This week’s biggest film release in the US is Deepwater Horizon – a film that, despite its title, is neither an underwater sequel to Event Horizon nor a delicate coming-of-age story about waifish teens growing up in rural Sweden. It’s the very real, very tragic tale of the 2010 oil rig explosion that killed 11 people and caused an environmentally catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Mark Wahlberg stars as Mike Williams, the chief electrician aboard the Deepwater Horizon and the man tasked with saving as many of its occupants as possible. The film is the latest in a parade of gritty, true stories hitting cinemas as we stumble into the fall awards season.
It was only a few weeks ago that audiences were exposed to Clint Eastwood’s Sully, another dramatization of a simple hero thrust unwillingly into a position to have to rescue dozens of people. That’s how we like our real-life protagonists – stoic, grimly determined and covered in motor oil. We also like them to suffer for their good works. Poor Sully lands an airplane on the Hudson river, no one dies, and he still gets chastised by those damn bureaucrats (please read in gravelly Clint Eastwood voice) when he gets home. Brave Mike Williams survives the Deepwater Horizon disaster, but those dastardly oil barons at BP (please read in nasally Dave Schilling voice) don’t go to jail. Time after time, the system fails the noble working man in American cinema.
Considering my unique position working for a major British media company, I couldn’t help but wonder what the British equivalent of our tradition of ripped-from-the-headlines stories of valor is. Let’s just say that they’re not all that similar.
American real-life heroes
What we just can’t get enough of these days are stories about small figures caught up in tide of major global events. Oliver Stone’s Snowden doesn’t turn the soft-spoken whistleblower Edward Snowden into a swashbuckler for truth and justice. The real Snowden is quiet, thoughtful and deeply beholden to his own personal moral compass. Deepwater Horizon director Peter Berg also helmed another Mark Wahlberg working-class tragedy called Lone Survivor, which is about a group of Navy Seals fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. Last year’s little-seen Chris Pine movie The Finest Hours is about a coastguard rescue of a sinking oil tanker. What is it with the production of fossil fuels and calamity? You’d almost think it was a horrible idea which is slowly killing the planet. Tom Hanks knows this genre well, not just as Sully, but also as the titular Captain Phillips.
But it’s not just modern movies. Go back to the 1970s, after the obsession with retelling the legends of world war two wore off, to find a multitude of films about the common man. By the way, I don’t use the word “man” here casually. Unfortunately, most of the movies in this genre are about men.
Serpico is easily in the top five films of this genre, placing Al Pacino in the role of Frank Serpico, another whistleblower who uncovers rampant corruption within the New York police department. Even if he had one of the coolest names in history, Serpico’s story is not an epic one. At the end of the film, he retires a physically broken man who’s merely done what any righteous person should in his situation. He spoke up. He just happened to speak up in a situation where there were guns, drugs and death involved, which makes his life far more cinematic than, say, mine. You won’t get much excitement out of watching me type and eat chips for eight hours a day, which leads me to the grand tradition of the British real-life drama.
British real-life heroes
I hope that you’ve all already watched Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game, because I’m about to spoil it for you. In this film, the Nazis lose the second world war. If you weren’t aware and didn’t heed my spoiler warning, I’m sorry. I lobbied my editors for a page break, just in case, but I was denied.
The Imitation Game is but the most recent addition to the grand tradition of the British based-on-a-true-story film. Imitation Game’s hero, brilliant mathematician Alan Turing, is also a reluctant hero, as in the American tradition. He suffers the slings and arrows of a system that does not understand him nor is willing to recognize his contribution to the war effort. His cracking of the Enigma code is crucial to the Allied cause, but because he was gay, the military history books relegated him to footnote status until very recently.
So, what’s different between Alan Turing and Sully Sullenberg besides differing tastes in facial hair? First of all, Alan Turing knows he’s brilliant. What propels him to continue working on the machine that would help break the code and to defy superiors who doubted his efforts is self-belief. Turing’s lack of social graces in the film means that he often says what he is thinking, which is that he knows better. It’s safe to say the protagonist of Deepwater Horizon lacks this rarefied air. This is not to say that the average British hero is some strutting peacock and the American is a stern puritan. It’s notable only in that it’s a subversion of audience stereotypes and expectations.
What’s more pressing in this analysis is the contrast between the man of action and the man of principle, or in the case of the 2010 film Made in Dagenham, the woman. Made in Dagenham does not have explosions, gunfire or sweaty dudes covered in grease. Sally Hawkins stars as a fictional character plopped into the true story of a workers’ strike at a Ford motor company sewing plant in the Dagenham area of London. Note that a protagonist was invented for the purposes of dramatizing this story. In order to make a movie out of a collective social action, a person had to be invented. Similarly, the Sally Field film Norma Rae, an American film about the labor movement, fictionalized Crystal Lee Sutton.
Norma Rae is something of an outlier in American film in that it’s a movie that glorifies the unionization of labor rather than exalting the “lone survivor” story that we Yankees crave, while the British routinely revel in films like Pride, about LGBT activists who get involved in the 1984 British miners’ strike. Pride is an unabashed ensemble piece about how collective action can uplift people of all stripes. Modern Britain does seem to be becoming less and less amenable to progressive ideas, but there still remains that kernel of the European fascination with democratic socialism. In these British films, the system is still the enemy, but it can only be defeated with a group effort.
When the story is one of individual effort, British film tends to focus on the criminal figure – Roger Daltry in McVicar or more recently, Tom Hardy as the Kray brothers in Legend. It’s no coincidence that British true-story films that do well in America are usually ones that narrow their focus to one transcendent figure – King George VI in The King’s Speech, Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, or Alan Turing. Americans want heroes who succeed in spite of others, but in Britain, sometimes it’s OK for those heroes to succeed because of others.
