A Hero for Our Times

Photo: Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Every age gets not the superhero it deserves but the superhero it needs to ease its anxieties: the midwestern farm boy who conquers metropolitan crime; the caped vigilante of the Gotham night; the tortured teen whose sticky excretions become a source of potency; the persecuted freaks whose differences empower them to save the normal folks. Now, in Iron Man, the first of the season’s megabudget comic-book spectaculars, we get an American weapons mogul whose guilt over facilitating the deaths of U.S. soldiers and Mideast civilians impels him to turn off the arms pipeline and rescue Afghans from marauding warlords. The military-industrial complex ravages the Third World—then its former emissary swoops down from the sky in the guise of an impregnable weapon, using his might (and money, and American ingenuity) to undo the damage. Iron Man Akbar! It’s utter, wish-fulfilling crap, but when the whole world hates you, it does feel good.

Iron Man is a shapely piece of mythmaking. The director, Jon Favreau, doesn’t go in for stylized comic-book frames, at least in the first half. He gets real with it—you’d think you were watching a military thriller. After jetting to Afghanistan to demonstrate a guided missile (which launches itty-bitty guided missiles), “billionaire industrialist” and conscienceless playboy Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) gets kidnapped by insurgents, who blow up his convoy and kill his Army escort. He wakes up in a cave, where a kindly Afghan civilian (Shaun Toub) has inserted a magnet in his chest to keep the shrapnel from drifting to his vital organs. The bad guys order Stark to replicate his super-duper weapon. But are they in for a surprise!

The robotic Iron Man has little in the way of an expression, but his eye slots and the circular magnet in his chest have an unearthly glow, and his coloring is warm—gold and trimmed with red, like a sunset. Favreau keeps cutting to Downey’s big head bouncing inside the helmet, somewhat offsetting our knowledge that the Iron Man itself is entirely computer-generated. His first liftoff and crash landing owe a lot to Brad Bird’s incomparable The Iron Giant—although Favreau would probably say it’s “an homage.” At least he steals from the best. A movie like this is a sound designer’s wet dream: thunk, squish, clank, whir, kaboom. The heavy-metal rock that kicks in when Iron Man appears is an aural pun that works like gangbusters—although I wish there were a melody in there somewhere.

First chapters of superhero sagas are more alike than unalike: The hero tests out his new powers (painfully), amazes his friends and foes, and makes his auspicious debut before the wider world. (What is it? Where did it come from? Is it friendly? Is there a franchise in it?) Then there’s a villain who gets hold of the same technology and uses it for evil instead of good—that’s Obadiah Stane, played by Jeff Bridges with a little beard and a bald dome, making his bid both for Stark’s superpowers and William Hurt’s hold on the ex-leading-man hambone character-actor market.

The casting alone generates tons of goodwill. Who wouldn’t root for Downey as a guy who has to clean up his act? His Stark is a sex addict, a fast-talking heel whose jokes about his own irresponsibility are a hedge against growing up. Downey has such terrific instincts. He demonstrates his transformation by looking as if he has been yanked out of a blissful dream; his self-love dries up and so does his shtick. His loyal assistant, Pepper Potts, isn’t much of a part, but Gwyneth Paltrow is a presence. She stands around looking amused and flabbergastingly pretty, slinging wisecracks with serene aplomb. Bridges makes Stane scarily at ease with his villainy. He’s an inspiring actor: His movie-star vanity never gets in the way of his playing an asshole. Only Terrence Howard as Stark’s military liaison Rhodey seems ill used: He’s perilously close to being Jim to Downey’s Huck. Or maybe he’s supposed to be Colin Powell.

Blockbuster action movies often pick up on bad vibes in the air and transform them into something that lets us sleep better at night. In 1989, the same summer Spike Lee dramatized our seemingly unbridgeable differences in Do the Right Thing, Hollywood gave us Lethal Weapon 2, in which an unruly white guy and a middle-class black family man collaborated to destroy the evil representatives of South African apartheid. Poof—racial divisions melted away in a show of righteous force. Iron Man is more family-friendly, but it’s in the same liberal-fantasy tradition. And don’t misunderstand—I loved it. I’d so rather think about blockbusters than bunker-busters (or the Democratic primary).

