|
Which is not
entirely fair, I realize.
Which is not entirely fair, I realize. Voight, also nominated
for Outstanding Prosthetic Appliance In A Drama, turns in a better
Cosell than Smith's Ali, but, simply knowing that's Jon
Voight under there somewhere took me right out of the story and
right out of Voight's otherwise fine performance. The latex
became the sideshow, and suddenly I understood Oliver Stone's
decision to forego rubbering up Anthony Hopkins's Nixon—
a performance jolting in that Hopkins looks nothing at all like
Nixon, but, by the second reel you just don't care, so riveting
was Hopkins' performance. Paul Sorvino's otherwise brilliant
Kissinger, however, was a
show-stopper in as much as the rubber nose just made me guffaw
every time Kissinger appeared in the oval office. Such
distractions ruin the narrative flow, and the rubbery Cosell
tended to do that for Ali. Jamie Foxx's Bundini Brown was actually a fine performance,
but, again, just knowing that's Foxx under the bad hair and big
glasses just kind of took me out of the moment. In fact, my only
real joy of this film was John Tuturro, so lost inside Ali
cornerman Angelo Dundee (below, extreme right)'s skin that I
didn't realize it was him until very late in the game.
We've all read countless pull quotes about Will Smith's miraculous
transformation into Ali, and to some extent the praise is earned
and credible. Though still too skinny to be Ali, Smith did a
credible job of at least appearing to be a light heavyweight (Ali
was frequently a bit too lean to be thought of as a true
heavyweight), and Smith nailed many of the champ's trademark moves
in the ring. In fact, the scenes in the ring were exemplary, the
best part of the flick, with Mann getting his camera in the
confined space in new and innovative ways, really bringing the
ring experience home and dispelling the more cartoonish Rocky
feel of fight movies. If there's any place that Ali excels,
it is between the ringing of the bell.
But Mario Van Peoples' wretched Malcolm X nearly destroys the
first act. I tend to avoid anything, anything at all, with Mario
Van Peoples in the credits, as I accept the words "Mario Van
Peoples" as a warning label. Peoples is a singularly numb actor and
director who comes across as so incredibly full of himself that I
can't get any story out of his work. Watching Peoples here was,
for me, the fingernails dragged across a chalkboard. And, maybe
that was the point: to distract us from Smith's leaden and
lifeless Ali, a take so stunningly dry and humorless that I'm left
puzzled and disappointed by my two heroes, Mann and Smith.
I will, typically, see anything with Michael Mann's name on it.
From the brilliant but ignored TV show Crime Story, to the
empty calorie guilty pleasure Miami Vice, to the Silence
of The Lambs prequel Manhunter, Mann has wowed me with
style over substance. But such convincing style, such overwhelming
style, that I don't even care that, at the end of the day, the
plot was only a few lines on the page. Mann's stock and trade is
guilty pleasure, Don Johnson wandering around South Street Seaport
in Armani off-white and no socks while Glenn Frey croons You
Belong To The City in the most blatant and shameless plug for
a new record ever done in the history of television. It was
horribly contrived and insultingly obvious, but I didn't care. The
magic of Mann is he makes me not even care that he's
manipulating me or taking advantage of me because the picture is
so pretty and the mood is so perfect. It is a testament to
the power of word of mouth that I had no interest in seeing Ali
theatrically. After Mann's brilliant evisceration of Mike Wallace
and 60 Minutes in the Al Pacino-Russell Crowe IntelliFlick The
Insider, I was more than ready to line up, shekels in hand,
for Ali. But people I trust got to me beforehand,
dissipating my enthusiasm for this film, which I've only seen
yesterday on DVD.
 The failure, for me, with Ali, was likely in Mann's
literalism. Here, Mann reaches for Oliver Stone's seriousness and
attempts at accuracy, which is to miss the point of the great Ali
myth: Ali was all about creating a fantasy, a world much larger
than life of which he was the absolute ruler. The crime, here, is
in making a dull film about so Wyle E. a coyote as Muhammad Ali.
One viewing of
Leon Gast's vastly superior When We Were Kings, a film I do
not recommend anyone to see if they intend to see Ali,
shows us where Mann missed his mark: in his stretch for realism,
he lost sight of the fact that realism was the last thing Ali
wanted us to see. Realism is two guys get inside a roped-off
platform and hit each other for a half hour. Or, more accurately,
they hold and duck and evade each other. The fact is, most boxing
matches are just dull, few rising to the fervor of your average Rocky
flick. In order to raise the gate— the money
earned by the fight— Ali rightfully figured these bouts needed
to become cultural events. Almost single-handedly, Ali did
just that, propelling boxing to the status of a rogue comet or
seismological event: everyone was talking about these major
bouts. When Ali climbed into the ring, the world stopped spinning
on its axis, and the winner was the only news story of the
night, and the front page of every paper in the world the
following day. It is difficult to describe what boxing was in
Ali's heyday, largely if not exclusively because of him. I don't
even know who the current heavyweight champ is, and I can't
remember the last time I even cared, let alone when the last time
the winner of a heavyweight title landed on page one of the New
York Times.
