A Face in the Crowd

As I have watched the drunken clown rodeo that has been the presidential campaign season so far, I’ve been particularly interested in the role the media – both social and mass – have played in shaping the story of who is going to be the next president. Reporters getting thrown out of press conferences, professional Internet trolls on the campaign payroll, front page stories about candidates saying things like “"I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters" – it’s all been like a fever dream you have after drinking Nyquil and falling asleep to CNN. 

 As it has been happening, one movie keeps coming to my mind, a terribly underappreciated film that should be a classic but for some reason is kind of forgotten. Directed by Elia Kazan and released in 1954, A Face in the Crowd stars Andy Griffith and Patricia Neal. It is a brilliantly written and acted excoriation of the relationship between mass media, its producers, its consumers, and the American political machine.

Most of us know, Andy Griffith as the folksy and superhumanly decent Sherriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry or perhaps as Matlock the folksy and superhumanly decent lawyer. But here Griffith plays Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, a moody, immoral, but immensely charismatic drifter. Rhodes is discovered while sleeping it off in a jail cell by Marcia Jeffries, an ambitious, college educated woman who produces a radio show for her uncle’s station in Arkansas. A Face in the Crowd is a kind of man-on-the-street show focusing on local color. Marcia asks Rhodes to say a few things when she’s on the scene in the local jail and immediately his aw-shucks demeanor combined with his cunning intelligence make him immensely popular.

Lonesome Rhodes soon becomes a household name. He transitions from radio to the fledgling world of television and becomes an opinion maker of the first order. Rhodes is willing to endorse whichever products or candidates pay the most money and he revels in the sway he holds over the American people. Barreling and blustery, a creature of almost completely unbridled appetites and opinions, Rhodes seems to have walked straight out of a Tennessee Williams play. Griffith plays him with a sweaty, evangelical fervor that is both off-putting and hypnotic. Marcia is played by Patricia Neal who exudes canny intelligence and the naïve ambition that helps Rhodes achieve his success. She’s repelled but also helplessly drawn to him. Neal’s naturalistic performance is one of the least showy and most convincing film portrayals I’ve ever seen. 

 

Rhodes’ arrogance, contempt for his audience, and lust for power eventually prove to be his undoing. Afraid of his lack of conscience and his growing power, Marcia turns his microphone up during the closing credits of his show while Rhodes refers to his viewers as idiots, morons, and trained seals who flap their flippers at his command.  In the time it takes his elevator to go from the top floor of the studio building to the bottom, Rhodes’ career is over.

The film ends with Lonesome Rhodes truly alone in his penthouse apartment, bellowing out Marcia’s name as she leaves him behind forever. And while it’s a happy ending in that Rhodes doesn’t become as powerful as he could have (he had his eye on a cabinet position in the White House), the film doesn’t let viewers of the hook that easily. Rhodes is more the symptom than the disease which seems to be our collective gullibility and willingness to listen and obey without thinking too much.

As the campaign clown car continues to careen toward November, do two things: first, really investigate each candidate’s claims and plans, see what he or she really wants to do and how they plan to do it. Second, watch A Face in the Crowd and see if it doesn’t make you want to be a little bit more careful about who you listen to.

Miracles From Heaven

I’ve always been fascinated by the similarities between going to the movies and going to church. Both are held in special buildings set aside just for their specific purpose, both involve large groups of people coming together at appointed times, facing the same direction, and receiving a message. Church and movies both tell us stories intended to shape how we think and feel about the world. Both have the potential to be uplifting and joyous. In both places, I usually wish the people sitting near me would just shut up. 

There have been intersections between film and faith since the very beginning of movies, and one of the latest developments is the popularity of evangelical Christian movies on the big screen. In the last ten years or so, films like Fireproof, Facing the Giants, God’s Not Dead, and Courageous have transitioned from the home viewing market and select screenings in churches to the local multiplex. Audiences are making evangelical cinema an economically viable film genre in America.

Of course, critiquing any religiously-based film can be tricky business because it’s never “just a movie.” Viewers often feel polarized for reasons that go beyond the effectiveness of the cinematography, acting, or writing of the film. The movies represent how they feel about evangelical Christianity – for better or for worse, and sometimes the film itself gets lost because criticism of the movie feels like criticism of the belief. 

 

Last week, I screened Miracles from Heaven, a film based on the true story of a 10 year old Texan girl named Anna Beam. In the film, Anna is sudden stricken with a digestive disorder. Her body can’t process anything she eats or drinks and so she goes from being healthy and happy to being fed through tubes and being in constant pain. Her family stands behind her and does everything possible to help, but her condition is incurable and only gets worse. Devout Christians that they are, her family prays for Anna to be healed but as things continue to worsen, her mother, played by Jennifer Garner, loses her faith, leaves her church, and becomes embittered toward God.

