8. Patricia Ducey – Page 5 – LFM: Libertas Film Magazine

LFM Double Review: “Country Strong” and “Golden Girl of the West” Live at the Met in HD

fanciulla_1 — From Puccini's "La Fanciulla del West" ("Golden Girl of the West") HD series at The Met.

By Patricia Ducey. Giacomo Puccini’s Wild West opera, La Fanciulla del West (“Golden Girl of the West”), is the latest offering from The Met: Live in HD series (Encore: Wednesday, January 26, 2011, 6:30 PST).

Commissioned 100 years ago by the Metropolitan Opera, Fanciulla is Puccini’s homage to the conventions and themes of the American Western—and to America itself. Puccini gave his patrons exactly what they were looking for, and after 19 standing curtain calls on opening night, the Met knew they had a durable hit in their first commission.

This year, the Met celebrates Fanciulla’s centenary with a boisterous, lyrical restaging featuring American soprano Deborah Voigt and Italian tenor Marcello Giordani and a delightful ensemble chorus of gunslingers, miners and banditos—a wonderful addition to a movie season that includes other shining examples of Americana like True Grit and the lesser Country Strong.

The music is Puccini-gorgeous, from one of his most beloved arias, “Ch’ella mi creda” (see here) sung by Dick Johnson as he begs his executioners to spare Minnie the knowledge of his perfidy, to the orchestral passages that reportedly inspired Andrew Lloyd-Weber’s Music of the Night.

Fanciulla’s story centers on frontierswoman Minnie, a saloon owner and Bible study teacher to a gold mining camp’s barely civilized miners. These are rough men: they drink their whiskey straight and shoot first, ask questions later. The only trace of sentiment emerges when they share stories of the dear mothers and big old dogs they left behind. Minnie and her “boys” are courageous loners, striking out for the fabled Sierra gold mines, for personal freedom and for adventure. Minnie with her book-learning and Bible lessons is the slim thread that ties them to civilization, and they are all in love in one fashion or the other with her. She helps them write home and tempers their anger in their many arguments and brawls. In one scene, when they catch one of their own cheating at poker, she instructs them, Bible in hand, “Every sinner can be redeemed.” Later, we suspect she will have to walk that talk herself.

In Minnie we have a new kind of Puccini heroine: a self-made woman, owner of a thriving business, cheerful in adversity and fiercely independent. Her pistol is her best friend, she recounts to an overly amorous miner, and she breaks up more than one unruly mob with a few well-aimed gunshot blasts. Puccini looks more to Annie Oakley than Mimi for this Minnie. She would rather live alone than be trapped in a loveless marriage with any of the several men in camp who endlessly woo her–as soon as she asserts that independence, though, in walks the handsome stranger. Of course she falls totally in love, but her love leads her to triumph here rather than to a pitiable death, as in most of Puccini’s other operas. In the final act, she singlehandedly holds back the lynch mob and at the same time inspires her man to renounce his banditry and dedicate his life to goodness and love.

In Fanciulla, Puccini weds the traditions of operatic tragedy with American optimism. Like the deservedly praised True Grit, Fanciulla exults in themes of Americana as well as in the Judeo-Christian heritage that anchors them. From True Grit’s Bible allusions–read without irony–to the rollicking barroom brawl in Fanciulla, both honor the eternal truths expressed by the Western genre and thus revive its classical expression. Puccini recognizes that the Western is the essential American morality play, and that goodness eventually will triumph in this land caught between wildness and civilization. That’s the real American Dream and the sense of possibility that drew so many of Puccini’s countrymen to our shores.

Writer/Director Shana Feste, on the other hand, is all mixed up about her Americana in Country Strong. She misses entirely the reason country music is so popular: there is no self-hating in Nashville. The movie starts out as a melodrama about Kelly Canter (Gwyneth Paltrow), a fading country singer sprung a little too early from rehab by her emotionally distant husband James (Tim McGraw) because … well, we’re never told why. He insists she needs to start touring before the docs release her. Do they need the money? Is he trying to gaslight Kelly because he loves a younger singer? We hope to find out, yet McGraw’s character and motivation remain a mystery.

