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They Both Reached for the Gun
By FRANK RICH
Printed in the New York Times March 23, 2003 Posted
by T. Maithland, Detroit.
In Honour of the Oscars, Frank Rich comments on a spineless American
media
To see why "Chicago" became the movie of the year in a year
when America sleepwalked into war, you do not have to believe it is the
best picture of 2002 (mine would be Almodóvar's "Talk to Her").
Nor must you believe that musical comedy is making a comeback in Hollywood
(it's barely holding its own on Broadway, where even "Hairspray"
has empty seats). All you have to do is watch a single scene.
That scene is a press conference in 1920's Chicago. A star defense attorney,
Billy Flynn (Richard Gere), wants to browbeat a mob of reporters into
believing that his client, Roxie Hart (Renée Zellweger), did not
murder her lover when in fact she did. "Now remember," Billy
coaches Roxie, "we can only sell them one idea at a time." The
idea: Roxie acted in self-defense. "We both reached for the gun,"
Roxie sings to the reporters, who obediently turn her lie into a rousing
chorus, repeating it over and over in a production number that portrays
them as marionettes, bowing and scraping to the tug of Billy's strings
and spin.
For history's sake, this spectacle should be paired on the DVD with George
W. Bush's fateful White House press conference of March 6, 2003. This
was the president's first prime-time faceoff with reporters since a month
after 9/11 and certain to be his last in what remained of peacetime. The
former Andover cheerleader had failed to convince America's friends to
come aboard. The economy was tanking. But the journalists at hand were
so limply deferential to the president's boilerplate script that the subsequent,
good-natured "Saturday Night Live" parody couldn't match the
gallows humor of the actual event.
One reporter, April Ryan of American Urban Radio Networks, asked, "Mr.
President, as the nation is at odds over war, how is your faith guiding
you?" - a God-given cue for Mr. Bush to once more cloak his moral
arrogance in the verbal vestments of humble religiosity. "My faith
sustains me because I pray daily," came the president's reply. "I
pray for peace, April, I pray for peace." Far be it from Ms. Ryan
to ask a follow-up question about why virtually every religious denomination
in the country, including Mr. Bush's own, opposes the war. She might as
well have been Mary Sunshine (Christine Baranski), the sob sister reporter
in "Chicago," who tosses Roxie an image-burnishing softball
at her press conference by asking, "Do you have any advice for young
girls seeking to avoid a life of jazz and drink?"
At Mr. Bush's sedated show there were no raised voices, not a single query
about homeland security or Osama bin Laden. As Billy Flynn says, one idea
at a time is enough for the journalistic pack - in this case the administration's
idée fixe of Iraq. And like their "Chicago" counterparts,
the Washington press corps were more than willing to buy fictions if instructed
to do so by the puppeteer. "Eight times [Mr. Bush] interchanged the
war on Iraq with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001," wrote The New York
Observer, "and eight times he was unchallenged." The unproven
but constantly reiterated White House claim of a Qaeda-Saddam Hussein
connection has now become a settled fact, not to be questioned at a press
conference any more than any "Chicago" reporter challenges the
mythical pregnancy Billy Flynn flogs in his propaganda campaign to save
Roxie Hart.
The movie's press conference ends with Billy Flynn's message spreading
from the servile reporters' lips directly
to the next morning's paper: "THEY BOTH REACHED FOR THE GUN"
is the banner headline we see rolling off the press. At Mr. Bush's press
conference, under the guise of "news,"
CNN flashed the White House's chosen messages in repetitive rotation on
the bottom of the screen while the event was still going on - "People
of good will are hoping for peace" and " `My job is to protect
America.' " No less obliging were the puppets at CNN's rival, Fox
News, whose Greta Van Susteren sharply observed: "What I liked tonight
was that in prime time he said to the American people, my job is to protect
the American people." Though Mr. Bush usually appears on TV in front
of White House backdrops stamped with the sound bite he wants to pummel
into our brains, this time he didn't even have to bother. As he knew -
and said, in his one moment of truth that night - the entire show was
"scripted." It has been from the start.
That "Chicago" should catch the wave of an American moment in
2003 is remarkable when you consider that its roots go back to a Broadway
play of 1926. Coolidge was in office when it had its premiere at the Music
Box Theater under the direction of George Abbott - more than a year before
the arrival of the most famous stage incarnation of Chicago city rooms,
"The Front Page." "Chicago" was the first and only
durable work by Maurine Watkins, a one-time Chicago Tribune reporter who
had covered the Leopold-Loeb case and served as a movie critic. She was
not enamored of her former profession. "They're awful dumb, reporters.
