Mission Compromised.

Perhaps it wasn’t the best nightcap to Poseidon — four and a half hours of crashes and explosions tend to run together after awhile — Still, J.J. Abrams’ loud, garish Mission: Impossible III, while assuredly better than John Woo’s miserable M:I:2, doesn’t to my mind improve on Brian De Palma’s slinky, Eurotrashy original. (And I’m by no means a De Palma fan, particular after megastinkers like Mission to Mars and Femme Fatale.) I guess if you’re a huge fan of Alias, this might be your cup of tea — the film definitely plays like every episode of that show I’ve ever seen, what with the in-media-res opener, the artfully named McGuffin, double-double-agents, kick-ass femmes, and the weird, off-putting emphasis on torture. (Ok, there may be dollops of Splinter Cell and The Vanishing somewhere in there too.) Still, I found M:I:3 basically a sleek, well-designed non-starter and, in a word, missable.

It probably didn’t help that the central conceit of M:I:3 involves superspy-turned-desk-jockey Ethan Hunt’s new paramour (Michelle Monaghan), since Tom Cruise’s real love life has become both so creepy and inescapable over the past year. But, here we are (after the flash-forward opener), attending the Hunts’ resolutely normal wedding shower somewhere in suburban Virginia, and once again watching Cruise do his “This woman drives me cRaZy!” schtick. (No couch-jumping, alas.) But, domestic bliss is soon interrupted by an urgent (if oblique) call from Hunt’s new boss (Billy Crudup), and, quicker than you can say “silent birth,” Ethan has gotten the band (Ving Rhames, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Maggie Q) back together again, who then venture off to deepest, darkest Berlin to save a compromised agent (Keri Russell) from, you guessed it, torture. There, he crosses swords with criminal mastermind Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman) — or at least his underlings — and the battle is joined, one that will eventually rage from the Vatican to Shanghai to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge (which in this universe seems to be about a 10-15 minute drive from DC.)

If this all sounds a bit campy, well, it is…or, at least, it is at times (such as when Cruise dons priestly vestments to infiltrate the Vatican), and probably should have been for its entire run. But Abrams, in keeping with his usual Marathon Man-ish predilections, has decided to give this film his own brutal gloss, and I for one found all the wallowing in harsh interrogation scenarios a bit much. (Well, at least for this franchise…frankly, Bond could probably use more of it, at least if the Daniel Craig run will verge closer to the books. But I digress.) When you get right down to it, torture scenes not only aren’t very entertaining (by design, I guess), they’re also very close to cheating — Of course we’re going to feel for Cruise and his new ladyfriend when they’ve been put in such a situation. In short, Abrams is substituting visceral reaction for good writing — as someone on Slate noted with 21 Grams back in the day, he might as well have the bad guy kick a puppy while he’s at it.

That being said, the bad guy here, scene-stealing support by Lawrence Fishburne and Shaun of the Dead‘s Simon Pegg notwithstanding, is the highlight of the film. A million years away from his recent turn as Capote (or his prior Cruise pairing in Magnolia…ok, he’s a bit like his character in The Talented Mr. Ripley), Hoffman underplays his soulless and sadistic arms dealer as a man thoroughly bored with his ubervillain station in life, and seems all the more plausible for being nondescript and banal.

Liner Notes.

Admittedly, a summer B-picture like Poseidon isn’t going to turn the world upside down in any case. And it’s got nothing on the original Poseidon Adventure of 1972 (which itself isn’t all that great a film): Josh Lucas is almost always a likable presence, but he’s no Gene Hackman…nor, for that matter, is Kurt Russell Ernest Borgnine or Richard Dreyfuss Red Buttons (or is he Shelley Winters?) — but that may speak in this version’s favor. Still, by this point director Wolfgang Petersen is a master of both the underwater nightmare (Das Boot, The Perfect Storm) and the tube movie (Boot, Air Force One), and as a big, dumb disaster flick, Poseidon is competent enough. I can’t really recommend that you rush out and see it by any means, but it may be worth watching the back half on TNT some day.

