|
Keeping the message in the movie >> Costa-Gavras returns with Mad City by MATTHEW HAYS
Although he made his first feature in 1964, Costa-Gavras didn't gain international attention until 1969, when he released Z. A well-acted, dramatic film based on an actual assassination and its political aftermath in Greece, Z soon found a broad audience, garnered heavy critical praise and eventually won the Best Foreign Film Oscar. Costa-Gavras again drew international praise with Missing (1982), another based-on-a-true-story film in which Sissy Spacek and Jack Lemmon starred as the wife and father (respectively) of an American political subversive who'd gone missing in Chile. The film was nominated for best picture and Costa-Gavras won his second Oscar for screenplay adaptation. Costa-Gavras is back this year with a new film and again he's tackling a social issue. The director, now 64, has corralled Dustin Hoffman, John Travolta and Alan Alda to star in his latest effort, Mad City. Travolta plays a disgruntled security guard who's just been laid off. He returns to the museum where he worked with a gun and some dynamite, only, he claims, to force his former boss to listen to his plea for help. Before he knows it his gun has accidentally gone off and he's taken an entire elementary classroom hostage. By chance Hoffman, playing a down-on-his-luck TV reporter, happens to be in the washroom after doing a routine story on the museum. He begins to report on the hostage-taking, forging a strange but opportunistic bond with the damaged Travolta. Before Hoffman can stop, the TV cameras are spinning things out of control, and the hero of the people he's helped to create is soon being manipulated by the media into something else entirely. Though the turf may sound well-trodden, Costa-Gavras says the film--co-penned by journalist Tom Matthews--doesn't really bash the media at all. "We don't try to say the media is evil. We even have John Travolta at one key point in the film saying TV is good. The media is a tool, a tool which isn't necessarily bad. If you crush your finger, it isn't because of the hammer, it's because of the guy who holds the hammer. The problem is who uses the tool and how they use it. This is really a movie about people." With Z and Missing, Costa-Gavras managed to make the political highly entertaining to mass audiences. But doesn't the director feel that by turning serious issues into matinee fodder he threatens to trivialize them? "People know when they're going to see a movie that they're seeing a show. It has to be entertaining, like a theatre play has to be entertaining. But it shouldn't just be empty and say nothing, it should say something about life. It should challenge people. "If people walk away from this movie and manage to watch the news with more critical eyes, it would be an extraordinary accomplishment." Opens Friday, Nov. 7. See film listings for showtimes
|
Whatever happened to the good old-fashioned message movie? Though they're often maligned, people forget that some truly great cinema has grown out of the effort to convey a political message. Think Italian neo-realism. See The China Syndrome. Or witness the films of Constantin Costa-Gavras.