The Sapphires (**3/4)

The novelty of its subjects, an aboriginal girl group who cut their teeth entertaining the troops in Vietnam, just barely raises this above showbiz cliché. Despite being (loosely) based on a true story, the prejudicial episodes generate more sympathy than a true understanding of Australia’s history with its native population. But this isn’t Rabbit-Proof Fence, nor the failed epic that was Australia, so it doesn’t need to do that, but only to function as a streamlined underdog story with musical interludes. Funniest moment: Chris O’Dowd, as the semi-alcoholic emcee who becomes the group’s manager, telling them to drop their Merle Haggard covers and embrace soul.

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viewed 10/26/12 7:20 [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 10/30/12

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (***1/4)

It was a war begun under a false pretense that lasted way longer, was more deadly, and proved much more costly than predicted. The outcome was not as planned, and that severely impacted the political fortunes of the president who had poured hundreds of thousands of troops into a faraway country. That was Vietnam. People under 45 or 50 won’t remember Daniel Ellsberg, and yet his actions indirectly may have led to the downfall of a president and to one of the most important First Amendment verdicts by the United States Supreme Court.

Ellsberg’s goal was to end the Vietnam War, though. Through his job as a United States foreign policy analyst at the Rand Corporation, he had access to a top-secret report about the history of US involvement in Vietnam. Notably, it was top secret not because it would aid the enemy, but because it would demonstrate the deception of American presidents and the unreality of upbeat assessments about the likelihood of success. After handing the report to The New York Times and other newspapers, Ellsberg earned both a federal indictment and, from President Richard Nixon, the epithet that gives this film its title.

This can be seen as a companion piece to The Fog of War, the Errol Morris documentary that featured Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. McNamara and Ellsberg were both originally supporters of the war (though Ellsberg with more reservations), and both realized that the US was not, as President Lyndon Johnson had told the public, winning the war. But whereas McNamara felt, until decades later, that his duty was to be loyal to his boss, the president, Ellberg came sooner to feel otherwise. Directors Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith allow Ellsberg to narrate his own story, incorporating recent interviews of him and others. Stylistically, the movie is not noteworthy. There is no Philip Glass score a la Morris’s work to lend a sense of urgency, and no fancy graphics. Minor re-enactments of certain scenes are included, and period footage, but mostly the movie is a typical “talking heads” documentary. Almost all of the voices, though, are of those directly involved in leaking the document, in Ellsberg’s life, or in related matters. One academic, people’s historian Howard Zinn, appears, but as one who knew Ellsberg in the 1970s. Nixon is heard on tape, wondering in one excerpt whether dropping a nuclear bomb on Vietnam might not be a good idea.

While little new information is revealed, this is a very well organized look at a piece of history that any American ought to know.

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viewed 4/14/10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 4/15/10

The Baader Meinhof Complex (***1/2)

Neither apartment buildings nor a psychological condition is the subject of this drama. The title probably sounds better to German audiences, but something pithier like The Terrorists would have been better in translation. The RAF (Red Army Faction) were something like the Weather Underground, only the latter group targeted only buildings, whereas RAF didn’t mind killing its enemies, such as police and politicians they considered instruments of a corrupt state. Moreover, despite the violence, the RAF, unlike American radical groups, enjoyed a substantial level of support among the German youth who had grown up after the Nazi era.

The group grew out of the student movement of the 1960s. (See Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers for a very different look at the movement, in France.) The early sequence in which pro-Shah of Iran security forces and German police violently clash with peacefully protesting students feels as real as any riot scene I’ve seen, but the rest of the movie concentrates on violence committed by RAF members. The film more or less traces the history of the group from its origins in the 1960s student movement to the late 1970s.

Primary characters include two women. One is Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck), a leftist journalist who becomes radicalized upon witnessing police brutality and meeting Gudrun Esslin, a Mao-quoting firebrand who questioned the utility of words without deeds. Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu, of Run Lola Run and Munich), another RAF founder, was Esslin’s boyfriend. Esslin believed in drawing a thick line between friends and enemies and, as played by Johanna Wokalek, spends a good deal of the movie cursing the “pigs” and the capitalists and the American and German governments. The shrill rhetoric and general level of anger among the RAF members can become wearisome, but not dull. Esslin in particular is tremendously irritating, yet real, for which much credit must go to Wokalek.

Providing a calm counterpoint to the radicals, and welcome quieter cinematic interludes, are the scenes in which the government plans its counterstrategy. The film’s most recognizable actor, Bruno Ganz (Downfall’s Adolf Hitler), plays Horst Herold, head of the West German anti-terrorist force, Although the movie is no way polemical, when one of Herold‘s subordinates questions why Herold wants to understand what motivates the terrorists, it’s hard not to think of more recent differences of opinion on the same subject.

It’s also hard to tell what sort of a society the RAF would have wanted to create had they succeeded in defeating those they called imperialists, but the film presents a good view of their general worldview and the differences of opinion between somewhat more practical members like Meinhof, and less-cautious ones like Esslin. Neither overly bogged down in detail nor dumbed down, this brilliant German film clearly deserved its foreign-language film Oscar nomination and will appeal to those who like films such as Munich, thoughtful real-life thrillers. Despite the 2:30 length of the film and unfamiliarity of the subject matter to me, it was neither slow nor confusing. However, if the plotters in Munich were merely morally suspect, those here present the paradox of incredibly passionate people who might seem admirable had they applied that passion via less-appalling methods.

