Cynical Cinema

The theory is sound.  You take one major event, then show it from several different perspectives, or “vantage points”.  It worked to perfection in Akira Kurosawa’s brilliant existentialist visionary examination of the nature of truth, 1950’s Rashomon.  It worked almost as well in Zhang Yimou’s magnificent 2002 Chinese kung-fu epic, Hero.  And it has been done well, in various forms, in dozens of other movies like Run Lola Run.  But in Vantage Point, director Pete Travis shows us exactly how NOT to do a movie in this way.

Vantage Point starts out in a promising way.  Sigourney Weaver is a newswoman manning a trailer outside a plaza in Spain where the American preisdent is scheduled to give an address as part of some kind of summit conference.  Just as he begins his speech, the president is shot by a sniper, and all hell breaks loose.  A bomb goes off in the podium and…we get pulled back to the start of the film, this time from a different vantage point.  Now we are riding along with Dennis Quaid, a secret service bodyguard who recently took a bullet for this same president and became a national hero.

Then we see tourist video shot by Forest Whitaker (although we don’t really see the whole thing through the eyes of his video camera, we see him holding it.  Why not show the video footage?  At least it would be different.)  Also giving their perspectives are the president himself (a wooden William Hurt), a local Spanish cop whose job it is to protect the mayor of this town, the assassin who is sent to do the dirty work, and the terrorists.  And others.

Which means we see the same beginning.  Again and again.  And it gets more and more tedious.  Each perspective we see gives us just a few more clues to the total plot, each time leaving us with some kind of mysterious cliffhanger until we see the next vantage point.  And as the pieces of the puzzle fall into place, it becomes more and more obvious, glaringly so, that nothing about this movie makes any sense at all.  Not that the scenes don’t fit together - they do.  The story becomes somwhat of a whole picture by the time the movie ends.  But no reasonable person could accept that this is the actual story.

First of all, we would have to believe that it is remarkably easy to assassinate a president.  I’ve gone on a ride-along with the RCMP in their Prime Minister motorcade, one step down from their President of the United States motorcade.  Trust me, it is not easy to shoot a president.  And certainly not in this manner.  Secondly, this extremely well-planned attack relies on the fact that upon the shooting of the president, the secret service will immediately panic to the point where someone can walk up and place a bomb in the president’s rectum.  Which is essentially what they would have us believe.

Then, we are asked to believe that one well-armed Rambo type (or, more accurately, Chow Yun Fat from The Killer type) can take out several hotel floors worth of secret service agents on his own.  Silently.  And that the bad guys, once they had actually succeeded in their massively daring and brutally violent plan, having slaughtered many hundreds of innocent citizens, would risk their getaway just to avoid…well.  I won’t give away the ending here.

But it wouldn’t really matter if I did.  After all, the ending is telegraphed from the very beginning.  Dennis Quaid is obviously that Secret Service guy who is going to step up and save the day at the end of the film - we know this, everyone knows this - we know what has happened to the president long before the movie tells us.  We know who is really responsible before we’re supposed to.  We know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are from the get-go.  And even then, when it finally plays out the way we fully expect it to play out, it’s even more ludicrous than we could have imagined.

And finally, adding insult to injury, thy set up the president to appear like an incarnation of George W. Bush.  the protests that accompany his visit to Spain.  The placard-wavers and the “World’s #1 Terrorist” signs and the vitriol in the streets.  You see, this president is hated.  And there is a big deal made over this at the beginning of the film, having to do with the censorship of the news and so forth.  Then we’re asked to believe, just a few minutes later, that this president actually is the antithesis of Bush.  That he is a smart, moderate and decent man who does NOT want to listen to his advisors, who are telling him to attack Morocco.  Yes, Morocco.  And he gives a speech about “we don’t need to show strength.  We need to have strength.”  Or some crap like that.  So which is he?  Ah, who cares?

