Who is America's most successful
political filmmaker? While most would argue divisive names like Spike Lee or
Michael Moore, I'm going to nominate Gary Ross. You know his films: "Big," "Dave," "Pleasantville," "Seabiscuit,"
"The Hunger Games" and now "Free
State of Jones," which opened last Friday. His work routinely captures
the zeitgeist, but with no indie credibility or claim to auteurship, he rarely
gets the credit, and his themes and motifs don't get discussed. This should
change. A close reading of his career reveals an acuity at telling political
stories that attract broad, bipartisan audiences in an increasingly polarized
era. He may also be the most idealistic filmmaker working today.
Idealism is not to be confused
with political purism. Purists are everywhere these days. From social media to
the op-ed pages, they have to come to dominate political discourse on both
sides of the aisle. Purists reject nuance in their politics. They view
political compromise as counterproductive and steadfastly refuse to seek common
ground on those who disagree with them. Purists are divisive; idealists seek to
unite us behind something positive.
Ross is an idealist but not a purist.
Before he got into directing, he was a hugely successful screenwriter, penning
such feel-good hits as "Big" and
"Dave." Both films have a
common thread; they are about the "redemptive power of innocence," as Ross has put it.
They depict idealistic characters who enter cynical institutions—corporate
America and the White House—and return them to their more innocent roots
through honesty, enthusiasm and an utter lack of guile.
"Big" and "Dave" were crowd-pleasers, and (or perhaps because) the politics
that lurked underneath their crowd-pleasing stories were simple. Josh Baskin,
played by Tom Hanks in "Big,"
was a yuppie analogue, a grown man-child thrust into a position of economic
power. While his youthful vigor may have brightened the mood of his glum
co-workers, the film is still a relatively shallow probe into the corporate
culture that so defined the Reagan era. The politics of "Dave" are equally superficial; the
administration taken over by Dave Kovacs (Kevin Kline), a presidential
look-a-like asked to secretly step in when the real president falls ill, looks,
at first, a lot like a liberal fantasy. Kovacs reshapes the presidency as an
apparatus of the working class, but he does so only through his everyman
charisma; the film's dismissal of the actual work of governing and
consensus-building makes its ideal ruler seem more like an authoritarian
strongman than the leader of a democracy.
When Ross finally got into the
director's chair, he started to atone for this simplicity. His political
perspective became richer and more nuanced. No longer was he content to simply
hold up idealism as a virtue. He began to explore idealism from many angles,
examining how the concept is used and packaged in order to satiate the masses.
In his directorial debut, "Pleasantville," David (played with
literal wide-eyed optimism by Tobey Maguire) is an idealist in a cynical world.
He doesn't quite fit in at high school and is overwhelmed by complicated
contemporary issues like global warming, so he finds comfort in the TV
Land-style pleasures of the story's eponymous TV show, a 1950s domestic comedy
in which things are simple and true and right. When a magical remote control
transports him and his bad-girl sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon) to the TV world of Pleasantville, David is initially
thrilled to be living in such a wholesome place.
But over the course of the film,
Ross lifts the veil on Pleasantville and finds that social order comes at a
social cost. His TV mother Betty (Joan Allen) has a sexual awakening that serves as a
symbol of the second-wave of feminism. As David and his classmates start to
come to life, they turn "colored"; town authorities, threatened by their
otherness, start to crack down with a series of laws that resemble Jim Crow.
Ross has been clear about his political intent. After a decade or so of hearing
politicians like Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole ("I want to build a
bridge to the past") clamor about a return to the prosperity of the 1950s,
buttressed by a film industry that seemed set on supporting that fantasy (films
like "Back to the Future," "Diner,"
"Stand By Me" and "Peggy Sue Got Married" made Hollywood
seem like a ‘50s nostalgia factory), Ross felt compelled to remind audiences of
the real social dynamics at play during this so-called better era, in which conformity
quashed individuality—and prejudice and fear consumed our democracy. The 1950s
were a simpler time, he points out, as long as you were white and male.
