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

I didn’t rush out and see it on opening day or anything, but I’ve been kinda sorta halfway interested in seeing Swing Vote. It’s about a presidential election that’s so close that it winds up coming down to one man’s vote, but due to a technical glitch, his vote is lost on election day and he gets to cast it again ten days later, meaning that both candidates spend those ten days doing everything humanly possible to persuade him to pick them, which is a pretty good concept — and I’m something of a politics junkie, so it sounded like it’s right up my alley. Besides, I like Kevin Costner. (So sue me; he has an amiable presence, and he’s actually a better actor than most people give him credit for being. Besides, he’s made a bunch of really good movies, like The Untouchables, Bull Durham, Tin Cup, and plenty of others.) But anyway, back to Swing Vote and my half-formed plans to see it. Luckily for me, Bill Martell took the bullet so I don’t have to.

Here are an excerpt of the post in which he explains how Kevin Costner has put another nail in the coffin of his career, but you should really read the whole thing. (It starts off talking about the recent earthquake out in L.A.; the movie section comes after that.)

One man will decide the fate of the free world.

And that man is Joe 6 Pack. His name is even product placement - Bud. The problem is, they make fun of him - the movie ridicules him and turns him into a complete idiot… even though he’s our lead. Our identification character. He’s a complete idiot, he lives in a trailer park, he works in an egg factory (but the movie doesn’t really get into egg processing at all - it’s like nobody did any research) and is constantly drunk. This is what they think of the average American voter… Thanks!

Now, there are things they could do to make Bud likable - but they don’t do any of them. In fact, they seem to go out of their way to do the opposite - to make him even more of an unlikable, impossible to identify with idiot. They could have made him really really funny - kind of the Adam Sandler method (though Sandler isn’t that funny) - but all of the jokes are on Bud - we’re laughing at him, not with him… except we aren’t laughing at him, either. He’s an idiot - you wonder what *Costner* was thinking. They could have had things happen to him that earn our sympathy - but when he loses his job at the egg factory it’s because he was stumble-bum drunk on the job and knocked over a whole pallet of eggs - right in front of the security camera. Nothing sympathetic at all.

Now, bear with me a moment for what might seem like a bit of a digression.

A few days ago, I watched A Face in the Crowd at the urging of a close friend who’d rented it from Netflix. It’s a very good movie (written by Budd Schulberg and directed by Elia Kazan) about a charismatic hobo who gets turned into an overnight media sensation and quickly takes advantage of the situation to become one of America’s biggest and most powerful celebrities, and Andy Griffith surprised the ever-living crap out of me by delivering an astoundingly good performance, but after I finished it, I commented to my friend that as good as it was, I didn’t think the movie was completely successful because the lead character just wasn’t sympathetic enough for me to really care what happened to him.

Her response was that There Will Be Blood proves that the protagonist doesn’t really have to be likeable for a film to work. (She knows it’s my favorite movie of 2007 even though she doesn’t like it quite as much as I do.) Paul Thomas Anderson, though, took care to make Daniel Plainview powerfully sympathetic in Blood despite his many tragic flaws by giving him a son he clearly loved, and as the story unfolded and the worse angels of Plainview’s nature threatened to get the better of him, I was rooting for him to hold onto his love for his son and become a better person with every fiber of my being. Giving a bad character (or even one who’s just morally conflicted) someone to love is just one of the many techniques available that can very effectively make audience members emotionally invest in him even when he seems quite unsympathetic on the surface, and Paul Thomas Anderson pulled it off handily.

I think Andy Griffith’s character in A Face in the Crowd was supposed to start off as a likable country-bumpkin everyman who only gets corrupted when the media and rich power brokers get hold of him, and that does work up to a point because of Griffith’s superb performance, but the problem is that the character he plays was actually pretty much dishonest and corrupt right from the beginning, and just for in case anyone had any doubts on that point, one of the supporting characters, Mel Miller (played by the great Walter Matthau) actually says so near the end of the movie. Not a good idea when you’re trying to make a tragic drama about the malevolent influence of money and the media on otherwise innocent Americans.

Anyway, once again, back to Swing Vote. Apparently, the filmmakers did an even worse job of making Kevin Costner’s character sympathetic than Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan did with Andy Griffith’s, which is kind of ironic given that Kevin Costner came much closer to getting it right in another movie he produced, Mr. Brooks, which is actually about a much more overtly unsympathetic character, a serial killer! Too bad, but hey, at least I get to save twelve bucks and wait for it to show up on cable. Thanks, Bill!