So, you probably know the set-up. It’s New Year’s Eve somewhere in the middle of the ocean, and, aboard a massive behemoth of a cruise ship that makes the Titanic look like the S.S. Venture, passengers party the night away to the Black Eyed Peas’ Fergie, oblivious to the ginormous “rogue wave” bearing down on them. Soon, the wave hits, the ship capsizes, and our gaggle of disheveled celebrities — a professional gambler (Lucas), a recently-dumped gay architect (Dreyfuss), a former fireman and mayor of New York(!) (Russell), his daughter (Emmy Rossum), etc. etc. — band together to get to the bottom of things (which, of course, is now the top.) Along the way, they must brave fearsome flash fires, watery death traps, and clunky exposition-riddled dialogue in order to get out alive, if they can. (I won’t say who makes it and who doesn’t, other than to say that [Spoilers] actors from the HBO stable don’t seem to fare too well on this vessel.)

So, is the movie any good? Well, yeah, it’s ok, in a turn-your-brain-off kinda way. True, the dialogue and characterizations are pretty much terrible — even the wisps of backstory and perfunctory conflicts given these folks turn out to be barely credible. But the movie still works, since you just end up rooting for the long-suffering actors instead, many of whom seem like they must be hating the water tank by now. (Speaking of which, Kurt Russell, no stranger to B-flicks, seems particularly at home here.) And, to its credit, there are a few legitimately clever and suspenseful setpieces herein, the best of which makes a solid, if not incontrovertible, case for never getting trapped in a water-logged air shaft behind a claustrophobe and Richard Dreyfuss. And, like the similar crests in Petersen’s Perfect Storm, the Big Wave itself has a wrath-of-God grandeur to it, particularly in its first appearance, as it looms in the distance like inexorable Fate. In short, Poseidon is nowhere near to being a great film, but it does make for a mildly diverting carnage-filled cruise.

Miller’s (School) Crossing.

When I read in multiple interviews that writer-director Rian Johnson found his inspiration for the film Brick in the Coens’ Miller’s Crossing — which with Brazil and Amadeus holds the top spot in my all-time (non-fanboy) film list — my interest was piqued. And, to be sure, Dode, Tug, and the Pin of Brick bear more than a passing resemblance to Bernie Bernbaum, the Dane, and Johnny Caspar of Crossing. (In fact, some aspects of Brick, such as the mass of flunkies waiting in the hall and Brendan’s glasses (a.k.a. Tom’s hat), seem like direct lifts from the Coens’ film.) Still, ultimately the Prohibition-era Midwest of Crossing serves as a more plausible and fertile environment for Dashiel Hammett‘s tough guys and dangerous dames than does the sun-and-drug-drenched California high school here. Brick is worth seeing — It gets points for innovation, and for having the good taste to lift from a really great movie. But it’s also slow and uneven at times, and in its worst moments is somewhat reminiscent of Bugsy Malone. In a way, Brick also reminded me of Bubba Ho-Tep — an imaginative conceit that looks great on paper, but one that loses something in the execution. (That being said, and as some AICN reviewers noted, I could see this becoming a cult hit of Donnie Darko-ish proportions, particularly among high schoolers.)

So, what’s the rumpus? Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a high school loner forced to turn shamus when, after heeling him three months earlier for the in-crowd of dopers and jocks, his former twist (Emile de Ravin) shows up on ice. With his ally the Brain (Matt O’Leary) backing his play — namely by keeping an eye on the vice-principal’s office for him — Brendan starts digging around the high school underground to see what shakes. Along the way, he encounters a couple of filles fatale (Nora Zehetner, Meagan Good), a local drug lord — with a (maltese) falcon-headed cane, no less — (Lukas Haas), and some irate muscle (Noah Fleiss) who may or may not be chiseling on the side. Will Brendan get to the bottom of it all, and find some measure of belated justice for his dead ladyfriend? Or will he gum it, and end up just another broken-hearted yegg shuffling through fourth period study hall?

