RogerEbert.com — Brian Banks
It is a tricky time to be releasing a movie like “Brian Banks,” based on the true story of a Southern California high school football star who was falsely accused of rape and sentenced to six years in prison. Aldis Hodge gives a strong performance, and certainly this does happen to some people. But in the wake of the #MeToo movement, a feel-good story about a man overcoming a wrongful rape accusation just feels sort of …icky, maybe? My mixed review, at RogerEbert.com.
Re: ‘The man fallen’ and his mis-placement in the modern age
Christy,
What used to happen in this kind of movie, was it was used to portray the man fallen, as opposed to the man wronged. But what has been intentionally allowed to happen in cinema, is that the man fallen has gotten misplaced, and in his absence we have been all forced to improvise. Hence, the man wronged has taken his place.
The one who had come to the end of a line, and they were forced to some day of reckoning. And those perhaps were interesting characters, for actors to play. But here is the thing, I don’t know if male actors in cinema are allowed to have these parts to play any longer. The one of the displicable individual male, who has gone astray.
I think really that is what has happened. It would be nice to see a really bad guy portrayed on screen again. One who was very far from being a flower pettel (like all men are supposed to be now). And that is why cinema has been backed so far into this corner – where the last remaining alternative – is to invent ‘the good guy’ now, and try to explain how tough it got for him. Several decades ago, there used to be actors and directors who were around who were willing to create characters that weren’t one’s to look up to. Actors used to be much more brave in that way, and grasp some of these nettles, to play a part.
In a different place, in a totally different time, you had actors such as Peter Strauss forty years ago to be exact in films such as ‘The Jericho Mile’ in 1979. Even before that, in 1974, Burt Reynolds played the part of Paul Crewe. Earlier than that again, there was Newman in 1967 in Cool Hand Luke. This story (and as critics maybe you are able to fill out a broader spectrum of movie titles, which relate to my point), has been around a while. Just in very broad, non spefic terms, it’s the story of the talented individual fallen.
I watched the Burt Reynolds movie lately, and the maker of that Paul Crewe character did not hold back any punches. I mean, there isn’t any attempt in ‘The Longest Yard’ to dress it up to suggest that he was an individual who was wronged. In the Peter Strauss charachter, Larry ‘Rain’ Murphy, there isn’t any attempt made to disguise the crimes of this man either. Again, the man who has fallen theme, where there is something actually broken in the character.
The point of the sporting aspect of the story, isn’t to erase the sins commited, or the sins that had to be accounted for. Running the mile isn’t going to bring the character to redemption, but he’s going to run the mile any way. And ‘The Jericho Mile’ as a movie does not try to put it’s arm around you, hinting there is some happy ending to it all. There is no attempt made to disguise the reality that the cheering spectators around Larry Murphy are all equally bad men.
The sport was just the aspect of the character of Larry Murphy that hadn’t been damaged, along with everything else. Same with Burt Reynolds character, same with that of Paul Newman’s character Luke. That’s what celebrated, the contradictions in life, and the complexity of reality. The movie just doesn’t want to buy you an ice cream cone. The point is that, these are men capable of bad. They aren’t straightforward as individuals, or in terms of their story. But that character is forbidden in modern cinema script writing. Where characters of late have been basically boiled down to villains, arch-villains and pure saints. There are no rogues left, or allowed to exist at all.
I’m reminded for some reason of Phil Esposito’s post match Canadian ice hockey match interview from 1972, after his team suffered a bad defeat to the USSR. Esposito remained on the ie and proceeded to give an interview to a terrified looking small man with a microphone, which spoke to a whole nation. These are the kinds of characters, that just aren’t written into movie scripts in the way that they used to be. And actors, for their part have to be willing to play the dispicable, flawed character. Which the older actors did practice a lot more at doing.
Robert Redford made a movie called ‘The Last Castle’ with James Gandolfini, in which he played the character of General Irwin and Gandolfini player Colonel Winters. What was interesting about that movie from 2001 in the same way, was the writer’s lack of attempt to try to make these men into perfect individuals. I think that the key facet that I’m reaching for, and I think that which makes the whole story riveting when executed well by actors, director and a script writer – is that these movies can capture a moment in the much, much longer lifetime of the characters – where not only is the flaws of their character revealed to an audience.
