THE EAST
In The East, a film
showcased at the Sundance Festival, co-writer and up-and-coming star Brit
Marling plays Sarah, a young private-sector spy keen to do well for her agency.
She has to keep her assignments so secret she tells her nearest and dearest
she’s off to Dubai when really she’s just a drive away in the deep woods,
infiltrating a troublesome band of youthful anti-corporate eco-terrorists. She
lives with them, learns their ways, and becomes assimilated in order to uncover
their schemes to disrupt big business – a service much coveted by those same
businesses. But the experience is so intense, this monkey-wrench gang gradually
starts to change her. Whenever the unit temporarily disbands and she
heads back to her normal city life, she feels like she has come back from a
foreign country, only now it’s her home that feels foreign.
The East is named
after the fictitious anarchist collective Sarah spies on -- a mysterious,
much-hyped group of rebels out to punish mega-corps which heartlessly destroy
the planet or poison masses of human beings. The movie is many things – spy
caper, romance, psychological drama, crime thriller, coming-of-age story,
animal-friendly environmentalist lament – but it is perhaps predominantly a
journey-to-another-world. Like Alice or Dorothy, once covert agent Sarah slips
into the woods, she finds herself in an alien, Looking-Glass world. There are
no surreal talking animals in this universe, but with the very first initiation
rite Sarah can see she’s “not in Kansas anymore” – and that she’s out of her
element. Tough as nails and primed for a fight, Sarah is astonished to discover
that battle isn’t really the point here among all the soul-baring and trust
exercises.
Of course, Sarah is a stand-in for the audience, so Marling
and writing partner Zal Batmanglij (the film’s director) peel away the outer
layers of the forest-dwelling radicals incrementally, letting us first see them
the way she would. The most immediately alienating is Benji (an ardent
Alexander Skarsgård), who comes off at first as a Charles Manson-like cult
leader. His hair is archaically, kiddingly, long, and he appears to hold a
privileged status in the commune-like encampment from which he delights in
breaking newcomers’ spirits. Then there’s diminutive Izzy (Ellen Page), so
solemn and ideologically fierce she seems like the most potentially dangerous.
And though the group turns to Doc (Toby Kebbell) for medical help, his manner
and his simple home remedies are so unorthodox his ministrations seem likely to
do more harm than good. Yet before too long Benji’s wild tresses have been
shorn, Izzy has revealed her soft side, Doc’s qualifications have been
affirmed, and we, along with Sarah, have gained insights into this band’s
traumas, regrets, and vision.
Though Batmanglij and Marling disapprove of these activists’
tactical choices when they injure others, we can see, eventually, how much
respect they have for the young outliers’ heartfelt motivations, and for their
willingness to explore an alternate form of living. Rather than just showing the surface trappings of
counterculture, The East tries to get
inside all this experimental living and find out what it’s really all about.
(Marling and Batmanglij were inspired to write the film because they spent a
few months living with squatting freegans.) And often the script is quite deft
in the economical way it scores its points. The first dinner at the East’s
remote hideout is a clever, visual way to show the group’s internal philosophy
of interdependence. Then, at a climactic juncture, Sarah finds herself
impulsively eating from a trashcan to illustrate the principles of freeganism –
it’s a perfect merger of story, theme, character revelation, and eloquent
speech-writing. It’s also a moment of humor/suspense that works beautifully.
Kudos are definitely due to Batmanglij and Marling for
navigating a minefield with this kind of story: they could have easily fallen
into preachiness either for or against their characters. Instead, Benji’s
lynchpin character is variegated enough for Sarah and the audience to change
our opinion of him in each of the film’s three acts. Likewise Sarah’s boss at
the agency, the wonderful Patricia Clarkson, is never a cartoon but moves
deliciously from mentor to formidable opponent.
The East doesn’t make
us choose between collectivism and the power of one – it honors both. Its
slight of build yet tightly-coiled heroine – thanks to a visceral performance
by the ferociously intelligent Marling -- is a mesmerizing protagonist. She’s
no latex-squeezed, ultra-competent action-heroine, but is instead serious and
resourceful, sensitive and relatable, and she pays a high cost for her
achievements. But after learning about harmony, equality, and unity from the
rebels, she comes out the other side as an exemplar of the idea that one person
can make a difference. It is thanks to her dynamic character that the film is
able to pull off its balancing act, conveying the notion that: in questions of
morality, even when the goals are harmony, equality, and unity, perhaps one’s
own conscience is the only reliable arbiter.
Along the way, Marling and Batmanglij expose something that
gets very scant attention – corporate spying on citizen activists – and at a
time when Edward Snowden has made people more conscious of the extent to which
our communications are being captured as a matter of course, this film couldn’t
be more timely. Without lecturing (except briefly, in the sequence where Izzy
confronts her CEO dad), The East manages
to convey searing criticism of current business as usual in the U.S. of A. It
is one of the most eloquent and vital movies indicting late capitalism you
could hope to see, underpinning its twisty, surprising climax with the burning
philosophical problem: how can we save the world?
