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These days, even animated films have an agenda
Issues become plot points as more movies aim to be 'about something'
JAY STONE, CanWest News Service
Published: Thursday, June 22, 2006Not too long ago, Bruce Willis and Avril Lavigne were at a press conference to talk about a movie they're in together. If you think it's odd that Bruce Willis and Avril Lavigne would be in a movie together, you'd better brace yourself, because as it turns out, they're in two movies together: as voice artists in the animated movie Over the Hedge, which is about animals that steal food from humans, and as real-life actors in the coming Fast Food Nation, a fictionalized retelling of the best-selling book about how bad chemicals are getting into our food and how we mistreat the immigrants who sneak into the United States to help prepare it, and so on.
By further coincidence, if that's what it is, both movies are about rampant consumerism in Western society. Fast Food Nation is all about that: its final scenes of an actual cow being slaughtered should reduce your hamburger consumption, at least for a day or two. Over the Hedge, which is in general a genial children's film, sneaks in the message when Willis's raccoon character says humans have no concept of "enough."
When journalists wanted to talk about this issue - the anti-rampant-consumerism thing seemed to constitute a trend, if not an imperative - Willis objected that while that was sort of true, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact Over the Hedge is not some Michael Moore documentary but is just an entertainment. The reason for this demurral, apparently, is that it might be hard to get the kids out to the cute raccoon film if they start reading on the op-ed pages about how it is yet another film that strikes a blow at the excesses of Western society.
So while it was a coincidence, it was a telling coincidence, the second generation, in a way, of a trend toward movies that are actually "about something," as a producer of my acquaintance noted the other day.
The producer was one of the men responsible for the 2004 film Hotel Rwanda, which may have been the first of the new "about something" movies that really had an impact in the marketplace.
It's parenthetically interesting that while that movie was the first popular exploration of a conflict that was mostly ignored while it happened, Rwanda has become a mini-industry in the movies: current projects either in theatres, about to be released or being filmed include Un dimanche a Kigali, which gives a reporter's view of the Rwandan slaughter; the Michael Caton-Jones film Shooting Dogs, set in Kigali; and Shake Hands with the Devil, based on the Romeo Dallaire book about his experiences fighting to save lives in a place the world didn't seem to care about until there was a film about it.
Rwanda is just part of what's going on in cinema: last year's menu of issue films ranged from Crash (racism) to The Constant Gardener (bad pharmaceutical companies) to Good Night, And Good Luck (McCarthyism and freedom of speech) to Syriana (American imperialism) to Munich (Israel and the morality of revenge.)
That's not counting the many documentaries, of which the most prominent current example is Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, a warning shot across the bow of global warmers (that's us, folks.) United 93 took a substantive view of the events of 9/11, and the coming Oliver Stone film World Trade Centre has all the markings of another difficult drama that is also "about something" in a stricter sense than, say Mission Impossible: 3 was "about" how Tom Cruise looks while he's running.