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SUNDAY, AUGUST 22, 2010 The liberties taken in Hollywood’s history lessons politics from E1
ish and apprehension by local filmgoers, many of whom are like- ly to have witnessed the events on- screen firsthand. Much as people in Detroit critique movies about carmaking, or lion tamers pick apart movies about the circus, po- litical insiders see movies about true events in Washington as two- fold entertainments, first in the theaters and later during the par- lor game of spot-the-error (or hear-the-ax-grinding). But every once in a while, a film
survives the vetting and emerges as a tacitly approved version of true events — an interpretive his- tory far more enduring and pow- erful than even the most rigor- ously researched, authoritative text. In the annals of Washington’s most sacred narratives, none is more venerated than “All the President’s Men,” which since its release in 1976 has held up not only as a taut, well-made thriller but as the record itself of the Wa- tergate scandal that transpired four years earlier. Among film- makers, “All the President’s Men” is considered the ur-text of fact- based political drama; Peter Mor- gan, who wrote “The Queen” and “Frost/Nixon,” calls it “a master- piece.” It barely matters that the film’s most iconic piece of dialogue — “Follow the money” — was never spoken in real life. According to Bob Woodward, whose source Deep Throat utters the deathless line in the film, the quote aptly captures everything his source, FBI associate director W. Mark Felt, was telling him at the time. “It all condensed down to that,” Woodward says. Even the most scrupulously footnoted book, he adds, can’t be 100 percent accu- rate. “No matter how well report- ed or carefully done, it’s not an en- gineer’s drawing of what hap- pened.” Indeed, faithful as “All the
President’s Men” is to Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s journalistic process in discovering how a break-in at Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate led to the White House, the film itself has been accused of its own brand of mythmaking. Many observers have criticized the movie for ad- vancing the tidy but reductive idea that it was two reporters who brought down a president, rather than a far more complicated — and less telegenic — skein of ef- forts by members of Congress, federal prosecutors and the FBI.
Myth or reality? That’s the ques- tion posed by movies based on true events, and it’s a conundrum that Washington officialdom seems to have a perennial prob- lem in reconciling. Never has the political establishment been as unsettled as in 1991, when “JFK” hit the screen. In bold, bravura strokes, the film turned settled history on its ear, suggesting that a malign conspiracy of political, criminal and corporate interests killed John F. Kennedy in 1963. While many viewers saw “JFK” as a technically brilliant, expression- istic portrait of generational angst and American paranoid style, just as many observers were alarmed that, precisely because the film was so accomplished, Stone’s ver- sion of history would come to be accepted as fact. Subsequently, Stone went on to
VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
OUR WATERGATE: Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, Jason Robards, Jack Warden, Martin Balsam in “All the President’s Men”
FRANCOIS DUHAMEL
HOME FRONT:“Charlie Wilson’s War,” with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, drew a mixed reaction from local filmgoers.
WARNER BROS.
CONSPIRATORIAL TONE:Gary Oldman as Lee Harvey Oswald in Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” which unsettled the political establishment.
KEN REGAN/SUMMIT ENTERTAINMENT WHAT WILL WE LEARN?Naomi Watts as Valerie Plame Wilson in the new film “Fair Game.”
make “Nixon,” a Shakespearean portrait of the brooding former president and, more recently, “W.,” about George W. Bush, both of which took their own liberties with imagined episodes and dia- logue. But by then, viewers were more familiar with Stone’s autho- rial style, which favors bright lines and (often wholly imagined) em- blematic scenes over messier shades of gray. “It’s a movie,” Stone said in a re- cent telephone conversation. “You’ve got to make it fun. You’ve got to make it exciting.” As for viewers who can’t abide his tech- niques, Stone says, “there are lit- eral people, and they’ll never get it. They’ll never, ever get it. As long as a movie is fun, it’s exciting and it doesn’t have Iranian subti- tles, it’s okay. “And by the way,” the director added puckishly, “ ‘JFK’ is right.” (Most Americans would agree on one of the movie’s angles at least:
Polling since “JFK’s” release sug- gests that between 70 to 80 per- cent of respondents believe that more than one gunman killed Kennedy, a percentage that has re- mained relatively consistent since the 1980s.) You don’t have to support
Stone’s signature brand of revi- sionism to agree that overween- ing literalism can sometimes ob- scure a larger truth. If we can stip- ulate Nixon probably never stood in front of a portrait of John F. Kennedy and said, “When they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are” — as he does in “Nixon” — that tableau still encapsulates volumes about what motivated, tortured and fi- nally undermined a brilliant and complex man.
Which movie is true, “All the
President’s Men” or “Nixon”? Both, in important ways — one conveying not just events but a
Maybe the best way to understand these films isn’t as narrative at all, but an experience more akin to ritual.
zeitgeist, the other in creating viv- id psychological tone. But the more useful question may be how filmgoers can most profitably en- counter movies that, while not pure fact, aren’t pure fiction, ei- ther. “There are facts, and there are interpretations of the facts,” says Morgan, who most recently scripted “The Special Relation- ship,” an HBO movie about Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. “As soon as people interpret the facts, it be- comes someone else’s fiction. I think there’s a covenant of trust and understanding between the dramatist and the viewers. They know they’re getting an interpre- tation.”
Sorkin, who wrote “Charlie Wil-
son’s War” and plans to make his directorial debut with the adapta- tion of “The Politician,” Edwards aide Andrew Young’s book about his former boss, called nonfiction drama “a tricky needle to thread” in an e-mail. “When an audience sits in a theater having been told that ‘The Following is a True Story,’ ” he said, “they should look at it the way they’d look at a paint- ing and not a photograph. Picas- so’s subjects probably didn’t have three eyes. There was no one named Falstaff in the court of Henry IV.” But the artist has his own obli-
gations, according to Sorkin, who follows his own set of best prac- tices in dramatizing real-life events. “When you’re writing non- fiction drama, you’ve got two im- portant things in your hands — history and somebody’s life,” he says. “So . . . first do no harm. I would never want to unfairly de- fame anyone (either the moral or the legal definition) and while sometimes I’m willing to conflate time, create composite characters or have a scene take place in an of- fice when it really took place in a living room, I wouldn’t change or invent a fact that I felt fundamen- tally lied about something signifi- cant.” Morgan, who wrote three films about prime minister Blair (“The Deal,” “The Queen” and “The Spe- cial Relationship”), agrees with Sorkin’s
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photograph idea. He puts non- fiction political drama in a catego- ry alongside caricature, editorial cartooning and satire as part of the territory in a public figure’s
life. A film burrows into collective consciousness and stays there, he says, “only when it’s good. Because people will reject it if it’s bad — it will disappear as so much flotsam and jetsam. I would argue that’s the reason why ‘All the President’s Men’ has had the lasting impact that it’s had.” Alternatively, he says, “the audi- ence will reject a cynical enter- prise. If they feel people have been negligent, partial, lazy, disrespect- ful or dishonest, they can smell it.” Thus in “The Queen,” when Queen Elizabeth encounters a lone stag on one of her solitary rambles in Scotland, filmgoers don’t have to get hung up on whether the episode actually hap- pened; instead they can glean Morgan’s metaphorical meaning from one exalted but isolated creature regarding another. Mor- gan also deemed it fair to include an imagined scene in “Frost/Nix- on” in which Nixon drunk-dials a befuddled David Frost late at night, in order to convey Nixon’s state of mind at the time. “Nixon was actively making these sorts of phone calls, of which he had no recollection,” Morgan says. “And when I discov- ered that, I said, ‘He has to ring my boy. He has to ring Frost and have no memory of this.’ ” As long as dramatists seek to
make protagonists out of mere humans — to reduce their tangled webs of contradictions, complex- ities and banalities to a set of sin- gle-minded motivations and fatal flaws — audiences will need to ap- proach these narratives with a blend of sophistication and skep- ticism. But maybe the best way to understand these films isn’t as narrative at all, but an experience more akin to ritual. When reli- gious pilgrims travel to the sacred sites of the Holy Land, for exam- ple, the locations they visit often aren’t the literal places where a biblical figure was born or bap- tized. Instead, they’re the sites that, through centuries of use and shared meaning, have become in- fused with a spiritual reality all their own. Thus, the movies about Wash-
ington that get the right stuff right — or get some stuff wrong but in the right way — become their own form of consensus history. “Fol- low the money,” then, assumes its own totemic truth. Ratified through repeated viewings in theaters, on Netflix and beyond, these films become a mutual exer- cise in creating a usable past. We watch them to be entertained, surely, and maybe educated. But we keep watching them in order to remember.
hornadaya@washpost.com
MORE PHOTOS Ann Hornaday looks at some of the memorable political films involving D.C. intrigue with a photo gallery at washingtonpost. com/style.
Photo © Michal Daniel, for Minnesota Opera PWYC PERFS AUG 23 & 24!
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