Kelly wants rehab orderly Beau (who also conveniently happens to be a singer) to open for her on the tour, but James chooses newcomer Chiles Stanton (Leighton Meester) instead. Kelly is jealous of the younger woman and imagines her flirting with James—or maybe she is flirting with him?—yet Kelly herself has been bedding Beau since rehab. Who’s zoomin’ who? Eventually all four of them are on tour together, in the crucible of Kelly’s comeback. They hook up, break up, fight and make up, with lots of streaked mascara but little discernable rationale. With all possible plot points on the table, the histrionics and plot twists remain vaguely mystifying. No much is at stake here: not principles, life and death, nor even love. In hipster movies, love hurts.

The actors do a heroic job, and a few of the tunes, even though we never hear one in its entirety, are iPod worthy. Paltrow proves again what a rich, emotionally layered actor she is, and Meester, of Gossip Girl fame, wrests depth and nuance from a most shallow stereotype. Garrett Hedlund from Tron could have a singing career. Tim McGraw, one of the most radiantly masculine stars on screen, though, is seriously misused or underused. McGraw’s James is written as cold and distant, but this behavior is never explained. Maybe a prequel will explain his pinched rejection of the whole lot of them?

Country Strong is a serviceable enough musical melodrama, but it’s hard to tell what the point is. This is either a script-by-committee mashup, or Feste is another screenwriter gripped by existential confusion towards her subject. She cannot decide if Country Strong is a classic melodrama or hipster hit-piece. On the one hand, the script panders to the bien pensant with jabs at what she envisions as flyover country: Christians are hypocrites, patriots are jingoists, pro-lifers are haters, crossover country is insipid and beauty queens are stupid, etc. Then why is Kelly’s triumphant comeback song an insipid pop song itself, presented without irony? On the other hand, sometimes Country Strong seems to be playing it straight, as with the actors’ performances, and that does work. Her method seems to be to throw tropes and clichés on the wall, however contradictory, and see what sticks.

Puccini’s Minnie and the Coen brothers’ Mattie Ross would be perplexed at so much wild emotion in service of such small stakes. Minnie probably would chuck Kelly out of her saloon at the first whine, and Hattie would sniff and ride off, head held high, to right another wrong. They knew that their journey was the American journey, into the wilderness and into the human heart, and that “strong” is more than just a word in a song.

In related news, the inevitable: the Royal Opera House’s Carmen is soon to be released in 3D (see here). I’m down with that.

Posted on January 10th, 2011 at 3:56pm.

Ballerina as Careerist: Black Swan

By Patricia Ducey. Darren Aronofsky’s new film, Black Swan, is not The Red Shoes, the original ballet and madness movie that spawned many imitators – and it’s not a thriller (as it’s billed), either. It’s pretty clear early on that our heroine’s worst enemy is her own shaky self. Ballet movies like The Red Shoes and its progeny explore the Romantic ethos of the artistic life; to live, and perhaps even to die for art, is the highest calling of humanity – if we are to believe them.

But Black Swan tosses dance aside. We never do understand why ballet is so important to our heroine Nina (Natalie Portman) or even to autocratic artistic director Thomas (Vincent Cassel). The dancing (even if I had not recently seen the electrifying Mao’s Last Dancer), is sadly pedestrian, even after Natalie Portman’s yearlong marathon of training. Aronofsky’s camera instead focuses mainly on the physical toll to the dancers’ bodies as they joylessly go through their paces. His characters never express dance as any sort of intellectual or spiritual vocation. They do not seek transcendence – they want to be stars! And our doomed ballerina Nina apparently suffers from the worst case of such careerism and perfectionism. We wonder for two hours whether she will make it to stardom, or whether her neuroses will destroy her main chance. This is not so much an opera as an after-school special – albeit R-rated -about self-esteem.

As in his previous films The Wrestler or Requiem for a Dream, Aronofsky eschews coherence or depth in his stories and instead uses narrative merely as a frame, as insubstantial as gossamer, on which to hang his feverish and sometimes arresting images. Tellingly, most of the images in Black Swan are not of the ballet itself but of sex (sex with a sadistic boss, in a dirty toilet, between lesbian rivals) and gore (flesh peeled off fingers, feet broken by dancing, guts ripped open by mirror shards).

With such explicit focus from the director on sex and death, what’s left for the actors to imply by nuance or expression? Not much. The arc-less script is not interested in nuance or emotional truth, and this hampers the performances of our two leads. Nina begins the movie as a tightly wound child and ends there, too – she is not destroyed by the dualities of the Black Swan/White Swan at all. She might just as well have been a lawyer or a housewife; the ballet is only a backdrop to foreground her neuroses.

