APRIL 2007
The Current Cinema
Men Gone Wild “Shooter” and “300.”
by David Denby
An incomparable marksman, stealthy, silent, relentless, hiding among snowcapped peaks; the muzzle of a high-powered rifle aimed directly at the camera; helicopters swirling over mountains and city streets, pursuing the hero from the sky; gunmetal colors everywhere, and the chuggah-chuggah-chuggah of pounding drums and electronic music, a sound both primal and advanced at the same time: “Shooter,” directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Mark Wahlberg, as Bob Lee Swagger, a betrayed Marine marksman who becomes a vigilante crusader for justice, is a virtual textbook of action clichés. Fuqua made something fiery and memorable out of “Training Day” (2001), with its demonic performance by Denzel Washington as a corrupt cop, but here the director serves as little more than a skilled functionary. For two hours, chase follows shoot-out as Swagger fires at men who, like movie targets from time immemorial, obligingly refuse to take cover. Swagger never misses—he could hunt mosquitoes for a living—and the extras, both live and digital, do their job; they fall down. The action has an oddly undifferentiated, wearying feel to it. Yet this standard industrial product does something strange. On the surface, the movie offers liberal ideological sentiments: it condemns covert overseas operations controlled by oil interests; it’s angry at the higher-ups who escaped blame for Abu Ghraib; it exhibits a clear distaste for the person and values of Dick Cheney. But it places these sentiments within a matrix of gun culture and lonely-man-of-honor myths. Swagger is the latest incarnation of Rambo, the anti-government crazy. The filmmakers may be trying to appeal both to liberals and to the Pat Buchanan conservatives who hate big government and multinational corporations and want American warriors to stay home. The clash of political currents suggests the degree of confusion roiling Hollywood at the moment. How do moviemakers find military heroes in the midst of an unpopular overseas war?
When we first see Swagger, he is taking down uniformed soldiers as part of a mysterious operation somewhere in the Horn of Africa. The operation is scrubbed, and Swagger and his partner, a spotter, are abandoned. Outraged, Swagger quits the Marines, and moves to a cabin in Wyoming with his dog. But he’s pulled back into action by a retired colonel (Danny Glover), who works in some unnamed federal agency. The colonel tells Swagger that a sniper may be planning to assassinate the President, and the agency needs Swagger to think like him and track him down. But the hero is being set up—made to look (for reasons I will not explain) as though he’s the one attempting the hit. The plotters try to eliminate their patsy on the spot. Swagger is shot twice, falls through a window, nearly drowns in the Delaware River, yet, with all of law enforcement after him, manages to escape into the American nowhere. Throughout the rest of the movie, he takes vengeance on the swine who tried to do him in—a rogue unit in the government, operating under the control of a powerful, oil-mad senator from Montana (the Cheney figure, played by Ned Beatty). The government may be rotten, but American honor is saved by the lone killer.
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The movie is based on the successful 1993 novel “Point of Impact,” by the Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter, whose glumly macho fictions (there are three Bob Lee Swagger books) are very different in tone from his shrewd and funny reviews. Swagger has many notches on his gun. From a distance, in hiding, he has killed dozens of people in war, and the movie celebrates his prowess in all its solitary cultic glory while wrapping him in an aura of sanctimonious approval. The mechanics of audience manipulation may be obvious here, but they often work. The shooter, twice betrayed, becomes a victim. His fight against corrupt enemies absolves him of any personal guilt, and we can simultaneously enjoy his skill at picking people off and the righteousness of his wrath.
