A Retrospective Review of Moneyball

“How can you not be romantic about baseball?” asks Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) in the penultimate scene of Moneyball, echoing his earlier declaration that “it’s hard not to be romantic about baseball.” Perhaps the reason the theme gets underlined is because the makers of Moneyball themselves ran into this problem a lot during production. Indeed, the source material, Michael Lewis’ Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, is about as unromantic a look at the sport as you can possibly get. The whole point of Lewis’ book (and Beane’s theory) is that scouts have to ditch all their romantic notions about what makes a great player (who’ll draw a crowd? Who’s likely to be a fan favorite? Who looks like a hero?) for more practical and frankly less sexy criteria (who gets on base a lot, even if that just means being walked or bunting?). As a result, Pitt’s rhetorical question was probably a very literal disciplinary guideline for the screenwriters: How can we not be romantic about baseball?

Because the standard sports-movie cliché is that a team of losers gets thrown together for a crack at the title, and either a) wins said title against all odds due to their teamwork, or b) loses, but that’s okay because winning isn’t everything. What’s important is that the players stuck together as a family and learned something. Moneyball is, of course, just the opposite: winning is the only thing that matters (as the subtitle of Lewis’ book suggests), and the players are more or less interchangeable. They certainly don’t mean anything to Beane, and they definitely don’t mean anything to economist/whiz kid Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), who sees them as statistics instead of human beings. This is not a criticism of the film, it’s merely the truth, attributed to the fact that Lewis’ book was (like his excellent Liar’s Poker) not a heartwarming triumph-of-the-will sports story but a clinical, economical meditation on a new way of thinking. The book is great, so it’s not difficult to see why it got optioned, but it must have been a headache to put onto the page. How do you make this mathematically-heavy work into a film?

One good solution was to hire Aaron Sorkin to help write the script. Sorkin is adept at writing characters who think and speak logically, and at its best moments, Moneyball resembles his previous work, The Social Network. Network looked at the development of Facebook mechanically, near-autistically, refusing to seek touchy-feely justification for Mark Zuckerberg’s cutthroat startup of the world’s largest social networking site. He was just a really smart dude who saw an opportunity and solved it creatively, without letting something as silly as a personal relationship with, well, anyone get in the way. In Moneyball, you can see Sorkin’s hand in such scenes as Billy Beane teaching Peter Brand how to break the news to a player that he’s been traded. You have to remember it’s a business, Beane tells him. Don’t talk to them, just get in and get out—would you rather get shot in the back of the head or take six in the chest and bleed to death? (“Are those my only options?” Brand mumbles). Over and over again, Beane gets obsessed with Brand’s statistical approach to scouting players, trading them on the phone with other general managers as though the players are baseball cards, with no regard for the fact that his picks have moved their entire lives to Oakland based on Beane’s drafting.

That’s heartless, sure, but it’s honest—that’s what really happened, anyway, and it’s a ruthless and—yes—unromantic way of going about things. But unfortunately, the film is stuck on this idea: it wants to answer the question “How can you not be romantic about baseball?” with, “You can’t.” And so it ends up doing this weird thing of actually trying to make Beane into a romantic hero, a very romantic hero, which is where the other screenwriter, Stephen Zaillian (Schindler’s List, Awakenings) comes in. How do we turn a guy who basically disregarded the personal lives of every player on his team into a sympathetic protagonist? Give him a daughter!

And, okay, I’m sure Billy Beane really did have a daughter and whatnot, and he probably cared a lot about her and wanted to make her proud of her daddy and send her to college and blah blah blah (“I have a daughter who I’d like to be able to send to college,” Beane actually says in the film, immediately after making one of his most ruthless decisions, in a (failed) effort to take the sting out). But the problem is that the film gets confused, almost arbitrarily from scene to scene, about whether it wants to be a heartwarming story about a loving dad and unappreciated general manager who did something spectacular, or whether it wants to be a cold, clinical look at a guy who said, “Fuck lessons. I just want to win.”

This is probably why we hear, almost ad nauseum, voiceover from the doubters and haters, negative Nancies who are supposed to sound like priggish stick-in-the-muds, but who say actually kind of touching things like, “You can’t win baseball with statistics. You win it on the field, you win it with good players who can work and learn from their mistakes.” Granted, maybe they’re wrong (not even maybe, they are wrong, seeing as how the Red Sox won two years later ignoring that advice and taking on Beane’s method), but they’re at least championing the idea of Heart over Tenacity, because they don’t know how not to be romantic about baseball.

How can you not be romantic about baseball? I’ve found it pretty easy, actually (I don’t watch it). But the film can’t resist it, and we end with this shot of Pitt driving away in his car, listening to his little girl sing a song to him, tearing up, because by instituting the A’s winning streak, he’s managed to stay in Oakland and watch her grow up. I think we’re supposed to be touched, but I think (and I’m right) that he’s kind of an asshole who favored his own self-preservation over the welfare of everyone on the team, so the part that resonated with me much more was when his daughter, teasingly, starts singing, “You’re such a loser, Dad.”

Maybe I’m just unromantic.

7/10

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I visited home this past weekend. There’s very little to do in my hometown, and I spent the lion’s share of the time watching TV (I don’t have a TV at my apartment in Tucson, so it’s a rare treat to check out what’s on cable, let alone network shows). Two things were playing ad nauseum more or less every time I sat down to watch. Since the government shutdown ended the day before my plane landed in New Jersey, one of those two things was coverage of the fallout: Jon Boehner and countless other House Republicans were taking hyperbole to a level formerly unreached by any actual public official, proclaiming the Affordable Care Act a disaster, and the worst thing ever to happen to the United States (that’s a direct quote). The other thing on TV was this movie Project X, just released on Showtime and playing round the clock. Have you seen it? If not, let me fill you in quickly: it’s a faux-“found footage” film about some teenagers who throw what they think will be the Greatest Party of All Time, documented by one of their friends. And I couldn’t help but think, as I flipped back and forth between these two, how oddly similar the sensibility of the main characters was.

Let me explain, because I know what you’re thinking: Ted, Project X is nothing like the government shutdown: one is an immature philistine’s fantasy about getting to do whatever the hell you want once the adults have no power, and the other is Project X. And that’s kind of my point. Project X—other than being horrendously directed, written for the kind of people who think midgets are by definition funny, and probably the worst-acted film since The Room—is a ludicrous fantasy. The parents go away, three nerds who’ve never thrown a party before invite a bunch of teenagers over, and everything goes according to plan. The teenagers have shitloads of fun, of course, but it somehow manages to maintain a sense of order. Groups divide themselves into separate corners to perform specific acts of hedonism: a handful of girls is totally content to spend the entire night jumping on a trampoline topless (no one wants to join them, and they never want to get off); a piñata full of ecstasy is burst open and everyone calmly gets a hit from the ground without fighting (and of course no one ends up overdosing); our heroes jump from the roof of the house onto a bouncy castle and everyone politely stops and watches them do it (no one tries to fuck with them, or ignores them, and when the fat kid jumps and pops it, he’s fine). The government (police officers) tries to intervene at one point, but the kids gather in a unified “Cops Go Home!” chant and all they have to do is throw a single bottle of beer at a squad car and the cops leave for the next four hours (two cops investigate a noise complaint at the beginning of the night, are unable to do so because the kids for some reason have an encyclopedic knowledge of their fourth amendment rights, and then they don’t investigate again until pretty much the end of the film).

Even when things do go wrong, it doesn’t end up being that big a deal. Thomas, the host of the party and the biggest nerd in school (despite looking like he belongs on the cover of TeenBop, like his girlfriend who’s supposed to be a fellow nerd but is probably one of the most beautiful actresses I’ve ever seen), is told by his friends several times to just chill out. A midget gets locked in a stove, the dog gets locked in a drawer, someone drives dad’s car into the pool, but Thomas remains cool until someone tries to break a vase. “That’s an antique!” he shouts. “Dude,” says his friend Oliver, “just take some ecstasy. I know you’re not a drug guy, but it’ll help.” He does, and it does. Problem solved! The neighbor tries (and mostly succeeds) to set the entire block on fire with a blow torch, and Thomas’s house catches on fire, destroying it. His father’s response when he gets home the next day? Without a hint of irony, I swear the film makes whoever this actor is ask this with a straight face: “How was it?” “It was awesome,” Thomas says, looking at the ashes of his former house.