David is still idealistic at the
end of "Pleasantville," but
it's an earned idealism, and such characters populate Ross' next three films. "Seabiscuit" was an unabashed love
letter to American resilience at a time when the country needed it most. The
film, which was nominated for seven Oscars including Best Picture, came along
less than two years after 9/11, and its Depression-era tale of damaged
Americans—including a disabled jockey, a failed businessman and the injured
horse itself—resonated with a nation recovering from its own national trauma.
It's not one of Ross' most nuanced works; "Seabiscuit" lacks a self-critical apparatus to elevate it beyond
its propagandistic tendencies, but much like George W. Bush in the days after
9/11, it was the film we needed at the time.
But even through its rose-tinted
nationalism, "Seabiscuit" celebrates a strain of idealism borne out of hardship and loss.
The horse's owner, played by Jeff Bridges, is the best model of this thinking.
Riffing on his role in 1988's "Tucker:
The Man and His Dream," Bridges plays the happy-go-lucky bicycle
repairman who gets rich when he starts selling automobiles (he describes them
as "the future"). But his life comes crashing down with the market; he loses
everything, including his wife, who leaves him after the money goes away. The
positivity with which he shepherds Seabiscuit—and, the film argues, an adoring
nation—to success is inborn, but it's also a product of his loss. He refuses to
let Seabiscuit retire or be euthanized after an injury because he just can't
stand to see another defeat.
Nine years later, Ross returned
with his most successful film yet, the mega-blockbuster adaptation of "The Hunger Games." Although he was
hardly a household name, it's easy to see why producers trusted Ross with the
first installment of what they hoped would be a franchise that would make lots
of people rich. Ross had demonstrated an ability to turn political material
into a mainstream hit, and "The Hunger
Games" would be one of the most political blockbusters ever made. Its
dystopian story of class revolt tapped into the spirit of both Occupy Wall
Street and the Tea Party, and while pundits from both sides tried to claim the
film's politics as their own, its enormous commercial success clearly showed that
it transcended party lines.
Again, idealism is the subject at hand. Katniss Everdeen is a most reluctant
hero, who becomes an unwitting symbol of an uprising. People follow her, but
she's not sure she deserves it. The subsequent films in the franchise directed
by Francis Lawrence delve more deeply into the way symbols are used and abused by
those in power, but Ross deftly set the stage by defining the oppressing world
of the Capitol in broad but efficient strokes and refusing to cave in to the
film's more sensationalistic elements. In explaining his refusal to rely too
heavily on special effects and (particularly) 3D, Ross said that
to do so would be "exploiting what the book
condemns: a media-centric society where entertainment in that culture devolves
into spectacle, and that spectacle evolves into political control."
Ross's latest, "Free State of Jones," is by most
accounts his first significant misstep. It's one of those labors of love that a
director works on for a decade and, after a big hit, gets the capital to make a
reality. It's a film that, if the weekend grosses are any
indication, someone probably should have stopped. In addition to its general
narrative failures, its racial and gender politics are woefully outdated,
relying on a politically incorrect "white savior" archetype and relegating its women—without any agency of their own—to the jobs of wife and mother.
And yet it
touches our political moment in eerily specific ways for a story that was ten
years in the making. Its tale of a deserter from the Confederate Army who
starts his own army, and eventually "free state," may have been pitched as a
racial story, but what drives Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey) and his merry
band of outsiders together is economics. Many poor white Southerners join his
cause because of unfair taxation laws, income inequality and disillusionment
over the war; when white savior Knight tells an escaped slave that he left the
Confederacy because he didn't want to die over cotton, the slave laughs and
replies, "Me, too."
Knight starts off as a cynic; as he helps his followers shed their racial
divisions in pursuit of an economic utopia, he becomes an idealist. In this
way, "Free State of Jones" captures
our anti-establishment moment in which the old rules no longer apply. In 2016,
voters on both the right and left are threatening to refuse their party's
nominee. Some Republicans are even planning to vote for Hillary, their
once-hated rival, while disillusioned Sanders supporters are looking into the
Libertarian Party and Gary Johnson. This is the brand-new world that "Free State of Jones" reflects, and
it demonstrates once again the virtues of that director who can speak the
language of politics to a truly bipartisan audience. Ross has his finger on the
pulse of our democracy, and even if the box-offices grosses are not always
kind, perhaps history will be.