It’s always fun to watch David Mamet Mametize another film genre: the heist picture (Heist), the red-meat war movie (Spartan), and now, in Redbelt, the go-for-it sports drama. So how’s the Mamet Rocky? Fast. Lively. In your face. Very watchable. And, like its predecessors, so bizarrely convoluted it barely holds together on a narrative level. But the underpinnings are consistent. As Mamet has evolved into a confident and resourceful film director, his worldview has hardly budged. What’s changed is that his movie heroes manage to protect themselves from life’s inevitable betrayals.

In Redbelt, Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Mike Terry, a jujitsu instructor with an affinity for cops. (He teaches the Brazilian variation, which is heavy on wrestling holds.) The opening gives Mamet a chance to do his specialty number: the character that intones lessons for combat that end up being lessons for life (which is, of course, a series of power struggles). This time, though, the protagonist has an Eastern tilt: He thinks defensively. Everything is a force: Embrace it or not. Deflect it—why oppose it? Conquer your fear and you’ll conquer your opponent. Ejiofor is a great Mamet spokesman. He internalizes the lines—he internalizes everything—so you’re not aware of all the finicky punctuation. Like Forest Whitaker, in Jim Jarmusch’s ludicrous Ghost Dog, he can speak of the spirit and honor of the samurai without making you long for John Belushi.

Early on, we learn that Mike has never fought competitively and also that he’s short of money, a source of irritation for his sex-bomb bookkeeper wife (Alice Braga). It’s no surprise that he ends up preparing for battle, but the road to the ring is rich in sudden reversals. Should you ever wake up to find yourself in Mamet Land, here are a few survival tips: Movie stars and their agents will bestow instant money and power and withdraw them just as capriciously. Wives and girlfriends will always go for the mother lode. Joe Mantegna is not to be trusted. Rebecca Pidgeon (Mamet’s wife) is especially not to be trusted.

For a change, Mamet gives us a guileless woman (Emily Mortimer), a lawyer even, although early in the film she’s strung out on drugs and hasn’t had the chance to formulate schemes. But Mortimer and Ejiofor make an irresistible Rocky and Adrian. The final fisticuffs are rousingly good, although everything around them (the crowd, the media, the jujitsu master nodding in approval in the green room) is preposterously bad. Never mind: Onward. I can’t wait to see Mamet try his hand at sci-fi, Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Rebecca Pidgeon distributing the pods.

The hero of Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely is a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) enticed by a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) to an impersonator commune in the Scottish Highlands. There he finds a menagerie of international wannabes, among them Curly, Larry, and Moe; the pope; and a hilariously foulmouthed Abe Lincoln. Everyone is dear except Marilyn’s husband, Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant), a controlling little Fascist. As the group copes, sadly, with a flock of infected sheep and, hopefully, with rehearsals for its new show, Korine cuts to a flock of (sheeplike?) nuns being exhorted by Werner Herzog to test their faith by leaping out of a plane without parachutes. Herzog is playing a priest, but he’s not much of an actor, and the subplot seems like a metaphor for visionary directors and their sacrificial-lamb performers.

Mister Lonely reveals that the punk abrasiveness of Korine’s youth has been replaced by a lyrical self-pity—the apparent upshot of a decade on the skids. I’m glad he has pulled himself together, but the film is pretty ramshackle, full of obvious group improvisations that fail to spark and an overdose of bathos. The best parts are Luna’s Michael Jackson dance moves, which eerily conjure up the man—himself a kind of impersonator—and do justice to the movie’s most intriguing line: “There are no truer souls than those who impersonate.”

A film eighteen years in development, Iron Man passed through several studios before Marvel bought the rights in 2006 and brought in Elf director Jon Favreau, who plans to spin it into a trilogy. In a Yahoo! Movies clip about the James Bond–worthy set (“perched on Point Doom overlooking the Pacific”), Favreau, zipping around on a Segway, looks every bit as zhlubby as he did when he co-starred with Vince Vaughn in Swingers. In the movie itself, he makes a cameo appearance as Tony Stark’s bodyguard, Happy Hogan.

Iron Man
Directed by Jon Favreau.
Paramount. PG-13.

Directed by David Mamet.
Sony Pictures Classics. R.

Mister Lonely
Directed by Harmony Korine.
IFC Films. NR.

E-mail: filmcritic@newyorkmag.com.

A Hero for Our Times