The screenwriter, Jonathan Lemkin, has acknowledged a debt not only to Hunter but to “Three Days of the Condor” and “The Parallax View,” seventies thrillers that drew on fears of shadowy government conspiracies. Lemkin has updated the old plots with gun-catalogue lore. The movie is full of contented talk of rifles and ammunition, and at one point Swagger picks up an astounding amount of what can only be called ordnance at a Virginia shopping mall. Snub-nosed and barrel-chested, Wahlberg looks a little like a gun himself. “What I love about Mark,” the movie’s producer, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, has said, “is he’s not afraid to be a man.” Perhaps not, but di Bonaventura and Fuqua seem afraid to let him be an actor. In this role, he certainly has the stillness and the determination of a marksman, but he mutters in a sludgy monotone that’s hard to understand. Wahlberg has an unpretentious air about him, and I’d hate to see him get locked into dour star turns as an implacable killer. The engaging, fast-talking idiosyncrasy of his performance in “The Departed” has vanished.
In “300,” a blood-dark account of the battle of Thermopylae, the Spartan king, Leonidas (Gerard Butler), and his noble queen, Gorgo (Lena Headey), make love in the full splendor of their nakedness. When the Spartans, pumped like linebackers leaving the weight room, go out to fight, they wear nothing but leather codpieces and red capes; they die clutching one another’s hands. The Persians go one better. Their king, Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), an epicene seven-footer with a shaved head and what looks like a gold-lamé thong, lounges on cushions in his court, surrounded by aroused lesbians intertwined and writhing like snakes in a basket. When he goes out to fight, he commands an army of robed and turbaned slaves who enthusiastically hurl themselves onto Spartan spears. “300,” which grossed nearly a hundred and thirty million dollars in its first ten days of release, is perhaps the nuttiest film ever to become an enormous box-office hit. Based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller, the movie is a porno-military curiosity—a muscle-magazine fantasy crossed with a video game and an Army recruiting film. The director, Zack Snyder, poses the Spartan heroes against the horizon or along the crests of mountains under roiling skies. The softening colors of blue and yellow have been filtered or drained out of the palette; the dominant remaining color is the molten brown-gold of bronze shields. The action is prolonged in agonizing slow motion, only to snap to hyper-speed and then to a full stop, leaving nothing moving but the fountain of blood spurting from a decapitated body.
In Tehran, after pirated copies hit the streets there a few weeks ago, the movie was quickly denounced by an Iranian government spokesman as an act of “psychological warfare” that was intended to prepare Americans for an invasion of the country. “American cultural officials thought they could get mental satisfaction by plundering Iran’s historic past and insulting this civilization,” he said. The complaint was echoed by President Ahmadinejad, who said, “They are trying to tamper with history . . . by making Iran’s image look savage,” and a Time correspondent reported that many Iranians assumed that the movie was produced by an American government conspiracy. It is perhaps unfair to expect the Iranians to develop a sense of humor about American pop culture. They may also have trouble understanding that commercial American movies are ordered up not by “cultural officials” but by studio officials. The film is, of course, less an act of psychological warfare than an act of capitalism. It was called into being not by a hunger for war but by the desire to exploit a market—professional-wrestling and X-treme Fighting saturnalias play into the movie’s atmosphere. Everyone screams at everyone, and specialized Persian warriors wearing masks and other freakish regalia turn up to do battle. Pop has always drawn energy from the lower floors of respectability; this movie, in which fan-boy cultism reaches new levels of goofy chaos and sexual confusion, draws energy from the subbasement.
Still, the Iranians have a point: though first planned years ago, “300” is a political fable that uneasily engages the current moment. An all-volunteer expeditionary force of Spartans ventures forth, the warriors sacrificing themselves to stop the invading hordes from killing their wives and children, which may be an allusion to the Bush Administration’s get-them-in-Iraq-before-they-hit-us-here rationale. The Spartans also fight, as a lofty narration informs us, “against mysticism and tyranny.” Against mysticism? How many ancient armies went to their deaths with that as their battle song? And how many men have died, as the Spartans do, to defend “reason”? A whiff of contemporary disdain for the East—what the late Edward Said called “Orientalism”—arises from the mayhem: “300” turns into a dawn-of-democracy epic in which violence is marshalled to protect the future of Western civilization. Made in a time of frustration, when Americans are fighting a war that they can neither win nor abandon, “300” and “Shooter” feel like the products of a culture slowly and painfully going mad.