But at the same time as the audience watching the movie becomes aware of the significant character weakness or outright failure – the character in the story has reached their own level of self awareness also. They are trying to come face to face, with themselves and their own short comings as human beings. That’s the part that translated in 1972 in ice hockey into something which all of Canada could understand. And anything less than Esposito’s honest admissions in front of the camera on that occasion, wouldn’t have worked.
I’m aware of recent, real world example of this story in Ireland in sport here, which went to trial in court involving sports stars. And it did make a lot of people think hard. But we do live in an era now, where men are now allowed as characters on screen to display actual flaw in any way. And that is not the same as the movie industry of earlier times. Like in the example of ‘The Last Castle’, it was really only the bravery of actors like Gandolfini and Redford which made it possible to tell a story about those men.
There was one character I admit I liked having there. He was a character in the Hobbit movies, who whenever there was a battle to be fought, he’d hide with ‘the women and children’ or something. And given every single possible opportunity to redeem himself, he failed every single time. There was a character played skillfully too by Robert Vaughn named Lee, in ‘The Magnificent Seven’ released in 1960 and directed by John Sturges, who again represented ‘the man fallen’. In fact, to be honest there was not that much dressing up of the characters of Chris and Vin played by Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen either.
We as an audience are simply meant to accept them as they come too. I.e. Damaged goods who have been drifting across the planes for too long. And that’s not what we are allowed to witness or to expect from the male character as directed by Antoine Fuqua now in 2016. Heck no. The story has been flipped inside out, where these characters played by Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt or Ethan Hawke have got all of those rough edges filed away. So you’re not prsented with the concept of the soul who has been broken down by their life and their times any longer.
Which is what was great about William Munny played by Clint Eastwood, or Ned Logan by Morgan Freeman in the film from 1992 (not to mention those parts that were played by Hackman as Little Bill and Richard Harris as English Bob).
And just in terms of really throwing a hammer after the whole ‘hatchet’ thing above, when Alan Ladd rides across the river in 1953 as Shane – by the time he rides out of that valley at the other end of that movie – no audience member is being asked to walk away and think, that Shane is going to find a nice quiet life for himself, in some quiet corner of the old west. Heck no. From 1953 up until 1992, we were as audiences priveleged to become acquainted with ‘the man fallen’ in various ways, and through the work of various film makers. And not any longer, one has to venture into the archives nowadays if one wants to find that. Brian
holy crap, quite the essay you published! that’s gotta be at least three or four times longer than the longest comment I’ve ever seen here before. I better go back and read some of it before I say anything too snarky… ok yeah I agree with your thesis that difficult characters are often far more compelling than the tools we’re supposed to be rooting for. Everybody I’ve spoken to finds the Ben Mendelsohn character in Rogue One to be by far the strongest element of the movie. I certainly feel that way, he’s the only thing that keeps me watching, that and a few special effects shots.
Krennic’s passionate outbursts followed by recalcitrant back-peddling is a delight to watch. The Felicity Jones character is just a mopey, pretty face, her motivations unconvincing, and her colleagues are so thin and poorly-drawn and not at all fascinating even though the filmmaker are sure we should be. Moreover I asked a new friend of mine who an example is of a guy in cinema she found attractive and guess what, it came back as Director Krennic, Ben Mendelsohn. So yeah, you’re absolutely onto something. I want more unrepentant villains in film, not these lame goody-two-shoes victims. And Christy, did you also think that Krennic was kinda hot, or not so much.
I’d like to hear the expert movie critics’ conversation about this at some stage. In all honesty, what I’d probably like to see is Alonso’s hundred best bad men in the movies. It would sit nicely on a shelf, next to his hundred best Christmas ones. I can offer two distinct reference points to the experts though, to open that debate – one being a movie from 2019, and another from back in 2002. It’s really two final speeches made by the male lead parts in those movies 17 years apart from each other. And basically, I’m asking the experts what has happened to the big screen within those 17 years they have all been writing and reviewing films in? Because I don’t know the answer to that. I’m just a bystander.