In other words, this film is made by and for people who are sick of stupid parents telling me what to stupid do all the time! And by and for people who are convinced that, if stupid parents just left them alone, they could not only take care of themselves but enhance the entire living experience to the point that Jimmy Kimmel would mention it in his monologue during the credits!

And what a perfect metaphor for the way the Republican Party responds to government oversight these days.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I know that the Tea Party, Libertarians, and the Republicans get lumped together an awful lot, but the one thing they all have in common (at least if publicly stated philosophy is anything to go by anymore), it’s that they want small government. They just want to be left alone to do as they please, and the government, according to them, should abide by that. And to be fair, I totally get that, in some cases, that’s true. It’s why I think gay marriage and abortion should be (and are, respectively) legal: they’re personal matters, and the government shouldn’t have anything to do with a citizen’s private life.

But break down the word and it’s pretty easy to see what the government is there for—to govern. In a truly free society, we need a governing body to make sure we don’t turn into Lord of the Flies. An entirely free citizenry (says Plato) can never truly function, because human beings as a species lack the discipline and intrinsic feeling of debt to civic duty that keeps a society running smoothly. Just as teenagers need parents around to put restrictions on what they’ll do (because, of course, the real-life version of Project X would have ended like Woodstock ’99, where everything was set on fire and there were a record number of sexual assaults), adults need the government to restrict their totally selfish indulgences.

Again, I hear you: but Ted, adults are adults. Of course teenagers need restrictions, because they aren’t mature enough yet to decide what’s best for them. Adults shouldn’t be watched like that. And to that I say fair, but the truth is that the average American adult today is just a teenager plus a decade or two. Adults in America read Harry Potter. They tweet. 32 million adults in America can’t read, and the ones who do rarely read the newspaper (23%, according to a Pew Research Center report).

So let’s agree, then, that a total abolishment of the government is not only ridiculous, but dangerous. But, of course, that’s not what the government shutdown was about. The Republicans weren’t trying to get rid of government altogether; they were trying to gain leverage so that a specific overreach by the government (the Affordable Care Act) would be altered. But is that fair? Should the citizenry be allowed to choose which legislation is too much, and which is necessary?

Of course. Because we aren’t teenagers, even if we sometimes act that way, we should be allowed a say in what laws are made to govern us. And that’s what the Affordable Care Act is: a piece of legislation passed by a congress we elected, signed by a president we elected, deemed constitutional by a Supreme Court made up of Justices nominated by presidents we’ve elected in the past.

But the Republicans now, as ever, seem like the teenagers in Project X: throwing a giant tantrum based solely on the fact that they didn’t get what they wanted, which was the ability to do whatever the fuck they wanted. There are certain things that need to be legislated, just like there are certain Apollonian restrictions you put on a teenager’s Dionysian brain. They can’t just buy a closetful of semi-automatic weapons. They can’t only play with the kids in their inner-circle and shut everyone else out (that’s why we have Affirmative Action). And they need to put some of their money toward sensible things, like health insurance, before they go out and buy a dirt bike.

“This wasn’t possibly the greatest party ever, this was the greatest party ever,” says a character at the end of Project X. Maybe, but who is going to pay to clean the whole thing up?

The post A Meditation on the End of the Government Shutdown appeared first on Rookerville.

Hopefully, what we have to look forward is stuff like ABC’s Trophy Wife, which in its tone and wit reminds me of the way-underrated Suburgatory. It’s not that Trophy Wife doesn’t do a lot of the things I’ve already claimed that contemporary (and, let’s face it, traditional) family sitcoms do: it affirms family values, its central family is so white you need sunglasses to watch them, they live in a comfortable upper-middle class neighborhood, etc. Product placement abounds, from the cars to the phones to the hilarious prop that is (of all things) a water bottle.

But Trophy Wife has wit. And maybe that’s what I was getting at in the beginning of all this: our 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s sitcoms had reliable formulas that made it clear which ones were shit and which ones were great, because they were so stripped down that the jokes themselves were front and center. Trophy Wife is not a mockumentary, so none of the jokes are in the editing. The jokes are actual jokes, right there in the dialogue and the premise, and they’re good ones, too. The premise is that Kate (Malin Akerman) meets Pete (Bradley Whitford) after a meet-cute at a karaoke bar. They end up in the hospital together and fall instantly in love, but then Kate finds out he had two former families. Mercifully, the show spends almost zero time dragging this set-up out (it’s all handled in a quick flashback w/ helpful narration), so instead we can just dive right into the chaos. Kate’s both overwhelmed by the fact that she’s had to give up her party-girl lifestyle so suddenly and also a little peeved that no one takes her seriously enough to let her parent any of the eight million kids running around. The series essentially follows Kate as she tries to adjust.

Maybe that’s one thing I like about Trophy Wife: it treats family like something you have to adjust to, rather than the steady rock that everyone turns to in relief from the Big Bad World outside the home. Akerman, sounding like Cameron Diaz but with a less self-consiously goofy vibe, is a kickass choice for someone to carry the show, but even if she weren’t, the rest of the cast is great, too. Bradley Whitford is welcome to come back to TV any time, and Marcia Gaye Harden (!) plays the stone-faced, humorless former wife who has little patience for what she calls a “child bride.” (There’s also an adopted Asian kid, I guess because the series premieres after Modern Family, and they needed some crossover reference or something; long story short is that it’s the one annoying aspect of the show, this need to create a rainbow world despite the fact that white people still dominate the cast).

Even the situations—the “sit” of sitcom—are funny, and smart too. Pete’s son writes a spin-off of the Odyssey (!) in Homeric prose that devolves into a sex fantasy about his new stepmom. And Pete’s daughter sneaks vodka into school by putting it in a water bottle. When her mom is about to catch her, Kate bails her out by chugging the whole thing, making for the best second half of an episode of any comedy I’ve seen in at least a year.

I like families. I do. I like them so much that I think it’s wrong to use them, to see them only as potential consumers to whom we have to consistently proclaim, “You’re doing great! Family rules!” Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it’s hard. Trophy Wife gets that, or at least tries to.

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Dads is bad. Dads is painfully, totally, in spots off-the-charts bad, made with the kind of primitive humor and style that makes you wonder whether anyone involved had ever seen a sitcom before. It’s the only multi-camera, laugh-track sitcom of the lot here, but that’s not what makes it regressive. It regresses to a time long before the advent of multi-camera sitcoms.

Dads’ premise is simple enough: two guys (Seth Green and Giovanni Ribisi) work together designing videogames. They have a hot, young Asian secretary who does everything they want her to do, including dress up in Sailor Moon outfits. One day, their dads decide to move in to their apartments (because of the economy or something; I swear the telling is so clunky and awful that I can barely recall the set-up).

I teach a unit of my class on media ethics, wherein the students are required to determine what the demographic (age, race, gender, etc) and psychographic (attitudes, worldview, political leanings, etc) for a given television show is. Sometimes that’s tough. In the case of Dads, it’s easier to tell who the show’s written for than it is to remember any of the characters’ names. I mean, they design videogames for a living? They can’t work unless they’re stoned? Their secretary has no work to do—seriously, none—aside from walk in and throw in a few punch lines? How much pandering does a show have to do before it just turns into one giant circle jerk?

Unsurprisingly, the dads are un-PC and deliberately offensive. Very surprisingly, someone actually convinced Martin Mull and Peter Riegert to play the dads. It’s depressing to have to watch them deliver dusty old lines that would make Archie Bunker roll his eyes at the lameness of. “I was going to eat a piece of chocolate,” says Riegert, “but then I remembered it’s for women!” Ha ha? “The Chinese are an honorable and noble people,” says Mull, “but you can’t trust them!”

I mean come on. It’s not even like the show is actually offensive in any way—it came under fire recently for its handling of Asian stereotypes, but I just assume that’s because Seth McFarlane is involved, and everyone likes to wring hands about Seth McFarlane. Truly offensive humor might even make it fun for the shock. It’s simply lame, the kind of sitcom that we’re (hopefully) almost done with; at least it’s hard to imagine members of the current generation, reportedly the most tolerant generation the world has yet known, playing curmudgeonly racists in forty years, but who knows?

