Movie Reviews

Robert Brent Toplin
Contributing Editor

Reel Report, 2001–2002

Reel Report summarizes some of the important developments of the last year that may be of interest to historians involved in the study of film.	1
Once again, Hollywood played an important role in bringing the past to the American and international public, and, as is often the case, movies about war were among the most prominent entries. Pearl Harbor was the most aggressively advertised combat movie of the year. Director Michael Bay's big-budget picture about the disaster of December 7, 1941, looks like James Cameron's 1997 Titanic in its dramatic structure (combining a love story with a tragedy), but it is much less engaging as entertainment and as history. The film features Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett as heroes in the U.S. Army Air Corps. Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down provides a realistic and frightening view of the experiences of elite U.S. forces in Somalia in October 1993. Black Hawk Down depicts the bloody battles over twenty-four hours in Mogadishu that erupted when U.S. elite soldiers became entangled in the country's brutal civil war. The film received considerable praise for its realistic-looking portrayal of fighting in the city's streets. Francis Ford Coppola also made a contribution to the war genre in 2001 by releasing a new version of his 1979 classic, Apocalypse Now. The remastered film carries the title Apocalypse Now Redux, and it includes forty-nine minutes that did not appear in the original theatrical release. Coppola's original movie, which was based loosely on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, presented a somewhat disjointed tale set on the frontier of the Vietnam War. The movie's production team encountered many difficulties on the set, including a typhoon, a heart attack by the star, Martin Sheen, and substantial cost overruns that threatened to shut down the filming.	2
Hollywood's treatment of domestic subjects in 2001 included The Majestic and Ali. The Majestic, starring Jim Carrey, depicts the experiences of a movie screenwriter who runs into trouble with the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He becomes the subject of a witch-hunt because he attended a political meeting in order to pursue his romantic interest in a young woman. Much of the cinematic storytelling in The Majestic is inspired by the example of a noted director of the 1930s and 1940s, Frank Capra. Michael Mann's Ali examines the boxing experiences of the heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali. The film also gives attention to Ali's resistance to the draft during the Vietnam War. Will Smith plays Muhammad Ali, and Jon Voight portrays the sportscaster Howard Cosell.	3
The greatest controversy about Hollywood's treatment of historical evidence was related to the motion picture that won the Academy Award for Best Picture. This controversy merits attention, because debates about A Beautiful Mind addressed questions that are of considerable interest to historians involved in the study of cinematic history.	4
Critics argued that the film, directed by Ron Howard, took excessive liberties in representing the life of the mathematician John Nash and that the movie left out important facts. Defenders of the motion picture said it expressed many essential truths about Nash's life, and they maintained that the movie never intended to provide a comprehensive biographical portrait.	5
A Beautiful Mind, based on an award-winning 1998 biography by Sylvia Nasar, examines John Nash's difficult struggle with schizophrenia. The movie portrays the paranoid delusions Nash experienced. A character played by Ed Harris symbolizes Nash's mental condition by enacting situations that were present only in Nash's mind. Jennifer Connelly plays the role of the brilliant mathematician's wife, Alicia. The film shows Alicia standing by her husband through his many difficulties and helping him to gain a degree of control over his illness. Eventually, Nash emerges as a successful researcher and wins the Nobel Prize for his innovative ideas about game theory.	. . .