The age of 'innocence'

UnAmerica's greatest hits..

By Susan Gerhard

ON A SIDEWALK somewhere in Los Angeles on a vaguely sinister spring day, I am throwing up into a trash can and John C. Reilly is struggling with a dog and a child, neither of whom is following his directions. He could be a character in one of the four major films he's starred in this year: the Cuckold (The Good Girl and Chicago), the Dupable Papa (The Hours), the Ineffectual Brute (Gangs of New York). Fifteen minutes before the most nerve-racking interview of my life, I'm glad to witness his morning; he's the comic relief I desperately need. His performance in the street is much like his performances in the movies: it's the essence of innocence. Big, ugly and beautiful all at once, a giant who won't resort to violence, he's tangled up in dog leash and baby body and looks so sweet you want to pet him. On-screen he can physically manifest ugly America, at its very best. He is the beast who has the potential to bully, and could turn at any moment – particularly when not subdued by a six-pack and a few bong hits – but doesn't need or want to bare his fangs. He's the guy who's too dumb to truly worry over. He is Monsters, Inc., not monstrous.

Graham Greene called American innocence a kind of insanity. America had a moment of clarity a few Septembers back but just as quickly went off its medication. Commentators who drummed home the idea that America had lost its innocence, while calling for more killing elsewhere to heal the psychic damage, only drove home the fact that America can't seem to shake its innocence. In the past year the monster quickly turned from fuzzy green to very mean.

It's fitting that Reilly ended his year with Gangs of New York – in which he bullies for the government, without realizing it's not in his best interest. I ended mine with a screening of The Quiet American, in which the Vietnamese are made to bully for the United States, without realizing it's not in their best interest. Screen bully Sean Penn gamely ended his year with a trip to Baghdad, where crowds were said to have remembered him for another Reilly film, Casualties of War, as much as for his words with Tariq Aziz. Phillip Noyce, who'd spent a year waiting for Harvey Weinstein to have enough guts to release the turning-point film in Noyce's almost-wasted career, ended his with some vengeance: a limited release of The Quiet American (to open here in the coming months) and, as a bonus, a Golden Globe nomination for its star, Michael Caine.

The idea of "innocent" Americans and the problems they cause is central to Greene's Quiet American. It's central to Noyce's interpretation of the book. And, of course, it's central to the film's destiny. As the now well-known story goes, the film screened to Miramax Sept. 10, 2001, and its fate changed drastically the very next day. Suddenly, unexpectedly relevant as a critique of current U.S. diplomacy, and not just a time-capsule criticism of U.S. policy in the pre-Vietnam War era, the film had to be kept from the public, Weinstein felt, until delicate, traumatized America could stomach it. You can almost hear Greene groaning, "God save us from the innocent and the good." It wasn't until Michael Caine complained about a planned January dump on the most bored film market of the year that the film got out just in time to collect some award nominations before shuffling off into video retirement.

Patience doesn't pay. Martin Scorsese waited 25 years to finish Gangs of New York, and look what it got him: the worst possible moment in history to release an old-school "New York" film. "Mean streets" are now martyred ones, and sainthood doesn't suit the Scorsese set for an immigrant massacre. The radical nature of Scorsese's final scenes – his use of New York's Draft Riots of 1863, when immigrants rose up against conscription, is the most literal antiwar statement of the year – could easily be lost on a public weaving under the brutality of Scorsese's unrelenting saga. Then again, Scorsese's audience is too recently baptized by the constant stream of new fears and new wars to take in this high-profile call for truce. This is the most threatening age of "innocence" yet.

Not that filmmakers themselves weren't trying. Daughter from Danang reviewed the misplaced zeal behind the United States' mission of "rescuing" orphans from Vietnam in 1975, which appears, in retrospect, to be full-scale theft. Far from Heaven reminded us of the rot Douglas Sirk had already smelled back in the '50s, another innocent era. The Cockettes spoke to the greedy '90s straight from the revivified, sordid, idealistic '60s. They were the rare films, and they helped promote the delusion that there are possibilities in the major motion picture, letting us forget, for a second, that American film is an industry like all industries – with a bottom line, not a brain.

Yet there's nothing to keep a person from losing innocence over and over again. How many times has Michael Moore done it? Or how many times has he pretended to? To the annoyance of many, Moore may just be the least-quiet American of them all. Trusting the goodwill of public figures until the door slams shut, he scored a victory over Kmart – no matter how tedious – that couldn't be clipped out of Bowling for Columbine; it was DV history for the man. Yet the rest of that film, in which Moore thinks out loud and patches together an argument that moves from the obvious (gun control) to the unspoken (thought control), turned into the most profound moviemaking of the year – precisely because Moore didn't factor out that most propagandized fall day in recent history. Like Gangs of New York, Bowling began with all these skirmishes on the ground (the United States' incredible gun-death rate) and, almost as epically, widened the picture to reveal the bigger-scale violence coming from above. Scorsese has Uncle Sam's soldiers rain down on the already bloodied Five Points; Moore just takes his audience on a ghost-of-Noam Chomsky tour of U.S. imperial adventures. The priceless-image-of-the-year award goes to Moore for interviewing a Lockheed Martin P.R. flack about the company's "anger management" program for the potential school-killers of Columbine in front of a missile manufactured by his employers.

One doesn't have to travel to the target of that missile to see that war is hell: Moore's got the surveillance footage from the Columbine killing spree, the most heart-wrenching war scene ever put on celluloid, broadcasting from a high school library. Congress blamed the deaths on Marilyn Manson, and the American public regained its innocence just in time for the next important war. Susan Gerhard's top 10

1. Punch-Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA)

2. Y tu mamá también (Alfonso Cuarón, Mexico/USA)

3. Bowling for Columbine (Michael Moore, USA/Canada/Germany)

4. Karmen Geï (Joseph Gaï Ramaka, France/Senegal/Canada)

5. The Quiet American (Phillip Noyce, USA/Germany)

6. I'm Going Home (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal/France)

7. Adaptation (Spike Jonze, USA)

8. Blackboards (Samira Makhmalbaf, Iran/Italy/Japan)

9. Daughter from Danang (Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco, USA)

10. Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, USA)