All through the film, I kept hearing Mann tell Smith,
"Tone it down. Flatter, dryer." Will's southern drawl is
incredibly bad, and his Ali is lifeless. Smith looks sleepy
through most of the film, seeming alert (and winning the day) only
in short bursts of exuberance (the false bravado of Ali
interrupting George Foreman's workout with conga drums and the
proclamation, "The king is here!"— that was one
of very few times when Smith convinced me he was Ali, one of the
very few times I could see the brilliant Smith in his Ali
portrait). At the end of his
sentences, Smith turns nearly every note downward, to the point
where it starts taking me out of the story because now I'm looking
for it, the downward turn on the last note of every sentence. Then
I put in Kings and look for Ali himself doing that,
sounding like that. Maybe it was because the cameras were rolling,
but I never once saw Ali talk the way Smith talks in Ali.
I'm wondering where that notion, of that leadenness, came from.
Maybe I missed a meeting, maybe it's just me. I've never, ever,
heard Ali sound like he does in Ali. I've never heard the
downturned note, and I've never heard the energy sapped out of
this guy, this energized figure who was always on,
twenty-four hours a day.
Ali omits two
milestone's of Muhammad Ali's career, Ken Norton's breaking Ali's
jaw in the second round of their 1973 fight (Ali's second loss as
a professional, after his defeat to Joe Frazier in '71), and
Ali-Frazier II, the ex-champ's revenge bout with Frazier, which
Ali won in a 15-round decision in 1974. Ali-Frazier II was not a
championship bout, as Frazier had lost his title to newcomer
George Foreman, a fighter Ali now desperately wanted in the ring,
but who was making Ali wait his turn as Foreman went about the
business of destroying one fighter after another— notably
dropping Ken Norton, who had beaten Ali, in two rounds.
Ali-Foreman seemed inevitable, and quite necessary to Ali's
comeback hopes, as this new guy had summarily crushed the only two
men who had ever beaten Ali professionally. Had the film taken
even two minutes of montage or, gee, stock footage and voiceover
to set this up properly, the final act of Ali would have
been much more powerful and made much more sense. As the Zaire
bout with Foreman is the concluding chapter of the film, it was
critical that the audience understand why this wasn't just another
fight: why The Rumble In The Jungle was the most important fight
of Muhammad Ali's life.
 
Mann glossed over
the significance and importance of George Foreman to Ali's career.
The 1974 Ali-Foreman battle, "The Rumble In The Jungle,"
was thought by most as the last battle of Ali's career. Having
been floored by Joe Frazier in '71and had his jaw broken by Ken
Norton the year before, the consensus was
that Ali's best days were behind him. Our born-again cuddly fryer
pitchman Foreman, now re-cast as some kind of American folk hero, was
a very scary individual in those days. An Olympic gold medallist,
Foreman was a fairly humorless, straightforward giant of a man who
destroyed opponents in the ring. In their title bout,
Foreman tossed Frazier around like a rag doll, hitting him at will
with bone-crunching punches that left Frazier ruined. He dropped
Ken Norton to the mat in the second round of their fight. Foreman was
the Mike Tyson of his day, only much worse because he was much
taller and hit much harder and had even less of a sense of humor. George
Foreman, at his peak, would have destroyed Tyson. The prefect
villain for a motion picture, the specter of Foreman threatened to
end Ali's ambitious attempt to return to heavyweight greatness.
Very little of this was made clear in Ali's narrative.
Nobody thought Ali
could beat Foreman. Nobody. Not even people in Ali's camp. In his
corner. His wife, Belinda, feared for him. The agonizing wait for
the fight (the bout was postponed six weeks because of a Foreman
injury) was a Dantean hell for Ali, surrounded by chanting,
cheerful supporters, but completely and utterly alone in the
truest sense. Most experts suggest Ali himself was scared. Not
scared of being beaten so much as scared of the implications a
Foreman demolishing had for him, his career, his family, and all
those who depended on him. On some level, Ali had to be scared of
the sullen, near-mute giant Foreman, who had almost casually
disposed of the two men who had all but ended Ali's career. Ali
himself spoke of the Zaire match as being his last, that he
intended to retire on the high note of trouncing Foreman, but it
was widely speculated that this was more about the money, about
one last big payday for Ali, whom most everyone assumed would lose
and lose decisively.