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The soapy family values that MJFS can’t help but avoid are on full display in The Goldbergs. For weeks I’ve been seeing Facebook ads proclaiming, “Liked The Wonder Years? You’ll love The Goldbergs,” and reviews have strangely lumped the two together as well. I have no idea why. Aside from the presence of the protagonist narrating the show as an older man, I have to say that I have seen The Wonder Years, and you, Goldbergs, are no Wonder Years. TWY was an unusually accurate portrait of the awkwardness of adolescence, set against the background of the Vietnam War. The whole point of Kevin Arnold’s upbringing was that he was learning the serious and dark ways of the world at the same time as the rest of the country, losing his innocence as the country lost its own. The Goldbergs is about a kid named Adam Goldberg whose family is crazy. End of premise.

What’s weird about the show is how mind-numbingly average it is. It’s not even bad; if it was bad it would at least be memorable. It’s simply lazy, I think. One reason this might be the case is that the show was made by Adam Goldberg—real life Adam Goldberg, as opposed to the protag. of the series—who seems to be doing little else besides rehashing stories from his childhood. The effect is exactly what it sounds like: you just feel like you’re being told about someone else’s upbringing or looking at their family photos, which is crazy boring, I assure you. Adam captures the whole thing on a camera (as does Mike Henry’s daughter in MJFS), basically because I think it’s illegal to not have people speaking directly to cameras in sitcoms these days. But otherwise there’s no flare in the telling; no Kevin Arnold-style neuroses or cringe-inducing moments of honesty; no consciousness of this family-as-a-microcosm-of-the-whole-country; no context at all. The Goldbergs exist in a vacuum.

Well, there is one piece of context, and that’s the 80’s. And Jesus Christ, if ever there were a television show that pandered to its chosen decade, it’s this one. The paean-to-the-fifties Happy Days looks subtle by comparison. Even That 70’s Show had fewer time-period references, at least insofar as it didn’t try to sell the 70’s as the greatest time anyone could have ever lived. Director Seth Gordon seems physically incapable of staging a single shot of the whole pilot without at least six references to the 80’s: everyone wears Star Wars t-shirts and plays with Rubik’s cubes and watches Alf and listens to REO Speedwagon and has big hair etc etc. We get it! We get it! And in case the wholly unsubtle directing didn’t let you know when you were clearly enough, the writing goes even further to drive the point home: “It was the 80’s. There were no parenting blogs or peanut allergies. There was no Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram…” says the narration, attempting to paint it as a simpler time. Maybe I’m just getting old, but weren’t the 80’s not that long ago? Isn’t this nostalgia a little…weird? But I mentioned before that Goldbergs isn’t actually bad, it’s simply average. It could have been worse. It could have been Dads.

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The Michael J Fox Show (Thurs. 8:00) is not the good show. It also is not, however, bad in any way. The premise is that Fox plays an ex-news anchor named Mike Henry who had to quit his job due to his Parkinson’s disease. If you’re thinking that the show is maudlin or manipulative in any way, the show is well aware. In fact, more or less the entire pilot is about how sick Henry’s entire family is of everyone’s sympathy, and the writing is refreshingly unblinking at its central subject. Mike tries to scoop some eggs for his wife without spilling any as his hand shakes, and she waits patiently, only to follow it with, “Jesus, can you not have a personal triumph right now? We’re starving.” Likewise, Mike’s kids deal with the ins and outs of being the children of a Parkinson’s victim in creative ways. One scene has his daughter coming to school, the teacher taking an extra moment after taking attendance to ask, “Are you okay?” “Fine,” she responds nonchalantly. “Are you?” he asks again, as everyone stares at her, and all she can do is roll her eyes at the callousness of the people she’s surrounded by.

She realizes, as any kid would, that this situation is a potential goldmine, and decides not to do the assigned reading of The Grapes of Wrath, instead making an over-the-top Hallmark-style video of her dad (“Parkinson’s is his personal dust bowl”). The teacher gives her an F, calling it manipulative, and she shrugs incredulously as her own song parody of Enrique Iglesias’s “Hero” plays on the tape.

