11/11/15 (Part Two): Mr. Cage Goes to Washington

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Austin Stark, based on true events, BP, Bryan Batt, cheating husbands, Christopher Berry, Ciera Payton, cinema, Connie Nielsen, crooked politicians, directorial debut, extramarital affairs, film reviews, films, husband-wife relationship, Kerry Cahill, Movies, Nicholas Cage, oil spills, Peter Fonda, Sarah Paulson, set in 2010, sex scandals, The Runner, Wendell Pierce, writer-director

Is the phrase “honest, self-effacing politician” equitable to “jumbo shrimp” or “deafening silence”? Is it actually possible for someone who makes their living brokering deals, securing power structures, rewarding patronage and constantly campaigning to do what they’ve been elected to do and serve the average, every-day citizenry? Sure, there are plenty of examples of good, necessary actions taken by politicians stretching all the way back to the dawn of our political system: the concept of absolute evil is convenient for pop culture and entertainment but rarely plays out that way in real life. Even the very worst, most self-serving and vilely corrupt glad-hander out there is still capable of doing good…provided, of course, that it also benefits their bottom line.

Is there really such a thing as an incorruptible, sincere and tireless proponent for the average tax-payer, however? Are there really politicians who see their choice of career as a personal calling and chance for advocacy rather than a convenient way to achieve power, influence and wealth? The answer, at least based on writer-director Austin Stark’s The Runner (2015), is a resounding, firm “yes and no.”

We begin with Rep. Colin Pryce (Nicolas Cage), from Louisiana, and his passionate, fiery condemnation of “Big Oil” in the aftermath of the BP oil spill of 2010. There’s definitely a lot of Mr. Deeds in Pryce, especially as portrayed by Cage, whose intense earnestness has been a sort of cottage industry for the past few decades. There’s no denying that Pryce wants the best for the fishermen and blue-collar workers that compromise the electorate in his predominately African-American precinct: his speeches before the House and to the locals bespeak commitment and conviction far more than carefully planned rhetoric.

While Pryce might have all the best intentions as a political representative, however, it turns out that his personal life is much more of a shambles. The son of an alcoholic, philandering, former mayor who was known as a public mess as much as a civil rights pioneer (Peter Fonda, doing solid support work), Pryce shares a few too many genes with his daddy for comfort: chief being, of course, that he’s currently shtupping Lucy (Ciera Payton), the wife of one of the local fishermen that he’s supposed to be advocating for. Doh! Even better, Pryce is also married (Connie Nielsen, essentially reprising her role from the TV show Boss), which means that the whole situation is a powder-keg just waiting for an appropriate match.

That match ends up coming in the form of one whopper of a political scandal, the fall-out of which promises to thoroughly thrash whatever remains of Pryce’s career. As Pryce scurries around, attempting whatever measure of damage control he can, he finds that his proposed good deeds have become eclipsed by the mountain of negative press that surrounds him. Once “Big Oil” comes sniffing around the mortally-wounded Pryce, will he be able to hold on to what little values he has left or will he sell out the people who believe in him (along with his own soul) in order for one, last desperate chance to stay in the game?

Earnest, focused, deadly serious and, unfortunately, more than a little dull, Stark’s directorial debut (after serving as a producer for several years) doesn’t make a lot of obvious mistakes but also never rises above anything more than a passable time-waster. The story’s beats are overly familiar, by this point, much more capably echoed in TV shows like House of Cards or the aforementioned Boss: in fact, there were so many points during the film’s 90-minute run-time that directly reminded me of not only House of Card’s plot points but also its characters, cinematography and sound design that the film often felt like some sort of indirect homage to the series.

While the infidelity angle comes across as over-heated and melodramatic (Stark lacks the finesse to paint these scenes with anything less than the broadest brush strokes), the political machinations pack a little more punch, even if they’re given rather short shrift overall. Mad Men’s Bryan Batt turns in a great performance as a gently slimy BP executive whose attempts to court Pryce have the subtlety that too much of the rest of the film lacks.

It’s this schism, in the end, that probably does more to harm The Runner than any of the myriad minor issues that plague it: by splitting the focus between the scandal and the political maneuvering, neither aspect is explored to its fullest potential. There are some nice bits involving the apple not falling far from the tree, as far as Fonda’s character is concerned, and some generic “dark night of the soul” stuff from Cage (who pretty much specializes in that) but none of its interesting or novel enough to keep audience attention from wavering.