In
addition, Ali was not tremendously popular. He was,
largely, thought of as a draft-evading Muslim big mouth. He'd been
dropped by Frazier and Norton in his previous two major bouts, and
had wins over only minor characters of minor consequence. Ali was
turning into yesterday's news. Ali's one-man taunting campaign, intended to irk
Foreman and keep him from going home (if Foreman went home, it was
unlikely the fight would ever happen. If the fight didn't happen,
it was unlikely anyone would take Ali seriously as a contender
again), was, likely, Ali at his bravest— taunting Goliath when just the sound of Foreman
hitting that heavy bag was enough to discourage most challengers.
This, the narrative
drive of When We Were Kings, was largely absent from Ali.
I mean, it was there, if you knew what you were looking at.
If you already knew how vital this fight was and how alone Ali was
and what a menace— a real threat— Foreman was in those days. But
Mann never paints a clear enough picture of why this is the climax
of the film, a film many thought would center around the
Ali-Frazier Trilogy. Ali-Frazier were the biggest events in boxing
history, but Ali-Foreman was the fight of Ali's life. Foreman was
Darth Vader, in a sense, and this part of the story was never made
very clear. The film ended at the end of the bout, leaving, I
would imagine, a great many young people puzzled and frustrated by
the lack of definable narrative closure.
The worst crime, I suppose, is to have the very
talented and very expensive Will
Smith and not let him be Will Smith. The painful consequence of
Smith's "miraculous transformation" into Ali is he lost
Smith somewhere along the way. And that was simply criminal. The
fire, the spark, the impetuous ad libs are Smith's stock and
trade. Here, Smith is ACTING! Doing so much ACTING!
Every moment
feels heavily scripted, carefully staged, without even one place in nearly three hours where I felt Will had an unguarded and
unchoreographed moment. Will didn't crack me up, even once. Even funny
lines where he's mocking Joe Frazier's clothes are delivered with
a sleep-inducing thud, a millstone around Smith's neck. I've never
thought of Smith as an actor. Maybe, in Ali, he was
striving to be an actor. I'd rather Smith just be Smith
and show up for work being the guy we paid nine dollars to see.
 In Nixon,
Anthony Hopkins was clearly doing Nixon, but he
was obviously Anthony Hopkins as well. A composite
character, a neo-Nixon, emerged from this combination of personalities
that satisfied us that, yes, this was Nixon on the screen,
but it was also familiar enough as Hopkins for us to not be jolted
out of the story. At first blush, Hopkins' stocky and short
figure, loaded with his famous British accent, disappoints and our
hearts sink at the first glimpse of his Nixon, drunk and defeated in
the Lincoln Room of the White House, warming himself by the fire
while running the air conditioner at the same time. However,
within fifteen minutes of this three-hour biopic (why do biopics
always have to be three hours?), we've all but lost Hopkins
entirely, so utterly convincing is his Nixon, and so hypnotic is
his Nixonian gestures, expressions and stupefying recreation of
the late president's bad posture. Hopkins is Nixon, as unbelievable
as the very idea, the very notion of this proper and slightly
rotund British gent filling the oft-parodied shoes of Tricky Dick.
Hopkins' Nixon never once slips into satire, though he gleefully
bounds along the razor's edge. Hopkins plays a tragic Nixon, a man
who has retreated beneath deep emotional scars where he has
created for himself a kind of reality that justifies even the most
heinous crimes, and makes it impossible for him to apologize—
something that clearly would have saved his presidency, if only he
had the moral fiber to do it. Hopkins is abetted by a
superb supporting cast, led by the scene-chewing James Woods as a
delightfully sleazy Bob Haldeman and Joan Allen in her
Oscar®-nominated role of Patricia Nixon.
