On Some Recent Controversies

My colleague Nick Bergeman just wrote about the hullabaloo surrounding Django Unchained and its writer-director's continued feud with Spike Lee as a result. Django was really only one of several major cinematic controversies to come to the forefront this year, all based around criticisms with varying degrees of validity. Check after the jump for my thoughts (mild spoilers follow).

We'll start with easy answers, and go from there.

Zero Dark Thirty endorses the use of torture!

Short answer: No, it doesn't, and if it did it does an incredibly bad job of it.

Much has been said regarding the graphic portrayal of torture used in Zero Dark Thirty, and many have said that this contributes to a disputed view that torture was instrumental in the process of locating Osama bin Laden. My retort is simple: why are they going to graphically portray the dehumanization and mistreatment of another person if they're earnestly trying to encourage or even just condone its use? The premise of the argument is absurd. 

The film, in the early stretches, depicts several scenes of a man being tortured by Jason Clarke's character in order to extract information, all under the supervision of Maya, the main character. But even with Bigelow's generally detached sense of direction, the terror of the tortured man, the coldness of his torturer, and Maya's initial disgust and gradual hardening are plain to see. After a couple of these very uncomfortable scenes, the man is brought out of the torture-shed, receives some (real) food, and is asked about what he knows. He gives them a piece of information they pretty much already had, but Maya grasps onto it and then the rest of the movie happens. So while the film does, in its own way, suggest that torture was part of the process that discovered Osama bin Laden, if anything it portrays it as a redundant one. At no point in this film does Jessica Chastain stare into the camera and decry the use of torture, but, as Maya, why would she? This is a rare film that presents a situation honestly and frankly, urging and trusting the audience to draw their own conclusions.

And honestly, what's the alternative? Pretend torture never happened? What's worse: a film that depicts the CIA using torture, or one that tries to brush it under the carpet?

The Impossible whitewashes recent events by making it about fake British people!

Short answer: Kinda, yeah.

I mean, there is something important to note about this film. The Impossible is, contrary to popular belief, not a Hollywood production, but a Spanish film by Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona about a real Spanish family that was caught in the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami that is featured in the film. The family became a little media sensation in España, since it gave perspective to this otherwise far-off tragedy. The film cast Australian Naomi Watts and British Ewan McGregor in the lead roles probably to increase international marketability. 

So, the story itself is based on real things. That said, the film kinda does focus disproportionately on foreigners, mostly European, caught in the tsunami. This certainly isn't a bad topic for a film (natural disaster + foreign country = terror), but the film doesn't seem especially concerned with that, specifically. There's an interesting shot at the very end of the film, where Watts, McGregor, and their children - this obviously affluent White family - are being escorted to a helicopter, and they pass by rows and rows of these injured, lost, and scared refugees, mostly Thai, and there's an impression there that Watts & Co, who have been the focus of a pretty terrifying disaster film, got off easy. They get to go home, they didn't lose anything, none of them died. So the last scene kind of jarringly throws perspective over a movie where an improbable amount of the relevant characters, especially the tsunami victims, have been non-Thai. At least it acknowledges the disparity, I guess.

Argo is historically inaccurate!

Short answer: Oh my god, it's a movie Sure, but maybe it's intentional?

There are two main points of dispute regarding Argo's historical authenticity. The first is that there's this whole kerfuffle in the airport at the end of the movie that never really happened, which I think is kind of a dismissible criticism on its own, and the other is that the film downplays Canada's role in the operation, which is more valid. My thoughts are that the general historical inaccuracies and some of the clichéd Hollywoodisms that crop up in the final act may have been part of the film’s vision.

