Those
searching for signs of how leaner economic times are being felt at
Sundance 2009 need look no further than the fact that the festival's
opening weekend yielded only one major sale — and that one was
something of a foregone conclusion. Although the tepid reaction to
director Antoine Fuqua's Brooklyn's Finest
from critics and audiences alike led upstart Senator Entertainment
(which paid a reported $5 million for the North American distribution
rights) to immediately start calling the film a “work in progress,” you
had to figure that if a cop drama from the director of Training Day,
starring Richard Gere and Ethan Hawke, couldn't close a deal at
Sundance this year, it really was going to be a long 10 days in the
snow.
Meanwhile, one of the best films to premiere thus far in
the festival's dramatic competition isn't even seeking a theatrical
deal, but will go straight from Sundance to HBO in a little over one
month's time. The movie is called Taking Chance
and it would, admittedly, be a tough sell to moviegoers even in a boom
market. Based on the journal kept by now-retired Marine Lieutenant
Colonel Michael R. Strobl as he escorted the body of a decorated PFC
killed in Iraq back to his family, Taking Chance has the double
misfortune of arriving at a moment when the industry has reached an
undeniable state of Middle East fatigue. “If they even see 'Asalaam
alaikum' on the page, they close the script,” one well-known Hollywood
screenwriter recently told me, citing as an example a spec script he
had recently sold, then been asked to rewrite so as to remove any
reference to Iraq, Afghanistan or Islam. The box-office implosion of
Ridley Scott's recent Body of Lies
seems to have been the straw that broke this particular camel's back,
but even many smaller, more indie-flavored dramas and documentaries
about America's Middle East misadventures have been greeted with
similar audience apathy.
I myself came with some degree of trepidation to Taking Chance,
which on paper sounds like an unholy marriage of two recent films that
tried and failed to effectively dramatize the homefront impact of the
Iraq campaign: the vomitously maudlin Grace Is Gone
(in which John Cusack shilled shamelessly for an Oscar as a father
hiding the death of his Marine wife from his two young daughters) and
the Paul Haggis-ed In the Valley of Elah (in which Tommy Lee
Jones' Iraq vet son turns up dead and Jones responds by hanging an
American flag upside-down). Then there's that too-clever-by-half title,
Taking Chance — because, you know, the fallen Marine's name was
Chance and he's being taken home. And yet, this is an Iraq movie that
consistently defies your expectations, and then exceeds them.
The directorial debut of the veteran indie producer Ross Katz (whose credits include In the Bedroom and Lost in Translation), Taking Chance
announces early on that its intentions are of a procedural (rather than
polemical) nature. The film begins on a black screen, while the
soundtrack illustrates the Mahmoudiyah IED attack that leaves PFC
Chance Phelps among its casualties. Katz then goes on to document the
preparation and transportation of Phelps' body as it is packed into ice
on the landing strip of a German air base, flown to the mortuary at
Dover Air Force Base, x-rayed for explosives, vacuumed of moisture,
cleansed (along with Phelps' personal belongings) of dried blood and
finally prepared for burial. No detail is too small or insignificant
for Katz — one scene depicts the tailoring of new uniforms for the
dead. All of it is filmed with a stark, clinical intensity that
suggests this is work performed day in and day out, over and over again.
For
many filmmakers, the default inclination would be to bring us as close
as possible to Phelps, whether by way of flashbacks or testimonials —
to put an individual face on what might otherwise seem just another
flag-draped casket. But it speaks to the tact, simplicity and
intelligence of Katz's approach that he elects to keep Phelps a largely
abstract figure — or, rather, a representative one, of all those men
and women who fight and die for our country, regardless of whether we
approve of the conflict in which they fight.
It's hard, I
think, for a movie to engender much respect for the U.S. Military these
days, let alone convince you of the fundamental goodness of people, but
Taking Chance manages to do both precisely by not trying too
hard to do either. Katz's film is, at heart, a classically structured
road movie that begins in the suburban homes and corporate military
offices of Quantico, Virginia and gradually winds its way to the
wide-open spaces of Wyoming. In between, Strobl (who is played in the
film by Kevin Bacon) encounters ordinary citizens who disarm him — and
us — with their quiet kindness and dignity: the flight attendant who
gives Strobl her crucifix; the pilot who tells him he can remember the
name of every killed-in-action soldier he has ever transported; and the
old Korean War vet (a superb Tom Aldredge) who invokes a bygone era's
sense of honor and duty. By that point in the film, we seem to have
traveled not merely West, but back in time — a feeling capped by a
country funeral that Katz stages as though it were an outtake from My Darling Clementine.
Taking Chance
isn't always as good as that. Like many first-time directors, Katz has
a tendency to use original music as an emotional crutch, and his
subtle, tasteful direction occasionally verges on being too discrete
for its own good. Still, Katz has made one of the few Iraq movies that,
along with Brian De Palma's Redacted, Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker and parts of Kimberly Peirce's Stop-Loss,
feels vital to our celluloid record of this seismic moment in American
history. He has also created an extraordinary showcase for Bacon, who
is the sort of actor audiences get in the habit of taking for granted
(he has never been nominated for an Oscar) because he is so
consistently good and so rarely self-aggrandizing. Here, his largely
nonverbal performance consists of a rigid military posture and a face
that is a remarkable palimpsest of grief and the impotent rage Strobl
(a Desert Storm vet) feels at having passed up his chance at a second
tour of duty.
This is a movie to see, whether on large screens
or small. That most people will only be able to experience it the
latter way is unfortunate, yet entirely understandable, given that
theatrical distribution — for all but the biggest Hollywood
blockbusters — has now devolved into a loss leader for DVD sales and
cable broadcast. So it's not all that surprising that HBO Films, which
had a modest theatrical success in 2002 with Real Women Have Curves and another one the following year with American Splendor, set a February 21 broadcast date for Taking Chance
before Sundance even began. Factor in the day-and-date cable/theatrical
models already being embraced by IFC Films and Magnolia Pictures and we
may well be entering the era in which the true success of indie movies
will be measured not in ticket sales but rather in TiVo downloads.
Happy viewing.
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