Alternatively, Aussie film director (and
Bill Clinton clone) Roger Donaldson opted to not
even try for a JFK clone in the melodrama Thirteen Days,
choosing Bruce Greenwood, a man who has, I guess, a head shaped
like Kennedy's but otherwise does not look or sound much like him,
to fill the film's center chair. Thirteen Days succeeds,
however, on the sheer strength of Greenwood's acting ability, previously seen as Ashley Judd's dastardly husband in
Double Jeopardy and the grieving father in Atom Egoyan's brilliant
The Sweet Hereafter. Greenwood simply runs away with it,
turning in an understated and restrained but weighty performance
that delivers every knot in JFK's
stomach during the Cuban Missile
Crisis. Greenwood's Kennedy speaks loudest when he breathes life
into the space between the lines of script, the other film within Days
that could be aptly titled This Is The Reason Kennedy Was
Assassinated. The cloud that hovers over Thirteen Days
is our knowing Greenwood's heroic figure had less than thirteen months to live. Donaldson skillfully immerses his story in the
unspoken horror of the Kennedy assassination, being a little
obvious in places (like when JFK refuses to fire the Joint Chiefs
for fear of Soviet Premier Khrushchev thinking there had been an
attempted coup d'etat in Washington, and the scene where Kevin
Conway's General Curtis LeMay snarls that, "Those damned
Kennedys are going to ruin this country unless we do something about it,"
words all the more chilling from having been culled from
documented records).
 Kennedy's rich young Catholic skirt-chasing
idealist (Donaldson, hypocritically, omitted the skirt-chasing,
Greenwood's JFK seeming a bit too saintly, here) is a complete
outsider to the Good Ol' Boy Washington power circle, the shadow
cabinet of J. Edgar Hoover (curiously missing from Days)
and the villain of the piece, Air Force Chief of Staff General
Curtis LeMay, a hawk of the first order hammily played with
mustache-twirling delight by Kevin Conway. Days firmly
implicates LeMay in Kennedy's assassination, relying on historical
records of LeMay's outbursts to and about Kennedy, a man he openly
despised (LeMay was seen in the bleachers at the Kennedy autopsy,
smoking a cigar and smiling). In those turbulent times, most of the power in DC
belonged to guys like Hoover and less flamboyant and less-known
names like LeMay, the director of Strategic Air Command (the
nukes) who had commanded the country's air forces since World War
II. During the Cuban crisis, LeMay ran missile tests, set off an
H-bomb in the south pacific, and set all nuclear forces at DefCon
2 without Kennedy's permission. LeMay deliberately undermined
Kennedy's careful and measured attempts to communicate with Khrushchev,
sending U2's into Russian air space and personally interviewing F8
pilots to see if they'd been fired upon (which would give LeMay an
excuse to start bombing Cuba). This was a guy who ran roughshod
over Maxwell Taylor, the Joint Chiefs Chairman and LeMay's boss,
and insisted on being in the Oval Office because he didn't trust
Taylor, a Kennedy loyalist. He was a guy Kennedy absolutely should
have fired, but there was speculation that Kennedy was afraid of
LeMay. Most everyone else was.
Days
truly wins where it aptly demonstrates Kennedy's ongoing battle
for control of his own White House. The real crisis in the Cuban
Missile Crisis was not the Russians at all. We now know the
Russian nuclear capability, the so-called "missile gap,"
was nearly 10-to-1 in our favor. Khrushchev would never have
committed suicide by firing off a nuke at us and LeMay knew it.
History has proved LeMay right: he could have blasted the Cubans
into the stone age and still cleaned every Russian clock in Berlin
(of course, hundreds if not thousands of American soldiers would
die in the doing, but that was a small matter to LeMay). The real
crisis was the Kennedys' (Bobby and Jack) struggle with these old
guys, to get them to stop seeing the world as a big RISK game
board, and end the diplomacy-at-gunpoint practiced, most wryly
here, by Khrushchev himself. The exasperation on the face of Bill
Smitrovich's Joint Chiefs Chairman Maxwell Taylor, a Kennedy
loyalist, fairly screamed at us, throughout the film, that Kennedy
was clearly irritating the military hawks, which was a dangerous
thing to do. And that's the guilty pleasure of Days— not
the non-crisis of Cuba (the Russian's never even put their forces
on alert, and Russian nuclear subs were, before and after Cuba,
still the greater threat) but the real crisis of a group of plump
old farts, in power for a quarter of a century and accustomed to
settling their problems at the business end of a nuclear warhead,
trying to bulldoze the latest temporary occupant of the Oval
Office, a kid and transient figure they neither liked nor
respected (and this was, very much, my tenure as Spider-Man
editor
at Marvel).
 Days clearly implicates these men in Kennedy's assassination,
and not without cause. Days helps make Oliver Stone's JFK
case, and certainly fleshes out both JFK and Nixon,
where Stone suggests a paranoid Nixon erased 18 minutes of Oval
Office recordings of himself making his case for paying off the
Watergate burglars rather than risking their testimony in open
court (the burglars included Frank Sturgis and Howard Hunt's Track II CIA cell,
which Vice President Nixon once ran out of the Eisenhower White
House in efforts to remove Castro. Track II was subsequently used by
President Nixon for a variety of political shenanigans. Stone
asserts these contract agents, mostly Cuban exiles and survivors
of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, likely assassinated Kennedy).
