So Lieberman and Stone walk into a bar

August 10, 2006 By

9553 posterI spent yesterday in an unformfortable chair waiting to see if I has going to end up on a jury. There’s a good chance I’ll be back in one of those chairs again in the days ahead. The good news is that this allowed me to read some long articles that I had torn out of magazines in recent days and stashed in my battered DC-commuter shoulder bag.

Thus, I read all of last week’s Newsweek cover package about Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center while the courthouse television monitors over my head droned on and on about the results of the Connecticut primary (when they were not stuck on the Game Show Channel). I also read the negative — but fascinating — review by Desson Thomson in The Washington Post.

You know what I think? I think that if Sen. Joe Lieberman and director Oliver Stone got together for a beer this weekend, they’d have a lot to talk about.

I have not seen Stone’s film yet (I think young master Pulliam has), but I was pitched information about it by public-relations people who stressed that it was highly spiritual and very straightforward about the facts of the events, as opposed to being an Oliver Stone-ish flight into up-to-date political commentary about Iraq. This was a movie, I was told, in which Stone attempted to be nonpartisan and reach out to people who might disagree with him on a wide range of political and cultural issues. It showed respect for faith and ordinary Americans, especially cops and others in uniform — like Port Authority officers John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno.

The goal was to hit the middle of the American bullseye, in terms of demographics. This would not be a looney movie.

Sounds like Lieberman would like it, doesn’t it? I mean, Stone even dared to show his admiration for that great old-fashioned Democrat Frank Capra. Yikes. Check out this passage in David Ansen’s lead feature:

Stone was determined to be faithful to the factual details of John and Will’s experience, and that takes him places you may not expect an Oliver Stone movie to go. Jimeno was sustained in this long ordeal by an actual vision of Jesus, and Stone shows us that vision as Will might have seen it. …

One of the two men who first found McLoughlin and Jimeno was Sgt. David Karnes (Michael Shannon), a character many preview viewers wrongly assumed was a pure Hollywood contrivance. Karnes, an ex-Marine and devout Christian who was working as an accountant in Connecticut on 9/11, felt called to Ground Zero by God. He shaved his head, donned his old uniform and drove to New York (in a Porsche 911 — a portentous omen the movie omits for fear of stretching our credulity too far). Karnes then talked his way through the security lines and, miraculously, located the men buried in the wreckage. His eyes blazing with zealous righteousness, Karnes will be seen by some as a moral paragon, by others as a “nut job,” as one of the rescue workers refers to him. What no one can deny is that his heroism helped save these men’s lives. Stone makes no judgment.

wtc2This cover package was sort of strange, with elements of hard news mixed together with personality profiles and passages that seemed like an early and glowing review. But I think Ansen was right to focus on the fact that this movie about 9/11 would be controversial because, well, Stone elected not to make it controversial. The director played it straight, even when it came to the religious zealots. He declined to pass judgment and tried to make a film for everyone. He tried to find the middle, risking elite rejection.

Well, Sen. Lieberman, is the middle gone? Can Americans pause to reflect on Sept. 11 and find some kind of unity of purpose or calling?

For all I know, the movie may not be all that good. But you know Stone has to feel that many of the media people who normally would cheer for him are, instead, slapping his wrist (at the very least). Check out this section of the Post review by Thomson:

The filmmakers have omitted a wider context — something as conspicuous by its absence as the towers themselves. Five years on, most of us understand that day as the opening chapter of a continuing, agonizing chronicle. We crave perspective — even from a movie that specifically limits itself to one claustrophobic corner of the story. Why reprise this story without the hindsight of Afghanistan, Iraq, Madrid and London? One of the only allusions to the post-9/11 world is a Marine’s passing comment that we should avenge ourselves — which feels oddly ironic, given our failure to capture Osama bin Laden.

I’m not sure precisely what that passage means, to tell you the truth. But I think Stone and Lieberman would have an interesting time discussing it.

Print Friendly

Filed Under: Film, Journalism, Pop Culture
About TMatt

Terry Mattingly directs the Washington Journalism Center at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. He writes a weekly column for the Scripps Howard News Service.

  • Larry Rasczak

    I think you have hit on something very important when you say Sgt. David Karnes was “wrongly assumed was a pure Hollywood contrivance”.

    As a Christian, Texan, Republican, and an Army Reservist I have had the great honor of knowing a many many fine people just like Sgt. Karnes. In my not so humble opinion they are the folks that hold this country together.

