We all know that real life is messy. That heroes can be baddies in disguise, and halos may inconveniently materialise over the heads of condemned men. This is why we like to roll our eyes at stories that try to pretend otherwise. At comic-book blockbusters whose heroes are by definition super, or long-running franchises whose villains come with mad plans and a white cat. It’s also why we admire movies that adopt a classier approach.
Happily, two Oscar frontrunners this year appear to deliver just what we ordered: a radical challenge to the conventional narrative. Both are based on real-life events – and both, as it happens, are excellent. Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, out next week, stars Tom Hanks as the cold war-era attorney James B Donovan and Mark Rylance as Rudolf Abel, the Soviet agent he’s told he has to defend. Once Donovan fails (it’s a stitch-up; he’s hired only to suggest due process), he successfully lobbies for Abel to avoid execution so he might be used in a prisoner swap – which Donovan also ends up negotiating.
Spielberg’s story demonises neither the embedded spook, dead-set on undermining the nation whose hospitality he’s enjoying, nor the Russians, nor even the Germans. Rather, the finger of blame is wagged at politics in general; the rigmarole of government, all that diplomatic palaver. Says Donovan to his opposite number in Berlin: “We have to have the conversations our countries cannot.” Countries, eh! Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em.
In Spotlight, a fictionalisation of the Boston Globe’s exposé of paedophile priests in 2002, baddies are also offered a wide berth. The child molesters are not vilified (one, we see, is himself a victim of sexual abuse), nor the Catholic lackeys or lawyers who, by doing their job, help perpetuate the horror. Rather, we’re told, the problem is bigger than that. It’s the blind eye climate, the legacy of silence.
For a while both films flirt with the idea of letting the audience share the blame. Spotlight cites collective responsibility, before narrowing it down to particular sections of Boston at a particular time. In Bridge of Spies Donovan is glared at by fellow commuters when he first defends Abel, then given admiring glances once the papers recast him as the good guy – a reprimand to the average Joe for being such a sucker.
Yet both movies ultimately let us off the hook. Don’t worry, they conclude. Nothing to do with you, mate! How were you to know? This stuff is way above your pay grade. It’s the system, innit!
Why? Well, film-makers have about as much wriggle room here as Donovan did in the dock. We’re paying them to exonerate us. The idea that we want movies to tell us the truth is a lie we tell ourselves to save face. Sure, we may want to protest that we’re too grown-up for fairytales, but actually we need to sleep just as much as the children to whom we’ve recited the nightly happily ever after. We don’t want to be patronised, but we really don’t want to be terrified. So we demand our movies purport to be real, yet package the facts in a three-act format that sends us home with catharsis, not tasks.
A few years ago a number of lobbying documentaries tried something different. Films such as The Age of Stupid and The Cove concluded with calls to action about recycling batteries and boycotting particular fish. But such codas fell out of favour. People don’t go to the movies to be empowered or handed responsibility. We want evil if not squashed then at least externalised. The thrill is in identifying with the person to whom we have delegated the challenge, be it Superman or Donovan or those dogged reporters on the Globe. Bridge of Spies and Spotlight don’t have villains partly because there are just so many damn heroes.
And so it is now make-believe that bears the most resemblance to real life – or, at least, such fictional films as can cope with not appeasing. Movies such as Caché (Hidden), Michael Haneke’s Paris-set drama about bourgeois guilt and ethnic tension, peppered with random acts of violence, closing with no resolution. Or the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men and A Serious Man – the latter about the existential terror of a Jewish professor – both of which end as abruptly as a cut-off phone call. All these films were praised; all also angered people for their suggestion that there may be no logic, no connection, no point. After all, we get enough of that at home.
We need something to place our faith in – and fiction is not only the easiest option, in a world that defines itself by unpredictability, it’s probably the only one. In Bridge of Spies – which, as it happens, the Coens also wrote – Donovan’s wife asks her husband, as he heads off on a mysterious trip, to tell her where he’s going. “Just give me something to hold on to,” she says. “I don’t care if it’s the truth.” If only we could all be so honest.