Stone's Nixon suggests Nixon's battle to keep his tapes
private was at least partially an unselfish act, Nixon realizing
those tapes contain him babbling incessantly about Track II and its darker
implications (which Nixon refers to, throughout the film, as
"That Bay of Pigs thing," a euphemism for the Kennedy
assassination and the CIA's involvement in it). The famous
18-minute gap, Stone intimates, contained Nixon babbling on about
the "beast" they'd created, a beast Sam Waterston, in a
chilling turn as CIA director Richard Helms, garrotes Hopkins'
Nixon with in a stellar performance Stone dropped from the picture
(the scene is only available on the discontinued laserdisc box
set). It was an outrageous suggestion at the time—
that Nixon's greater fear was not of being caught in obstruction
of justice but of revealing the CIA plot against Kennedy—and Stone was
thunderously scoffed at for connecting everything in this life to
the Kennedy assassination. But time is typically good to Stone,
who seems less paranoid with every fresh revelation about those
dangerous times.
 Greenwood's
performance in Days almost makes
us forgive Costner's horrid and ill-advised attempt at a Bahhston
accent. Costner is clearly a guest in his own film, playing
fly-on-the-wall Kenneth O'Donnell, RFK college pal and
"Special Counsel" to the president (O'Donnell served as
the de-facto Chief of Staff and was Kennedy's pit bull), as a head-nodding
loudmouth who fancied himself JFK's last line of defense (the real O'Donnell was rumored to carry a pistol). I didn't
understand Days' choice of minimalizing and humiliating
Lyndon Johnson, a guy played for laughs by Walter Adrian but who
was clearly one of the sharper tools in the shed and himself a
card-carrying old fart Good Ol' Boy. Senate Majority Leader Lyndon
Baines Johnson was a fiery power broker and one of the most
powerful men in the country until his humiliating primary loss to
Kennedy and career-ending acceptance of second chair, a job the
Kennedys never wanted him to have and one he didn't want, but the
looming threat of a Nixon White House threw the men together in what was documented as a
very unhappy marriage. This was a guy who was never going
to be president, not if the Kennedys had anything to say about it.
There were rumors of JFK dropping LBJ from the ticket in '64, as
the immensely popular president no longer needed Johnson's
credibility and political weight to soundly thump the extremist
Barry Goldwater. Bobby, not Johnson, was the clear heir apparent and, had JFK not
been assassinated, the lonely VP slot would have likely been the
finish to LBJ's otherwise remarkable career. The Kennedys
minimized and tried to ignore LBJ, whom they saw as a toothless
southern dinosaur, a tool needed only in election years. But LBJ
knew more about the political waters the Kennedys were swimming in.
There is absolutely no evidence to even suggest Johnson played any
role in JFK's assassination. Even the most jaundiced cynics tend
to agree there is no evidence whatsoever pointing Johnson's way.
Which, in my
Black Panther plot mindset, makes him the likeliest
of conspirators, if for no other reason than that he emerged with
the least stink on him.
I do not doubt
LBJ helped cover the assassination up after the fact, and probably rightly so: the
1963 American public were in no position to digest the concept of
a military coup, and the men who achieved it, led most certainly
by some of the men portrayed in Days, could certainly
remove LBJ easier than they removed Kennedy. These facts were
likely not
lost on Bobby Kennedy, who absolutely had to have known the truth
about his brother's killing and so had to have known the danger
to the country efforts to bring a prosecution would present. Not
the least of which would be the certain smear campaign on JFK,
releasing details about his women and his father's Chicago mob
connections among other things (hence the amusing moment in Days where both
O'Donnell and Kennedy are reluctant to "cancel on
Daley;" a bit only amusing if the name Sam Giancana means
anything to you). And those truly responsible
for the coup would never be prosecuted, anyway. The "cancel
on Daley" moment was one of several places where Donaldson
injected humor into a relentlessly gloomy story, made all the
moreso by our understanding of the eventual fate of the Kennedys
and the chilling subtext, skillfully woven throughout this film,
that these men were, ultimately, the architects of their own
demise (Costner's O'Donnell, in the one moment in the whole film
where Costner's powers present themselves, harangues RFK late in
the film, "What if the problem isn't Khrushchev [or the Joint
Chiefs] at all? What if it's you two."