The film provides no easy answers but is on the side of the
angels -- it promotes, without spelling it out too much, mutual respect,
co-operation, open-mindedness, and educating the public. It is clear that Batmanglij
and Marling believe in film as a force for social change. But they also realize
that to be effective they must be disciplined in providing us with compelling
characters, a gripping conflict, and a tight story structure. They deliver all
that in spades. The East lays down the
gauntlet for other fiction filmmakers to retain a strong point-of-view on hot
political topics and make an exciting entertainment to boot.
THE COMPANY YOU KEEP
Robert Redford’s Sundance Festival gave Batmanglij and
Marling’s film its premiere, and Redford even cast Marling in a pivotal
supporting role in his own film The Company You Keep -- clearly he wasn’t concerned about the
similarities between the two indies, though they were released within weeks of
each other this spring. There certainly are similarities, though. The
East and The Company You Keep are both thought-provoking political thrillers about
a small group of domestic left-wing militants who are designated as terrorists
by authorities. Both show the radicals’ driving forces to be reactions against
mass-scale atrocities perpetrated by those in power. And both films clearly
condemn violence as a tool of political resistance.
Still, Redford’s film has its own precedents. It seems to
make sense to view The Company You Keep as
the third film in a Redford trilogy about the ‘War on Terror’. I haven’t heard
him describe any such trilogy, but Redford’s last three films seem very much
concerned with the post 9/11 era and the direction the country has taken. The
first, Lions for Lambs (2007),
was a politically laudable but artistically dull and didactic Bush-era anti-war
screed. The second, the superb and moving drama The Conspirator (2010), was set in the maelstrom right after
Lincoln’s assassination yet was indisputably modern in its portrait of the
oppressiveness of railroading military tribunals like those Bush had brought
into the fore as part of the ‘War on Terror.’ Most of the referents in
Redford’s third film of the trilogy, The Company You Keep, are
to the 1960’s and 1970’s, but the film is set in modern times, and its subject matter is terrorism, unjust
war, and dissent. No doubt it wasn’t just a historical exercise.
The Company You Keep, like
Redford’s prior two films, is the story of an older man, an educated liberal,
who mentors an antagonistic or disengaged young upstart. In Lions for
Lambs it was Redford as a university prof
teaching apathetic student Andrew Garfield to care more about what his
government is up to; in The Conspirator it was Tom Wilkinson handing over a complex defense case to Civil War
veteran James McAvoy. Here it is Redford once again, as an aging attorney who
is an upstanding citizen working for the public good. He scolds cocky rookie
reporter Ben (Shia LaBeouf) – even while fleeing him half-way across the country.
The chase begins because LaBeouf’s ambitious stringer discovers that Redford’s
small-town lawyer is a big-time outlaw, an ex-member of a militant 1960’s
group, and a fugitive from the FBI because of his secret terrorist past.
The mentoring dynamic throughout Redford’s trilogy may
simply be a natural outcome of Redford being in his 70’s and being highly
successful, sought-after, and opinionated. Yet, if there’s one overriding
aspect of Company which prevents it from
being truly politically effective, it might be the film’s underlying ageism –
an elevation of those politicos over 60 and a patronizing slant on the
uninformed under-40s. The movie evinces an implicit belief that Hippies were
much more aware and engaged than Tweeters are. The politicized people in Company
are all above a certain age (played by
Redford, Nick Nolte, Sam Elliott, Julie Christie, Susan Sarandon, Richard
Jenkins, and Brendan Gleeson). By contrast, none of the young adults in the
film (LaBoeuf, Marling, Anna Kendrick, and Terrence Howard, who plays an FBI
agent) are politically opinionated – except, perhaps, about terrorism. The
ex-hippies express passionate views in the film on current events, but the
young people are more concerned with their careers, schooling, and personal
lives. It’s weird that the retirement-age radicals who flee to the deep woods
in Company somehow have no idea
that anyone like the young rebels of The East could be hiding out too; in Company’s world, activism seems to have halted in the mid
1970s.
This isn’t to say the youngsters don’t have winning
personalities. LaBoeuf’s cheeky, devious, irreverent reporter uses some of the
sly techniques Redford himself used, alongside Dustin Hoffman, in All the
President’s Men. He is also the Tommy Lee
Jones character to Redford’s Harrison Ford, for just as in The
Fugitive we find ourselves pulled in both
directions, unsure whether to root for pursuer or pursued. But ultimately, the
view of the press evinced by Company is that it is both shallow and overzealous: Ben’s doggedness in
pursuing the ex-Weatherman is cast in a similar vein as Sally Field’s
destructive investigative reporting in Absence of Malice.
