DVR Diary: THE GREAT LOCOMOTIVE CHASE (1956)

Walt Disney was a notorious political reactionary, but at least he knew which side was the right side in the Civil War. By comparison, Buster Keaton, who made arguably the greatest film set in the Civil War, once said it was hard to make the Union the good guys in that setting. His thinking seems to have been that the Confederacy was the archetypal underdog battling gallantly against overwhelming force, and that no one wants to root for the overwhelming force. In Keaton's defense, The General is no brief for the Confederacy; you root for Buster as the Reb hero because he's one guy against overwhelming odds, not out of any belief in states' rights or the goodness of slavery. Disney's Great Locomotive Chase, directed by Oscar-winning editor Francis D. Lyon and a product of an era when "Disney live-action film" meant "cool adventure movie" rather than "tasteless pabulum for the whole family," is a mirror-universe version of The General, based on the same historical events but choosing the Union men who stole the train known as The General as its heroes. While Walt's heart was in the right place, it's still a strange decision because Lyon ended up making a film about failure. This time we see that the Union team led by James J. Andrews (Fess Parker) went up against overwhelming odds themselves, and lost.

It must have been a worrisome film for Parker, Disney's Davy Crockett, to make so soon after seeming to become a superstar, because it must have seemed as if Disney was typecasting him as a doomed hero. More worrisome still may have been the way Jeffery Hunter, in effect playing the Keaton role, not only steals the train back but quite nearly steals the film from Parker, as if to prove that Keaton's choice of hero was more dramatically correct if not politically correct. Using the character's real name, William Fuller, rather than Keaton's Johnnie Gray, Hunter plays it straight and more realistic, yet with some of Keaton's indomitable determination. Keaton was making a comedy that is also arguably the first action movie as we understand the concept today, and it was important in both respects that he retake his train alone. As Fuller, Hunter has help every step of the way, but is the indisputable leader and motivator of his little band. He's at his most Keatonesque early on in the chase, when he initially, madly goes after the General on foot until he and the men trailing behind him find a handcar. The film as a whole is often Keatonesque in its commitment to authenticity -- Disney sent Lyon down to the actual historic locations in Georgia -- and an aversion to fakery for the most part. The history simply lends itself to a certain epic manner of filmmaking, but while Keaton made it into a comic epic Disney, Lyon and screenwriter Lawrence Edward Watkin made a thriller undermined by that same history, lurching from suspense to suspense as the Union team is nearly exposed or fails yet again to thwart Fuller's pursuit, until it succumbs to cumulative anticlimax, while Keaton used the actual events as a springboard for advanced slapstick.

Shackling themselves to history, the Disney team must give up the locomotive chase with something like a half-hour left in the picture. We're set up to expect a desperate escape back to Union lines, but Parker's whole gang is promptly captured -- most of them, including Parker himself, offscreen. The film then builds toward a mass prison break that serves only to resolve the character arc of a supporting player -- Jeff York apparently was cast in this role because he'd been Mike Fink to Parker's Crockett -- and while the idea is for Andrews and the other guy to give the others time to flee, most of them -- though not the relatively dull fellow who narrates the story and receives one of the first Medals of Honor -- are rounded up offscreen and herded back to prison to be hanged. It was all worthwhile, we're told at the end, because it diverted Confederate troops to railroad guard duty, but the film leaves you with not so much an appreciation of heroic sacrifice as pity for Andrews and the other losers. The film's self-defeating quality, its many pictorial virtues notwithstanding, leave you wondering whether Disney, eager as a train enthusiast to make a film about the chase, felt he couldn't make Fuller the hero because he thought Keaton might have been able to sue. In the end, historical accuracy is the only advantage Great Locomotive Chase has over The General. The later film can't help but look like a rough draft of the former, despite Technicolor and Cinemascope, in part because Keaton was so far ahead of his time as an action filmmaker but also because, thirty years before Disney, he had already remade tragedy as farce.

On the Big Screen: BRAVE (2012)

Pixar's new animated feature had a troubled production. It's not the first so troubled, but there's a political or cultural significance this time because Brave was supposed to have been Pixar's first feature directed by a woman. In the end, Brenda Chapman shares the directing credit with Brendan Chapman, while Steve Purcell is recognized as a presumably subordinate co-director. Pixar is our nearest equivalent to a classic Hollywood studio, so collective production is a fact of life. But because of the peculiar publicity Brave's shifts in personnel have received, reviewers seem inclined to look for seams in the finished product. It's assumed that Chapman's vision was compromised, and that assumption puts one strike on the movie before it even begins. While reviewers may think they're doing justice to Chapman, I think they're a little unfair to Brave. The new Pixar is doubly unique for its period setting -- ancient Scotland -- and its intense focus on a mother-daughter relationship. The latter detail gives the film considerable emotional power and archetypal weight. Deeper critics will have a field day with Brave -- and so will pornographic fan artists, I'm afraid.