I watched Taraji P. Henson along with Sam Rockwell acting together in a movie released in 2019, ‘The Best of Enemies’. The story again was about one of these broken individuals who was glued back together again and fixed. The parts are played brilliantly needless to say, by both Rockwell and Henson. But it leads me tothink, that if modern cinema is able to fix the local Clan leader, what would it do with someone like Shane Poster? It wasn’t the objective of the story told back in 1953 to present Shane Poster’s character as anything other than a man, who didn’t fit in. He was no longer considered suitable for the polite and decent community, that the settlers wanted to build. That is the kernel of the story presented by Sergio Leone too in 1968, where the bad men come first and subsequently they all die and make way for the common people, who actually build the town of Sweetwater and live there. There is no place for Cheyenne, Frank or Harmonica. They get to ride to the next town or frontier only, if they are fortunate.
The only thing those movies offered to an audience was a suggestion that sometimes, one particular kind of evil can run directly into another kind. There is no good involved in the making, even if there might be some good suggested in the outcome. Like the ironic part about Sturges film from 1960, ‘The Magnificent Seven’ is that the children of the farmers are left to put flowers on the graves of their idols, who are essentially very bad dudes. That is the irony of their story, that what they couldn’t achieve in life (embrace of the community), at least is what they had earned in passing. But in 1960, the movie doesn’t try to pretend the magnificent seven are humanitarian aid workers, or doctors without borders.
In the modern remake (or dare I say ‘re-boot’), of the magnificent seven, the characters played by Washington, Pratt etc are shown to us like that. Like they were all volunteering for the Red Cross. I would draw a question mark over the validity of that narrative, and more broadly in cinema. Where have all of the broken men gone to? Banished as it were, sort of like Alan Ladd’s character from 1953. I wouldn’t mind but Washington is an actor who once played John W. Ceasy in the early 2000’s. To contrast with the part played by Sam Rockwell though, I would simply submit this. Kurt Russell’s speech from 2002 in ‘Dark Blue’, as Eldon Perry who would himself as the third generation in a family of Irish law enforcement professionals in Los Angeles, asking the character played by Ving Rhames, to slap the hand cuffs on him. Brian
“what I’d probably like to see is Alonso’s hundred best bad men in the movies. It would sit nicely on a shelf, next to his hundred best Christmas ones.”
That’s actually not a bad idea! would probably sell well as well, provided it had an awesome cover illustration, like Norman Stansfield giving one of those demonic impish grins in Leon: The Professional. I wonder what Alonso would say to this, because I don’t think he reads comments over on Christy’s website. Take it to him brother, it’s a solid idea, and could make him some good scratch too.
Alonso has been banned from reading comments, a good while back. Yeah, it’s a thing that fits in with his critical technique (e.g. Die Hard movie example, needing both the hero and anti hero).
An anti hero is not necessarily a prototypical ‘villain’ either. Because to do hero and anti hero well, there’s empathy and understanding between those two character elements, that needs to be built into a story.
‘Gold’ starring McConaughey about prospecting had that hero and anti hero thing, without the story needing to have the prototypical villain either. This is part of what i’m talking about in all the overhead.
Sub-note : Question about smaller screen writing?
It was actuall Matt Atchity who first made reference a long time ago to one of the famous American comedian George Carlin, who used to talk about how he despised what he called ‘professional parenting’. I’m adapting that concept to a wider thing in cinema today, whereby the ‘man fallen’ as I have described him, the broken character first having been acknowledged in the beginning of the story in cinema, is not allow to leave the movie’s story on the other side, without being fixed. We’ve already seen the 2016 re-make of one of my top three favorite movies of all time, ‘The magnificent seven’, where the bunch of guys who should have been broken have been pretty much re-habilitated and detoxified by the end of the moden film. But if we were (horror of horrors), to witness a re-make of the 1953 film ‘Shane’ as well, then Alan Ladd’s character would not have been permitted to ride out of that valley at the end of that film without having some merit badge pinned to his lapel too. I’ve passed the ‘Daz white test’ (British washing powder for clothes, long story), and I’ve been fixed.