 While
nearly completely mute throughout Days, and looking
extremely buffoonish, Lyndon Johnson had to know, better
than Kennedy, just how dangerous it was to rub LeMay's nose in dog
poop and publicly rip Navy Chief of Staff Admiral George Anderson
a new one (as Dylan Baker's Defense Secretary Robert McNamara does
in Days). The real Kennedy later fires Anderson as Chief of
Staff, and an Anderson-like character shows up at the JFK autopsy
in Stone's JFK. Boy it's fun to connect the dots, kids. Greenwood's power as an actor transcends the cheesy-ness of Days,
a film with the stink of Made For TV on it (the stock footage the film uses to keep the budget
down really hurt it, made it feel less like a docudrama and more
like an ABC After School Special), were it not for
assets like Greenwood and Steven Culp, a man who, without any
obvious prosthetic assistance, looks and sounds so much like Bobby Kennedy he jolts
you right out of the film when he wanders into the Oval office in
the first act. I mean it, the story screeches to a stop when,
within minutes of meeting Greenwood's impression of JFK,
RFK's literal ghost, in a black-and-white Oliver Stone moment, wanders in. Culp (previously seen as Friend Number Two in Nurse
Betty and as Bobby Kennedy in a Marilyn Monroe TV biopic)
looks and sounds so much like RFK it makes your skin crawl and
completely unsettled Christopher Lawford, RFK's actual nephew and
the actor portraying Naval pilot Commander William B. Ecker.
Culp's performance is marred only by the extremely
apparent looping of nearly all of his dialogue as he grew into
the Bahhston accent.
Unfortunately,
I think Donaldson left a good deal of his film's credibility on
the cutting room floor. The DVD boasts a nice assortment of
deleted scenes, nearly all of which could have been left in,
especially the original opening sequence in Buffalo, NY and Kenny
O'Donnell's elevator confrontation with Robert McNamara. O'Donnell
and McNamara are the strongest personalities surrounding the
Kennedys, and this viewer was, in fact, wondering what their
dynamic was like. A minute and a half is a small investment to
fill in those blanks for us, and both of these deleted scenes were
winners for Costner's O'Donnell, who is being an incredible prick
in both (McNamara: anybody ever tell you you're a real prick?
O'Donnell: the president. Just this morning. Twice). Many
of the deleted scenes contained great character stuff that made
the film less HBO-like. There's a great one where RFK passes his brother a
note, "Now I know how Tojo felt planning Pearl Harbor,"
was cut because Donaldson feared the audience would be wondering
who Tojo was. Screw who Tojo was— I
tend to think whenever a movie goes over my head a little, the
film seems more "grown up" to me. When a film explains
everything to me like I'm a two year-old, I start yawning. I would
have gone home and looked Tojo up. The Buffalo scenes, jammed with
hundreds of colorful extras, painted a broader picture of the
film's budget, told the viewer this is a real movie, not a Made
For TV movie. The scene gave the film scope and scale, and the mundane political considerations (the
approaching "mid-term" congressional elections), while
not germane to the immediate plot, grounded the film in a kind of
trivial everyday routine, similar to the psuedo-documentary feel
of Rob Lurie's brilliant The Contender.
 What made The
Contender and Nixon work was none of the actors seemed
aware they were in a movie, while, in Thirteen Days, most
everyone but Greenwood seems extremely aware they are ACTING!
There is so very much ACTING! going on, and Donaldson trimmed away
these few un-self-conscious moments to move the plot along. But we
need a little sauce for the goose: after all, the plot in and of itself
is a bunch of guys sit in various rooms and talk. It feels very claustrophobic
and very pay-per-view.
The White House set, even the exteriors, were built on an interior
soundstage and looked it. The odd echoing of their voices out on
the portico and the not-quite-natural enough fake sunlight made
the whole thing look cheap, as opposed to similar scenes in The Contender or Rob Reiner's
masterpiece The American President. The White House detail
was all there, but by trapping us on that soundstage, I starting
getting that dog-on-a-leash awareness of how small Donaldson's
world was, and Days began to feel more like a stage play
than a big budget feature film. Now that I've seen the stuff still
in the can, I applaud Donaldson for moving the plot along, but
remind him also that in addition to establishing the plot and the
characters, a good director must establish and protect the
credibility of the film itself: we need to see our nine
dollars up there on the screen. We need to be dazzled by
spectacle, and a little background noise of unimportant political
detail, a few over our heads references and a wider view of the
earth itself helps us feel like the film was worth our time and
money. Days' relentless sameness, intercut with cheesy
archival footage, makes the film look cheap. Even the one scene
where the film starts to look big-budget, Commander Ecker's
low-level flight over Cuba, is marred by our never seeing the
actual F8's take off or land (they cut away, in Made For TV
fashion, to really bad CGI planes, the CGI planes do not appear to
even be painted in some shots, looking gun metal blue (the actual
planes are white) with no markings on them). Of course, finding
functional F8's, or restoring the ones they borrowed for the film
to flight capability, was likely cost prohibitive. But could
we get the CGI guys to at least paint their computer generated
versions?
