Director: Robert Redford
Cast: John Turturro, Rob Morrow, Ralph Fiennes, David Paymer
Have I Seen it Before: Somebody mentioned to me that it was by far their favorite movie many years ago, so I went directly to the downtown library to track down a copy, and I remember thinking it was one of those classy, grown-up pictures, even way back when. For some reason it never got into regular rotation for me, and I don’t think I’ve seen it since.
Did I Like It: The movie strikes me in very much the same way now. We’re not really in a period where studios generally—and Disney or their prestige label Hollywood Pictures, specifically—are interested in making a thoughtful drama about intelligent people largely reckoning with their own insecurities.
Class, wealth, formal education, religion, looks. There’s this notion in American life, and probably never insisted on as stridently as it was in the first fifteen years after the second World War, that none of those factors should have any weight on the success of a man*, as long as that man maximizes his smarts (definitely separate from education), luck (someone will have to explain to me why that’s different than class, wealth, and looks, but we’ll leave that discussion for a different day), and hard work. Smarts and luck are on full display, but ease of work is what’s reached for by these people.
That’s the film’s greatest revelation, even if that revelation should have been self-evident: Our grandparents in the so-called Greatest Generation were just as obsessed with fame for the sake of being famous as we are. As with all great stories taking place in a bygone era, it’s just as much about the people of the 1950s and the Quiz Show scandals, as it is about the people of 1994 at the height of MTV and CourtTV, or the people of now with social media dominating their lives.
*The film insists it doesn’t have room to reckon with women’s angst in any real way, and given the balance of Stempel (Turturro), Goodwin (Morrow), and Van Doren (Fiennes), there’s probably a reason for that.