Winning at failure

I highly recommend Too Big to Fail, the docudrama currently showing on HBO, and was surprised to find other critics somewhat less enthusiastic (MC-67).  Adapted from Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book of the same name, and directed by Curtis Hanson, this film concisely and comprehensibly gives a day-by-day account of the financial crisis of September 2008, with an astounding cast giving spot-on portrayals of the now all-too-familiar players, starting with William Hurt as Hank Paulsen, Billy Crudup as Timothy Geithner, and Paul Giamatti as an uncanny simulacrum of Ben Bernanke.  In the array of asshole bankers are James Woods, Bill Pullman, Tony Shaloub, and other familiar faces easy to recognize and easy to associate with the real characters.  I totally believed that this is how the crisis looked from the inside – perhaps an outside perspective is required for the total picture of the economic meltdown, but as personal drama this was informative and convincing.

On a lesser scale, I found another recent HBO docudrama worthwhile.  Cinema Verité (MC-74) recreates the filming of the Seventies fly-on-the-wall documentary series on PBS, “An American Family,” which may be considered the fount of “reality tv.”  The Loud family willy-nilly became a cultural phenomenon, their lives a topic of controversy on every side.  Made by the American Splendor pair of Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, this retrospect is equally adept at negotiating levels of reality, cutting from original documentary into re-creation.  Diane Lane is her reliably marvelous self as Pat Loud, and Tim Robbins is also excellent as Bill.  James Gandolfini is okay as the show’s producer, and the rest of the cast up to snuff.  It’s possible the film does not hold up without one’s own memories of the time portrayed, but the nostalgia is astringent rather than balmy.

I’d been planning to give Albert Brooks another look and Cinema Verité was the perfect lead-in to Real Life (1979), his take on the same phenomenon and startlingly prescient in many ways, despite being more a series of sketches than a real movie.  Brooks plays the obnoxious documentary producer who inserts himself as well as his crew into the lives of a “typical” American family, and is an equal opportunity satirist, mocking himself along with everyone else.  It’s all quite hilarious and biting.

Not quite so biting, and therefore not as great as it might have been is his Defending Your Life (1991).  The set-up is perfect -- Brooks is an advertising man who drives his new BMW off the lot and into an oncoming bus, and wakes up to find himself in Judgment City, an amusingly ordinary purgatory where the newly-dead are tried to see how much they have evolved above fear and whether they have to go back to earth for another crack at becoming a bigger brain.  The neurotic Brooks is not a good candidate to move on, as the key points of his life’s humiliations are reviewed, with Rip Torn not helping much as his defense attorney.  He meets a newly-dead woman whose benign calm makes her certain to move up; Meryl Streep, in an underwritten role, provides enough delight to make this sweetheart plausible.  The many funny complications in the process go mushy in an ending that must have been copped from The Graduate, but despite going soft at the end, this film about heaven is funny as hell.

Poor reviews had so far kept me from one film by Williams classmate and particular favorite of mine, writer-director John Sayles, but I finally caught up with Silver City (2004, MC-47).  The film has its moments, especially with Chris Cooper as a W. clone running for governor of Colorado, and a notable cast that includes Richard Dreyfuss as his Cheneyesque handler and Kris Kristofferson as the robber baron power behind the throne, but the story detours into a questionable murder mystery by an equally questionable investigator in Danny Huston.  Chinatown this ain’t, but I still look forward to more from Sayles.