Ultimately, that’s kind of a shame: buried beneath the stereotypical sex scandal aspect, it’s clear that Stark’s film does, indeed, have something to say. While the story of a well-intentioned, but flawed, politician attempting to atone for his past transgressions is certainly nothing new under the cinematic sun, it’s not like that particular tale ever goes out of fashion, especially during our current political climate.

Craftwise, The Runner does what it needs to do in fairly unspectacular fashion: it looks and sounds fine and the large cast turns out a collection of performances that run the gamut from “getting the job done” (Nielsen, Payton, Wendell Pierce) to “fully invested” (Cage, Fonda, Batt, American Horror Story’s Sarah Paulson). The biggest problem, at the end, is that the whole thing is so predictable that it never subverts, tweaks or upends our expectations: if you’ve seen one film like The Runner you have, quite probably, seen much of what’s being offered here. Even Cage, widely recognized as the “wild card” of mainstream film, turns in the kind of subdued, middle-of-the-road performance that will, undoubtedly, remind one of at least half-a-dozen other, similar performances.

With little individual identity, The Runner manages to go the distance, yet never separates itself from the rest of the pack. We might remember the folks who are the first to cross the finish line…hell, we’ll probably remember the folks who are the last to cross it, too. All the other ones clustered in the middle, however? Just like in real life, it’s kind of hard to tell them apart.

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3/15/14: Just a Couple Good Old Boys

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actor-director, Altamont, America, American Dream, Best Original Screenplay nominee, Best Supporting Actor nominee, bikers, Billy, Bob Dylan, Born to Be Wild, buddy films, Captain America, Charles Manson, cinema, classic movies, counter-culture films, counterculture, Dennis Hopper, directorial debut, Easy Rider, end of an era, film reviews, films, friendship, hippies, Hoyt Axton, Jack Nicholson, Luke Askew, Mardi Gras, motorcycles, Movies, Oscar nominee, Palme d'Or nominee, Peter Fonda, Phil Spector, rednecks, road movie, road trips, Sharon Tate, Steppenwolf, the American Dream, the Manson Family, The Pusher, Wyatt

When, exactly, did the Summer of Love go up in flames? Conventional wisdom usually points to Altamont, in December 1969, as the point where the promise of free love and hippy Utopianism soured. For my money, though, I always pinpointed Sharon Tate’s murder, on August 9th of the same year, as the real tipping point. Even though the Woodstock festival (usually seen as the pinnacle of “hippyism”) would follow Tate’s murder by less than a week, I always viewed that as sneaking one last one in before Manson and his followers nailed down the coffin lid. By the time the Mason family had cemented their terrible legacy, it was pretty apparent that the shiny red apple of peace, love and harmony contained more than its fair share of rot. While Altamont may have slammed the door shut, it had begun to close long before then. In fact, some folks could see the end way before then: when Dennis Hopper’s now-iconic Easy Rider was first released, in May 1969, who could know that the man would seem like Nostradamus a mere seven months later?

Easy Rider is many things: a buddy film…a road movie…a counter-culture landmark…a return to the sensibilities of On the Road at a time when that attitude seemed not only passe but quaint…a drug movie…a critique of the fractured America of the ’60s…More than anything, however, Easy Rider serves as a death knell, a dire warning from one of the original “freak-flag-flyers” that times were changing and that the peace-and-love hippies were about to be swept from the Earth in the same way that the dinosaurs once were. You could stay the same, he posited, but you would die: that was a given. You could, of course, leave behind your ideals and survive by evolving into something else entirely, something colder, more calculating, less romantic. But isn’t this, in the end, the same sort of death as offered in the first option? Above all else, however, Hopper was making concrete the words of Bob Dylan, albeit casting them in a much darker light than Dylan originally intended: the times, indeed, were a changin’.

As a film, Easy Rider has a pretty simple structure: it’s essentially a series of vignettes featuring Billy (Dennis Hopper) and Wyatt (Peter Fonda), usually addressed as “Captain America.” As the two men travel around the back-roads of America, they meet with an odd assortment of characters, including a hitchhiker (Luke Askew) and his hippy commune, a drunken lawyer (Jack Nicholson), lots of rednecks and some good, old-fashioned, middle-American squares. They sell cocaine to Phil Spector (not the “person” of Phil Spector but the actual man: he’s billed as “The Connection” and wears one seriously yellow suit, complete with matching gloves and glasses), visit a whorehouse in New Orleans and leave a diner one step ahead of an angry mob of rednecks and small-town cops.