    That the reviewers would simply assume that such people simply could not exist… well that says a great deal about the reviewers, their world, and the cultural gap that separates the two groups.

  • http://www.tmatt.net tmatt

    Of course, I didn’t say that. Newsweek did.

    And note the Fields comment on the WashTimes op-ed page this morning on the same topic. This is a conservative spin, of course. But you know people on the left are slapping Stone with precisely the same angle, as a negative:

    Oliver Stone resists the interpretation of the lone Marine, but the movie sends it in spite of the director’s well-known politics. It’s impossible not to watch two hours of unrelenting suffering without confirming the voice of the Marine who speaks as if a Greek chorus: “We’re going to need some good men out there to avenge this.” Mr. Stone was encouraged to cut this line, but couldn’t because it rendered the young Marine as real.

    The Marine is a man of humility, who fuses his military training with a spiritual incentive to do God’s work. He seeks no glory. When someone asks his name and he replies with the long title, “Marine Staff Sgt. David W. Larnes,” the inquirer wants something shorter to remember with his heroism. “Staff sergeant,” he says. He is generic military hero and the filmmaker concedes that he represents the point of view of many — most — Americans.

  • larry

    I would not consider Lieberman to have ever been a moderate, nor do I think moderate itself is a meaningful term. Unless is is code for someone who tries to define a “compromise” on life/death issues.

    What Karnes and Lieberman have in common is the Connecticut accounting establishment. Look up Lieberman’s part in helping Enron along its merry way. (I think Moyers did a decent piece on this.) This sort of thing has been a part of Lieberman’s undoing and is the sort of thing to undo incumbents from any party in any place.

  • http://www.getreligion.org Mollie

    I saw the movie the other night and was very moved by it. The religious themes are well done and very true to each character. It’s a deeply moral and very humanist film — and unlike the Post’s Thomson, I found Stone’s restraint to be almost shocking.

    I was sitting in a theater filled with folks who bristled at the few scenes of President Bush — my NW DC crowd was not Republican — but I got the feeling that my fellow moviegoers felt the movie was good as well.

  • Robert Imbelli

    The Washington Post review, though critical of the film, refers to the vision of Christ that sustained the younger of the police officers. Desson Thomson says that some may be moved by the special effects image, while other my find it “distressingly hokey.”
    A.O. Scott, in his more positive review of the movie in the New York Times, makes absolutely no mention of the vision.

  • http://www.getreligion.org Mollie

    I might also point out this paragraph from an article on Slate yesterday about inaccuracies in the film:

    As for Dave Karnes, his role as one of two Marines to locate McLaughlin and Jimeno by searching the pile when the professional rescuers had backed off is based on reported accounts and fictionalization, since he didn’t cooperate with the film’s producers. Rather than work on a picture in Hollywood, Karnes re-enlisted in the Marines at age 45 “to go after the people who did this so it never happens again,” as he told me. (When his first tour of duty didn’t take him to Iraq, he re-upped for a second tour and made it to the combat zone, serving 17 months there.) In the movie, Karnes leaves his Wilton, Conn., office, dons his old Marine fatigues, stops to get a Marine Corps haircut, and visits his pastor on his way to Ground Zero. While these events are mostly accurate, the film seems to overplay his zeal without conveying his motivations and reasoning. In reality Karnes wanted to dress the part of a Marine for access to an all-but-sealed Lower Manhattan. In the movie, many of Karnes’ lines are cryptic religious references that make him seem like a robotic soldier of Christ—a little wacky and simplistic. This may be why test audiences didn’t believe he existed, according a report in Newsweek. The man I interviewed, while he embodied extraordinary inner conviction, was a real human being who took risks that most of us didn’t.

  • Discman

    The half-filled theater I saw the film with, at a preview screening last week, included its share of criers and throat-clearers.

    And I could swear, if it’s even possible to determine such a thing in a darkened auditorium, that all of those “cry-babies” — myself included — were the MEN in the audience.

    The Karnes character is the film’s most interesting. He also gets the best line in the film, delivered to the men below the rubble. It really brought on the emotion for me.

  • Larry Rasczak

    Anybody read the “Houses of Worship” colum by Naomi Schafer Riley in the August 11th WSJ?

    Deals with Lieberman and the “religious left”.

    Intersting.

    Was hoping to see what the folks here thought of it.