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viewed 9/23/09 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 9/23–24/09

Rescue Dawn (***)

Christian Bale plays Dieter Dengler, a German-born American fighter pilot shot down in his first mission early in the Vietnam War. Captured by the Viet Cong, Dengler immediately began plotting his escape along with other prisoners. Bale and other cast members, including Steve Zahn, lost a lot of weight to lend credibility to the conditions portrayed. The treatment by the Vietnamese is cruel, but is only shown enough to make that point. Nor is the film about politics. Director Werner Herzog, who profiled Dengler in a 1998 documentary, keeps the focus on his subject’s mixture of optimism and practical skills that allowed him to persevere. It’s a good story well told, and Bale brings a lot of personality to the role.

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reviewed 12/13/07; viewed 12/08/07 on an airplane screen with bad sound; my rating may have been higher had I seen it in a theater

The U.S. vs. John Lennon (***1/4)

? This documentary is broader than the title would suggest. Although the second half does explore the Nixon administration’s efforts to discredit and deport the former Beatle, who had moved to New York, nearly an hour is devoted to what preceded that. There’s a good deal of footage of both Lennon the political activist and other activities happening at the same time, mostly centered around anti-Vietnam War protests. Contemporary interviews of various leftish types such as Angela Davis, Gore Vidal, and George McGovern supplement the old clips.

+  The period footage of Lennon himself is most fascinating. This includes, for example, footage of Lennon and his second wife, Yoko Ono, co-hosting The Mike Douglas Show and featuring Black Panther Bobby Seale as a guest. There’s also Lennon/Ono’s famous “bed-ins” designed to raise awareness while placating a press fascinated by the newlyweds. While the singer’s aims were serious, he appeared not to take himself too seriously, unlike many of his contemporaries. The sight of thousands of demonstrators in Washington, DC, chant his simple hit song “Give Peace a Chance,” also reveals Lennon as a savvy marketer of nonviolence. (This footage is an upbeat change from the vulgar chant directed at the Johnson White House, seen earlier.) Ono is also one of the people interviewed by the filmmakers, and she’s helpful in explaining Lennon’s state of mind, which could be described as paranoid, except that the government really was out to get him.

- The movie’s a lot better at putting the investigations into the context of Lennon’s life than the activities of the Nixon administration, though there are some efforts in that direction. Watergate mastermind G. Gordon Liddy would appear to be the only pro-“establishment” figure interviewed. (Nixon White House counsel John Dean and a couple of 1970s FBI agents appear too, but expressing regret.) Additionally, I would have liked the film to further explore the effect of the investigations on Lennon’s psyche. One can presume that his move away from political music (along with his retreat from political activism) as well as his two-year “lost weekend” that began in 1973 might have stemmed from the stress created by the government’s lengthy efforts to deport him. But it would have been useful for the film to discuss this.

= ***1/4 A worthwhile film that will appeal to Lennon fans and students of cultural history, less to those interested in political skullduggery.

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Sir! No Sir! (**3/4)

The history of U.S. military opposition to the war in Vietnam, as told by the participants, raises as many questions as it answers.

David Zeiger’s debut feature tells the story of perhaps the most powerful drive to oppose the American war in Vietnam, the one within the American military. It began with isolated individuals but burgeoned in coffeehouses near military bases, in underground newspapers, and in Army barracks. (This was the war that gave rise to the term fragging, which referred to the killing of an officer by his own soldiers.) The movie is the history of a movement, not the story of the war itself. (For people who don’t know much about Vietnam, this isn’t the place to begin.) Nor is it particularly meant to persuade. Zeiger, a former protest organizer, more or less takes for granted his subjects’ view that the war was immoral and lets the ex-soldiers tell the story of what they did about it. There are no historians, no journalists (other than in period footage), and just about no non-soldiers in the interview segments at all, save the ubiquitous Jane Fonda. Fonda has been a lightning rod for critics of antiwar protesters for decades. Love her or hate her, though, the footage of her and others being cheered on at overseas rallies by thousands of in-uniform soldiers at the height of the war makes it clear that she spoke for a great many of the military rank and file. I would have liked to see more of an attempt to quantify the film’s implication that opposition to the war was the rule, not the exception, among the lowest ranks, but the period footage alone clarifies that this was a mass movement. (One statistic that the movie does throw out is that there were over half a million “incidents of desertion.”)

The sole reliance on the participants to tell the story is both the strength and weakness of the movie. It gives the film focus, but also raises many questions about which a historian’s perspective might shed light, such as the idea that the widespread reluctance of ground troops to carry out their missions was what caused President Nixon to switch to an air-based strategy. Near the end, the film explores a bit (not enough) of the revisionist history that has followed the war, notably the myth of the spit-upon Vietnam veteran. I’m not sure it completely justifies its subtitle, “The Suppressed Story of the GI Movement to End the War in Vietnam.” After all, the issue surfaced not long before this movie was produced in the presidential campaign of John Kerry (who’s not seen in the movie). Yet Kerry’s opportunistic strategy of portraying himself as a war hero, not a hero of the antiwar movement, suggests that those who supported the Vietnam War have been successful in framing the issue as one of protesters versus troops. In fact, Sir! No Sir! shows that the fierce debate about the war pervaded the military itself. As one veteran states, these soldiers weren’t proud of their service, and didn’t think themselves heroes, because what their government was asking them to do wasn’t heroic.

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posted and slightly revised 8/15/13