It’s a bold move to make a movie with an unsympathetic protagonist. We in the audience are expected to see the world through the eyes of the main character — and to feel it through his (or her) heart. But would you like to become Ted Bundy, Timothy McVeigh or Ken Lay, even just for a couple hours? Most people might not be able to experience the emotions that drive characters like those at all… and if they could, they’d probably rather not find out. That’s why something like three out of every two phrases you’ll hear in Hollywood are “likable protagonist,” “sympathetic lead role” or “relatable main character.” After all, nobody ever went broke underestimating the bravery of the American public.

So I have to give major props to the creative forces behind Mr. Brooks and Ratatouille for defying convention. (And yes, I really am drawing a parallel between Mr. Brooks and Ratatouille. Just bear with me; it’ll all make sense in a minute.) Unfortunately, I also have to take a lot of the points I give them with one hand away with the other, because in the end, they both chickened out. Mr. Brooks, as you probably know, is about a serial killer played by Kevin Costner, and Ratatouille not only stars a rat, it stars a French rat named Remy who desperately wants to become a chef at a five-star restaurant. Talk about unrelatable! In each case, though, very possibly because someone with power over the purse strings was afraid audiences couldn’t or wouldn’t relate, we also get another, more overtly likable character as an emergency backup target for our sympathies. In Brooks it’s the cop played by Demi Moore, and in Ratatouille, it’s the hapless human Linguini, who also dreams of being a chef, but who doesn’t have even a fraction of Remy’s talent.

The problem is that these extra quasi-protagonists have the exact opposite of their intended effect. As I explained in another blog entry a week or two ago, the contrast between Earl Brooks and Detective Atwood makes Brooks seem less sympathetic than he would have been without her. The likable shmo Linguini does the same thing to Remy the rat, but Ratatouille has another problem on top of that: Linguini actually takes over the story for awhile, leaving Remy in limbo. In fact, at one point it’s not completely clear whose story Ratatouille is telling — and that’s extra-deadly when one of your leads has glowing red eyes, sharp teeth and jagged, spiky fur. Linguini is made even more relatable (and more damaging to audience investment in Remy) by the addition of the Colette subplot. (Colette is the assistant chef Linguini falls for.) Romantic longing is one of the most appealing and sympathetic traits a character can have… and it goes to Linguini rather than to Remy. I’m not saying Linguini should’ve been cut entirely; being a rat, Remy needed someone to help him in the kitchen. But Ratatouille wasn’t Linguini’s story, and it shouldn’t have ever seemed like it was.

For those of you who still think that Atwood and Linguini were necessary as full third-wheel protagonists because Brooks and Remy just weren’t sympathetic enough, rent As Good As It Gets. Melvil Udall (played by Jack Nicholson) is one of the most obnoxious and detestable protagonists to come down the pike in a long time, and yet the movie made almost $150M domestic and won a couple Oscars for its leads. That’s because Mark Andrus and James L. Brooks took care to balance Melvin’s unappealing characteristics with plenty of ones that we could understand and relate to. To be fair, Brad Bird et al did much the same with Remy — he has a dream he’s determined to fulfill, he feels unappreciated by his family and painfully out of place with his own kind, he’s very good at something he cares a lot about, and so on — but they didn’t quite have the courage of their convictions. Or, as I suggested earlier, someone else took their courage away from them. And that’s too bad, because both films would’ve been a lot stronger and more successful if they’d stood foursquare behind their protagonists instead of trying to be all things to all people.

P.S. Don’t get me wrong; Brad Bird is one of my favorite filmmakers, and for for all its flaws, Ratatouille is great stuff, easily my third-favorite Pixar film behind The Incredibles and Monsters, Inc. Unfortunately, it’s also my third favorite Brad Bird film, and he’s made only three.

The Kevin Costner vehicle Mr. Brooks offers an interesting new take on the serial killer genre — something we should all be grateful for after years of being assaulted by the same tired old knockoffs that seem to stagger out into theaters by the dozen — but it’s also a case study in contrast, or rather, in the unfortunate lack thereof.

Perception is a funny thing. People like to think in absolutes (saved or damned, black or white, good or evil, etc.) but in fact the way we see things is largely relative. Here’s a classic art school exercise to illustrate the principle: put a light grey square of paper next to a deep black one and it’ll look white, but place it next to a genuinely white square and it’ll appear to be dark grey, closer to black than white. The same is true of characters. Put a chubby guy by a morbidly obese man and he’ll look thin, but move him over so he’s next to a skinny beanpole type and suddenly he’ll seem like he’s seriously overweight. Nor is this phenomenon limited to appearances; it also applies to deep character. Consider Die Hard. Alan Rickman’s character, Hans Gruber, is everything John McClane is not: refined, well-dressed, European, materialistic, pseudo-intellectual, and convinced of his own essential superiority to everyone else in the human race. McClane is a regular-joe blue-collar cop with marital problems and garden-variety fears (he’s a white-knuckle flyer, for example) and the profound contrasts between him and Gruber underline his everyman qualities and make it easier to relate to him and emotionally invest in his character. For a great illustration, check out this exchange:

Hans: But who are you? (scornfully) Just another American who saw too many movies as a child. Another orphan of a bankrupt culture who thinks he’s John Wayne… Rambo… Marshal Dillion.