This is all great stuff, and, as I said, kind of a miracle considering that they’re trying to make Fox’s real-life disease into so much farce. The only question is where the show is going to take it from here. It could go either way. One path—one I hope they don’t go down—would be to simply hammer these jokes into the ground over and over and over again, the way Will & Grace used to do with gay jokes: they knew they had something innovative, and they played their one-joke premise for all it was worth. Another direction they could go in is one that Mike Henry himself worries about in episode one: he doesn’t want NBC to turn his return to TV into a weepie personal victory “in slo-mo with soft music playing in the background.” While MJFS wants to be too hip to stoop to that level, it comes dangerously close to it, especially in the last few minutes. Like Modern Family, it soft-pedals everything that happened in its first twenty minutes by abandoning the jokes in the final two, with annoying voiceover summings-up of the proceedings, and, yes, inspirational soft music playing over the final shot.

What I hope it ends up doing is simply moving on from the Parkinson’s thing altogether. Fox is and has always been a charming actor, and it may sound trite but the disease by no means defines who he is, and neither should it define the show. The writing is strong enough in its non-Parkinsonian moments to prove that it can go elsewhere if it wants: Mike’s sister stops over and smells something he’s cooking in the kitchen, and when she guesses it, she says, “Oh my god, enough with the kale. We get it. You’re white.”

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It was inevitable, I guess.

The state of the TV sitcoms is dire, and it’s a long time coming. While television dramas are improving exponentially each year—so much so that TV is arguably the most dependable medium through which to receive any kind of quality product—sitcoms are struggling to maintain a foothold. Fewer and fewer audiences watch sitcoms anymore, anyway, and they (sitcoms) have certainly lost any kind of water-cooler cache (do people still gather around water coolers?). Probably that began with the advent of the single-camera, laugh-trackless sitcoms of the turn of the century, a phenomenon we at the time found to be unequivocally a Good Thing, and yet it also kind of fucked things up, reliability-wise. The multi-camera sitcoms of the second half of the twentieth century were mediocre, sure, but they were reliably mediocre. Like the verse-chorus-verse, three-minute pop song, the form had been carved, and the quality was easy to gage. The only variable was the quality of the jokes.

Not so anymore. Sitcom writers were encouraged to go off on their own for a while, gain some experiences, Thoreau-like, then experiment when they came back. So we got Arrested Development, and we got Scrubs, and we got My Name is Earl. Most impressive was the fact that, in this brave new sitcom world, the squares weren’t kicked out altogether; the conventional sitcom form was allowed to stick around as well, and nobody shat on it for being itself—so Two and a Half Men and How I Met Your Mother got their days in the sun, too.

After a while, though, network heads got a little nervous, wary of this culture of chance-taking, so they looked for some stability, a surefire new formula that couldn’t miss. Around this time, NBC imported The Office from Britain and had moderate success. At the very least, it was successful enough to spawn two new phenomena: the mockumentary and the rebirth of the workplace comedy. Parks and Rec, 30 Rock, Two Broke Girls, and most significantly, the powerhouse ratings juggernaut that is Modern Family were created in this wake, the latter of which being the only true, no-bullshit, unquestioned hit in the lot.

We were warned pretty heavily last year that the family sitcom was going to come back—hard. Underseen gems like Happy Endings were yanked off the air last spring, making room for some family-friendly fare. Here’s the problem: family sitcoms are 1. horrible, and 2. cynical. They are horrible for pretty obvious reasons—the kids are watching, so make sure everything’s watered down, and never end an episode on a note that doesn’t suggest that Family is the Most Important Thing in the World (barf)—but the ways in which it’s cynical are trickier than all that. Network TV exists because of one thing, and one thing only: advertising. Advertisers put up crazy amounts of cash to have their product pushed on the air. And advertisers only give to shows with audiences who’ll buy either really expensive stuff (hence the mid-90’s push for upper class urban dwellers in shows like Friends and Frasier) or buy their stuff in bulk. And who buys stuff in bulk? Why, two-parent, firmly established, financially stable groups of people living in one house, of course. Families.

All of this is a very, very long-winded way of saying that the network heads must have been very happy that Modern Family hit it so big, so they could justify making all these family shows again, and the networks have all but sprayed a new crop of shows at us about moms and dads (like, off the top of my head, Mom and Dads). The question is, are any of them any good?

I watched Dads (Fox), Trophy Wife (ABC), The Goldbergs (CBS), and The Michael J Fox Show (NBC) to find out what they had to offer. One of these shows is alarmingly good, one is potentially good though it’s not good right now, one is totally fucking lame, and one is so godawfully bad that I’m wondering whether there’s a joke I’m not getting, as though it’s actually supposed to be a parody of a horrible sitcom rather than a bad sitcom itself.

Check back this week each day as we reveal Ted’s thoughts on each of the shows he watched. 

The post Family Values Tour: It Begins appeared first on Rookerville.

Here’s the thing: here are issues, and there are Issues. Every film, at least those with a conventional narrative, is going to have an issue at its core. Characters need conflict and crisis to butt up against, they need problems to solve and hurtles to overcome and yes, issues to deal with. That’s par for the course. Some films, however, find their characters dealing with capital-I Issues, big, heavy socially-, culturally-, or even globally-relevant stuff, so that the film is more a statement than it is a story. In a film with issues, the issues are the mcguffin because what we really care about are the characters, and we want to watch them develop. In a film with Issues, however, the characters are the mcguffin, purporting to be the main show when really all they are is a set-piece upon which the filmmakers can say what they need to say.

Does that make sense? Let’s try something concrete to help me sound a little clearer. The Dark Knight is a film with issues: Batman has to catch the Joker, and he has to deal with his childhood (or something), and I think he has to work through stuff with Rachel Dawes. Precious is a film about Issues: it’s not that characters don’t exist in the film, it’s that the film is much more interested in Precious as a representative of all manner of serious societal problems: AIDS, child abuse, sexual abuse, teen pregnancy, race, illiteracy, poverty, class (Jesus that movie had a lot of Issues). Blood Diamond’s another good example—it was a story, sure, but it was first and foremost “about” something, namely the illegal diamond trade in Africa. It used the medium of a film narrative to get across its point, and you never really got the feeling that anyone cared too much about whether the story was any good (which is probably why it wasn’t).

All of this is to say that Short Term 12 is a film that can’t help but deal with certain Issues, since it takes place in a short-term foster home for disadvantaged kids who’ve been through all kinds of hell. What’s admirable about it is that, for two thirds of it at least, it finds a way to not be “about” those things; that is, it manages to avoid after-school-special territory, and to avoid making its characters into mouthpieces for the filmmaker’s social commentary. The fact that it does that is some kind of miracle; the way in which it does that is so common-sensical that you wonder why no one’s done it before.

The film, as I’ve mentioned, takes place at a foster care facility, at which works the dedicated and unsubtly named Grace (Brie Larson), who loves the kids dearly and advises a new co-worker on his first day, “You’re not their parents, you’re just here to provide a safe environment.” The film does little more than follow the day-to-day inner workings of the center (it was originally a short film, and you can see the remnants of a much less structured piece being stretched into film-length material). Sure, Grace gets pregnant (in like the second scene, I’m not giving anything away) and has to deal with some of her own stuff, but mainly what we’re watching is the interactions between the kids and the social workers, getting a sense of what it’s like to work at a place where chaos is the norm.

Acknowledging that chaos is the norm is the aforementioned common-sense strategy the film deploys to avoid becoming a very special episode of a mediocre sitcom. There are foster kids here who’ve been abandoned, abused, molested, arrested, who cut themselves, who cut other people, who are heavily medicated for severe psychological issues—or Issues—and yet director Destin Cretton manages not to make any of that feel oppressive, because this stuff is everywhere, the natural order of things rather than the exception to an otherwise worry-free life.