If you’re a noir aficionado who enjoys watching actors Hammiett-it-up, Brick is a treat most of the time. But, to be honest, some of the kids — not Gordon-Levitt or Haas, who are both very good — stumble over the period dialogue, and when they do, the whole artifice of this enterprise is exposed. Transplanting Hammiett into high school seems like a great idea, and at times the juxtaposition is really funny: Brendan tells an untrustworthy dame “If you need me, you know where I eat lunch” and warns the asst. vice-principal (Richard Roundtree), “If you’ve got a problem with me, write me up or suspend me — I’ll see you at the parent conference.” But, in the end, I think Brick should have gone farther with it. By having so much of the story revolve around a murder, a crime boss, and a totally absurd amount of hard drugs, Johnson is kinda cheating — this story isn’t really about high school at all. Brick would’ve been more satisfying, I think, if Brendan had just ended up navigating the interstices among high school social cliques as Tom Reagan does the Irish and Italian mob in Crossing. (Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War comes to mind as a template for how that might’ve worked.) But in having teenagers speak in Hammiett’s argot, while in no way acting like teenagers, Brick ends up feeling more like a pastiche or a film school exercise than it really should. I’d say it’s worth seeing, but ultimately Brick feels more clever than it does entertaining, and, all in all, I ended up admiring the attempt made here more than actually enjoying the film.

Turn You Inside Out.

Hearkening to the halcyon days of Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico, Spike Lee’s Inside Man is a clever contraption indeed — a sleek, intelligent, well-acted NYC heist flick whose central scheme is more about subterfuge, cunning, and misdirection than technical gimmickry. (In too many films in the genre — The Score, or Ocean’s 11, for example — the robbers seem to be spending more on state-of-the-art equipment than they’d actually make in the grift.) To be sure, there are some implausibilities throughout, including pretty much all of Jodie Foster’s character and [Spoilers] the idea that Christopher Plummer would keep that Nazi paperwork lying around for sixty years, and the film’s last half-hour takes too long to put the story to bed. That being said, for the most part Inside Man is a slick caper film that offers both legitimately surprising twists and the satisfaction of seeing parts of a well-crafted scheme fall into place like tumblers in a lock. In the immortal words of Hannibal Smith, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

Is that a spoiler? Well, no, not really. The movie (and the trailer) begin with Dalton Russell (Clive Owen, charismatic as ever) telling us he has conceived and executed “the perfect bank robbery.” Very soon thereafter, we watch Russell and three accomplices, dressed as painters, walk into a ritzy downtown Manhattan bank, bar the doors, and take hostage of the 20-30 unfortunate New Yorkers therein. Soon, led by detectives Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington, in top form) and Bill Mitchell (the always-excellent Chiwetel Ejiofor) as well as a by-the books captain (Willem DaFoe), the NYPD surround the bank, and a protracted stand-off begins. Meanwhile, the bank’s president (Christopher Plummer) adds an X-factor to the equation by hiring a Fixer of sorts (Jodie Foster, as good as anyone could be in this goofy role) to resolve the situation to his own satisfaction. With the board thus set, the rest of the film involves the pieces moving — We watch the heist unfold over the course of a New York City day and night, punctuated by clips of Washington and Ejiofor interrogating the bank hostages after the fact.

Of course, this isn’t just a well-crafted crime film, but a Spike Lee joint, and it resonates in the details. (In its own way, I’d say this is as strong as Lee’s last movie, The 25th Hour.) As Salon‘s Stephanie Zacharek notes in her positive review, “Inside Man is a movie that practices what Crash preaches.” It may be considered bizarre and even Oscar-noteworthy for people of different races and backgrounds to interact in the hermetically-sealed car-culture of Los Angeles, but New Yorkers have been colliding up against each other for some time now. And — unlike in Crash — Lee gets the feel right. (This is his thematic territory, after all.) Particularly noteworthy in this regard are the scenes involving a Sikh bank teller (Waris Ahluwalia) whom the robbers send out with their demands. On sight of turban, the cops immediately treat him like a terrorist bomber, and Ahluwalia manages to sound both terrified and fed up at the same time with the post-9/11 indignity of it all. True, some of the plot mechanics in Inside Man could be considered contrived, but, Jodie Foster’s corporate ninja notwithstanding, at least here the people seem real. (2nd Crash link via Listen Missy.)

Smoke Signals.

Brimming with affable actors and a cool, refreshing menthol topicality, Thank You for Smoking, which I caught last night in Union Square, is a wry, decently amusing satire — one that’s not much for side-splitting bellylaughs but good for a consistent chuckle throughout. Very few scenes go by without a few snappy lines or clever sight gag, and the film is all the more endearing for its understatement — like cigarettes, a lot of these jokes almost sell themselves. Still, I haven’t read Chris Buckley’s book, but I can’t escape the suspicion that a devastatingly funny movie could’ve been made from this source material if the filmmakers had just gone for it, um, unfiltered. More often than not, the film seems to want to be liked, when what it really needed was a jolt of the same type of dark misanthropy that propelled last year’s Lord of War (i.e. Thank You for Shooting.) I’d say it’s worth seeing, and I was definitely smiling through most of the film. But, at crucial times, and particularly in the second half, Thank You for Smoking feels too lo-tar and antiseptic for its own good. (Oh, and sorry, Tom Cruise conspiracy theorists: Katie Holmes’ brief sex scenes are still here.)

For those who haven’t seen the preview, the film follows the exploits of uber-charismatic cigarette lobbyist Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart, doing a friendlier variation on his In the Company of Men turn), a guy who basically has the heart of The X-Files‘s Cigarette Smoking Man in the body of Mr. Smith (Think Capra, not Matrix.) Sent on various charm offensives by his immediate boss (J.K. Simmons, pitch-perfect) and the head office in Winston-Salem (Robert Duvall, doing his R.E. Lee schtick again), Naylor must flatter, cajole, bluff, and wheedle his way past a number of moderately funny archetypes, including a Birkenstock-clad senator from Vermont (William H. Macy), a ruthless Orientophile Hollywood exec (Rob Lowe), their various flunkies (Todd Louiso, Adam Brody), and a thoroughly disgruntled Marlboro Man now suffering from lung cancer (Sam Elliott). Along for the ride on this tobacco tour is Naylor’s kid (Cameron Bright) — on loan from the ex-wife (Deadwood‘s Kim Dickens) and her new doctor boyfriend,(whose studiously scruffy beard is one of the many funny details herein) — and Nick spends much of the film trying to inculcate his son in the ways of activism for the amoral. (I have to admit, it’s hard to watch these scenes and not think of the author and his own dad, the venerable William F. Buckley, Jr..)

Like I said, for the most part Thank You for Smoking is a jaunty and amusing two hours, with enough clever moments to keep the general atmosphere lively and droll. Still, at times, it’s hard not to feel that there are opportunities missed here, particularly when the movie loses its step. (The climax, in which Naylor testifies before Congress, is basically a non-starter.) For one, the film occasionally jumps to voiceover (a la Lord of War), without ever really committing to it, and so it ends up feeling like lazy writing. And some potentially funny jokes just seem clumsily telegraphed — to take one small example, when Naylor’s gun lobbyist friend (Anchorman‘s David Koechner) has trouble with a security gate. Speaking of Koechner, he and Eckhart share several scenes with alcohol lobbyst Maria Bello (The Cooler, A History of Violence) as the “MOD” (“Merchants of Destruction”) Squad, which feel like they should be the centerpiece of the film. But Bello (an actress I’ll admit to rooting for) is almost criminally underused here — her best gag ends up being her quintessentially DC power-suit.

Not to miss the carton for the smokes, Thank You is a smart comedy that’s aimed at adults and funny enough to recommend…but I can’t help thinking it needed to be more rough around the edges, more stogie and less nicotine patch.

Fawkes News.