Vincent Cassel does his best as the autocratic sexual-predator director (of course) who has no feeling or opinion on dance at all, and his character stays here as well. Thomas recites his leaden, James Cameron-style dialogue with as much brio as he can: “I don’t think you have it in you!” he bellows over and over to Nina. Yet he chooses her for the starring role anyway, because she shows “spirit.” The evening before, he clumsily and arrogantly attempts to kiss her and she bites his lip in a panic, drawing blood.

What is an actor to do with such nonsense?

The swan chorus, meanwhile, is a bunch of Mean Girls who sound like foul-mouthed high schoolers rather than skilled, focused artists. So Mila Kunis as Nina’s chief rival doesn’t take all this dance stuff so seriously, ya know? She can go out on the town, down some shots, a little blow, and show up fresh faced the next morning at rehearsal. Yet Thomas continually compares her nonchalance and resultant superior acting/dancing to Nina’s. Why doesn’t he then choose her then for the Swan? At least she’s interesting.

In Aronofsky’s Brutalist school of moviemaking, disgust is all: he despises his weak, needy characters. Why bother with love stories (Requiem) or families (Wrestler) or transcendent art, he seems to ask, since we’ll all be worms’ meat soon enough! In Black Swan he delivers another dollop of the old ultra-violence with close-ups of bleeding skin, broken limbs and even more broken mirrors – but this is more Petit then Grand Guignol: the gore in Black Swan exists for its own sake, completely uncoupled from dramatic context. With each gruesome image, he delivers pain and stimulation and little else; when the story slows down and Nina inspects her self-mutilation scars, you shut your eyes. In The Wrestler, at least, Mickey Rourke’s broken body served the narrative about his broken dreams.

Perhaps Aronofsky, the inveterate bombast, cannot identify with the constraint and tradition and nuance of the ballet aesthetic. To him, striving for the unattainable in love or art is masochism. What’s left for him, then, is merely a simplistic psychologizing of the Swan myth: the good Nina can’t handle her bad Nina. It remains a mystery, though, how this timorous child/woman could ever have risen to the top ranks of any company when her personality continually stunts her performances.

black_swan06 — Vincent Cassel with Natalie Portman in "Black Swan."

And so we wait for Nina’s inevitable disintegration – because we no longer expect happy endings from movies, and we’re not surprised when that inevitable disintegration comes. We simply passively wait for it – but this isn’t enough to sustain a long movie.

Aronofsky almost redeems himself in the end – too late, though, to save the film. Nina finally snaps and ‘becomes’ the Black Swan. She dances with all the vigor and sexual energy Thomas has been calling for. The camera follows her as she finally surrenders to her role and leaps out onto the stage, where she appears to molt her human identity and change into an actual living swan. She greets the increasing transformation of her body with joy and she dances, for once, with abandon, and she triumphs. As the camera silhouettes her final bow against the stage lights, the unity of image and psychology and story is simply breathtaking. What a movie this might have been, if Aronofsky had been half as rigorous for the preceding two hours.

There is hope, then, that this ambitious, reckless filmmaker will one day rise – like Nina – to live up to his own artistic potential.

[Footnote: My Christmas present from Hollywood was seeing the trailer for The Tree of Life, Terence Malick’s new film, which promises that in 2011 we will be treated to a film by an artist in full command of his many gifts, one who actually understands and respects the complexity of the human soul.]

Posted on December 13th, 2010 at 2:17pm.

Freedom Through Punk Rock: LFM Reviews The Taqwacores

By Patricia Ducey. The Taqwacores is one of a few notable films lately (like Four Lions) nibbling at the margins of mainstream cinema with Muslims as its subject. Supported and developed at Sundance, and distributed by Strand Releasing, The Taqwacores is an original and winning little marvel.

The word taqwacore itself is a mashup of “taqwa,” meaning piety, and “core,” for hardcore – and the movie itself was adapted from Michael Muhammad Knight‘s 2003 novel, The Taqwacores, about an imagined Muslim punk scene in the U.S. – which in turn inspired an actual Muslim punk scene in America, then a documentary about it, and then this movie.

