the elder son, Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman), of an older couple who own a jewelry store in a town somewhere north of New York City has planned a robbery of the store, carried out by none other than his younger brother Hank. The next problem is that Hank (Ethan Hawke) hires a crude, inept friend to do the job because Hank does not have the guts to do it. The friend does a lousy job and sadly kills the brothers’ mother (Rosemary Harris) and dies himself in the exchange of gunfire. But things just get worse if that’s possible, as Andy takes over to try to repair things. There is a dire chain of events that are caused by attempts to “fix” the next problem and the next and the next. Every single choice depends on values. Andy and Hank sink lower and lower as they try to find something that will help them get through this. Hank resorts to alcohol and sex with his brother’s wife; Andy goes further by relying on heroin and thoughtless desperate measures to go along with his initial embezzlement which started his ill-fated scheme. You can just imagine where this all leads.

Director Sidney Lumet, eighty-three, and Ms. Masterson have come up with an ingenious way of telling this story which is based on the novel by Mike Ledwidge. It seems as though they have chosen to create scenes between two or three characters, close ups mostly, moving back and forth between them, in similar settings. Much like Lions for Lambs, but much more intricately, after a while this begins to feel like a stage play, the sets here and there on the stage, lit up carefully when necessary. If we wanted to know the background and values of these middle-class characters, we would have to go to the novel.

Taken together, these four new films bring feelings of respect and hope for the American filmmaking industry. All at once, in November, they are available, perhaps for the Oscars. But either way it doesn’t matter. They are all worth seeing and thinking about.

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