Like Ali,
the biggest problem with Days is the star himself. As one
of the film's producers, Costner may have rightly felt he needed
to star in this film if it was to get made, and the notion of a
point man for the audience to observe the Cuban Missile Crisis
through is a credible one. But Costner rarely finds O'Donnell and
O'Donnell is unsympathetic and bland: we are not rooting for him.
We do not care about him, not even enough to dislike him. In fact,
the movie is, curiously, bereft of much tension at all. Maybe
because we know, all along, what the ending is. But, Greenwood's
brilliance aside, the contorted faces of the supporting cast don't
move me and I don't believe they're really all that worried about
anything, or that there is anything to worry about. The excised
scenes would have helped push the needle on O'Donnell in one
direction or another, and certainly would have broadened the look
of the film. And I really wish studios and directors would take
more advantage of DVD's branching capabilities so I can decide if
I want to watch those scenes in the film or not. In theaters,
moving the plot along is the prime consideration. In home video,
entertaining the individual, the audience of one, is the priority.
I tend to like political dramas. Run time doesn't bother me nearly
as much at home as it might in the theater. Put the scenes back in
and let our individual remotes decide.
Mann
used the composite character approach to great effect with
Christopher Plumber's Oscar-worthy Mike Wallace in Mann's The
Insider. Plumber, eschewing latex gimmickry, was clearly not
Mike Wallace, but was a composite, a Plumber Wallace. But he had
enough of Wallace's manner, enough of Wallace's eye, to transcend
our skepticism and keep us invested in the story. In Ali,
however, Mann reaches for Ali at the expense of Smith,
losing Smith in the process, and most of Ali's potential audience
with it. Had more of Smith been in the mix, had we gone for
the composite Ali rather than the literal Ali, this
film would have been hilarious, I mean a scream, and the
box office would have been far healthier.
Director Mann with his Frazier and Ali
In a film that got so very much right, I am stunned at how
wrong they got Ali. I do not personally know Muhammad Ali
(although my mother did), I know Ali the persona. That's who most
people were paying to see. They were also paying to see Will
Smith. In discarding both of those personalities, perhaps in some
stretch for accuracy (in a film dominated by latex), Mann fatally
mistepped and crashed his biopic. I have absolutely no clue how
Smith won a nomination for this performance. For this lifeless,
too-flat, too-literal take on the most flamboyant sports figure in
history. When I was a kid, almost any boy on my block could do a better and wittier
Ali than Smith, and, honestly, I'm not sure I could blame Smith as
I believe Mann was firmly at the helm.
This film, like When
We Were Kings, ends with Ali's triumph over George Foreman in
1974, which fairly invites comparison between Ali and Kings,
which only hurts Ali. Kings was a documentary about
the Foreman bout, while Ali strived to tell a more complete
story. A wiser thought may have been to end Ali with the
second most important bout in Ali's life, his third, final and
most brutal encounter with his arch nemesis Joe Frazier.
Of course, Frazier was
only Ali's nemesis to the extent that Ali made him one. Mann's
biopic rightly shows the two young fighters cooking up the first
dramatic bout, in 1971 (wherein Frazier dealt Ali his first
loss). While never the best of friends, these men were hardly
enemies: they were professional sportsmen, and Ali chided Frazier
into Ali's circus act to drum up the gate (something Frazier may
not have understood at first, but certainly as their bouts grew
into a franchise, he realized the importance of dancing to Ali's
tune).
Ali-Frazier III, The
Thrilla In Manila, took place on October 1, 1975, with Muhammad
Ali fighting with his doctor's permission but against common sense (his
doctors had detected a small "tearing" of brain tissue,
and Ali was under great pressure to retire). Ring historians
consider this one of the greatest boxing matches of all time.
Larry Schwartz of
ESPN
.Com said:
The bout turned out to be three fights in
one: The first had Ali, the champion, outboxing and outscoring
Frazier, nailing him with clean, sharp shots. The second fight,
from the fifth through the 11th, had Frazier giving a terrible
pounding to Ali. The third fight began in the 12th round and
somehow Ali, with the will of a champion, tore into Frazier for
the next three rounds.
