A look at what's right (and what's wrong) with today's screenplays

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen has a small but extremely devoted following — enough to warrant a beautiful new Blu-Ray release of the film — but to many of its fans, the fact that it never caught on with a larger audience in any of its releases remains a mystery. Certainly the basic notion of a group of old friends and compatriots coming together for one last caper has great appeal; it shows up very effectively in plenty of heist films, for example. And when you add the twist that the characters are all old and forgotten by a world that’s moved past them, and they want to show everyone that they still have what it takes and that they shouldn’t be discounted, the concept acquires some real beauty and heart. So when I recently watched Munchausen again, hoping to find that my original lukewarm reaction was a mistake, I was hugely disappointed to find that I liked it even less than I used to.

Munchausen, as you might expect, is the story of Baron Munchausen, but he’s a completely unlikeable jerk. He’s selfish and egocentric, he treats other people like doormats, and he never, ever makes any kind of sacrifice whatsoever on anyone else’s behalf. This is just a quick blog entry, but one example of his awful behavior is enough: we find out that he left his faithful servant and good friend Berthold (the guy who can run really, really fast, played by Eric Idle) to rot in a birdcage prison on the moon for twenty years because he just didn’t give a crap, and he’s only rescuing him now because he needs Berthold’s speed. But since there apparently are never any real personal stakes for Munchausen himself (even when he gets killed, he just comes back) why couldn’t he have rescued Berthold a long time ago? This just isn’t a good way to make the audience like the Baron and root for him.

Perhaps Gilliam and his co-screenwriter, Charles McKeown, recognized the problem with the Baron on some level, because they added a little girl to the story, Sally (played by a very young Sarah Polley) to serve as a sort of surrogate POV character. After all, wouldn’t a spunky young kid without a malicious bone in her body melt anyone’s heart? But she doesn’t help. First, it’s the Baron’s story, not hers. He’s integral to all the major turning points of the story, and he goes through all the major character changes, such as they are. She’s pretty much just a bystander. And second, her character isn’t even developed to the degree she could have been as a bystander. So she’s really just window-dressing.

Finally, the stakes of the story are never adequately dramatized. Munchausen’s quest in the film is to save the city from the Turkish army besieging it, but the only citizen of the city we ever meet is its unspeakably repugnant leader, The Right Ordinary Horatio Jackson (played by Jonathan Pryce) and frankly, I’d rather get trampled and beheaded and cut into little pieces and then have all my little pieces shat upon by some soldier with a bad case of food poisoning than put up with that guy in charge for so much as one extra minute. Give me anything but Horatio Jackson, PLEASE! In fairness, a city is made up of a lot more people than its mayor, or president, or whatever the heck office is indicated by “The Right Ordinary”… except the only other characters we meet who are even temporary residents are members of the theatrical touring group owned by Sally’s father — and you guessed it, Sally’s father is also a huge jerk. That means that Sally is literally the only person we could conceivably care one whit about saving from the Turks… and she isn’t even in danger, because she’s off with Baron Munchausen rounding up his former servants to help break the siege! So who cares what happens? If anything, I was rooting for the Turks to raze the city and then dance on The Right Ordinary’s corpse in the rubble!

So, to recap, if you have a nice little film career going, you stand a very good chance of destroying it and rendering yourself unemployable if (1) you make a film with a complete asshole of a main character and do nothing whatsoever to make him likeable; (2) you make sure there are no larger stakes in the story to make the audience care about anything or anyone onscreen; and (3) you spend an ungodly amount of money so that the backers of your movie take a huge bath and have to eat lots of crow.

All in all, it’s too bad that it turned out this way, because aside from the story, there’s much to like here. (Though I know, that’s sort of like saying, “So aside from 9/11, how did you like New York City?” to a tourist who picked the wrong day to visit us.)  The production design is extraordinary — it’s practically an illustrated encyclopedia of Terry Gilliam’s artistic obsessions — and the acting is excellent, there are some great jokes, Uma Thurman is absolutely luminous… but there’s just no reason to give a crap about anything that happens.

It always surprises me when people tell me about an idea they’ve had or a script they’ve written and it turns out they don’t grasp what’s most interesting about it. Imagine if David Koepp started writing Jurassic Park and got sidetracked by the story of some tax auditors trying to find out where all the money went, or if Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana decided Brokeback Mountain was really about a cowboy and his mortage. Those alternate versions don’t sound very interesting, do they? Well, I can’t tell you about screenplays I’ve read in confidence, but last night I watched Fracture on DVD, and boy howdy did that train ever get derailed.