On another level, Brave is familiar stuff; it's a Disney princess picture, a female coming-of-age story. But this time the heroine resists the coming of age, if that means taking a husband or living up to a queenly model of domesticity. Yet Merida doesn't come across as a daddy's girl. Her father, the king, certainly enjoys her tomboy antics and encourages her from an early age, but she doesn't really go running to him for solace when she argues with her sometimes doting, sometimes daunting mother Eleanor. There's actually a sort of realism here, since Dad was probably off campaigning most of the time. Merida's primary bond is with Eleanor, and that's why their arguments over the daughter's duties to the dynasty are so painful to both of them. Merida precipitates the picture's crisis because she wants her mother to change -- her attitude, that is. There is, without spoiling things (Pixar has been quite coy about the main event of their film), more change than Merida bargained for, and in a way what befalls Eleanor serves as a kind of metaphor for Merida's own coming of age. It stands in for the often-"gross" realization that your parents are sexual creatures just as you come to appreciate what that means. In an ingeniously cartoonish way, Eleanor undergoes a rite of passage on Merida's behalf, with the ironic payoff, given the suspenseful threat of a permanent change, that both mother and daughter are changed -- presumably permanently -- for the better. Whoever's idea that was, it's kinda brilliant.

If you want to see a Pixar picture in a theater, you have to sit through trailers for other people's 3-D animated features. This is instructive. It puts Pixar's achievements, and Brave's in particular in perspective -- in relief, really -- if you sit through a promo for the next Ice Age film or a teaser for the Despicable Me sequel, or even the preview for Disney's own Wreck-it Ralph before the feature presentation. Frankly, the point is usually made by the end of the annual short, like this year's La Luna. Throw Brave into the scales and the comparison is unfair. Working in heroic-fantasy mode, Pixar is in a new place and the results are stupendous. Even the fault-finders acknowledge the achievement of animating Merida and her flaming red hair and I can only second the acclaim. The character animation is terrific nearly across the board, the exceptions for me being Merida's triplet younger brothers, who seem only blandly cute, especially when they go through changes of their own, compared to our fleeting glimpses of a younger Merida. They're a disappointingly generic element of a picture that rarely goes wrong. It may be telling that the one sequence that really falls flat is the film's one real attempt at anachronistic humor, a gag featuring a magical Dark Age version of an automated answering service. If you expect to see predictable corporate-mentality elements in the picture it isn't too hard to find them -- but they don't come close to defining Brave. Maybe it isn't anyone's personal vision in its final form, but it's far from impersonal. Brave may prove but a respite from a Pixar decline, given that next year's feature is the third sequel in four years, but it definitely proves what the studio is capable of in convincing fashion. If this was a troubled production, maybe smooth sailing is overrated.

TRON: LEGACY (2010)

To be honest, I have stronger memories of the Tron video game than I do of the 1982 film that after 28 years -- is that some sort of record? -- generated a sequel. I remember seeing the original on the big screen, and I know I saw it at least once on video -- but apart from the then-innovative visuals and certain verbal tics like "End of Line," little about it made an impression on me. Many other people must have had a different experience, as I assume the sequel was made to satisfy Eighties nostalgia as well as to show off Disney's current bag of 3D and IMAX tricks. On that assumption, I shouldn't have been surprised to see the film burdened with so much of the "fathers and sons" bushwah, though for once I can complain that a movie doesn't push this theme hard enough. That's not -- I assure you -- because I find the usual intergenerational guff compelling. Too often "fathers and sons" seems like a gimmick designed to make a film seem meaningful. With Joseph Kosinski's Tron: Legacy, however, the filmmakers had the material for an ultimate "fathers and sons" story, but largely ignored it.