Argo starts up kind of unusually. The first scene of the film is this kind of flashy little slideshow detailing the events leading up to the storming of the US embassy in Tehran, showing the factors contributing to the Iranian Revolution and making clear the US's complicity in the those events. This is followed by a scene of the storming itself, which is quick and scary and generally gives off a good sense of fear and realism. We then shift to the US, where we get Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston, John Goodman, and Alan Arkin fast-talking about the American political condition and how to make movies and drawing a number of unflattering parallels between Washington and Hollywood, to humorous effect. Soon, however, we're back in Iran, and... everything starts to play suspiciously like, well, your stereotypical Hollywood film. There's a few rather familiar plot twists, the whole artifice in the airport, and a good old fashioned happy ending where Tony Mendez (played by Affleck even though Mendez was half-Mexican) is reunited with his estranged family (they weren't estranged in real life), complete with an American flag waving in the background.

I could just be being naive, but the tone set up by the genre savvy, historically informed, self-depreciating first half of the movie, as well as the intelligence Affleck has demonstrated as a director so far, AND the fact that much of this movie is about how to make a movie, suggests to me that there's a tongue planted in someone's cheek here in regards to the last act of the film. I think it's clever.

Cloud Atlas's makeup is racist!

Short answer: This one's a bit murky.

So we're all on the same page, Cloud Atlas is made up of six stories that take place all around the world and over the course of centuries, using a core cast of thirteen actors to play in all six parts of the film in order to reinforce the themes of recurrence and reincarnation. The problem happens when one of these stories takes place in futuristic Korea and a good portion of the core cast is White. Three actors in particular – Jim Sturgess, Hugo Weaving, and James D'Arcy - have been under fire for prominently playing Korean characters in "yellowface" makeup, drawing the inevitable comparisons to Charlie Chan and Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's. There is a definite weight to these accusations, but Cloud Atlas and Charlie Chan almost have no ground for comparison.

Bottom line, the use of yellowface (and not even particularly convincing yellowface, at that) is absolutely problematic. Given the history of the practice, that can’t be avoided. However, given the context in which it is used in Cloud Atlas, I believe the practice is justified. Again, the cast of actors is reused and reimplemented throughout the six stories that make up Cloud Atlas, where certain actors play characters with recurring roles (most prominently, Hugo Weaving and Hugh Grant are antagonists in every story). This requires that many of the actors racebend as well as genderbend – an interesting choice, especially given that one of the film's three co-directors is recently transgendered Lana Wachowski. This contributes to one of the themes of the film, that boundaries of gender and race are not only societally imposed, but also temporary. Black plays White, White plays Asian, Asian plays Latina, Man plays Woman, Woman plays Man. Given the thematic direction the film was taking and the mix-matching of the multiracial cast, I find criticizing the film for casting not according to race to be misguided.

There are, however, some more practical and specific criticisms that seem more pressing. The first is that the casting choices made here denied roles to Asian or Asian-American* actors, already underrepresented in cinema. This is, I think, the most convincing argument against the casting choices, because it would have been easy to cast an Asian actor, like James Kyson, Sung Kang, or even John Cho, in the place of Jim Sturgess, as his one other important role is a 19th-century American that spends a lot of the film with a beard, so makeup would have been simple. Not only that, but it would also give a chance to showcase an Asian actor in a prominent, heroic role - not common outside of East Asia. The other prominent complaint is that the yellowface makeup isn't even particularly good. The characters still look White, just with the eyes and hair modified. The result is sort of jarring. I can't really explain this, but I can point to examples in the same portion of the film where the makeup was super good (Halle Berry literally disappears into her role as an old grizzly male Korean doctor) and also even less convincing, but obviously not due to laziness (Keith David plays the leader of the resistance, but is still very clearly Black), and say that there may have been a point behind that. It could have to do with the timing of that particular story – it’s more than a century in the future, so maybe racial lines have blurred in Korea – or the specific roles different actors play – the Whitish characters seem to be part of a ruling class and are generally antagonistic, darker and more genuinely Asian characters make up most of the very sympathetic resistance – but those are just guesses.

* Given that Cloud Atlas isn't a Hollywood film, but rather an independently financed German production, I always found the demand specifically for Asian-American actors to be ill-informed, but that's minor.