Verily, my view on V for Vendetta vacillates. Even with visage veiled, the venerable Hugo Weaving’s voice brings vim and verve to the verbose, volatile, and vindictive vigiliante. Natalie Portman is vivacious enough as V’s volunteer, and varied English veterans (Stephen Rea, Stephen Fry, John Hurt) bring valuable versimilitude to V’s environs. But, various vignettes notwithstanding, this vaunted venture is less vibrant and versatile than I’d hoped. V is too virtuous, and the villains — from a venal vicar to a vainglorious video host — too vile. Vendetta is a viable version of Alan Moore’s violent vision, I suppose, but a vulgarized one.

If you thought the last paragraph was clunky, be prepared for more of the same in V. Vendetta is an enjoyable night at the movies, and definitely an above-average, smarter-than-usual actioner. And Weaving is amazingly dynamic behind the static mask — It’s hard to think of anyone else who could’ve pulled this off quite as well. But, like the last two Matrix films, V‘s bravura moments — the escape from the BBC, V’s talk with the botanist (Sinead Cusack), the domino scene — are too often interspersed with leaden, expository-heavy scenes where the pacing of the film just goes slack. Particularly egregious in this regard is our Batman-ish introduction to V very early in the film, where even Weaving’s mellifluous phrasing can’t salvage a similarly V-intensive monologue. (Frankly, the whole scene needed a rewrite.) The film does eventually recover from this Act I stumble, but it takes awhile.

And the larger problem with V for Vendetta is that, for all its pretense of moral complexity, it stacks the ethical deck in favor of our terrorist-protagonist. It’s been awhile since I’ve read the graphic novel, but I remember V coming across as a much more unlikable character. He’s a monster created by monstrous circumstances, and as much a symptom as the cure of his society’s larger sickness. But here, V is too (anti-)heroic and charismatic, even given the second act twist, and the government too Orwellian and depraved by far. Who wouldn’t sympathize with rising up against this Taliban-meets-the-Tories outfit? As such, the subtler elements of Moore’s moral economy have been flattened out, and all the choices have been made for us. But perhaps it’s a problem of medium — what worked well on the page comes across as overkill on the big screen. (Exhibit A: Big Brother John Hurt…I liked him better as Winston Smith.)

All in all, I’d say V for Vendetta is much better comic adaptation than LXG or, say, Fantastic Four, and on par with the other Vertigo films, From Hell and Constantine. But it’s not a slam-dunk: Vendetta‘s heart is in the right place, but, sadly, something doesn’t quite translate.

Party Crashers.

So, all-in-all, I did pretty well in the Web Goddess Oscar Pool…I ended up going 10-for-12 in the major categories, missing Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture. (And I actually thought I had Adapted right, but forgot to switch my pick after moving Supporting Actor from Giamatti to Clooney….Ah well.)

As for Crash…I finally saw it last night and thought it was a well-meaning but ultimately rather middling flick. On one hand, I liked the central message of the film, which is that people always tend to be more complicated than you’d expect them to be. But, otherwise, Crash was filled with some of the most ridiculous speechifyin’ I’ve ever seen in a movie. As y’all know, I’m generally a fan of politically-tinged message films. But, throughout Crash, the characters never miss a chance to start monologuing about the state of American race relations, usually in barely believable fashion (To take just one of many examples, does anyone under the age of 55 actually use the term “Chinaman”?) Ok, this movie has its liberal-humanist heart in the right place, and mighta been the most daring movie of 1991. But, by this point, I thought it felt relentlessly out-of-date with its stilted verbiage and can’t-we-all-just-get-along grandstanding at every available opportunity. Which is not to say that racism isn’t a serious problem, but, to be honest, I’ve seen more believable disquisitions into L.A.-style racial strife on Curb Your Enthusiasm.

The Academy didn’t embarrass itself this time: Crash is definitely a better movie than Paul Haggis’ entry last year, the egregious Million Dollar Baby. (And I still can’t believe the best film of 2004, Eternal Sunshine, wasn’t even nominated.) But, to my mind, every one of the other nominees, as well as The New World and Syriana, were better films than Crash, which basically amounted, to my mind, to a glorified After School Special.

Armies of the Night.

