Cynical Cinema

There was a made-for-TV movie about the MIT students that took Vegas for millions of dollars at the blackjack tables a few years ago.  Try as I might, I can’t seem to find it now.  I believe it was Canadian.  It was being shown on the movie network this year, and it was pretty good.  It dealt with the same true story as 21, based on the book “Bringing Down the House”.  In fact, it was virtually the same movie as 21.  The only difference between the two movies is that 21 has better production values and a more well-known cast.  Kevin Spacey stars as the teacher at MIT who recruits a bunch of math geniuses to form a team that is ready to take Las Vegas for millions at the blackjack tables.

That team consists of Jim Sturgess, the smartest-of-the-smart, who is the last member recruited for the team.  Also Kate Bosworth, the hottest-girl-on-campus, and also Liza Lapira, Jacob Pitts and Aaron Yoo.  While the story deals with such themes as gambling addiction, the corruptive influence of Las Vegas, the ego clashes between team members, the modernization of Vegas and the shunting aside of the old guard, the questionable relationship between a teacher and his students, and of course the concept of “who your true friends are”.  But it deals with each of these themes so superficially that you already know how every moment of this movie will play out.

Every character is so obvious that it becomes clear within their first two minutes of screen time exactly how they will turn out.  The story arc of Jim Sturgess as Ben, the smartest kid on the team, is the only one that really gets fleshed out in the movie, but every moment of it is totally conventional film.  He joins the team to make money so he can go to Harvard med school.  (Although why someone with this kind of math genius would want to become a doctor is never explained.  It’s like they just figure “doctor” is the smartest thing someone can be.)  He gets sucked in by the allure of Vegas and money, and leaves his true friends behind!  And eventually gets out of control and his world comes crashing down…and so on and so forth.  I think we’ve all seen this a thousand times before.

The only character with some mystery is that of Kate Bosworth, who is either a femme fatale, luring Ben into this world of fast money and fast women, or she’s an innocent ingenue who also becomes corrupted by the influence of Vegas, OR she’s the only character who maintains her moral centre throughout the film.  Even after the movie ended, I was still not sure which one of these characters she really was.  But in the end, that wasn’t because the film makers wanted to give her that sense of mystery, but rather it’s because her character is so badly written that she actually is all of these contradictory things.  Bosworth is OK as an actress, but she isn’t quite comfortable in a role where no one (including Bosworth) really knows where her character is going in the movie.

21 is slick, polished and totally surface-deep.  Even the really interesting characters (like Laurence Fishburne as a casino security pro) get slicked-over, caricature treatment.  Which means that as far as brainless entertainment goes, 21 is pretty good.  It’s so smooth and polished that it gleams.  And many people who want to just sit back and enjoy a movie without thinking at all will enjoy that.  The problem I have with it is that this is a movie about the smartest math geniuses in the world, and an incredibly complex card-counting scheme, and yet the movie never makes an attempt to itself be smart.

“Recount” is an HBO movie that premiered on May 25th on HBO in the states and The Movie Network here in Canada.  Originally, Sydney Pollack was slated to direct the film, but pulled out at the last moment due to an undisclosed illness, which of course was cancer, the same cancer that caught up to him yesterday.  A sad coincidence as this fantastic movie premieres.  This is one of those major TV drama events where a made-for-TV movie actually gets hype and buzz and deserves it.  Well worth checking out.

HBO has just put the movie on TV, a dramatized version of the real events that led up to George Bush being fictitiously elected over Al Gore in 2000.  I recently saw Antonin Scalia, one of the American Supreme Court justices directly responsible for the handing of the election to Bush, saying in an interview “it was eight years ago.  Get over it.”  But America can’t get over it.  They still have that falsely-elected president, who is still screwing things up on a daily basis.  And not in a fun, keystone-cops kind of way.  Screwing things up in a malicious, Mr. Burns sort of way.  Scalia, by the way, is also the Supreme Court justice who believes torture is not an act in violation of the Eighth Amendment, the one dealing with “cruel and unusual punishment”.  His reasoning - although torture, such as waterboarding, IS cruel and unusual, it does not qualify as “punishment”.  You see, people who get tortured are not being punished for anything, since they have not been convicted of anything.  They may well be innocent.  And if they are innocent, then they are not being punished.  A prince of a man, Mr. Scalia.  But I digress.

Anyway, although the politics and questionable behaviour of Antonin Scalia are something about which I could rant for aeons, the man does not figure prominently in Recount.  Rather, the movie is about several other people.  Ron Klain (Kevin Spacey), Al Gore’s fired-then-rehired campaign advisor.  Warren Christopher (John Hurt), the secretary of state under Bill Clinton, who was sent by Gore to supervise the recount.  (Sidebar - Christopher, so far, is the only person portrayed in this film that has objected to his protrayal.  He has not seen it, but he read the transcripts and felt they made him sound way too naive.)  Katherine Harris (Laura Dern), the Florida Republican Secretary of State who exhibited terribly partisan and unethical behaviour during the 2000 election, doing everything she could to hand victory to Bush.  And James Baker (Tom Wilkinson), the Secretary of State under George Bush Sr., who was the chief legal advisor to Bush Jr. in 2000.

Each of those actors gives an examplary performance, especially Spacey, as an idealist who will fight to the end, and Dern as a woman in way over her head with a self-esteem problem and a taste for the spotlight.  Also terrific are Dennis Leary as Michael Whouley, and Ed Begley Jr. as David Boies.  Although we already know the end result of this film, (and for many of us politically interested folk, the entire process), this film still plays like a thriller.  Each moment is more and more tense, as you really get a sense of the machinations behind the scenes.  You get righteously indignant at the Republican troublemakers who tried to delay the re-counting of the votes.  You get furious at the groups who intentionally excluded more than 20,000 voters, most of them African-American, under the false pretext that they had been convicted of a felony.  You pull for the supreme court to render the right decision, and you can get right into it when something goes the right way for a change.  Even though you know for a fact that at the end of the movie the bad guys win and we get eight years of Chaney and Rumsfeld and Rove and Rice and that president guy.

 The only really irritating thing about the movie is the appearance of Bush and Gore themselves.  The two of them appear courtesy of archival footage, which is fine, but then they are shown, always from behind, and played by some stand-in actor.  That gives Recount, if only for those few brief moments, the feel of one of those lame, cheap, re-enactment scenes from a When Animals Attack show, or Unsolved Mysteries.  Aside from that, however, Recount is incredibly brisk, moves along very quickly, and is an absolutely thrilling political true story.  Tour-de-force performances all the way through, and a script that I’m sure just wrote itself.  Catch this one while you can, playing on The Movie Network right now.