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!

Last time out, I talked a little about House of Cards, and in doing so, I mentioned Richard III and Profit. Later that night, I got to thinking about the three of them, and I realized that for all their similarities, there’s actually a very interesting difference between them — while Profit goes to great lengths to reveal Jim Profit’s backstory and explain (and even justify) his dark and twisted nature, House of Cards tells us just about nothing about the life story and origins of Francis Urquhart, its own scheming, amoral protagonist. (Richard III strikes something of a middle ground, so I’ll leave it out of this discussion.) Yet House of Cards still expects us to empathize with Urquhart enough to be captured by the narrative, and in fact the miniseries was so successful that it spawned two sequels and much critical worship, while Profit suffered abysmal ratings and tragically premature cancellation.

This seems to fly in the face of the conventional wisdom, which dictates that everyone’s problems and pathologies be explained in terms of abusive parents, traumatic childhoods and the like. Probably the best single example of this pop-psychology approach to writing is the upcoming Halloween remake, written and directed by Rob Zombie based on John Carpenter’s and Debra Hill’s original. By all accounts, we’re going to see a ton of flashbacks to Michael Myers’ childhood, as well as a lot more material with Dr. Loomis, all in an attempt to make Myers understandable in contemporary human terms. Yet the original, with its faceless and incomprehensible villain, is a landmark, and made close to $50M in 1978, or over $150M in today’s dollars. The book hasn’t yet been written on the remake, but I doubt it’ll be nearly as successful.

Why the seeming paradox?

You could answer that House of Cards aired on the BBC while Profit was on Fox, and there’s certainly a lot of truth in that. Mainstream American audiences, and especially American broadcast networks, have very little patience for morally complex characters and low ratings, and in fact niche shows with deeply flawed protagonists (such as FX’s outstanding The Shield) have almost entirely flourished on cable, an option that unfortunately wasn’t nearly so available back when Profit debuted. But that’s not the whole story.

What’s really making the difference is something I alluded to in another recent blog post, that time about On the Lot: namely, how understandable and relatable the different stories’ protagonists are. House of Cards was successful not only because it found the right home, though that was undoubtedly very important, but because everyone watching the show could understand why Francis Urquhart, a man who spent his entire life behind the scenes making sure that other people’s careers stayed on track, would give into the temptation to sieze some power and glory for himself. And from the moment he made that initial decision, he found himself on a slippery slope, with each subsequent decision he made completely understandable given his circumstances — he had to do everything he did, almost as much to keep himself out of jail as to achieve his goal of becoming Prime Minster. Profit, however, failed because when you get right down to it, Jim Profit was a really weird guy, and very few people could find it in their hearts (or minds) to understand him. He had sex with his (step)mother, he slept in a cardboard box instead of a bed, he seemed to play games and manipulate people just for the sheer joy of it… None of these are traits that the average person can relate to even a tiny little bit. That doesn’t make the show any less brilliant, but it does mean it would’ve had a heck of a time finding an audience no matter when and where it aired.

In the end, I’m not sure what the lesson is in terms of craft. If you want financial success, obviously, design a protagonist who’s understandable and relatable even if he is antiheroic. Flawed and evil protagonists, after all, are a tough enough sell all by themselves. But Profit is probably my favorite show of all time, and I certainly don’t want to discourage anyone from trying to make something just as daring and inspired, so part of me hopes that at least some of you try to buck the system, if only just once.

It’s a cliche by now to observe that once you notice or remark upon something, suddenly you see it everywhere and it practically seems to be stalking you, but in this case, I think it actually may be true.

OK, not really, but it is pretty strange to blog about the awful and heavy-handed symbolism of the rat in The Departed and then to see the same damn thing just a few weeks later in an otherwise stupendously good BBC production from seventeen years ago. And when I say “the same damn thing”, I mean that literally. In The Departed, Scorcese put up a huge neon sign saying “CORRUPTION HERE!” with a big blinking arrow pointing right at the government by having a rat run up and across a railing with the Massachusetts State House in the background, and in House of Cards, Paul Seed did the same thing about a dozen times over by repeatedly cutting to rats cavorting through London, generally against the backdrop of one august and historic government structure or another. In fact, I have a very strong suspicion that Scorcese got the idea from House of Cards; he’s certainly very literate in film, and I’m sure he’s seen plenty of TV too.

(On a side note, isn’t it interesting (and depressing) that we have a variety of expressions for people who are conversant with literature — “well-read” and “literate” being just two of many — but none for people who have a great deal of knowledge about film? I was tempted to roll my own and call Scorcese “well-viewed”, but I thought people might think I was saying his films have been seen by a lot of people. We movie people need more respect!)

For those of you who don’t know what the heck House of Cards is, it’s a fantastic miniseries about a consummate back-room politician who decides one day that he wants to become Prime Minister of England (the ultimate front-room position) and goes after the job with every last bit of guile and venom he can muster. He regularly confides in us, the audience, but he keeps his hand carefully hidden from all the other characters in the story, and as his schemes unfold, we can only marvel at their ever-greater audacity — and, at least for awhile, at their continuing success.