Never get anything right," says the jail matron in a line that is
paraphrased by Billy Flynn in Bill Condon's current screenplay.
When Watkins's play was reborn as a Bob Fosse musical on Broadway in 1975,
it was seen as reflecting the cynicism of Watergate; the onstage band
played a sardonic "Battle Hymn of the Republic" at the finale.
When the musical was revived in 1996 - in the production still running
on Broadway - Billy Flynn was identified with Johnnie Cochran and Roxie
with O. J. Simpson. This year Miramax, the studio that produced the film
"Chicago," is trumpeting the movie's social relevance in one
of the relentless commercials of its Oscar campaign. The movie is "all
about American institutions being corrupt," says its director, Rob
Marshall, as we see black-and-white photographs of Bob Woodward and Carl
Bernstein and of the disgraced Richard Nixon's departure from the White
House.
That doesn't sound much like fun. But as concocted by Mr. Marshall, "Chicago"
is nasty, clever fun. The director is a bit of a Billy Flynn in his own
right. He has edited the movie within an inch of its life - or, more accurately,
within an inch of Ms. Zellweger, Mr. Gere and Catherine Zeta-Jones's feet.
You're never quite sure if the stars can really dance or if the dazzling
montage is merely spinning the brilliant illusion that they can. But if
the film is a "flimflam flummox," to quote its anthem, "Razzle
Dazzle," that stylistic shell game could not be in more apt unison
with the cynical content.
No one expected "Chicago" to become this big a hit (including
me, though I've known two of its executive
producers since they optioned a book of mine pre-"Chicago").
The movie's domestic box office is now
double that of "Moulin Rouge," the only other movie musical
to fly in years, and, unlike that predecessor, "Chicago" didn't
have to throw in David Bowie and Beck to entice the musical-phobic youthful
demographic thought to spurn show tunes by John Kander and Fred Ebb. Young
audiences have turned up anyway. Everyone has. The film has touched a
nerve this year as no previous incarnation of Watkins's play (there were
two previous film versions) ever did.
In a case of life imitating art imitating life, "Chicago" is
even mirrored in the year's juiciest Oscar scandal.
Miramax, no wiser for fielding a TV ad trumpeting the Watergate bona fides
of "Chicago," was caught in its own Watergate last week by John
Horn of The Los Angeles Times. He reported that a publicist for the studio
was the real author of a widely promoted OpEd piece carrying the byline
of the director Robert Wise, now 88, endorsing Martin Scorsese as best
director for another Miramax nominee, "The Gangs of New York."
In angry response, some Academy voters demanded their ballots back so
they could cancel their Scorsese votes - a mission as doomed as the reballoting
demanded by Palm Beach County's hapless Pat Buchanan voters. No matter:
Mr. Scorsese has lost anyway, even if he wins. His would-be benefactor,
Miramax's Harvey Weinstein, has made him look craven.
Such Oscar battles are welcome comic relief when set against the backdrop
of a real-life war. Which is not to
say that this year's Oscar nominees don't take war seriously. In Roman
Polanski's World War II drama, "The Pianist," a Nazi is moved
to save a Jew's life after the Jew, starving and half-dead, plays an exquisite
Chopin nocturne at the piano. This sentimental notion of art's transcendence
über alles was echoed early last week in the vow by the Oscars' producer,
Gil Cates, that the show (if not the red carpet) would go on tonight no
matter what. After all, the Academy considered and rejected the notion
of canceling in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Should Mr. Cates have reversed
himself by now, he will have committed the cardinal Oscar sin of good
taste.
It's hard to picture George W. Bush fretting about the fate of the Academy
Awards, let alone seeing "Chicago," but he knows his westerns.
Last weekend Vice President Cheney spoke admiringly to Tim Russert of
how the president "cuts to the chase." In the Azores last Sunday,
Mr. Bush instructed his erstwhile allies to "show your cards when
you're playing poker." On Monday night, he gave the Hussein gang
48 hours to get out of Dodge. In the days to come, we just may finally
learn who is brought back dead or alive.
By FRANK RICH
Printed in the New York Times March 23, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/arts/23RICH.html?ex=1049431773&ei=1&en=756477cb5fc30852
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