That tone is established (a bit self-consciously, albeit humorously) in the opening scene, wherein the social workers smoke a cigarette before work and recount the story of a kid who so violently wanted to get off of a bus that he made Mason (John Gallagher Jr.), the social worker telling the story, shit his pants instead of argue with the kid. Halfway through his anecdote, the door behind him flies open and out runs a manic foster kid trying to escape, screaming obscenities as he attempts to get farther and farther away, and without breaking stride three of the workers run after the kid, hold him down until his tantrum breaks…at which point Mason finishes his story as though nothing happened, so familiar is he with these violent outbursts.

And so on. Other kids swear and hurt each other, and hurt themselves—though, again, when this happens the social workers and the film itself just kind of deal with it, secure in the knowledge that a girl trying to tear off her own skin is a minor blip on the radar of anyone who works in this environment from day to day. And the film’s responsible, too, in that it does own the potentially severe consequences of these situations (Mason’s anecdote ends with the kid on the bus found dead in a bush two weeks later). Turning what would ordinarily be conflict into normalcy might make the film sound one-note (what’s at stake in a world where every new emergency is as plain as stubbing your toe?), but there are surprises in store. Probably the most interesting thing about the film is the way the social workers manage to find creative ways to ease these kids’ pain. One worker delivers a single trinket to a kid who’s been forced by a psychiatrist to give all of his childhood toys away; another hangs out and draws with a girl who’s a budding artist; in the most impressive scene, a particularly difficult case named Marcus (Keith Stanfield) isn’t chastised for beating another kid with a wiffle ball bat—instead he’s encouraged to read the new lyrics he’s written after the incident, so that the workers can understand why he did it in the first place, and the scene is shot so wonderfully, in a single take, slow-zooming closer and closer until you can see the pores of his skin as he reads, that you almost want to give it a standing ovation.

You don’t though, and you end up kicking yourself for being moved by that or any other scene, because the film ultimately proves gutless and conventional in its final third. I get the feeling that if I saw the film again, I’d wonder how I didn’t see that coming, because the narrative arc is flimsy: the inciting incident of the film (what a former professor of mine might have called the “why now” of the story) is that a new kid has arrived, a girl named Jayden (“It’s a boy’s name,” she says. “I don’t think so,” says Grace. “Will Smith did,” she mutters). Jayden’s a smart girl, an artist, an introvert who announces on her first day that she doesn’t want to be rude but she’s not there to make friends. Grace becomes overly attached to the girl because they share histories of abuse; both are cutters and both have been sexually assaulted by their fathers. So the narrative of the film finds Grace becoming near-obsessed in her attempts to make sure Jayden doesn’t get returned to her father. I call that arc flimsy because, well, it is: she works in a fucking foster home, for Christ’s sake—hasn’t she run into this kind of kid before? Wouldn’t the slow breakdown that she has already have come about in an earlier case, where she tried to play hero in an attempt to rectify the crimes that were done to her? (You could make the argument that she’s pregnant this time, and that there’s a maternal drive kicking in, but that connection is never made by the film until a throwaway line at the end).

Furthermore, the film has like six climaxes—I won’t name them but you’ll know what I mean; around the hour and fifteen minute mark moment-of-truth after moment-of-truth after moment-of-truth start popping up, like a spirited game of So What’s This Movie About?—the most climactic of which is a major letdown, especially since it’s preceded by (SPOILER ALERT) the possibility that Grace was going to break into a house and beat the shit out of a man with a baseball bat (!), then devolves into standard-issue expensive-car-as-objective-correlative-for-rich-abusive-dad stuff. (END SPOILER).

Anyway. I don’t know. It’s definitely worth a look, so don’t let my mini-rant dissuade you. Far too few films like this are made and seen, films with real balls and which are more interested in submerging the audience in their world than in leading you through said world with a phony narrative. I just wish the narrative it did settle on was a little less phony. Maybe that’s just my own Issue.

(p.s. are we supposed to believe that this entire foster care facility is managed by four people—one of whom just began working, meaning that just before his first day, only three people managed the whole thing—and that these people can spend significant one-on-one time with each kid, doing things like (for instance) braiding their hair? What happens when one kid tries to lock herself in her room and three people arrive to break down the door, and then another kid simultaneously tries to start a fist fight somewhere else in the house? Seems like a remarkably well-managed place to me…)

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