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Runaway Liberals
For those familiar with the Grisham universe, not much changes
in this movie other than the enemy: The Insider already
glamorized the anti-tobacco campaign, and now it's time for
gun makers. All the familiar Grisham elements are here: The
evil, big corporation lawyers (like the type Grisham sometimes
fought during his law career in Mississippi), the little guy
taking on the system, the idealistic-but-conflicted "good
guy" lawyers. There's not much to say of the film in a plot
and style regard that hasn't been said about other Grisham
adaptations like The Pelican Brief or The Firm.
The story is straight-forward suspense, the characters are
pretty broad, but Grisham's (and his adapters') appeal is
the ability to tie these legal, moral, and ethical issues
into a knot and unravel it strand-by-strand over the course
of a breezy few hours. In this, the film succeeds.
The most striking thing about this particular adaptation
is the number good and/or name actors in it, some of them
doing next to nothing: Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, John
Cusack, and Rachel Weisz at the top, with Bruce Davison, Bruce
McGill, Jeremy Piven, Nick Searcy, Stanley Anderson, Cliff
Curtis, Nora Dunn, Orlando Jones, and at least a dozen other
actors you might have heard of lurking in there too. This
same phenomena marked a worse (but far crazier) movie last
year, John Q, which gave us Denzel Washington, James
Woods, Anne Heche, Ray Liotta, Eddie Griffin, Laura Harring,
and a handful of other recognizable actors. What these films
have in common is, at their center, a transparently liberal
cause. John Q isn't a good movie, and its passion is
the insane, ranting, non-sensical passion of a zealot. And
though muted through much of Runaway Jury, the ending
is a similar plea for the hearts of the audience, that these
BIG companies have no hearts themselves--how can they live
with themselves for what they do? And this is what
we have to do to fight it! This has to be why so many
stars attach themselves to these otherwise mediocre projects.
Yet, both of these films suggest something darker, something
I'm not convinced the makers understand: Both John Q
and Runaway Jury are liberal vigilante justice fantasies.
John Q takes matters into his own hands, as does Juror No.
9 in Runaway Jury, which isn't a bad thing, especially
for the movies--but they are both essentially unethical characters,
if you count "unethical" as holding needy patients hostage
or jury conspiracy as "unethical". The message is that the
ends justify the means as long as we're well-meaning, as long
as we're stickin' it to those bastards who deserve it.
The construct is a liberal Western of sorts, and this
is what conservatives who despise Hollywood should complain
about: The hypocrisy of the message.
Hollywood is liberal, I don't think there's much doubt about
that. The only "conservative" genre in the mainstream (at
least that I can think of, anyway) is the vigilante justice
film--which is probably why Arnold Schwarzeneggar, Sylvester
Stallone, and Bruce Willis are all Republicans. These types
of movies affirm the intuitive American value of self-evident
justice beyond law, and when written and played well (like
the great Westerns), they tap into something distinctly and
greatly American. The liberal vigilante justice film, however,
smacks of hypocrisy: The law should be on the side of the
righteous and the reasonable, but without reason at the soul
of passion, then movies like John Q and Runaway
Jury affirm the exact tactics they purport to be against.
That's what should make people mad, not the fact that Hollywood
movie heroes "liberally" take on Big Companies.
The problem is that Hollywood is liberal and always will
be because liberalism and art are, at their centers, driven
by empathy. Roger Ebert calls movies "empathy machines" because
we are asked to identify with those images and faces on the
screen, which is much like the "liberal" pleas for social
programs and the like. This is not to say that the far left
liberal viewpoint is always right because it's empathetic--it's
certainly not, especially in matters that require harder hearts
(like terrorism, to a certain extent), or when empathy crosses
into exploitation, or blinds itself into naïveté.
But movies are typically empathetic, liberal endeavors. I
would love to see an NRA-funded potboiler in which the gun
lobby wins over the widow whose husband was shot by a gun
purchased by a released felon at an unregulated gun show,
with the gun lobby lawyers heroically defending the Second
Amendment, even in the face of unspeakable tragedy. Rupert
Murdoch has the money, but then again, he funded the anti-Patriot
Act X-Men 2. It just wouldn't work.
The idea is counter-intuitive to the essence of film, and
in some respects, of deeply-held American beliefs. Chris Matthews
has said that nearly every politician's favorite movie is
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. We know intuitively that
there's no way Senator Payne can or should win--but what happens
to these Mr. Smiths when they do go to Washington? Does cynicism
and "the way things are" erode their idealism? Has our American
egalitarian idealism eroded into little guy's acquiescence
to Big Companies? I hope not, but I do wish that liberal Hollywood
would make better, non-hypocritical arguments like those found
in insane, heart-tugger movies like Runaway Jury--they
don't have to film Gene Hackman, the EVIL lawyer for the gun
company, like he's Satan. He's not--deep in that reptilian
skin beats a heart. We have to remember that. If liberals
want to make their point, their movies need to remember that
Senator Payne once was a Mr. Smith himself. As Smith says
to the Congress,
"Take a look at this country through her eyes if you really
want to see something. And you won't just see scenery; you'll
see the whole parade of what Man's carved out for himself,
after centuries of fighting. Fighting for something better
than just jungle law, fighting so's he can stand on his own
two feet, free and decent, like he was created, no matter
what his race, color, or creed. That's what you'd see. There's
no place out there for graft, or greed, or lies, or compromise
with human liberties. ...Great principles don't get lost once
they come to light. They're right here; you just have to see
them again!"
We have to have the courage to use what the system allows
us, even if it damn near kills us, like Jefferson Smith's
heroic filibuster. That's the soul of liberalism, a necessary
naïveté. that keeps American ideals alive. We
have to believe that the people still believe, not just in
the right ideals, but that the system can still facilitate
these ideals. Liberals cannot lose sight of that; we cannot
fight like those we believe to be Jim Taylors, the political
boss in Capra's film. We cannot, in Mr. Smith's words, "jungle"
fight. Runaway Jury's Juror No. 9 may stick it to the
man, but does it in an anti-American, anti-liberal way. It
does the cause no justice, and only offers its foes more fodder.
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