Jun. 30, 2010 - Issue #767: The Bestest of Edmonton 2010

DVD Detective

The politics of celebrity

Politics and image collide in a pair of charged-up docs

Politics and celebrity are a strange combination, whether it's movie stars wading into political debates or the Obamas getting the superstar couple treatment on the cover of US Weekly. In Poliwood, Barry Levinson—who has already waded into these waters with the largely toothless comedian-runs-for-president satire Man of the Year and the slightly more successful manufactured-war flick Wag the Dog—purports to explore this odd crossroads by following around the Creative Coalition, a supposedly non-partisan group of celebrities ranging from Anne Hathaway to Alan Cumming to Ellen Burstyn, as they visit the 2008 Democratic and Republican national conventions.
I say purports because there are numerous times where Poliwood feels like little but an apologia for celebs who spout their political views, a kind of "stop picking on my friends" plea to the masses who dismiss every instance of political engagement from someone they've seen on TV as another airhead star yammering on about topics they know nothing about. To some degree, that's maybe a worthwhile cause: just because someone makes movies or music doesn't mean they can't also inform themselves on a topic and then maybe use their position to stump for what they believe. Levinson clearly shapes a couple sharp jabs at the naysayers by pointing out little-known facts like how Richard Dreyfuss is a lecturer on American history at Oxford, or that former Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello got a poli-sci degree from Harvard. He scores a better point when he mentions that, for every celebrity who might stand up for a cause, 10 will never say anything that even tips their hand at a political position, lest they piss off potential audience.

That said, Levinson's sympathies are pretty obvious here, and any attempts he makes to present the other side of the argument feel pretty half-hearted. The only time we get the anti-celebrity view, it comes from a group of Republicans with an obvious bone to pick and few credible arguments (they're vehemence against it is, of course, doubly strange when viewed in light of their lionization of Reagan). Against that, we get a ceaseless series of justifications, as well as some doses of unintentional undermining of the case.

Besides that, Levinson also endeavours to talk about that other thread, the increasing celebrification of politics, but here he suffers from the same missing-the-zeitgeist handicap as he did in Man of The Year. None of the points he's making are really anything new—he offers boilerplate observations about television culture with a profundity that suggests he's never even heard of Neil Postman—and he doesn't have any kind of killer instinct about taking the media or politicians to task, either. Whatever he was setting out to do, in Poliwood Levinson only really succeeds in making the case that we probably should take celebrity political opinions with a grain of salt, or at least exactly as much weight as we give to any other person on the street.

Juan J Dominguez isn't a celebrity, but his line of work seems just as uneasy in the political arena. Dominguez is a lawyer, but not the type who'd stand up for the little guy unless there was a large cash settlement to be had: he's one of those bus bench ad ambulance chasers, a man who promises that he'll get you the biggest settlement he can. His more sympathetic emotions seem to show through when he learns about the plight of some Nicaraguan banana plantation workers, who claim to have been sterilized—among other terrible side-effects—by chemicals Dole used to help grow the yellow fruit.

It's really their plight that's at the heart of Bananas!, but I could have done with a lot more of Dominguez. His conversion to political crusader seems a bit too pat, especially with potential billions to be made from the workers' claims. His story—especially since allegations of fraud got the cases documented here thrown out of higher courts—could be a pretty interesting take-off point for questions about the necessity of strange bedfellows when chasing justice, but director Frederik Gertten is more interested in the political outrages, which is more relevant morally but less esthetically.

From that frame, Bananas! is a largely standard leftist documentary about a corporation trying to cover up its own negligence, and at that it's fairly effective. Though, again, Dole has succeeded in getting the cases thrown out of higher courts, it seems pretty obvious that something shady was going on here, and it's more a case of their resources hiding things better than the workers' advocates can uncover them. V vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus