I came across an item yesterday that I couldn’t pass by without commenting on. It’s the National Review Online’s reader suggested, editor ranked list of the
"25 best conservative movies of the past 25 years." I’ll lay my cards out on the table right here at the beginning. If you pinned me down and made me declare a political position, I’d tell you “moderate.” I’m not a moderate because I can’t make up my mind, however. I’m a moderate because my standard for what would make good public policy cuts across Republican, Democrat, and other party lines. I won’t go into the details here, but my goal, for reasons of faith, is to let the Bible inform how I vote on issues. And no current or past political party has created what I would call an ideal platform.
So, I try not talk about politics much. But I do talk about movies a lot. And some of the interpretations of the movies in this list are…odd. This is not intended to be a post about bashing conservatives. I am one on some issues, after all. It is intended to be about something else, which I will reveal at the end. I will restrict my comments to movies I have seen, and to reviewer comments (each entry is by a different reviewer) that struck me as strange. Some of the reviews are actual reviews, while others appear to be manifestos disguised as reviews. Of those, I think they say a lot more about the reviewer than about the movie.
Starting at the beginning, the introduction states:
“We do not claim that the writers, directors, producers, gaffers, and key grips involved with these films are conservative. We certainly make no such assertion about the actors. Yet the results are indisputable…”This is spectacular. The guys who hold the microphones, the actors, the directors, and the writers may have
accidentally made conservative movies. This sentence alone was worth the price of admission. It also provides an important clue…
“Conservatives enjoy these films because they are great movies that offer compelling messages about freedom, families, patriotism, traditions, and more.” This is an honest question: does this sentence insinuate that people who do not classify themselves as conservative dislike freedom, families, patriotism, and traditions, or movies about the same? We’ll come back to this…
Now starting at the bottom:
“Also-Rans” –
Thank You For Smoking – Really? If you consider yourself a conservative, and you liked this movie, can you tell me why?
Amazing Grace - Abolitionists, whether here or in England, were without a doubt considered dangerous liberals in their day.
25.
Gran Torino (2008) –
“Clint Eastwood directs and stars in the ultimate family movie unsuitable for the family. He plays Walt Kowalski, a caricature of an old-school, dying-breed, Polish-American racist male, replete with post-traumatic stress disorder from having served in the Korean War. Kowalski comes to realize that his exotic Hmong neighbors embody traditional social values more than his own disaster of a Caucasian nuclear family. Dirty Harry blows away political correctness, takes on the bad guys, and turns a boy into a man in the process. He even encourages the cultural assimilation of immigrants.”This movie is too recent for me to explain why this review may have missed something extremely important about this movie. And it is a great movie, primarily as a direct result of what this reviewer missed. I guess you can email me if you want to know what I think that thing is.
24.
Team America: World Police (2004) – If you are offended by anything, DO NOT see this movie. It made the list because of its scathing take on politically active Hollywood types. It also apparently made the list because the reviewer didn’t realize that half the jokes in the movie, including the title, were about conservatives.
20.
Gattaca (1997)–
“The movie is a cautionary tale about the progressive fantasy of a eugenically correct world — the road to which is paved by the abortion of Down babies, research into human cloning, and “transhumanist” dreams of fabricating a “post-human species.”That sentence is correct up until the dash, at which point, I’m not sure we saw the same movie. The movie
I saw was about people being excluded because of genetics like near-sightedness and the propensity for heart disease. I’m not saying the things listed are not deplorable – but I don’t think you can just start listing things you hate into a movie review if the movie isn’t at all about those things. Speaking of which…
17.
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005)– This review just made me sad. I won’t even quote it. I will say it mentions hating Santa Claus, compares the White Witch to Kim Jong Il, criticizes land-for-peace swaps, and mentions the redemptive death of Jesus primarily as an excuse to criticize “leftists,” all in four sentences. Would this reviewer have been pleased to see Edmund and Mr. Tumnus imprisoned or killed as traitors? I suspect C.S. Lewis and the filmmakers were going for more.
16.
Master and Commander (2003) – This review I actually agree with. I also liked this movie a lot.
13.
Braveheart (1995) –
“Braveheart taught that freedom is not just worth dying for, but also worth killing for, in defense of hearth and homeland. Six years later, amid the ruins of the Twin Towers, Gibson’s message resonated with a generation of American youth who signed up to fight terrorists, instead of inviting them to join a ‘constructive dialogue.’”I'm going to try and tread very carefully here. I don’t think this review is saying that
Braveheart directly inspired soldiers to volunteer after 9/11, though it could be construed that way. I think it is saying that movie
Braveheart embodies the spirit of those who volunteered. However, I think that trivializes the volunteers by boiling their motivation to fight for their country down to one sentence in a movie review.