Strangely,The Taqwacores has been outright reviled by mainstream critics, but well-liked by audiences – Rotten Tomatoes gives it an 11% approval by critics and 51% by audiences – illustrating the apparently growing divide between the critical community and moviegoers. (I first began to notice this divide five years ago when I read a review of Memoirs of a Geisha, a movie I enjoyed and felt surpassed the novel, which stated that while the movie was well done and compelling, the reviewer felt he could not give it a thumbs up because its subject was a Japanese woman who engaged in and enjoyed – yes, shockingly, enjoyed! – an affair with an American military man in post-WWII Japan.) Sadly, it seems as though too many critics are either intimidated by political dogma, or feel obligated to uphold the politics and aesthetics of their mentors, to give little films like The Taqwacores a fair hearing.

Taq3 — Actress Noureen DeWulf, when not wearing a burqa.

The most unique aspect of The Taqwacores is that, for once, American Muslims are portrayed as the subject of a narrative and not as an objectified “other.” The Taqwacores is actually a coming of age story told from within a unique strata of American culture, with young people and their hopes and fears propelling the story. We are viewing the story of young American Muslims as they tell it to us in the way they want to tell it.

By contrast, a ‘mainstream’ Hollywood narrative would probably have involved a journalist writing about a punk rock scene that was pulling in local Muslim youth and ‘contaminating’ them with Western values. Somehow he would save these poor, besotted naifs; and, music swelling, the youths would return to the more pure, authentic lifestyle of their Muslim parents. (Or maybe a burned-out, disabled U.S. military vet would travel to another planet and rescue these well-meaning young people from American imperialism?)

In doing this, you might say that The Taqwacores revives the genre of politically incorrect cinema. I have not seen a movie that turns cliché on its head with such relish since the superb Last King of Scotland, a film that was as much a scathing indictment of western do-goodism as of Idi Amin.

As we hear the worried telephone voiceover of his mother, we meet young college kid Yusuf (Bobby Naderi), an American of Pakistani origin, arriving at a student rooming house run by “good Muslims,” as his mother assures him. Yes, a devout brother, Umar, does greet him and show him to his neat room, outfitted with a Koran – but as the day goes on, Yusuf begins to suspect that something is not quite halal about this place: metal music blares from the floor below; the refrigerator is filled with beer and nothing but beer; the one sister in the house, Rabeya (Noureen DeWulf) greets him – in a burqa covered with punk patches – and chats casually with him. A woman and man alone together, alcohol and rock and roll! What has Yusuf gotten himself into?

He spends the rest of the movie finding out. Soon he meets the other roommates – most notably the charismatic Jehangir (Dominic Rains), lead guitarist and resident punk theoretician. Jehangir has conceived his own anarchistic and liberating version of Islam, as expressed in his music. But Jehangir loves all music and especially idolizes Johnny Cash – “Johnny ruled the world” – and Jehangir is tired of being small. He wants out of submission and into relevance.

The roommates conduct Friday prayers, but with the woman, Rabeya, giving the sermon, and the prayers are usually followed by an all out drunken bash. Yusuf eventually falls for pretty former Roman Catholic Lynn, who has embraced Islam for its seeming lack of hierarchy that stands in contrast to her Catholic faith. But she and her freewheeling sexuality prove too much to Yusuf at the moment. Gradually though, Yusuf comes to understand and appreciate these new feminist and radical interpretations of his beloved Islam. He respects and is even thrilled by the way his housemates question and argue and embrace the Big Questions of life, like students everywhere, but he can’t jump into the mosh pit quite yet. And even though Yusuf is devout, he harbors no hostility to anyone – in contrast to angry young man Umar. He soon develops real affection for his housemates and their motley crew of hardcore rockers, feminists, and gays.

Yusuf changes, and he grows.

Taq1 — Actors Bobby Naderi and Dominic Rains.

Bobby Naderi plays Yusuf with the winning innocence of Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. I would call this a breakout role for Naderi, except that America’s critical establishment has frozen out this little film and Mr. Naderi along with it. Dominic Rains brings handsome, tragic Jehangir to life, and the supporting characters all shine. Shot in primary colors against the grey sky of Buffalo’s winter, the camerawork echoes the graffiti slathered over every inch of the Taqwacores’ corner of the concrete jungle, and frames its characters like they are jumping off the page of a graphic novel.