When the bell rang for the 15th round, Frazier, with his eyes
almost completely shut, remained in his corner as his trainer,
Eddie Futch, threw in the towel.
"Man, I hit him with punches that'd bring down the walls of
a city," Frazier said. "Lawdy, lawdy, he's a great
champion."
Ali said, "It was like death. Closest thing to dying that I
know of."
It is widely suspected
Ali's current struggle with Parkinson's disease had its origin, in
large measure, from the pounding he took in the Philippines.
Although Ali went on to around twenty or so other bouts before his
humiliation at the hands of former sparring partner Larry Holmes
in 1980 and Trevor Berbick in 1981, the Thrilla was, arguably, the
champ's last great battle. Had the credits rolled on Frazier's
accolades and Ali's triumph, Ali would invite fewer
comparisons to Kings and, thus, would have suffered less.
Where was this
guy? Ali ambushes Frazier at Frazier's Philadelphia training camp
Looking at how the film is cut, at how the promo pieces are
cut, it seems either Mann or his editors at some point realized
how bad Smith's Ali was. They minimized his dialogue (and seemed
to have looped a great deal of it as well). Minimized the dialogue
of one of the greatest motormouths of all time, a man who never
stops yakking through When We Were Kings, a film with much
better music, by the way (to hear a clip, click
here). A loudmouth
of velocity and range and fervor and wit and charm, almost none of
which come across in Smith's Ali.
I wish Smith could get
a rematch. This time with Barry Sonnenfeld or Ridley Scott or,
better, Reggie Hudlin, Bill Duke or— maybe the best candidate—
Ron Shelton (Tin
Cup, White Men Can't Jump). Shelton's Jump has the
verve and energy completely missing from the lifeless Ali,
a film so big and so important that they forgot to
have fun and forgot to make it funny. As important
and big as Ali, appropriately, should have been, Mann
should also have remembered the best parts of Mann's Last of the
Mohicans was Daniel Day-Lewis making fun of British (and
audience) expectations of Native Americans (Steven Waddington's
deliciously arrogant Major Heyward demands of Day-Lewis' Hawkeye,
"There's a war going on. How is it that you are heading
west?" To which Day-Lewis replies, "Well, we kind
of face to the North, and, real sudden-like, turn
left." There's not even one moment like that in all of Ali).
The real shame,
though, is kids— Will Smith fans of all ages and ethnicities—
likely flocked to Ali only to come away with a kind of
shoulder-shrugging ambivalence to this man, one of the greatest
legends of our time. I believe, in his attempts at reverence and,
perhaps, solemnity, Mann forgot to put some fun in here, and in so
doing, squandered an enormous opportunity, given Smith's talents
and his audience, to introduce Muhammad Ali to a whole new
generation. The difference between this film and a great
film would have been to let Will Smith not only be Ali, but be
Will Smith at the same time. That, my friends, would have
truly been a knockout. Ali: D, Thirteen
Days: B, When We Were Kings: A, Nixon: A, The
American President: A, The Contender: A, Last of The
Mohicans: B, The Insider: A.
Christopher J. Priest
June 1 2002
TOP
OF PAGE
ACADEMY AWARD(S)®, OSCAR(S)®, OSCAR NIGHT® and OSCAR® statuette design mark are the registered trademarks and service marks, and the OSCAR® statuette the copyrighted property, of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
ESPN.Com excerpt Copyright © 2002 ESPN Internet Ventures. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt from
When We Were Kings Copyright © 1996 PolyGram Film Productions B.V. All Rights Reserved. Sample/edit of
Rumble In The Jungle,
Written by Wyclef Jean, Prakazrel Michel, Lauryn Hill, Benny Anderson, Bjorn Ulvaes, Stig Anderson, Chip Taylor, Kamaal Fareed, Malik Taylor, Trevor Smith and John Forte. Produced by Wyclef Jean and Lauryn Hill for Refugee Camp Entertainment. Performed by The Fugees featuring Q-Tip and Phife of A Tribe Called Quest, Busta Rhymes and John Forte. From the Polygram CD When We Were Kings. Copyright © 2001 Polygram Int. Music Publ. Ltd. (BMI) All Rights Reserved.
NIXON images Copyright © 2003 Touchstone Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
THIRTEEN DAYS image Copyright © 2000 New Line Productions. Inc. All Rights Reserved.
ALI images Copyright © 2003 Torchlight Productions LLC and Sony Films
Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Text Copyright © 2007 Grace Phonogram eMedia. All Rights Reserved.
|