Monday, May 16, 2016

Money Monster

Like Spotlight, Money Monster  revives the lost ideal of responsible, investigative journalism. Lee Gates (George Clooney) is a TV showman who does vaudeville acts to flog his financial coverage. “We don’t even do journalism,” his sharp producer (Julia Roberts) admits. Gates initially embodies the modern media’s — like the government’s — sellout to corporate America. Then his cocooned complacency is upset by the invasion by a threatening bomber outraged that Gates’s glib recommendation caused the man’s — and many other helpless schnooks’ —  financial ruin.
As the world watches Kyle Budwell’s siege their stunned sympathy catches the frustration and rage that fuel the Sanders and Trump revolutions. The corrupt business executive Walt Camby steals north of $80,000,000 to finance an African adventure while his trusting shareholders are left broke an broken.  In a comic replay of the citizens’ impotence, a staffer tests a new erectile cream — but is prematurely rushed away on assignment. For the showman, of course, courage in investing is imaged as impressive balls.
As his name suggests Gates proves to be a pathway. He develops some sympathy for his attacker, especially after the boy’s pregnant girlfriend rages at him instead of pleading for his survival. The showbiz team turns serious when a friendly network of hackers exposes Camby’s lies and fraud. Gates is determined to get Kyle some answers, to justify his campaign. In the end he does, but he can’t save the lad’s life. 
The film operates on several levels of reversal. As the financial “journalist” plays showbiz the usual array of real newsmen, like the ubiquitous Wolf Blitzer, show up as themselves. Apparently no one has told them that if they play fictional versions of themselves in Hollywood fictions they squander whatever credibility they may have had on their own news shows. The very casting proves the film’s starting thesis: Americans are merely entertained where they need to be informed.  
The reversal of the pregnant girl’s usually sentimental appeal to her man parallels the film’s overall sense of an America in which normal loyalties have been lost to rabid self-interest. The casting plays a romantic twist on this. Clooney and Roberts in a movie, that promises scenes of electric romance. But no, in the bulk of their scenes they aren’t even together, just shot and framed separately as she communicates from the production booth to his earpiece. They connect but are separated, an emblem of a fractured union, a fractured country. Only at the end do they meet. She abandons her new job after he admitted his need for her. That adds a romantic tinge to the illusion of justice restored.
  And it is just an illusion. Villain Camby will be investigated but as he says, he didn’t break any law when he exploited the corrupt system. Remembering how all the real-life villains behind the mortgage calamity went scot-free, we have little hope he will suffer proper punishment here. And after a montage of saddened faces, the representative citizens shaken by the boy’s needless killing, the normal life of games and anodynes resumes: a guy resumes his bar game of fusball. Emotions give way to an automaton.
The film delights in reversals. When Gates twigs to the fact that the FBI are trying to shoot him, he uses the terrorist as his shield to get from the studio to the Camby interview. In that irony we’re reminded you can’t tell the good guys from the bad any more. Trump is counting on that. 

Sunday, May 1, 2016

A Hologram for the King

This might have been titled Rebirth of a Salesman. The new Willy Low-man is Alan Clay, i.e. the quintessential man. Tom Hanks as the current representative American doesn’t just have feet of clay; he is entirely vulnerable and crumbling. 
Alan was reduced back to sales after his management ruined his old bike-making company. When he shifted his manufacturing to cheaper China they stole his models and began making their own bikes — but better and cheaper — and stole the industry. 
He still flashes back to having to announce his US factory’s closure, for which his father has still not forgiven him. A camping story recalls the father’s lesson in self-reliance. By outsourcing its manufacturing Alan/America lost that essential value. No longer independent the once-powerful Alan/America suffers indignities and frustrations by having to go cap in hand to try to salvage a future by submission to an alien and antipathetic culture, i.e. Saudi Arabia.
The failed businessman also failed domestically, of course. His wife divorced him (for “not seeing the big picture”). He still has a tenuous relationship with his 20ish daughter — but he feels guilty for not being able to support her, to pay for her college, to provide for her future.
As befits a psychological analysis of America, the opening scene is Alan’s dream. While he glibly offers a hearty pitch (product indeterminate so irrelevant), the key elements of his life explode in puffs of pink smoke behind him: his house, his wife, etc. He’s flying to the Saudis where his new company depends on his selling the king on their new IT program for their plan to urbanize a desert. 
The ensuing comedy derives from the fumblings of a stranger in a strange land. He can’t adjust to the culture any more than to the time-lag. So he sleeps through his appointment times, only to find it doesn’t matter. He was stood up anyway. He stumbles into meeting his elusive contact only to be dumped by him again. The guy lets him drive his flashy Audi but only because the American is no longer in the global driver’s seat. The privilege is a taunt.
Obviously the key metaphor is the hologram of the title. Alan finally manages to show the king his company’s impressive holography, where a “real” character interacts with a virtual figure. He creates the continuum between reality and illusion, substance and image, power and pretence. Despite the perfect presentation the Chinese beat Alan out again.
Though holography is the new, ultimate force of image-making, America has always defined itself by fabricated images. That’s how Arthur Miller characterized his Loman, who taught his son the false importance of being “well-liked” and soared into failure with his suitcase and a smile. Falling for the image is the real failure to see the big picture.
Here the past image, the lost glory, is the Schwann bike, Alan’s old company. The bike evokes America’s lost station in the world, its mythic past of innocence, optimism, when it was a world power with clean hands and an unlimited future. Of course that was as illusory as the hologram. 
The Danish Embassy party is an orgiastic release from the Saudi restrictions. Yet Alan is as out of his element there as in the Saudi culture. Its noise, fever and license seem like another dream. He declines the woman’s offer of sex out of an uncertain mix of his purity and impotence. Similarly, when he declines to shoot the wolf the scene evokes the hunting scene in an earlier classic of American Innocent Abroad, Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter.  
Alan tries to negotiate the mysteries of the foreign culture. He’s thrown by his driver’s command of US pop music. He misses the banned booze — and suffers even more when he gets some. He’s especially at sea with the differences in gender issues. In a climactic paradox the woman doctor swims topless with him — in order to divert suspicion! From behind, a topless woman and a man look the same, you see. The underwater frolic seems another dream, the positive replacement of the first. 
In a side episode Alan has to deal with a growth on his back. It’s an image of a burden, a threat that proves benign. In a drunken initiative he tries to cut it out himself, another failed self-reliance. He finally has it removed by his woman doctor, who returns to lance his malignant love-life as well. 
If the romantic happy ending seems a bit forced and implausible — that’s because it is. This cross-cultural relationship is our anodyne, our relief from reality, another version of the false image of domestic bliss Alan will be offering his clients when he sells them the new apartments yet to be built on the Saudi sands.  
In that respect the entire film is a carefully selected image of Saudi Arabia. It’s defined by its massive population, its alien dress and manners, its fervid and ubiquitous religiosity, and its striking power. When someone decides to help Alan all his problems are immediately addressed. The huge and opulent buildings flash the new Muslim power, which dwarfs the American and leaves him helplessly dependent. 
The film frames out any suggestion of the Saudis’ support of terrorism, especially 9/11, and its current political play as a counterforce to the even more disruptive Iran. But that’s fine. The connotations remain, especially as we see how the Saudi businessman plays his American partner. Spelling out that political reality would probably have been too big a boil for the back of this satiric and pointed comedy to bear. 
     In any case, the world the Saudis are developing there is as false an image as the idealized America fabricated for Alan's opening dream commercial. Like any illusion, reality will eventually blow it up too.