McClane: Actually, I was always partial to Roy Rogers. I really dug those sequined shirts.

For more examples of contrast in action, think about any of the great buddy movies or unlikely-partner pictures, like 48 Hours, Lethal Weapon, Midnight Run, and of course The Odd Couple. In every case, the two lead characters are as different from each other as it’s possible to be. Hollywood calls this technique “cornering” — making sure that your characters occupy opposite corners of the continuum in every single dimension — and it’s an essential one to learn if you want to be a great screenwriter.

What does this have to do with Mr. Brooks? Everything. There’s a problematic lack of contrast between Earl Brooks and his two main antagonists, Detective Tracy Atwood, played by Demi Moore, and amateur photographer “Mr. Smith”, played by Dane Cook. Brooks is a wealthy, determined businessman who won’t let anything stand in the way of a deal; Atwood is a wealthy, determined detective who won’t let anything stop her from catching her perp. Brooks is a serial murderer; Smith wants to be one. Brooks’ essential nature as a killer makes family life difficult; Atwood’s dedication to her job helped end her marriage.

Perhaps the authors were deliberately trying to explore the similarities between antagonists. Though trickier to employ than contrast, that technique is a fascinating way to externalize internal conflict by making a protagonist battle someone who is in some ways essentially himself, and it can ultimately force the protagonist to finally acknowledge and deal with what’s really wrong with him by making him see it in someone else. For a great example of this type of character design, look no further than Raiders of the Lost Ark. The dynamic between Indiana Jones and Dr. Belloq is crystallized in a single exchange of dialogue:

Belloq: You and I are very much alike. Archeology is our religion, yet we have both fallen from the pure faith. Our methods have not differed as much as you pretend. I am but a shadowy reflection of you. It would take only a nudge to make you like me. To push you out of the light.

Indy: Now you’re getting nasty.

So what’s wrong with doing this in Mr. Brooks? In Raiders (and in other movies which make successful use of similarity) there’s no danger that our sympathies will fail to rest with the protagonist, let alone that they might wander off and settle on the antagonist. Indiana Jones is a charismatic, likeable guy with a tremendously exciting job, he’s regularly thrust into mortal peril, and he has a number of appealing everyman qualities, like his fear of snakes. Moreover, there are other ways in which Belloq and Jones aren’t so similar after all. Belloq is more refined, better-dressed, he’s European, more materialistic… shades of the Gruber-McClane relationship in Die Hard, in fact! In Mr. Brooks, by contrast, Earl Brooks is a serial killer. There are very few kinds of people we’re less likely to sympathize with than those who murder for pleasure, and so it becomes very difficult to arouse and maintain audience investment in him. Considered by himself, Brooks is an extremely dark grey square of paper.

The authors do make some effective choices. They largely externalize his killer persona in the form of Marshall, played by William Hurt; they show him going to AA meetings to combat his addiction to killing; and in a brilliant twist, he figures out that his daughter may have just murdered someone, and he agonizes over the possibility that he’s passed his sickness on to her.

The single most effective thing they could have done, though, would have been to surround Brooks with even worse people, with completely black squares of paper that would have made his dark grey one seem much closer to white. They took a stab at this (ho ho ho) with the Smith character, someone who wants to kill even though he isn’t driven by any obvious mental illness or dark compulsions, but because Smith never actually does anything himself, he fails to deliver more than a fraction of his contrast-enhancing potential. And they completely dropped the ball with Atwood by trying to make her sympathetic, giving her a gold-digging ex and the sort of serious job stress that everyone can relate to.

Instead, Atwood should have gotten off on hounding people, much like predators enjoy toying with their prey. In fact, she should have been so driven by the ego trip of catching perps that she didn’t care who she hurt (or even killed!) along the way. And imagine if Smith had gotten off on torturing his would-be victims — and Brooks, who always kills quickly and painlessly, had to step in and save them! Then we would have been really invested in Earl Brooks, because his square of paper would have seemed much whiter next to the pitch-black squares of his evil antagonists. But by making Smith an ineffectual villain and Atwood an overly sympathetic cop, the authors failed to invest us in their protagonist as deeply and effectively as they should have, and though interesting, the movie wasn’t the critical and commercial hit it could have been.