The War in Hollywood Bad Movies on Big Topics November 29, 2007 | 08:55 AM Hollywood was slow to respond to the events of 9-11, the war on terrorism and the occupation of Iraq. This fall, a slew of new feature films have addressed these issues. But it's not clear that audiences are interested. Hollywood's lag time resulted from logistics and commercial calculation. A major motion picture absorbs more time and labor than a soap opera episode or an indie film made with a pair of digital cameras. Compounding the difficulty is the long labyrinth of green lighting movies, with many strange turns for finding financial backers, bankable stars and a script agreeable to all parties. It also appears as if Hollywood played a wait and see attitude toward the major events of the early 21st century. At the time Oliver Stone's World Trade Center was released (2006), many Americans remained in a sort of post-traumatic shock and refused to see any movie about 9-11. As for Iraq and the shadow war in Afghanistan, well, who knew how things would turn out? Unlike the go-for-broke Bush administration, Hollywood hedged its bets. Why gamble $200 million on a movie about the victorious liberation of Iraq when events could move south? Why bet on a dark, pessimistic view of the war on terror when everything might turn out according to Rumsfeld's plan? At least six movies on the current state of the world have or will arrive on big screens this fall. That most of them have not been very good is only one reason for their low scores at the box office. To summarize: The Kingdom is a blow-'em-up action flick set in Saudi Arabia; grappling with U.S.-sanctioned torture, Rendition is poorly cast and leaves a cold, contrived impression; Lions for Lambs is an affable civics lesson, not a great film. Grace is Gone, a Sundance favorite about a father (John Cusack) trying to explain to his children why their soldier-mother died in Iraq, still hasn't opened in Milwaukee. Also on the horizon is a ready-for-Oscar prestige picture, Charlie Wilson's War, starring Tom Hanks as the mastermind behind U.S. aid to Afghan rebels in the 1980sa strategy that had unintended consequences. So far, the only first rank film on these subjects to open here has been In the Valley of Elah. It stars Tommy Lee Jones as the proud father of a soldier in Iraq faced with a mystery: why was his son killed near base after his unit returned home? It's not a war movie but a subtle investigation of the effects of war on those who fight it. Ticket sales have been modest. Is it all too soon? The first and possibly only great films about VietnamApocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter and Coming Homewere released in the late '70s, a few years after the last Americans pulled out. Perhaps creative minds need time to process epochal eventsespecially in the slow moving environs of Hollywood. And maybe if someone had managed to make a great Vietnam film in 1969, audiences grown sullen and confused by the conflict, fatigued by watching bad news on TV, would have stayed home or opted for escapism. Nowadays fatigue may be even more severe, in a 24/7 news cycle rigged up with annoying crawlers and fuzzy cell phone footage from the front.