Unlike the fictitious anti-corporate group living on the
fringes in The East, the organization
under scrutiny in Company is a
real domestic terrorist organization: the infamous albeit small revolutionary group which dubbed themselves
the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), formed in 1969 as a splinter of the
Students for a Democratic Society. Discouraged by the failure of mass protest
to end either the war in Vietnam or virulent racism at home, the Weather
Underground chose to make bombs and try to overthrow the U.S. government. They
were of course eschewed and condemned by the large protest movements of the
time, but became more infamous.
Though the kernel of Company is based on actual history, the names of the former Weather members are
fictional and the characters composites. Dramatic license is taken to fashion a
mystery about decisions of the past. It is not a literal evaluation of the
Weathermen, it doesn’t care about the exact details of their tactics, whether
there was any discipline to their goals of property destruction (warnings were
generally issued so buildings could be evacuated) or how exactly they crossed
the line into violence against living beings. (There is a documentary about the
Weathermen to cover that, however – Ben is even shown watching it as research
in this movie.) The facts, which Company doesn’t dwell over, are that three members of the
WUO died while bomb-building, and three security officers were killed during a
Brinks truck robbery staged by a couple of ex- WUO members -- who got sentenced
to life, and 22 years, in prison. But Company is quite vague about the internal workings of WUO,
or what led to the deaths of innocent people, because its characters are
composites and because it doesn’t recreate the events of the fateful day – it
is enough for the moral probing of the movie simply to establish that people
died. There is a central mystery, but it manages to lie beyond the details of
the long-ago crime; the film is not much interested in forensics, and focused
instead on the human heart.
Screenwriter Lem Dobbs has adapted Neil Gordon’s novel The
Company You Keep for this film. It is a
book first published in 2003, long before the McCain-Palin campaign brought the
Weather Underground back into the spotlight with charges that co-founder Bill
Ayers knew Obama in Chicago. But the novel did emerge as Bush was laying the groundwork
to make the world America’s battlefield. And like The East, this story asks the question of whether or not the ends justify the
means, of whether criminally violent resistance against powerful criminals is
warranted when the system itself is so violent to so many. Not too
surprisingly, the answer in both films is no.
Author Gordon seems especially pissed off at the WUO: “I
don’t think highly of the positions the Weather Underground took and I don’t
believe that political violence was an effective or appropriate tool”, he told
an interviewer. And he blames the WUO for an awful lot: “when Weather broke up
SDS, which they did violently, undemocratically, and with huge cruelty, they
destroyed what could have been an enormous, powerful progressive movement in
this country…The American left never recovered.”
*
The trouble with having two back-to-back films which debate
a choice between violent and non-violent resistance is that, surely,
non-violence won that debate for most people long ago. It is not a major
question for the millions of people who oppose corporate and imperialist agendas.
Given that it sure isn’t every day that features about left-wing dissent hit
the big screen, when two in the same season depict committed grassroots
activism as extremist, violent militancy, there is definitely the chance of
creating the wrong impression about those movements. And right-wing blowhards
would love to milk that wrong impression and spread it to PETA, Greenpeace, peace marchers, and many others who
try to fight the systems of cruelty and oppression the right would like to
protect.
Of course, that is not what any of these filmmakers would
want. Neil Gordon argues: “There is a great pathos to the history of the
American left. Its death is the saddest story of our country…[W]hen we look at
it from the vantage of today, where America, for all its power, has near–pariah
status throughout the world, it can only make us long for the lost ideals of
our country.” Both films want to take a complex view, to mourn the wasted
opportunities for change when people with noble motives abandon core
principles. Both of them keep alive the idea that an unjust system and the need
for resistance still remain.
The flaw with the approach of nostalgia and bitter regret in
Company is that though the characters
may find clarity, they don’t
offer much of a solution to the audience
– beyond an assertion that parents should take care of their children.
(Despite his age, Redford’s character is often shown, in rather cloying scenes,
as a dutiful father to a prepubescent daughter, and his commitment is a pillar
of the film.) It’s true that nothing requires art to provide solutions, and
often asking questions or exposing problems is enough. But we are dealing with
the future of the planet and human civilization, and it would be nice to have
something to go on. I get that the theme of Company is the importance of taking personal responsibility,
and that this could very well be interpreted as a responsibility to become more
active and engaged. But the metaphor of progeny-over-politics could also make
any conservative family-values champion proud – they might not admit it, but
that message is right up their alley. It is also, whether intentionally or not,
a kind of argument in favor of disengagement.
The East takes a
different approach from The Company
You Keep in many ways. The
characters feel rawer and more immediate. It’s less reserved, and it has a more
youthful energy. And it has more
relevance in the issues it presents: it’s about the state of the union right
now, and the examples of corporate lawlessness targeted by the East’s
members are loosely based on true recent instances. But perhaps the most
important difference of all is that The East suggests at the very end – fleetingly and delicately
– a way out of this mess of corporate mayhem and crimes against humanity. And
that, ultimately, is a discussion well worth having.
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