For the most parts, events in the film fall into a pretty basic formula: the duo rides to a new place, Billy acts like a square, the Captain tells him to chill out, there’s a musical interlude and the whole thing repeats. Each interlude, however, serves as a way for Hopper (who also wrote the screenplay, with Fonda) to dig a little deeper into the whole notion of the “American Dream.” The opening pre-credits drug-dealing sequence begins with Steppenwolf’s version of “The Pusher,” before their iconic “Born to Be Wild” slams us right into the credits. It’s a subtle way to establish Billy and the Captain’s manifesto (they do whatever they want, man), while also commenting on changes in the pop culture zeitgeist: “The Pusher” was written by Hoyt Axton, a popular folk singer in the early ’60s but it was Steppenwolf’s cover, not the original, that Hopper used. As one of the “heavier” new bands to emerge in the late ’60s, Steppenwolf was a good representation of the direction music was taking, at the time, away from the folk and early rock of the ’60s and into the hard rock and metal of the ’70s. Steppenwolf was pushing Axton out, just as the darker mid-late ’60s was crowding out the peace and optimism of the earlier part of the decade.

They end up on the hitchhiker’s commune but don’t get to stay long: the hippies end up picking on and ostracizing Billy, leading us to the notion that maybe these “peaceniks” aren’t quite as nice as they first seem. Although he couldn’t have known it at the time, Hopper was prophesying what would happen with the Manson family: the hippy exterior concealed a dangerous, deranged interior. Lest it be thought that Hopper is unduly picking on the counterculture (which is rather absurd, since he’s been a genuine, card-carrying member of the counterculture for his entire life/career), we also get scenes like the ones where Billy and the Captain get arrested for “parading without a permit” in a small town and are, essentially, chased out of a diner by a group of locals (including the sheriff) that are a few pitchforks away from the mob in Frankenstein. If the counterculture isn’t necessarily who they say they are, then the average middle-American “square” is exactly what they seem to be: small-minded, suspicious, frightened and utterly resentful of the “freedom” that Billy and the Captain represent. That these small-town folk and rednecks will, ultimately, end up being the undoing of Billy, the Captain and George (Nicholson) is certainly telling: although the counterculture has begun to collapse from the inside, its greatest threat still comes from the outside – the world at large.

All of these events eventually culminate in a truly apocalyptic ending for Billy and the Captain (and poor George, of course), although it’s a finale that would probably only provoke a shrug from the kinds of people who helped perpetrate it: those long-haired, weird bastards got what was coming to them. While the finale few moments of Easy Rider holds the answer to Billy and the Captain’s fates, it’s a moment just before that actually spells everything out for an entire generation. After finally achieving their “goal” of visiting New Orleans for Mardi Gras and surviving everything that came before, Billy is absolutely triumphant: they’re both “rich” now, thanks to the opening drug deal and have finally “made it.” “That’s what you do, man,” he tells the Captain, “you go for the big money.” The Captain’s response, however, takes the wind out of not only Billy’s sails but our own, as well: “We blew it, man.” By compromising their principles and losing sight of the “big picture” (changing the world for the better), Billy and the Captain (along with the entire “Free Love” movement) have truly “blown it.” The true extent wouldn’t be felt for some time, of course, but the writing was on the wall: whatever moment might have existed was now past and the movement would continue to spin out into irrelevance.

As a pivotal moment in the history of the counterculture, Easy Rider, much like Kerouac’s On the Road, cannot be easily discounted. Although certain elements have, by necessity, become dated, the overall themes and angles of the film hold up surprisingly well. As a film, Easy Rider is quite good, with sterling performances from Hopper, Fonda and Nicholson, along with some excellent cinematography that is reminiscent of the same year’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It’s always a hoot to see Hopper play the “straight” guy, particularly with the decades of crazy characters that would come after this. Nicholson, in particular, is excellent, providing yet another example of why he became one of the most beloved actors of all time. There’s a sense of playfulness that easily recalls Depp’s work in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, although Nicholson owned this type of role for some time before Depp wandered down Jump Street.

If there can be any complaints, it would have to be that the film definitely becomes formulaic well before the ending, although the final 15 minutes are still some of the most powerful film moments ever. Even though the film seems a bit dated now (the commune scene, in particular, is of its era, complete with a truly bizarre mime performance and some really hippy-dippy philosophizing), it’s held up much better than similar films of the era, such as Fonda’s ultra-silly The Trip from a few years earlier. In the end, Easy Rider exists as both a fascinating curio of a forgotten era and a timely reminder that we must be ever vigilant, if we hope to truly change the world. As Sisyphus knew, the moment you quit pushing forward and forging new ground is the moment where the boulder begins to slide back down the hill. In the ’60s, the hippies managed to push the rock quite a ways up the hill. The tragedy, of course, is that it crushed them all on the way back down.