As an afternoon chaser to a morning spent at the NY Comic-Con (I posted some pics over at Flickr), my brother, sister-in-law, and I took in the Russian cinema sensation of 2004, Timur Bekmambetov’s Night Watch. On one hand, it includes some really strange and arresting visual moments, and from very early on seems like a film in which pretty much anything can happen. But, frankly, I wasn’t feeling it. Even despite all the exposition in the early going, the movie makes very little sense, even by the laxer standards one accords fantasy films. And Night Watch wears out its welcome well before the end — To be honest, I kinda wish I’d just watched the two-and-a-half-minute version at the official site.

After a brief prologue describing the establishment of a centuries-old Truce between the Others, spectral forces of Light and Dark, Night Watch moves to the Moscow of twelve years ago, where a Ringo-haired Joe Flaherty look-alike named Anton (Konstantin Khabensky) seeks out a Love Potion #9 from an unsettling Russian crone. Soon, after consuming a concoction of blood, vodka, and lemonade, Anton flirts with the idea of causing a paranormal stillbirth in his now ex-girlfriend, which draws the attention of the Night Watch, a diplomatic police force of Others assigned (with their counterparts, the Day Watch) to ensure compliance with the Truce. Flash forward to the present, when Anton — as it turns out, himself an Other — has joined the Night Watch and now spends his days quaffing blood and chasing down vampires who kill without a license. (Did I mention this film was Russian? Even supernatural forces, it seems, rely on bureaucrats.)

Now that’s only the first twenty-five minutes or so — Night Watch takes several more baroque jags that involve, among other things, a prophecy of a Great Other precipitating a Last Battle between Good and Evil (Yes, this Film Demands a lot of Gratuitous Capitalization), a lovely Virgin and her ancient, unfortunate curse, an all-consuming vortex of bad mojo that rips rivets from planes and plunges them into your coffee, and a young child who draws the attention of a newly-minted vampire (at right). And, true, many of these new elements are introduced with clever visual flourishes — I particularly liked the aging secret, the spider-doll, and the world of the Gloom. But what is the Gloom, exactly, and how the heck does it work? What was the point of the Owl-woman? Why doesn’t the starving vampire chick feed on someone — anyone — else? Why did Der Evil Commissar give Anton the charmed necklace? And so on, so on. There’s something to be said for inscrutability at times, but Night Watch spends too much time making capital-R Rules only to break or ignore them in the later going.

Finally — and this is a more unforgivable sin — for a movie that occasionally moves at a bloody, visceral blur, Night Watch really drags at times. Given the thoroughly bizarre set-up and its fanboy grounding, I really wanted to like this film, but in all honesty I found my attention wavering within forty-five minutes (right about the time the Rammsteinish death metal accompanies the speeding Other-truck with the nifty gear-shift) and was kinda bored after an hour or so. There are some moody, memorable moments throughout, but they added up to a better trailer than they did a film. Apparently, the sequel Day Watch — is in the can, but I doubt I’ll revisit this particular world, or at least not without more vodka on hand.

Dixieland.

“If you are going to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh. Otherwise they’ll kill you.” This savvy George Bernard Shaw quote introduces Kevin Willmott’s razor-sharp documentary-satire C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, which opened at the IFC Center tonight (followed by a Q&A), and, by that measure, Willmott’s film is a rousing success. At times both blisteringly funny and quietly devastating, C.S.A is a take-no-prisoners alternate history of our Confederacy — Yep, the South won — done in the style of Ken Burns’ The Civil War (or Andy Bobrow’s Old Negro Space Program), right down to bizarro versions of Shelby Foote and Barbara Fields. Punctuated throughout by offbeat television commercials that are eerily similar to today’s TV, C.S.A. is one of the best (and most ruthless and unflinching) satires I’ve seen in some time. And it illuminates a central fact often obscured in so many Brother-against-Brother tributes to America’s bloodiest conflict (as well as drek like Gods and Generals): The Civil War was begun and fought over slavery. In the words of C.S.A. Vice-President Alexander Stephens — in his inaugural address, no less — the Confederacy was founded “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery –subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.“