Then, on a visit home from the hospital, Anna, in an effort to be normal, climbs her favorite old tree. Once up there, she falls into its hollow center, dropping thirty feet, and is unconscious for hours until rescuers can pull her out. They find that, not only does she have no injuries to speak of, but she suddenly has no symptoms of her disorder whatsoever. Later, Anna confides that while unconscious in the tree, her spirit left her body and went to Heaven where she met God and he told her that she would be healed upon her return. The film ends with footage of the real healthy and normal Anna and her family, even showing Anna visiting the very tree she fell into six years ago. 

Miracles from Heaven isn’t a bad film. It just isn’t a particularly compelling one. It asks nothing of its audience other than to be moved by the pain and then triumph of a charismatic young girl. But beyond that, the film feels more like a commercial. It’s all surface gloss and not much substance. The cinematography is uniformly sunlit and golden, and the characters are all decent but utterly predicable. Given the prickliness and difficulty of faith and of the questions raised in the film, we are let off the hook far too easily. Garner’s character’s faith comes back because she gets what she wants. Questions about why Anna is healed and not other people who suffer more are essentially ignored.

Miracles from Heaven is like going to church and the movies at the same time. For some viewers, that’s the perfect combination, but for me, I couldn’t make the leap of faith between seeing it and actually enjoying it.

Zootopia

Disney’s latest film, Zootopia, has a lot going for it. The production design, computer animation, and voice work are first rate. The whole movie is zippy, funny, and lovely to look at. In addition to all of that, Zootopia is also a meaningful statement about racism and prejudice as well as a smart, knowing take on a familiar film genre, the police procedural.

Zootopia takes place in a world of anthropomorphic animals who have evolved past their more primal ways. They wear pants and go to work and, importantly, don’t eat each other. In this world, we meet Judy Hopps, a petite rabbit from a small carrot-farming community whose strong sense of justice leads her to want to be a police officer. This is ridiculous, of course, because she’s a rabbit and everybody knows that rabbits just aren’t born with the physical or mental abilities required in police work. Judy pushes past her parents’ doubts and society’s low expectations and graduates first in her class at the academy. Arriving for her first assignment in the big city of Zootopia, she finds that her determination to break boundaries and her enthusiasm for police work aren’t shared by many colleagues. She is both casually and purposefully discriminated against because of her species. Even her kindest colleague refers to her as “so cute.” Judy is relegated to parking meter duty which is where she meets Nick Wild, a fox con artist who makes a killing with an elaborate scheme for selling contraband popsicles to the same group of lemmings every day. (It sounds ridiculous, but is actually ingenious and funny.)  

  

Judy and Nick end up working together as she tries to solve the case of a missing otter which, naturally turns into a much bigger case involving dozens of missing animals, citizens of Zootopia going wild and returning to their more animalistic ways, and a conspiracy that reaches all the way to the mayor’s office. Judy’s first-rate detective work and Nick’s clever street smarts complement one another in true mismatched buddy movie fashion.

What’s most interesting is how the film uses funny talking animals to deal directly with racism and prejudice. In the film, racism becomes the division between predators and prey but there is also the issue of casual stereotyping of individuals because of their species. It also punctures race and class privilege and shows that even well-meaning characters can be unintentionally prejudicial. Given the times we live in and the length of time it takes to produce a movie like Zootopia, the film is surprisingly prescient. There’s even a scene after a predator attack in which reporters mob Judy and ask if she thinks there should be a ban on all predators from the city. The film wisely points out that we are at our best when we look at and interact with individuals rather than making broad, uniformed, fear-driven assumptions about entire groups.

The other wonderful aspect of Zootopia is how well it knows and plays with the conventions of the policier, the police procedural movie. So many of the well-known components of cop movies are here – the ambitious academy recruit, the gruff commander, sneaky snitches, red herring villains, conspiracy and corruption within the ranks – but the film adds new insights to these seemingly tired conventions through clever character design, sharp writing, and the metaphor of animals as stand-ins for people. In many ways, it’s a familiar story, but Zootopia brings new light.

Ginnfer Goodwin of TV’s Once Upon a Time is a stand-out as the voice of Judy Hops and brings real emotion to what could be just an easy paycheck part. Idris Elba continues to be awesome as the cape buffalo police chief Bogo and even the usually limited Jason Bateman brings a new quality to his performance as Nick Wilde. Zootopia is good on just about every level a movie can be good. You should see it.