What is Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) if not the god of the merry little world of anthropomorphisized programs he helped create within that wonderful computer above the old video arcade? Add in his lookalike program, Clu, who plays the jealous, vindictive demiurge after seizing power from Flynn and his faithful e-companion Tron, and Flynn's real-world offspring Sam (Garrett Hedlund), who manages to get digitized the same way his father did way back when, and you have a holy trinity at war with itself. Or you could have had it. But since this is a "fathers and sons" movie, Sam is interested only incidentally in redeeming the world within the computer, and primarily in saving his dad. Dad's not that interested in being saved, if only because he can't imagine it being done without opening the door for Clu to run amok in the flesh world, and he isn't even that interested in saving his world, since he considers a rebellion inevitable and is willing to simply let it happen. For his part, Clu protests his purity of motive, insisting that he has only fulfilled his User's mandate to perfect the program world. Gladiatorial combat, it seems, is a prerequisite for perfection. On the other hand, he seems to enjoy power too much in a swaggering, virtual Jeff Bridges kind of way. Whatever else you say about Tron: Legacy, it does give Academy Award Winner Jeff Bridges a double ham sandwich of opportunity. He provides the skeleton of Clu's performance to play off his slightly Dudish, slightly Jedi-ish Kevin Flynn and indulges both selves, really letting it rip in his climactic showdown with himself. It is a rare master thespian who can pull off a "fathers and sons" scenario entirely on his own -- and maybe it's regrettable that CGI isn't yet so far advanced that he could have played Garrett Hedlund's part as well.

"They stole my monolith, man! It really held the room together." Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges, right) abides.

But Tron: Legacy is nothing if not a laundry list of opportunities ignored. Its biggest disappointment is how ordinary its fantasy world seems, or how like a vodka advertisement it often looks. Nothing afterward ever lives up to its one ingeniously disturbing sequence, after Sam has been digitized, arrested for vagrancy and condemned to the games. He's left in a vast chamber, where from the four walls emerge identically, fetishistically dressed females equipped with laser-tip fingers who first strip and then prep Sam for combat. The identically coiffed women -- two black, two white -- move in an unnatural, robotic choreography for no apparent reason, since the ritual isn't being transmitted anywhere, as far as I could tell. No other "programs" behave this way, and when we encounter one of them again, it's surprising that she doesn't live in her little alcove at the arena. The scene is obviously designed to be erotic on a superficially wholesome level -- the women are fully dressed -- but it also meets, however momentarily, our expectation of how strange this world should be.

I can predict at least one scene in Tron Legacy: the XXX Parody.

For the most part, however, the programs are all too human, or all too cartoonish. One wonders what the original program function of Castor (Michael Sheen), a pale, flamboyant fixer whom Sam is sent to meet, could possibly have been. But I suppose the point of such personalities is to show how decentralized sentience has evolved in that lonely computer over the arcade. It's even evolved entire neo-aboriginal species from nothing. All this should serve to remind viewers to schedule their antivirus programs to run regularly. Look what might become of your computer after 30 years.

If this isn't a malicious file, what is? Michael Sheen (center) as Castor.

The Tron sequel is less interested in such eccentricities than it should be. Castor is really the way he is because that's the kind of character who always turns up in utterly generic adventure stories like this one. Look past the fancy graphics and it's the same story you've seen hundreds of times. An unlikely hero must recover the special artifact that opens the portal to redemption with the aid of a loyal band, not all of whom will be able to go through with him. There must be sacrifices and arguments about sacrifices, the eternal choice between personal loyalties and the mission. And it's about fathers and sons! That doesn't mean there isn't some spectacle to enjoy -- and it was probably more enjoyable on the really big screen. But Legacy isn't anything more than cinematic candy, and not the kind that's filling in any way. It's like a box of Runts: tasty enough in a tangy chemical way, but you wouldn't want to be stuck somewhere for two hours with only those to eat.

The Marvelous World of Disney?

Nearly fifty years ago, Stan Lee was running a marginal comic book company on the brink of extinction, with one major asset: the rampant creativity of artist Jack Kirby. In the ultimate confirmation, by some standards, of Marvel Comics's elevation into the pop-culture canon, the company is going to be sold to Disney for four billion dollars. So the rich get richer and pop culture grows more homogenized. On the creative end, I suppose some Kingdom Hearts-style crossovers between the "universes" are inevitable if not compulsory. I doubt whether you'll see much difference in Marvel content, either in comics or movies, though you may end up seeing superheroes on ABC more often. Still, something distresses me about Disney's ongoing colonization of our shared culture. In my more dystopian (or maybe just dyspeptic) moods I can see a day coming when the Disney stamp will be a seal of cultural legitimacy and nothing will matter to most pop consumers unless it bears the mark of the Mouse. As long as Time Warner exists (and owns DC Comics) that day won't arrive, but between them the two rival colossi could form a kind of cultural "bipolarchy" of the sort I see functioning in American politics, in which the war of the gargantuas leaves nothing else standing, or drives the rest underground. Not everyone will be as pessimistic as I am sometimes, but I doubt whether anyone but a stockholder can say that this is a good thing.