Unfortunately, I suspect The Taqwacores will come and go quickly from theaters (not unlike Memoirs of a Geisha). So for an evening with Yusuf and his friends of smashing taboos and shocking the neighbors – set against the music of real taqwacore groups like The Komanis – you’ll have to move fast.

But it will certainly be worth it.

Posted on November 19th, 2010 at 9:40am.

LFM Review: Megamind

By Patricia Ducey. It’s lonely at the top.

That’s the premise of Dreamworks’ latest 3-D animated toon, Megamind. In a story that mines this rich thematic vein, we watch as two protagonists – the balding blue-headed ‘Megamind’ and his nemesis, the superhero ‘Metro Man’ – come to this sad realization. Metro Man finds his superhero status a burden, whereas the bumbling Megamind is revealed to be no brilliant, lonely anti-hero like Charles Foster Kane, nor an ambitious Huey Long figure – nor a god-man brought low by flying too close to the sun. Instead, he is the pitiable product of a lousy childhood – and this ‘he’s depraved on account of he’s deprived‘ trope proves the less successful aspect of the story.

I’m reminded of those great lyrics from West Side Story:

Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke,
You gotta understand,
It’s just our bringin’ up-ke
That gets us out of hand.
Our mothers all are junkies,
Our fathers all are drunks.
Golly Moses, naturally we’re punks!

Megamind borrows liberally from other cartoon narratives, especially Superman’s. A planet in a far-off galaxy is about to self-destruct, so two sets of parents rocket their babies off into the ether – hoping they find safety on firmer ground. In a pure accident of fate, one baby lands under the Christmas tree in the home of a loving, intact family – while the other alights in a prison yard. Predictably, the loved child grows up to be a superhero, albeit a bit of a conceited prig, and the prison baby grows up to be Megamind. But Megamind chooses the dark side, in true psycho-babble fashion, only after Metro Man and the other kids at school bully and tease him. If they think I’m bad, I might as well be bad, he figures. Thus their lifelong rivalry begins, and Megamind is satisfied with conjuring up devilish plans and having the occasional plot hit its mark. He can’t even imagine that one day he might actually defeat Metro Man – yet it happens, much to his surprise.

Megamind revels in his triumph for a time – The king is dead, long live the king! He raids the Federal Reserve, steals the Mona Lisa, and runs Metro City into the ground. Something is missing, though – so in disguise, he woos newswoman Roxanne Ritchi (like Cyrano wooing Roxanne). Will Megamind discover his inner good guy? Will Roxanne learn that a man’s heart is more important that his looks?

I think you know the answer.

All well and good. The weak link in the story, though, turns on the fate of Metro Man. Megamind thoroughly defeats him. Yet in Act 3 our supposedly dead hero reappears; apparently he faked his own death so he could drop out, grow a beard, and read self-help books. He abandons Metro City – just when the people need him – to search for self-fulfillment. And at last he finds his true calling: he’ll become a rock star! But his singing and guitar plucking are rather wanting. Who cares? He feels fulfilled! This is where the story (and his character arc) clunk to a stop, at least for an adult. He never wises up and returns to his responsibilities, even as Roxanne urges him to – forgetting the one true superhero credo: “With great power there must come great responsibility.”

The animation and 3-D effects in Megamind, though, are stunning, with incredible range and variety. On the micro side, a baby chewing on his finger is irresistibly sweet, while the billowing satin of Megamind’s cape adds to his creepy allure. On the macro level, director Tim McGrath’s depth of field recalls the artistry of a Greg Tolland or William Wyler, with action bursting out of the screen on all three axes. The evil Titan lashes the damsel Roxanne to the highest skyscraper in Metro City, and Metro Man careens down the concrete canyons of Wall Street; the film is truly a 90-minute roller coaster ride. In addition, McGrath inserts jokes for the grownups: a Marlon Brando/Jor-El parody as Megamind’s father, a political poster a la the famous Obama ‘Hope’ poster, etc. Continue reading LFM Review: Megamind

Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold at The Met and in Movie Theaters

By Patricia Ducey. If you were thrilled at Lt. Colonel Kilgore’s mad helicopter ride in Apocalypse Now or swept away by the portentous opening of Terrence Malick’s The New World, you may already be an opera lover. Moviemakers have always borrowed from the rich store of classical music – and very liberally from Richard Wagner – to heighten the emotion and theatricality of their productions, and now the Metropolitan Opera is offering HD productions of the source operas themselves.

