Tonight is Hollywood’s big celebration of itself @OscarCeremony
and we all tune in to root for our favorites.
This year, two of the movies nominated for Best Picture deal with actual
historical events and both have had controversy swirling around them. #Argo
and @Zero Dark Thirty both
tell stories about events that actually happened. The controversies are based on how true to the facts these movies actually
may be. Are they “based on facts,” “ripped
from the headlines,” basically true but dramatized, or just possessed of a
little “truthiness?” There are lots of
opinions out there but they don’t necessarily agree.
Jimmy
Carter tells Piers Morgan that Argo doesn’t’ give enough credit to the
Canadians, who were the real heroes—and former Canadian
ambassador Ken Taylor agrees with him.
On NPR, Gary
Sick, who was the Iran specialist in the Carter administration, goes into
more detail on what actually happened and what was dramatized, such as the
security gauntlet at the airport. And Sandy
Schaefer on Screenrant
wonders whether the movie would have been better if it had stuck closer to the
truth.
For Zero Dark Thirty, the question of accuracy concerns two things: (1) whether
it “glorifies” the use of torture and depicts it as contributing valuable
information to the hunt for Bin Laden; and (2) how the film condenses years of information
gathering and analysis into a short period of time and a large group of people
into a few imaginary characters. In
regard to torture, the New York Times
says that, “senior
officials, right up to the president himself, were misled about the enhanced
interrogation program.” OpEdNews.com
wonders whether, “a
person who stands by knowingly as a crime is committed, and willingly uses the
products of that crime might in fact have the same degree of guilt as the
person directly committing the crime.”
The Wall Street Journal prefers Zero Dark Thirty as being “largely
faithful to reality,” and actually “understands the fight against Islamist
terrorism.” Meanwhile, Reuters says that
it, “fails
to capture the true nature of the work of those involved in his hunt and
capture.”
I think it’s interesting that everyone has a different take on the
torture scenes. I felt that they
depicted the actions of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld administration without showing
that any real value derived from the torture.
In the end, it’s Maya’s determination and perseverance that lead her to
Bin Laden.
So much of this online analysis is available that you can spend days reading it all. Here’s what I think:
they’re both movies that mix truth and fiction to produce a bankable
product. Zero Dark Thirty is a colder,
more dispassionate film while Argo has you on your feet and cheering for
something that happened 30 years ago. We
knew how both stories ended when we walked into the theater, so it’s really a
matter of which approach you prefer—or which movie did a better job of
entertaining you. Personally, I loved
Argo and I’m rooting for it tonight despite any flaws, although I think the
award is more likely to go to Lincoln.
In watching these movies, I also noticed something else. The men and women who were actually involved
in both real events did so with a calm, confident professionalism that
contrasted vividly with Hollywood’s usual action-hero braggadocio. They say it ain’t
bragging if you can do it, but the fact is, that the folks who really can do
it, don’t brag. Whether it’s exfiltration expert Tony
Mendez going into Iran to get the American diplomats out, Ambassador Ken Taylor
putting himself at risk by harboring them, or Seal
Team Six carrying out the raid in Abbottabad, they go about their work the
way we would want them to do. No one
says, “Make my day,” or “I’ll be back,” or, “Yippee-Ky-Yay MF.”
I understand why screenwriters put this kind
of rallying cry into the script but both Argo and Zero Dark Thirty prove that
it isn’t needed and, if fact, the movies can be far more gripping without the
bragging.
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