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The East and The Lone Ranger. If one is a film and plays at Railroad Square and the other is a movie that plays at Flagship, that just means that they are aimed at different audiences. The story is the same. If you want to tell a story but don't think your audience is ready to hear it, then move the time frame to a familiar past with beloved characters; make a western. If you think your more limited audience is already mostly aware of what you want to say, then just go ahead and put the present reality in their faces: The East.
The message is the same: corporate greed destroys lives, corrupts government, and ruins the environment. To fight it, you have to wear the mask. The story is the same: idealistic establishment operative gets turned and joins the opposition. First the operative is embedded in an anti-corporate collective until he/she gets it; Johnny Depp is his own anarchist collective in the Lone Ranger. In The East, the operative becomes a kind of lone ranger, eschewing the more dangerous tactics of the collective and choosing instead to educate and turn the other operatives. Some reviewers saw this as ambivalence on the part of the film maker; I saw it as allowing more options in the good fight. The Disney Lone Ranger has terrific special effects and a lot of amazing train stunts; it also has, amid the silliness, a spirit horse who picks an unlikely warrior, a tragic Cherokee tribe and a shamanic figure who although comic never loses focus. Tonto is the counterpart of the deeply injured players Doc and Izzy in The East. The East has some terrific acting and directing, making us love the vulnerable humanity of the anarchist characters even as we shrink from their odd practices. Like Joan or rather Lena in Covert Affairs, Patricia Clarkson plays a chilly corporate boss, and the NYT reiewer thinks that Marling's slack-jawed, glassy-eyed passivity is an effective mirror of the audience’s ambivalence." The audience has to be apalled along with her if they are to later turn with her. Relatedly, in our own back yard, 350Maine's "jam" a couple of weeks ago seems prescient now given the horror in Lac-Mégantic. "That's why the most fitting response to Lac-Mégantic actually happened two weeks ago, by US residents 100 miles across the border in Fairfield, Maine. They were arrested blockading a train carrying the same fracked oil from the same oilfields of Northern Dakota, to the same refinery in New Brunswick, Canada. Their message was about ending our reliance on oil, not soon but now. For those who never knew the victims of Lac-Mégantic, there could be no better way to honour them." Something else to think about is that in a recent poll more than half of American voters think that Edward Snowden is a whistle-blower, not a traitor. |