We are all now able to share these performances live across the world. At 1 p.m. the curtain rises in New York; at 10 a.m. in California we sip our coffees and wait for the theater to darken; in Switzerland they dress in formals and make an evening of it. Now in its fifth season, “The Met: Live” is the perfect marriage of myth, movie artistry and music – and it’s also affordable at roughly $22 per ticket. Last season’s Tosca and Turandot, thoroughly grounded in the familiar narrative territory of romantic literature and soaring arias, won me over – and so I ventured out recently to what I hoped would not be a morning misspent with Herr Wagner …

Wagner_s_Die_Walk_re_ — Deborah Voigt as Brunnhilde.

To be honest, in 21st century America our sensibilities have been trained to respond to the conventions of moviemaking – i.e., camera angles, close-ups, etc. – so as a neophyte opera fan, I find these ‘movie’ productions almost better than some of the live productions I’ve seen. “Not if you had good seats!” my opera loving friend counters, but how many of us can afford that $200-plus ‘good’ ticket? In the Met: Live productions, the production team expertly uses the camera to enhance the storytelling so that we’re not, for instance, continuously scanning a huge faraway stage for the action. So for anyone who did not grow up with this art form as part of their national culture, the familiar conventions of filmmaking prove an invaluable aid here. In addition, the Live broadcasts open with a backstage tour, led (on this occasion) by Deborah Voigt, and include interviews with the cast (with shoutouts to their countrymen) and wardrobe/production staff, along with a “making of the Ring” mini-doc – all of which makes the opera very accessible.

The Met: Live opened October 9 th with Das Rheingold (“The Rhine Gold”), the 2.5-hour prelude to Richard Wagner’s massive-in-scope “Ring-cycle.” The entire cycle runs approximately 15 hours and is meant to be seen in four sittings. In this epic undertaking, Wagner creates an entire mythical world, borrowed from Norse and medieval German sagas, with gods and creatures engulfed in struggles for power and greed and love, all culminating in the four-hour Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods).

The opera opens with three entrancing Rhine maidens who guard the store of magical gold under the Rhine – and the evil Alberich, the dwarf who unsuccessfully woos the beauties. Angered by their rejection, he renounces love and steals their gold and forges it into a ring that the mermaid-like creatures have promised will allow any who possess it to rule the earth. We then meet the gods Wotan, his wife Fricka, and their progeny. Wotan would like to rule the earth as well, and outsmarts Alberich to steal the ring. Plot complications ensue, and the ring eventually ends up in other hands – Wotan trades away the ring for a safe home for his fellow gods. At the conclusion of Das Rheingold, his reunited family ascends into beautiful Valhalla, safe at last. Yet, as we hear the strains of familiar chords, we know that the peace of Valhalla is but a chimera; something is coming – something larger than life, something wonderful.

Terrence Malick, incidentally, who is a student of German philosophy, used the image of the water nymphs in the opening scenes of New World – mirroring the opening of Das Rheingold. I can only wonder if this was intentional. Another mythmaker, J. R.R. Tolkein, long-ago acknowledged his borrowing of the all-powerful gold ring for his own ‘Rings-cycle’ – as well as his indebtedness to Wagner’s vision.

Given the sterility and vapidity of our modern day myths (currently, Avatar), exploring opera, theater, short films or foreign films as we do at LFM can only enrich our understanding of filmmaking culture, infusing it with the chords and themes that have resonated in humanity through the ages; indeed, this may be the only way that new film practices will emerge, once the tiresome contemporary genres of the anti-hero, of puerile sexuality, or of nihilism have run their course.

While we await this salutary development, check out this schedule and make a date for The Met: Live. [There is an encore performance of Das Rheingold on October 27th.] I am not quite a Ringhead yet, but I will definitely make time for the others and certainly for The Valkyrie. These operas have it all: fierce heroes and heroines, magical golden rings, illicit love – and, most of all, majestically beautiful music.

Posted on October 12th, 2010 at 12:57pm.

LFM Review: Waiting for Superman

By Patricia Ducey. Waiting for Superman is an emotionally gripping and ultimately devastating critique of the American public school system, in the same vein as The Lottery or The Cartel and a host of previous education movies. Superman focuses on a half dozen children and their families – and their desperate quest to gain admittance to their city’s charter school. There are only a few spots in each school and many applicants; the filmmakers draw us in and–let’s be honest–manipulate us with the suspense leading up to what is characterized as a make-it-or-break-it day when the charter school chooses its next class by lottery. Will these children escape their neighborhood “dropout factory” and secure their futures?