Obviously, House has some clear similarities to Shakespeare’s Richard III, and also to the stellar but unfortunately short-lived TV show Profit, both of which I highly recommend. The beauty of Profit and Richard III — and of the vast majority of House of Cards, for that matter — is that they’re stuffed with magnificently-executed subtext, and understanding all the layers of meaning that unspool before us is tremendously rewarding, because we feel like we’ve accomplished something by figuring them out and putting them together. Furthermore, because we’ve drawn our conclusions ourselves, we take a sort of emotional ownership of them, accepting them as our own. That’s why preaching and overt messages rarely work; they’re finished conclusions people are trying to force on us, not deductions we’re allowed to partake in.

The rats, unfortunately, are the worst sort of preaching, completely free of subtext, and as such they stand in stark and unfortunate contrast to the rest of The Departed and House of Cards, both of which are otherwise written with great subtlety and skill.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled rodent-free browsing.

It’s fashionable in some circles to beat up on Spider-Man 3, but while there’s no question that it fails to live up to the standard set by its two predecessors, it’s actually a moderately entertaining and partially satisfying movie. The problem is that its authors tried to cram too many characters, too many narrative threads and too many different themes into the story. There’s not enough time to adequately dramatize and satisfactorily resolve them all — but simply making the movie longer wouldn’t have helped, because some of its themes have nothing whatsoever to do with the others.

Part of the movie concerns Peter Parker’s internal struggle with the arrogance that can easily come with power. This dilemma is magnified by his infection by the Venom parasite, which makes him a stronger Spider-Man but also strips away his inhibitions and heightens his negative emotions, making him more selfish, more arrogant and more likely to act on his anger.

The foundation of his character arc also could have meshed extremely well with his ongoing external conflict with Harry Osborn over Peter’s role in Harry’s father’s death. Harry is rich and has some of the selfishness and arrogance that often come with wealth, particularly inherited wealth, and his emotions drive him to take bloody revenge on Peter. The two characters, therefore, had the potential to dramatize one of the basic themes of the Spider-Man mythos — namely that with great power comes great responsibility — and to organically explore the internal tension between selfish arrogance and selfless nobility. When Harry imbues himself with super-strength and sets out for revenge without care for the consequences to anyone else (to the city in general, which would lose its protector if Harry succeeded in killing Peter, but also to any innocent bystanders caught up in the whirlwind of their combat and to Mary Jane and Aunt May, two people he ostensibly cares about) Peter could have been given a rude awakening, seeing his own Venom-exacerbated but nonetheless real selfishness and arrogance reflected in Harry, and deciding to renounce both his unhealthy emotions and the extra power offered by the parasite.

Unfortunately, neither this theme nor the effect of the Venom parasite are adequately dramatized. Yes, Peter Parker does cavalierly injure and defeat Harry while wearing his black suit, and yes, there are some extremely funny scenes involving his stuck up behavior towards women, but we never really see the appeal of the parasite — its upside, the reason Peter wouldn’t just throw it away immediately — because we never actually see the extra power the black suit grants him, and instead of serving as a dark mirror for Peter’s newly dark self, Harry suffers from amnesia and meanders out of the story for awhile.

Much of the problem stems from the fact that the movie throws an additional villain into the mix: Sandman, whose thematic nature is utterly at odds with the rest of the story. The Sandman material is about feeling the need to do bad things for good reasons (Flint Marko, who becomes the Sandman, attempts to steal money to save his daughter’s life) and learning to see the shades of gray in life when people want everything to be either black or white. In the end, Marko renounces his criminal ways, and rather than obeying the letter of the law, Peter lets him go. This is fertile ground for a story and could have made a fantastic Spider-Man movie by itself, even potentially tying into the Harry Osborn storyline, as Harry too has done things that require forgiveness, and forgiving Marko could have enabled Peter to forgive Harry — and Harry to forgive Peter. But that would have been a very different movie, one that didn’t involve Venom or Peter’s struggle with his personality and with unhealthy emotions.

The schism between the two disparate themes and narrative threads is most evident in the scene when Sandman and Venom form an alliance to take down Spider-Man. This is entirely in character for Venom, who is driven by the petty emotions of rage, jealousy and vengeance, but utterly out of character for Sandman, who just wants to be left alone so he can try to help his daughter. The Flint Marko whom we’ve gotten to know simply wouldn’t actively seek to kill Spider-Man, let alone deliberately endanger the life of an innocent woman in order to accomplish that goal. The authors of the film try to use this development to merge two fundamentally incompatible story lines, but that simply cannot work.

So that’s the lesson of Spider-Man 3. Both stories it tries to tell are intriguing and partially dramatized, but the movie as a whole is thematically scattered all over the place instead of being tightly focused. Every movie, whether it’s a blockbuster or an aesthetically challenging micro-budget indie, needs one fundamental theme underlying the entire story. Every scene, every character and indeed every subsidiary theme is just an aspect of that single foundational master theme, and a movie requires that all the relevant aspects of that theme be dramatized if it’s going to be complete, just as all the colors of light are required to combine to form true white.