Fracture, for those of you who don’t know, stars the great Anthony Hopkins as Ted Crawford, a brililant engineer who murders his cheating wife, confesses the crime to the cop she’s been sleeping with, and then pulls the rug out from under Ryan Gosling’s Willy Beachum, the young hotshot assistant district attorney he’s carefully selected to be his opponent in court. You see, it turns out that the gun he supposedly shot her with has never been fired and the confession he signed was coerced, and now it looks like he’s going to get off scott free. But where did he hide the weapon he actually shot his wife with? Why is it so important to him that this particular assistant D.A. handle his case? What’s really going on? These are all intriguing mysteries, and they would have held our interest quite handily if only the filmmakers knew to focus on them. Instead, we get a lot of irrelevant personal material about Beachum’s humble beginnings and his attempts to move up in the world and secure a high-paying private-sector job after his stint in public service, none of which has anything to do with the story. The story is rooted in the villain’s plan, and in Fracture, the villain’s plan is to kill his wife and get away with it, not to foil some other guy’s attempt to make a lot of money and live the good life.

In fact, Beachum doesn’t even wind up having any particular reason to be there. Despite all the sound and fury to the contrary, he has nothing to do with the villain’s plan; any assistant D.A. would’ve done just fine. Imagine, though, if Crawford had had a very specific and necessary reason for selecting Beachum — one that depended on Beachum’s acess to his high-powered new employer and his determination to hold onto his new job at any cost. Then Crawford would have been exploiting Beachum’s greed and ambition in order to pull off his perfect murder, and the external conflict, over Crawford’s attempt to get away with killing his wife, would have been directly and organically tied to the internal conflict, between Beachum’s base desire to make lots of money and his more noble aspiration to put criminals behind bars. That would’ve made for a great story. Alas for Fracture — and for us — that it wasn’t written that way.

Even though it’s set in space, Sunshine is the quintessential man-versus-nature story; the sun is fading out, and if humanity doesn’t restore it to its former brilliance, every living thing on Earth will freeze to death. Unfortunately, the filmmakers didn’t seem to realize this, because they added a superfluous (and very poorly executed) psycho killer storyline to the second half of the movie. Even more absurdly, the psycho killer is the captain of the first mission to restore the sun. He went nuts and killed his entire crew, and now he’s determined the stop the second mission too. Why? Heck if I know. There’s some confusing and badly-written dialogue in which he says he’s been talking to God, and I guess the idea is that he thinks God told him to make sure the human race finishes dying, but his reasoning (if you can call it that) is never adequately explained.

While I watched the once-promising story fall apart, I got to wondering. Was the first mission’s captain always a nutjob, and did he sign up for the mission (and somehow slip through what must have been endless rounds of psych evaluation) specifically to sabotage it? Or did something about the long journey through space drive him mad? I guess the former scenario is kind of interesting in an abstract, intellectual sense, but it has little direct relevance to the second mission, and the second mission is what Sunshine is about. The latter possibility, though, is never explored, and while it could have added some tension by making us wonder who else might go crazy, it really wouldn’t work that well, because people have had plenty of experience with long, lonely missions — on submarines, in Antarctica, and so on.

I can just imagine the story meetings that led to the addition of the nutjob captain; somebody must have been afraid that the story didn’t have enough conflict to fuel a whole movie. After all, if the stakes are “drop a bomb into the sun and save humanity… or don’t”, well, what sane person is going to choose “don’t”? There doesn’t seem to be enough conflict inherent in the choice unless you do add a psycho killer. But that argument misses the whole point of man-vs-nature conflicts; the question isn’t so much whether the characters should do whatever they’re trying to do, it’s whether they can. Flying right up to the sun and surviving long enough to drop a bomb on precisely the right spot is the mother of all impossible tasks, so there’s plenty of conflict inherent in the story — between the crew and the sun, between the ship and the sun, between the crew and the ship, and between different crew members who disagree about how to successfully execute the mission. But here’s an idea: if the filmmakers really wanted an extra layer of conflict, why not have the first mission discover that there’s intelligent life in the sun (of a very different sort than we’re familiar with, of course) and that setting off the bomb will save the inhabitants of the Earth.. and exterminate the denizens of the sun? That would be a heck of a moral dilemma, and it would create a ton of conflict — more than enough for three whole acts.