Political nostalgia has become Hollywood’s new discursive mode — Retropolitics. You can see it as well in today’s news media, which constantly force parallels between contemporary civil-rights causes and the 1960s struggles, and it explains the inanity of the new drama Stonewall, which purports to recreate events leading up to the riot that broke out on June 28, 1969, when police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, and gays and lesbians defied them.
It isn’t enough for Hollywood to document the beginnings of what was proclaimed as the Gay Liberation Movement (or the original protest parade, which over the years has morphed into an annual event that is now innocuously called the Gay Pride March). Retropolitics compels media makers to portray a past period of social activism as paradise. The movie Stonewall doesn’t supply historical context — it romanticizes and sanctifies.
Like Straight Outta Compton, Selma, and The Butler — falsified social histories described by Harvey Weinstein as part of an “Obama Effect” — Stonewall gives a simple, facile approach to history, reducing politics to outlaw clichés and sexual stereotypes.
Retropolitics seeks audience agreement through condescending means. Stonewall’s protagonist is Danny Winters (Jeremy Irvine), a straight-appearing blue-eyed blond from Indiana — which is shown as being as phony and repressive as the town in Footloose. Danny befriends a bunch of poor New York street kids (diverse, outrageous drag queens and lesbians), but he’s the one who picks up the first brick and hurls it through the Stonewall’s window — just like Spike Lee’s Mookie tossing that garbage can in Do the Right Thing, except that Stonewall uses a Ken-doll white protagonist to gain audience sympathy. This contradicts the film’s presumed advanced thinking. How can decades of struggle toward social acceptance go past, and Hollywood insists on being trite?
#related#Stonewall’s agit-prop confirms that the filmmakers have learned nothing from history; they discard whatever sensitivity might have been gained in the realm of sexuality and settle for political obviousness. Neophyte Danny, who has never heard of such gay culture totems as The Wizard of Oz or Judy Garland, suddenly proclaims, “I’m too mad to love anyone right now! We want gay power!” Such banality isn’t entirely surprising, since Stonewall was directed by Roland Emmerich with the same cluelessness he brought to Independence Day, Godzilla, The Patriot, and White House Down. But this is inexcusable when a thoroughly serious and emotive history of the gay-liberation riot was already made in 1995, also titled Stonewall, by director Nigel Finch and writer Rikki Beadle Blair. Emmerich and Broadway playwright Jon Robin Baitz go in for partisan games, distorting history with characters who are either all-right or all-wrong — the blinkered hindsight of Retropolitics.
Emmerich and Baitz hit bottom when purebred Danny is forced into a kind of gay white slavery and submits his virtue to Bible-quoting perverts — one in drag, the other a creepy Gore Vidal lookalike in a smoking jacket. Then, the day after the riot, Danny’s Latino drag-queen hooker BFF, Ray (Jonny Beauchamp), enthuses, “Things are really changing now. I can get a real job.” Back home, Danny’s adoring, Salingeresque little sister, Phoebe (Joey King), displays her support by boasting, “I don’t go to church with Dad and Mom anymore. You got me out of that.” It’s secular hate speech — Retropolitics in full effect.
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Nancy Meyers’s view of white middle-class heterosexual luxury, as evidenced by the films What Women Want, Something’s Gotta Give, It’s Complicated, and the new The Intern, seems only slightly different from Nora Ephron’s more popular, hackneyed rom-coms, but the difference is all important. Unlike Ephron, Meyers disturbs her class bubble by homing in on the emotional complications of aging romantics.
In The Intern, Robert De Niro as Ben Whittaker, a retired widower, goes to work for a young Internet entrepreneur, Jules Ostin (Anne Hathaway), but here Meyers’s gimmick is surprisingly different. Where Ephron’s tiresome plots evoked nostalgia for banal Old Hollywood romance and flattened screwball comedy, Meyers gets to the quirky heart of what makes her characters simpatico. Ben and Jules are both high-functioning businessheads, but most importantly they share a filial romance.
Meyers’s screwball comedies resolve in sanity, not just romance.
The mature De Niro has the gravitas to turn an aging fish-out-of-water into a man of probity. “I feel like everyone’s uncle around here,” Ben says in the midst of a pack of Millennials who all seem to lack home-training. This implicit longing for parental authority makes The Intern ungimmicky, non-Ephrony, and nicely affecting without ever seeming manipulative. The bond Ben and Jules develop is more than heartwarming — it’s practical in a social sense; an answer to moral displacement of a sort that Millennials like Jules search for yet cannot identify. Ben, a rare character who achieved fulfillment in his marriage, gives Jules roots.
The hipsters in Mumblecore movies founder because of just such unrootedness. Meyers’s acquired filmmaking skill applies a farcical screwball concept to the crisis of affluent characters seeking control of both their livelihood and their emotions. (The Intern’s energy level rises during a caper episode centered on a parent–child crisis.) Meyers’s screwball comedies resolve in sanity, not just romance.
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Looking back at the history of National Lampoon magazine, director Douglas Tirola also traces empire-building — that of America’s comedy institutions from the Harvard Lampoon to SNL to Comedy Central — in Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon. This is almost the documentary we’ve needed to understand how social satire and political humor have declined over the past 15 years — when the counterculture became mainstream and then used its impudence to gain political control following the 2000 presidential election.
Interviews with Lampoon veterans give some insight: Co-founder Henry Beard describes the magazine’s advantage: “It’s like there was an attic full of culture from 1945 to 1970 that had been accumulating and no one had been up there and we looted it.” A clip of the young P. J. O’Rourke becoming the magazine’s managing editor in the Seventies defines American satire’s defensive future: “a defense against hostility, a replacement for hostility, a defense mechanism against guilt and embarrassment.” Blame for Jon Stewart and his partisan ilk starts here.
— Armond White, a film critic who writes about movies for National Review Online, received the American Book Awards’ Anti-Censorship Award. He is the author of The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World and the forthcoming What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about the Movies.