To kick off its conceit, C.S.A requires that you make two leaps of logic from the history of the Civil War: First, that, after the Emancipation Proclamation is issued, C.S.A. Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin managed to convince England and France to join the war on the side of the Confederacy. (This was less likely, I think, than the film makes it out to be. Popular support in England — who had abolished slavery in 1833 — was pretty clearly on the side of the Union, particularly after Lincoln’s Proclamation, and “King Cotton diplomacy” just wasn’t going to work when England and France could import cotton instead from India, Egypt, and other waystations in their respective empires. And, even if the European powers had recognized the CSA, which they might’ve done had the South won more battles, they weren’t about to send troops across the Atlantic to fight on the side of slavery without severe popular repercussions.) Second, and more unlikely, is that, after capturing Washington DC, the South managed to subdue and annex the entire North, leveling Boston and Philadelphia (a la Sherman’s March) in the process. Even despite the Union’s hold on the Mississippi in the Western theater, the South might well have won the war, if Northern public opinion had collapsed in 1863 and 1864 (As it was, timely Union victories — and particularly the fall of Atlanta — buoyed Lincoln’s reelection.) But, had that happened, IMHO, there would likely be two nations uneasily living side by side for decades to come, as you find in Harry Turtledove’s How Few Remain series.

Ok, all that history geekery notwithstanding (which is somewhat unfair to the movie — it’s an alternate history satire, after all, which also explains the more recognizable battle flag replacing the official Stars and Bars on the moon and elsewhere), once you make the conceptual leap that the Confederacy managed to win the war and annex the Union, the rest of C.S.A is remarkably well-thought-out, and at times even scarily plausible. Like Jeff Davis, Lincoln is captured trying to escape in costume (on the Underground Railroad) and sent to Fort Monroe — Here, it’s dramatized in the 1915 D.W. Griffith film, The Hunt for Dishonest Abe. While the South contemplates various “Reconstruction” plans to reintroduce slavery to the North (and Nathan Bedford Forrest reenacts Fort Pillow over and over again), William Lloyd Garrison leads an abolitionist/transcendentalist contingent to Canada. Rather than the Chinese Exclusion Act, the C.S.A. passes a “Yellow Peril Mandate” providing for the enslaving of Chinese laborers. And, as in our world, the nation comes together again to fight a (here much broader) Spanish-American War.

As we get to the 20th century, C.S.A. continues to adroitly riff on American history. Audiences swarm to the Civil War musical, A Northern Wind. (“You tried to take my blacks, But I still want you back.“) In WWII, the C.S.A. plays nice with Germany while despising Japan. (Thanks to the service of Judah Benjamin, Jews can still live in the Confederacy, provided they stay on their “reservation” in Long Island.) Eventually, an armed, highly defended border — the “Cotton Curtain” — descends between Canada and the C.S.A., and ’50’s Confederates scour the nation for the “Abs” (abolitionists) in their midst. Later still, slave riots break out in Newark, Watts, and elsewhere in the turbulent ’60s, as many white Confederates reconsider slavery (due to global sanctions, give or take South Africa) and women begin to demand the vote.

Equally as nimble as the mirror-image counterhistory of the CSA are the many commercial breaks throughout the fake documentary, with ads that are both jaw-droppingly brazen and laugh-out-loud funny. (You can get a sense of this from the trailer — Think Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, itself an excellent satire, to the nth degree.) They range from fake ads for unfortunately real products (Darky Toothpaste, Coon Chicken Inn) to all-too-possible modern innovations — The Slave Shopping Network, a LoJack “Shackle”, a Claritin-ish drug to treat drapetomania (the runaway disease “discovered” by Dr. Samuel Cartwright in 1851), a COPS-style show called RUNAWAYS, etc. etc. As you can see, this is withering stuff, and some might find it in horrible taste. But, there’s method to CSA’s madness. As I noted before, we tend to do a pitiful job of facing up to slavery, America’s Original Sin, and for ninety hilarious, cringeworthy minutes, CSA forces us to look the peculiar institution square in the eye. If we’re serious about our proclaimed role as a Beacon of Freedom to the world, that’s something we need to start doing a lot more often. (But, don’t worry — C.S.A. sweetens this tonic with quite a few laughs.) At any rate, if it’s anywhere near you, definitely go check it out.