Co-written with Billy Kimball, directed by Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) and produced by Jeff Skoll’s Participant Productions, this documentary possesses an authentic progressive pedigree. Skoll views films as vehicles for social change, a kind of “loss leader” that delivers butts in the seat to the alliances and activists he has already mobilized to capitalize on them (see here) and he hopes to do the same with Superman. Skoll greenlights pictures that conform to his own world view, as he is of course entitled to, and sometimes departs from expected liberal orthodoxy – as when he reportedly turned down Michael Moore for Sicko funding. The Canadian Skoll knows from personal experience the failures of nationalized health care. Superman takes aim at a few surprising targets, as well – like teachers’ unions and government bureaucracies.

The film opens with Guggenheim driving by three public schools in his neighborhood on his way to drop off his own kids—at a private school—and recalling his first education documentary of 1999, The First Year. Nothing has changed since then, he muses with regret, and thus was born the idea of Superman.

Most of the children are poor in the film, and all of them are trapped in schools determined by where each family lives. One of the subjects of the present film, a fifth-grader named Anthony, is being raised in Washington, D.C. by his grandmother. His father is dead from a drug overdose; he never knew his mother. He wants to get a better education yet he doesn’t want to leave all his friends. He answers “bittersweet” when asked how he would feel if he really did win the lottery to get into SEED, a DC boarding school for inner city kids. This is what’s left for him, a child already burdened by loss, in DC, the film says, yet not one word about the voucher program in DC or President Obama’s phasing out of that city’s successful program.

But Superman does take on Democrat and Republic legislators alike and their alliance with what it considers the real enemy, the bulging PAC funds of the teachers’ unions. And the film praises bipartisan cooperation, too – specifically, that between the late Ted Kennedy and then President G. W. Bush that produced No Child Left Behind. Many people, though (including me) questioned that “unity” because it represented more government control – not less – of a problem that government itself caused.

This is where Superman goes irretrievably wrong. We endure the painful story of these beautiful children and their dedicated parents only to be urged on to … what? Send a text to Skoll’s website for mobile updates? Write an astroturfed letter to our governors, urging them to adopt a new blizzard of education standards? These have been formulated by Skoll’s assemblage of experts and appear to be a workaround for NCLB. I question how and why these experts arrived at their conclusions. The fact that they are unelected does not bode well, either, for future responsiveness to parents.

Superman has all the smart facts. Reading and math scores have not improved in 30 years; a number approaching 50% of our children do not graduate from high school at all. I would ask, then, why are solutions like distributing vouchers or dismantling the Department of Education (founded roughly 30 years ago) and returning schools to local and parental control considered too radical? Let it be said that I know many wonderful teachers and public employees, as well. I want to emphasize that the problem is mandatory union membership and union alliances with politicians and non-education groups. In Superman, we see placards at “teacher” protests against Chancellor Michelle Rhee from the ubiquitous ANSWER, for instance, indicating that something other than local education issues are at stake.

Slick websites and tweets and texts do not constitute a real answer to the problems presented by this otherwise moving film. Adding to the sticky quagmire of federal, state, and local rules and regulations for education, rightfully lamented by the film, will not cure the problem or force accountability. Freedom to choose just might. Why not reduce top-down solutions like national standards and national experts, and empower individual parents and local communities? Superman rightfully rues the lottery system, necessitated by the scarcity of truly effective charter schools now in operation. But how do we empower individuals? The voucher system, to me, represents a much quicker, more elegant solution.

Guggenheim is free to choose what he thinks best for his children because he has the money to pay for tuition. He feels terrible about it. But the Superman parents have money, too, available to them. It’s just that the government and their handmaidens – the education unions – mediate the transaction between family and school.

The only true accountability for schools will be realized when parents can vote with their kids’ feet, and take their voucher and their child to another school. The answer to bureaucratic failure is never more bureaucracy. The answer is freedom – because the answer is always freedom. I hope that the families who send their children to school every day know, like Guggenheim, that it’s ultimately their own free choice where they send them.

Posted on October 5th, 2010 at 10:36am.