A.O. Scott, Right on as Usual

For the most part, movie critics are clueless hacks when it comes to anything political. David Denby and Dana Stevens spring to mind in particular, but the problem is pretty endemic.

The New York Times‘s A.O. Scott, however, is both nuanced and smart when it comes to reading the political subtext within film. While some were busy praising 28 Weeks Later for being a damning critique of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq, Scott wrote “it is only when things spin out of control that the inherent brutality of the situation becomes clear, but here again the movie poses intractable conundrums rather than scoring easy points. To the soldiers and the survivors alike, there are only bad choices, and doing what seems like the right thing–firebombing an open city or rescuing children from the bombs–can turn out to have horrendous consequences.”

So it’s no surprise that Scott is among the only critics to note the fact that Steven Soderbergh’s Che glosses over the protagonist’s, um, foibles. Writes Scott:

There is a lot, however, that the audience will not learn from this big movie, which has some big problems as well as major virtues. In between the two periods covered in “Che,” Guevara was an important player in the Castro government, but his brutal role in turning a revolutionary movement into a dictatorship goes virtually unmentioned. This, along with Benicio Del Toro’s soulful and charismatic performance, allows Mr. Soderbergh to preserve the romantic notion of Guevara as a martyr and an iconic figure, an idealistic champion of the poor and oppressed. By now, though, this image seems at best naïve and incomplete, at worst sentimental and dishonest. More to the point, perhaps, it is not very interesting.

If there were more critics like Scott writing today at major news organs, the film criticism community would be a more interesting and enlightening place.

(For the record: This is not solely a problem of the left. There are plenty of film critics on the right who lambaste lefty actors and directors like George Clooney and Michael Moore without bothering to engage the work they produce. It’s simply more pronounced on the left because, as a guess, 90% of film critics at work today are raging liberals.)