Reviewed by Mark London Williams
Author: Jared Brown, 400 pages; Backstage Books; $29.95 By now, most of us know the filmmakers' pantheon of the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls era: Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, even grizzled Sam Peckinpah. Unjustly missing from that list, however, is Alan J. Pakula, who produced To Kill A Mockingbird while still a young man and went on, as a director, to make such films as Klute, The Parallax View, All the President's Men and Sophie's Choice. Jared Brown's new biography takes pains to give Pakula his due as a director, particularly for what has been labeled his "paranoid trilogy." Klute (1971) starts the cycle with Jane Fonda as a call girl stalked by an unseen villain, warily protected by the film's titular investigator, played by a young, relatively unknown Donald Sutherland. The other two corners of this particular triangle are 1974's The Parallax View and, coming in America's bicentennial year, All the President's Men. Brown records that this de-facto trilogy grew out of Pakula's motivating desire to make movies "about troubled individuals dealing with the sorts of problems, [both] social and emotional, that were all but ignored on television." The irony, of course, is that television, in the form of cable channels like HBO, is now the place where such stories tend to be told, given Hollywood's fondness for kinetic bloat. It wasn't always thus. After a long apprenticeship producing theater and film-the high-water mark being the film version of Harper Lee's iconic book To Kill a Mockingbird - Pakula began his own directing journey with The Sterile Cuckoo in 1969. It was a low-key, carefully observed romantic comedy, adapted by the director's lifelong friend, screenwriter Alvin Sargent, and it won an Oscar for star Liza Minnelli. But with the times, Pakula would rapidly shift gears, seeking and initiating film projects with a more resonant edge. Klute won another Oscar for its lead actress, Fonda, while All the President's Men was a big contender at the 1977 Academy Awards, only to be beaten out by the sentimental Rocky. Overlooked by the Oscars and, mostly, by audiences at the time, it's the middle film, The Parallax View, that stands as the sharpest of the three - particularly given what a contemporary viewing says about our present moment. Parallax posits that the proclaimed "lone nut" assassinations of the 1960s were, in fact, products of conspiracies, in this case of a specific corporate elite housed in The Parallax Corporation and working in conjunction with rogue elements in the U.S. government. The movie doesn't reference those epochal '60s assassinations directly, but instead opens - and closes - with the murders of two fictional politicians: the first, a liberal Senator, done in by a "waiter" during a speech in the Seattle Space Needle, and the last, a more folksy, Perot-like politician, killed in a convention hall while the political gathering set for his nomination is being set up. That both of these killings were unstoppable - with no way to even bring the perpetrators to justice, as renegade newspaper reporter Warren Beatty finds out in the most awful way possible - reflected the despair afoot in much of America, when the '60s dreams of a better world appeared definitively dashed. In turning his attention to the tale of how Woodward and Bernstein broke open the Watergate case, Pakula, with All the President's Men, seemed to be grasping for comfort after the bleak view of Parallax. President's Men portrayed its lead reporters as countercultural heroes, and showed that the system, however flawed, can correct itself and crooks can be brought to justice -- even if they're residing in the White House. There's no such assurance now. Though he made other films touching on political themes - the Oscar-winning Holocaust drama Sophie's Choice (1980) and the IRA-themed The Devil's Own (1997) - Pakula didn't return to making the kind of films that captured the political sensibilities of his time the way his 1970s oeuvre did. Still, it's interesting to speculate whether he'd find some Parallax-like conspiracy material in the skullduggery of the Bush Administration: two irregularity-ridden elections and a veritable mountain of scandals - all with a "gate" suffix, from "Plamegate" to "Votergate," "Iraqgate," and beyond. It's hard to imagine he'd portray the news media as crusading truth-seekers anymore, either. Today's reporter seems, at best, neutered; at worst, complicit. As Michael Wolff's recent Vanity Fair article about the punitive outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame points out, both Time and The New York Times knew for months that White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove was one of the leakers of Plame's identity. Wolff writes, "The greatest news organizations in the land had a story about a potential crime that reached as close as you can get to the President himself and they punted, they swallowed it, they self-dealt." That's a long way from Bob Woodward huddling in a Washington parking garage with Mark Felt. Alas, we'll never know what films Pakula might have made about Bush's America. When he died in a freak auto accident in 1998, he was prepping a would-be epic about another wartime president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Jared Brown's serviceable biography of Pakula may leave us wondering, but it should also restore the director to an underpopulated pantheon - not that of American auteurs who were great stylists (for all his virtues, Pakula was certainly no Welles), but that of American filmmakers willing to tackle social and political themes with relish. |