On a separate note, a friend of mine proposed another “American” interpretation of this film – a native people, seen by their neighbors as barbarians, are betrayed, slaughtered, and oppressed. In other words, the American hero most like William Wallace might be Crazy Horse.
Here’s a favorite line from another Mel Gibson movie,
Maverick. “Oh, I hate Indians. I try to kill at least one a day. I figure it’s their fault for being on our land before we got here.”
Now, I’m not saying
Braveheart is about Native Americans. I’m saying metaphors are tricky.
12.
The Dark Knight (2008) -
"This film gives us a portrait of the hero as a man reviled. In his fight against the terrorist Joker, Batman has to devise new means of surveillance, push the limits of the law, and accept the hatred of the press and public."
Wow, just, wow. Where to start? Batman is an anti-death-penalty activist, as well as a strict enforcer of gun control laws. (Batman and I go
way back.)
The best scene in the movie, to me, was when the Joker offered two ferry-boats the chance to blow the other up – one filled with criminals, one with normal folks. A healthy debate ensues. Perhaps you remember how it turned out – Batman tells the Joker, “Not everyone is like you.”
Batman agrees to use his super-surveillance just once, provided it is used by the most trustworthy man in the movie, after which it is destroyed forever, because it is “too much power for one man.”
This movie as a whole is about escalation, as set up in the last three minutes of
Batman Begins. It is about how fighting evil draws one perilously close to the edge of evil, and how much personal cost is involved even in a righteous battle. Not just the cost to one's reputation, but to one's loved ones.
11.
The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) -
Author J. R. R. Tolkien was deeply conservative, so it’s no surprise that the trilogy of movies based on his masterwork is as well. I can only assume the anti-industrialization and anti-deforestation message of the books and the films slipped past this reviewer.
When Frodo sighs, “I wish none of this had happened,” Gandalf’s response speaks to us, too: “So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” That is a great dialogue, and I agree with the reviewer that it speaks to us. So does the one about two minutes before that, when Frodo says, “It’s a pity Bilbo didn’t kill him [Gollum] when he had the chance.” To which Gandalf replies, “Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo’s hand. There are many who live who deserve death, and many who die who deserve life. Can you give it them? Do not be so quick to deal out death and judgment.”
7.
The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) -
Gardner never succumbs to self-pity, even when he and his young son take refuge in a homeless shelter. They’re black, but there’s no racial undertone or subtext. Again, this is an honest question: It’s ok for the actors to be black, but if they talk about it, and how it affects others’ perceptions of them or their perception of themselves, that’s not ok?
4.
Forrest Gump (1994) -
"Tom Hanks plays the title character, an amiable dunce who is far too smart to embrace the lethal values of the 1960s."
Like racism. He is a Congressional Medal earning veteran, and the keynote speaker at an anti-Vietnam War rally. I think you could make a good case that this film’s take on American history allows for some moral ambiguity.
But this is the one that really got me:
1.
The Lives of Others (2007) – I saw this movie
this weekend, and it is a truly remarkable film.
"It chronicles life under a totalitarian regime as the Stasi [East Germany’s secret police] secretly monitors the activities of a playwright who is suspected of harboring doubts about Communism."Oh, but it’s about so much more. You need to see this movie.
The thing that absolutely floored me about this movie’s inclusion in this list, and at the #1 spot no less, is that apparently nobody realized that one of the things this movie is about is the effect things like domestic wire-tapping, inhumane interrogation techniques, widespread paranoia, imprisonment without trial, and a culture of suspicion toward one’s neighbors and co-workers have on the people living in such a system.
So, the number one pick is a good example of what this post is really about – people often see what they want to see in art, and movies apparently are no exception. In fact, I think truly great art, and truly great movies, allow for a variety of interpretations. And everyone goes to the movies with their lens preset, so to speak. I tend to watch movies primarily through the filter of my faith. I see meaning when someone dies in a cruciform posture (which happens a lot in movies). My supposition is that good filmmakers include things like that on purpose. Others appear to primarily watch movies through the filter of a specific political agenda, and may assume that elements which fit that filter are there by accident. I don’t think any of the filmmakers involved with the films in this list accidentally made conservative movies. I do suspect that some people may have accidentally
watched them as conservative movies. Or put another way, some people took values which are embodied in these movies in an “indisputable” way, values which were probably intended to be portrayed as universal – values like freedom, family, patriotism, tradition - and put a label of “conservatism” on those values, and thus on the movies.