The thing that made Rashomon and Hero brilliant was that the same exact actions were presented with different motivations so that we could see them from a different character’s perspective.  Audiences are left to decide for themselves which version of events is the truth, or whether the truth can ever truly be determined in any case.  But each character had a different feeling about the same events, which made the events themselves different.  But Vantage Point doesn’t do this.  So we watch the same events over and over, without any new insight, just new “clues”.  And it makes no difference if we’re watching through William Hurt’s eyes or Forest Whitaker’s.  They’re basically just shooting the same scene, over and over, from different camera angles.  Which is pretty boring.

Everything about this film is totally ludicrous, and every new “clue” we get about the real identities and motivations of the bad guys makes us care less and less about the final act of the movie.  And when it does, it relies so heavily on coincidence and implausible actions that it’s laughable.  The whole movie would be laughable, if only it didn’t take itself so seriously.  Which is the main problem.  Vantage Point wants so badly to make this movie seem as realistic as possible, when the connection between reality and this plot is like the connection between the Leaning Tower of Pisa and my fridge.  Vantage Point is an absolute turd of a movie.

Oh yeah - Matthew Fox.  From Lost.  You know what’s interesting about him?

There are many, many movies just like The Great Debaters, which comes out May 13th from Alliance Films. Movies that deal with race relations in the Jim Crow south. Movies that show kids in college achieving a greater understanding of the world through a special teacher and through competition. Many of which have starred Denzel Washington. All of which means The Great Debaters is nothing new. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t excellent. What sets this film apart is the crafting of the movie, courtesy of Washington, who directs, and the performances that hold it together, also courtesy of Washington. He is terrific as the college professor who molds a team of Africa-American debaters into the most potent orators in the college world.

Also terrific is Forrest Whitaker, who now has to merit some consideration as one of the finest actors of our time. He plays a preacher at the same college as Washington, a fine orator himself and a renowned scholar. He doesn’t quite understand, the way Washington does, how best to harness his intellectual powers to effect true change, but he grows over the course of the film. But the character who does the most growing is his son, who is played by the aptly-named Denzel Whitaker. As the youngest member of the Wiley College debate team, Whitaker is both the emotional centre of the movie and the one character whose growth most mirrors the story arc. His performance as 14-year-old James Farmer Jr. May well be the best in the film.

Rounding out the terrific cast are Jurnee Smollett and Nate Parker, as the eventual other two members of the debate team. Parker plays a rebellious student, who is brilliant but tortured. Smollett is a driven, intelligent woman, who aspires to become only the third black female lawyer in the United States. Their story, (and romance) is incidental to the film, but it works. Denzel Washington’s story seems incidental as well, at first. When he isn’t working at the college, he is dressing up as a farmer and holding clandestine meetings in barns, attempting to organize the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. This leads to him being branded a communist, and there is a backlash against him that comes from both the white establishment and his African-American colleagues. In the end, this is not simply an incidental story line, it is essential to the full fleshing out of the story.

The fact that this film is based on a true story might be the most remarkable thing about it. These people did exist, they did do this remarkable thing, and who knows - had we been there at that time, in 1936, it may well have been as powerful and inspirational as the movie itself. Now, I do have a quibble or two. If this were 1936, using a reference to Hitler to win a debate wouldn’t exactly have the gravity that it does now. In fact, it might have been a rather weak argument in 1936. Like making a Gearge-Bush-is-awful argument in August of 2001. Maybe you can see something terrible coming, but it sure isn’t there yet. And also, the top-ranked Harvard debate team seems to have had their lines dumbed down a little. They don’t make enough sense and they aren’t good enough points for such a highly-touted debating team. That being said, however, I would have really liked to see a little more of the debates themselves. They are all so compelling and so interesting that I could have handled another hour of movie if it was all debating.

As Wiley College mows down their opponents in Texas, and takes on the best Negro colleges in the States, a final showdown is set when Harvard agrees to meet the team and debate against them. Harvard is, of course, the perennial powerhouse team, the best in the country, and they are willing to meet this remarkable Negro team in an historic debate. Of course, this is the big, climactic, and inspirational finale of the film, and it’s fairly routine in the way it ties everything together, but it is set up and delivered so well that it doesn’t feel like a cliche or like the obvious ending, it just feels great. And so does the rest of The Great Debaters.