Plot Foiled.

A quick book bash: I wasn’t going to write about Philip Roth’s The Plot against America, which I read a few weeks ago, until seeing C.S.A tonight crystallized my problems with it. I should say up front that I run hot and cold on Roth — I quite liked Portnoy and American Pastoral, but kinda loathed Goodbye, Columbus. And, while The Plot Against America is getting good reviews all around, I had a strongly adverse reaction to it. For those of you who haven’t heard anything about it, Plot describes an alternate USA in which famed aviator and rabid isolationist Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR in 1940, makes peace with Hitler, and begins a pogrom of sorts against Jewish-Americans, forcibly enrolling Jewish children (including the narrator’s brother) in Americanization programs and, eventually, attempting to relocate Jewish families to the Midwest. As per Roth’s usual m.o., the tale is told from the perspective of a Newark family trying to find their way — not very successfully — amid the deteriorating events.

As alternate histories go, it’s a great idea for a book, and I was really looking forward to seeing what Roth did with it. But, unlike CSA, which clearly showed an attentiveness to both what happened and what might have happened, Roth here has written an alternate history without seeming to give a whit about the history. In short, I found the book stunningly, almost narcissisticly, myopic. One gets the sense from reading Plot that the rift beween Jews and Gentiles in America was not only the most significant but the only ethnic or cultural schism in FDR’s America. This is not to say anti-semitism wasn’t rampant and widespread at the time — Of course it was, as attested by Father Coughlin, Breckinridge Long, and Lindbergh himself, who — in a speech that tarnished his reputation much more than Roth lets on — blamed support for the war on the “large ownership and influence [of Jews] in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our Government.” But, in The Plot Against America, no one else seems to even exist besides Jews and (White) Gentiles — To take the two most notable examples, there’s no mention of the fact that Africans-Americans were being lynched in staggering numbers in this period (the only lynching mentioned is that of Leo Frank), or that we actually did intern Japanese-Americans during the war. (As a point of contrast, C.S.A.‘s central thesis is about slavery, but it moves beyond white-black relations to explore, or at least reference, the place of Asians, Latinos, and gay Americans in the new Confederate system.)

This isn’t about tokenism — it’s about doing justice to the people and the history of the period you’re writing about. And, frankly, the history in The Plot Against America strains credulity time and time again. I’ll skip over the final twist so as not to give it away, and because it’s so ridiculously implausible that Roth couldn’t have intended for us to take it seriously. But, even despite that, Lindbergh’s popularity — and the public’s taste for isolationism — by 1940 seem significantly overstated throughout. (To take one example, there is no way that the Solid Democratic South would up and vote GOP that year — With the Civil War only recently out of living memory, the Dems could’ve run a wet paper bag in the South, so long as it wasn’t of the party of Lincoln and didn’t threaten to upset the Jim Crow racial order. That didn’t even begin to change until Strom in ’48.) And, while Walter Winchell plays a large role here in calling out the Nazi-American pact and resulting Jewish pogrom, he seems to be the only public figure in America doing so. Where’s everyone else? It doesn’t make sense.

Finally (and I’ll admit, this really ticked me off), Plot basically commits a character assassination of progressive/isolationist Burton Wheeler of Montana, who here appears as Lindbergh’s Vice-President (or, more to the point, his Cheney — I’m assuming that’s what Roth was getting at.) At a certain point in Plot, we’re supposed to believe that Wheeler — a guy who refused to prosecute alleged dissenters as Montana Attorney General during the hysteria of WWI, helped lead the investigation into the government corruption of Teapot Dome, and turned on FDR because he thought court-packing was an unconstitutional powergrab — is going to, out-of-the-blue, declare martial law and start rounding people up? That makes zero sense, and is, in effect, a slander on a real historical figure. Roth is obviously one of America’s most gifted writers — but, lordy, I thought The Plot Against America needed more research, more attention to historical nuance, and more sense that injustice and suffering in this country has often run along more than one axis of discrimination.