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March 24, 2006,
7:45 a.m.
Firing Blanks
American Gun.
Participant Productions — the film company that takes Ben & Jerry’s zeal for social change and makes it George Clooney sexy — had a great 2005. All the big name projects it touched — Syriana, Good Night and Good Luck, North Country, Murderball — turned that gleamy Oscar-nominated gold.
Long in production, American Gun is set to be one of the first Participant-funded movies out of the gate in 2006, and, well, things change. The low-profile semi-tragedy is a tiring, foggy affair that dives so headily into art-house sensibility it forgets what it is — a polemic.
So begins a stultifying dichotomy. There’s no reason to doubt that American Gun is a movie that runs solely on the power of its message. Participant wouldn’t want you to. Its executive vice president, Meredith Blake, has said (someone should bronze this quote), “Our product is social change, and the movies are a vehicle for that social change.” The blunt title helps too. Then again, on its website, Participant writes about the movie as “a powerful series of interwoven storylines that bring to light how the proliferation of guns in America dramatically affects and shapes the lives of its citizens.” Note the dodging, nuance-speak: “bring to light,” “shape everyday lives.”
Whether they are interwoven or not, the movie is composed of a hodgepodge of storylines. The first is introduced through the device of a news special on the third anniversary of a Columbine-style high-school shooting in tiny Ellisburgh, Oregon. There we meet Janet Huttenson (Marcia Gay Harden), blue-collar mother of the shooter (deceased), helplessly claiming for the cameras she couldn’t have seen the signs. Her surviving son, David (Chris Marquette), is now as old as his brother was when everything happened, and Janet is full of taut, if vague, dread. All the more so when David’s private school drops him after the news segment runs and he’s forced back to the public school where his brother killed.
The report also dredges up feelings for Officer Frank (Tony Goldwyn), the Ellisburgh cop wracked by guilt for not being able to save those kids.
The third storyline is an odd, but not unexpected appendage. Off in Chicago, formerly idealistic inner-city high-school administrator Principal Carter (Forrest Whitaker) finds that his star student, Jay (Arlen Escarpeta) — a cinematic statue of ghetto virtue: studying hard, working a night job, more upright than his friends — is carrying a gun to school.
The fourth is an undiagnosable lump. In Charlottesville, Virginia, Carl Wilks (Donald Sutherland, used to 1/10,000 of his potential) runs a gun shop, and his co-ed granddaughter doesn’t like the fact that she has to work there part-time.
These situations meander in quiet ambiguity, never stumbling across one another in any meaningful way. The characters, tense and angst-ridden as they are, don’t say much and are filmed in a narrative style so listless that, halfway through the picture, you’re still not sure of their names. Arguments, accusations, and decisions come in erratic bursts. It’s high indie style. Usually this signals to viewers that, whatever it is that the director is trying to get across, it’s deep and complicated in a smart kind of way.
But co-writer / director Aric Avelino is carrying a message — even if it feels like he’s been forced to share it against his will. Sticking to his art-house instincts he works his polemic in with subtlety.
Instead of action A effecting result B, leading to socio-political inference C, American Gun sets the good intentions and simple goodness of each of its characters as counterpoints to the arguments that gun-control opponents often make. Janet is a hardworking, guilt-ridden single mom. There’s no way she could have prevented her son from becoming a killer. The TV reporter seems rather nasty for insinuating it. Officer Frank lives in his own guilty hell. Obviously enforcement, and the enforcers, of existing gun laws are doing all they can. Gangs? Drugs? Jay only carries because he has to survive. All that’s left to blame for the agony of our characters is guns themselves.
Three cheers for novel conception. The execution stumbles when, trying to pull sympathy his characters’ way, Avelino overreaches, creating improbable situations for everyone. Pitiable Janet is abruptly mobbed by neighbors bristling with hate, shouting that her son murdered their kids. Officer Frank brings down a homicidal, well-armed robber without resorting to his pistol.
Snippets of the movie work. Janet and David start to move towards a mutual appreciation of one another as the climax looms. These snippets work best, though, when you think of them as separate little movies in and of themselves. After 80 minutes, the picture runs out of bullets never having hit its target, then slapping together four endings, one that’s shamefully predictable and three that just end.
But — but — it does make you think — about two other movies, Bowling for Columbine and Gus Van Sant’s 2003 fictionalized peek inside the lives of the Columbine shooters, Elephant. Michael Moore’s blockbuster was slick, dishonest, and many times more watchable than American Gun. It didn’t care to do anything but make its point cleverly. Elephant was more watchable still. Not needing a table to thump, Van Sant was free to go wild with the compelling nuances of violence, and he flourished. American Gun tried to split the difference, and made a terrible mess.
Hollywood is indignant enough to keep making big-message movies for at least another Oscar season or two. The more they crank out, the greater the temptation will be for some to want to do it differently; without all the exploding cars, assassins, and $20 million-per-picture leads. To do it in a way that shows simultaneously how complicated America’s problems are, and how right they are about them. And, hey, it’s Hollywood. Anything’s possible. Except, generally, a good review that features the phrase “an artistic, nuanced polemic.”
— Louis Wittig is a writer living in New York City.
