Deterrence

23rd Portland International Film Festival

by D. K. Holm
www.cinemonkey.com

Deterrence is the movie about the Jewish president who drops an A-bomb on Baghdad.

f course, the movie, which is one of the opening films of the 23rd annual Portland [Oregon] film festival, is a little more than just that. Most important, the film is the latest entry in that rare breed, a film directed by a former movie reviewer. There haven't been many. Frank S. Nugent was a Times reviewer who became one of John Ford's most important screenwriters. Francious Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Charbol, Rohmer, and other nouveau vague masters started out as writers, if only, in Truffaut's words, to see free movies. Bertrand Tavenier still maintains his critical credentials by issuing the book 50 ans de cinema americain. Paul D. Zimmerman was a reviewer for Newsweek, and became one of Martin Scorsese's important collaborators. Peter Bogdanovich and Paul Schrader are more recent additions to this significant sub-genre of directorial personality.

Lurie is the former reviewer for a Los Angeles radio station and the author of the show biz crime tale, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. But now he has made a rather difficult career change. Directing is an exhausting profession at the best of times, but trebly difficult for a man who has had harsh things to say about people he may end up working with, or who may be in a position of power to thwart his ambitions.

Well, despite these additional dangers, Lurie has made a movie. And it may not be the greatest movie ever made, but it is unusual in the current Hollywood climate for focusing on politics (in fact, Lurie's projected second film is also about politics, in that case about a female VP candidate tarred with a scandalous past). Lurie's President Emerson (Kevin Pollack) is not revealed as Jewish until about midway through the movie. Despite his Pragmatist moniker, he is also not an elected president. VP Buchanan was indicted and resigned; Emerson was appointed; then his President died suddenly. The first unelected president since Ford, he is now in a difficult primary in the year 2008, when Rag invades Kuwait again. After negotiations break down (from the President's temporary perch in a snowed-in Colorado diner) Emerson makes the historic decision to bomb a recalcitrant Baghdad.

As a stage drama in the tradition of The Petrified Forest and When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?, this material might have been a bracing, fast-paced, tension filled modern parable about knowledge versus ignorance. As a movie, however, it is merely a little stagy, with actorial turns from secondary actors that lack spontaneity or authenticity, within movie pacing that denudes the narrative of its suspense. We should feel more tension about the end of the world as we know it. Lumet's version of Fail Safe has similar scenes of translated negotiations but conveys much more tension through the dignity and restrained fear of the participants (Henry Fonda, Larry Hagman) in an suffocatingly enclosed, unduly bright room.

Deterrence has the quality of one of Brian DePalma's early low-budget independent features such as Sisters: the lighting can be crude, the dialogue is stagy and feels incomplete; but worse, some of the political implications of the film are rather distasteful. To take the most obvious, it is unlikely that a political leader would leap to the use of the atom bomb, as here, on the basis of the slaughter of some 300 Americans in a peace keeping force. After all, Reagan didn't use it after terrorists killed over 300 marines. Still it is one of the few films that actually addresses politics, from a neophyte director who has yet to learn how to rely on good collaborators.

For more information about the film festival, visit the website for the Northwest Film Center. For an alternative view of this film, visit Culture Vulture.net.

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