Don't get me wrong: if I'd been there, I'd probably have been out marching in the street in defense of the play, too. But it's all so black and white: the lefties are noble, committed to their art, multi-culti and gender neutral, principled and brave. The forces against them are evil, oppressive, money-grubbing philistines, smug old white men who find sedition in a children's play called "Revolt of the Beavers" and whose art purchases fund Mussolini's war chest. I took most exception to this simple set-up when John Cusack's dashing tycoon, Nelson Rockefeller, orders Diego Rivera's mural in his lobby destroyed because the artist refuses to take Lenin's face off the painting. Robbins makes it seem like Rockefeller's love of art fails before his love of capitalism, but come on -- he's paying the guy to paint a specific mural in the lobby of the building with his name on it: I think he's got a right to draw the line at having Lenin's face gazing down on his visitors every day. Or maybe I just hate having John Cusack look bad.
The primary hook of this story is that the director of the play was Orson Welles (in a nice touch, Robbins runs the opening credits over a long tracking shot in homage to the one that opens Touch of Evil), but he's just one of many, many characters swirling around. The movie's bursting at the seams with talent, but there are so many characters and story lines that almost no one has a chance to register with us. We're left mostly with broad character sketches: Angus MacFadyen plays Welles as an autocratic, hypocritical boor; Emily Watson's Olive is the meek ingenue; John Turturro's Aldo stands on principle even when it hurts his family. A few performances do stand out: Cary Elwes has some great laugh-out-loud lines as the fatuous producer John Houseman; Ruben Blades brings some snap to Diego Rivera; Bill Murray is slow-burn funny as ventriloquist and proto-McCarthy (Joseph, not Charlie) Tommy Crickshaw, and best of all is Cherry Jones (not a porn star, despite the name) as Hallie Flanagan, the noble, idealistic head of the WPA theater project who gets grilled by a Congressional committee of self-satisfied old white men who twist her words around. Boy, glad that sort of thing doesn't happen in this day and age.
All that said, I did enjoy the movie. It's not one of the best of the year, or even one of the best in theaters right now, but it's a decent evening's entertainment. You won't see a better assemblage of actors in one place anywhere else until the Oscar telecast. And it's something of a history lesson, however slanted -- I didn't even know the WPA had a theater project.
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