And my question to the panel of Christy, Matt, Alonso and company, is how does modern cinema get around that? Maybe the answer was what the writers of Mad Men? I.e. Where the television series has been based around this character of a Korean war veteran (who was also a deserter, straight away being revealed as an example of what I referred to as, the man fallen). And even though the time is set is the 1950’s, the characters who are in Mad Men aren’t purposefully ‘fixed’ in order to reflect the yard stick measurements of character quality, as of today. Instead, all of the characters in Mad Men, and including many of the female ones too are left broken, and very badly broken too. And there’s really no redemption offered to any of those characters either throughout the series.
We don’t really get an episode, ‘wher Don Draper finally turns a corner’ and we can all breath a sign of relief. No in fact, Don only keeps storming through it all, until he finally finds himself in a boardroom telling clients about Hershey bars, and being a kid growing up in Depression America. So what they are doing (and I think this is what was so interesting about how Ben and Alonso used to review the other longer form, smaller screen, non-communal screen work such as ‘The Americans’ and so on), . . . is that maybe the smaller screen is where things haven’t been sanitized now to an extent to which, the man fallen as a character has just vanished now off the page of modern ‘big screen’ writing. To be replaced with the new non-toxic, and more environmentally friendly, but not nearly half as good, man who is ‘wronged’ instead. Brian
Re: Ennio Morricone, and stories etc
Speaking about good men, who were led to doing bad. Men men who did good, and a fairly decent music score to go with that by Morricone.
As another possible reference point, a movie released back in 1989, directed by Roland Joffe as another case in point. Fat Man and Little Boy, with Newman who acted as General Leslie R. Groves, which is full of the kind of complexity, and many questions that are simply left unanswered. There is no attempt made to try and fix wrongs, to fix the different characters, but they are simply left to be. It’s something that maybe has been explored better in the little screen, but which seems to have eluded writing for the larger one. Bruce Robinson who grew up in the immediate post war years in England, and trained in London in speech and drama once upon a time was it’s screen writer (also did a film which is very much about a side of English culture that is harder to find nowadays, called ‘Withnail and I’).
Re: The true representation of the bad guy in movie script writing.
Christy, one other movie reference point, I had to look up the name of the writer again, but I think the reason that he’s important to the big screen and part of a lineage of writers, is because of all of what I’ve said overhead.
Taylor Sheridan’s writing, i’m reminded of ‘Hell or High Water’ (2016). It’s just one of these movies, that seems to look bigger and better as it ages a bit. Imagine if the character of one of the brothers, played by Ben Foster, imagine if the writer had tried to facilitate a way for that character to reform, or find some way to discover error on his ways?
Imagine if that compromise had been made to that character in the writing, what it would have meant to the story as an entirety and in terms of it’s credibility. I think that having Ben Foster’s character in the story, served to provide some kind of anchorage point, around which the broader stories pivots. He very much was left with a task of trying to play the man fallen.
That’s not something that we see too often. And the character played by Emily Blunt also in Sicario (2015), has got strong components of that man fallen idea, in her task as an actor too. The way that her character and the story more broadly, would hinge together.
I had to mention that 2016 movie though, because it is a big screen movie feature. It is a story set in the modern, post economic crash landscape. And just like another movie that did get reviewed and discussed at considerable length in 2019, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The 2016 did end in a scene of immense violence and danger too. Which again, did make sense within the story and within the context of that important fallen individual kind of character who was played by Foster. Brian
Re: Once Upon a Time
In fact, i’d go out on a limb and ask the final question, is it possible for the movie ‘to earn’ the big, brash final Quentin Tarantino ending, and not first anchor the movie down firmly, by using the device of the Emily Blunt, or Ben Foster character that I mention. The one that really doesn’t change or become reformed, in the end? And in the absence of self reformation, all that’s really left is the bonus prize of a deeper self awareness.
That was really the only prize that Kate Macer, Tanner Howard, Shane Poster, Larry ‘Rain’ Murphy or Eldon Perry ever got to walk away with. I think that’s why this ending of ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’, may not have felt like it was earned.