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easymoney101

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Wednesday, 06/02/2004 3:33:29 PM

Wednesday, June 02, 2004 3:33:29 PM

Post# of 472950
COLD COMFORT
by ANTHONY LANE
“The Day After Tomorrow.”
Issue of 2004-06-07
Posted 2004-05-31
"The Day After Tomorrow” is about a threat that confronts us all. Two things make the threat especially frightening. One, it is already in our midst and may, without warning, assume catastrophic proportions. Two, there is almost nothing that we can do to fend it off. There may have been a chance to forestall the calamity, but we chose not to act on our responsibilities, and that chance has effectively passed. All we can do is wait. This planetary menace has a name. It is called Rupert Murdoch.

“The Day After Tomorrow” is brought to us by Twentieth Century Fox, one of Murdoch’s proudest possessions. Whether the makers of the movie—notably the director, co-writer, and co-producer, Roland Emmerich—were paying a touching, unconscious tribute to the chairman and C.E.O. of the Fox Entertainment Group or whether they were operating under direct orders is hard to tell. Let us simply note that there is barely a scene in which some fearless Fox News reporter, microphone logo to the fore, does not wrestle with the elements in order to keep the public informed. When the action switches to Europe, the flame passes to Sky News, part of British Sky Broadcasting Group (Prop., Rupert Murdoch). Emmerich, who gave much thought to the perils of world domination in “Independence Day,” has clearly enjoyed a change of heart. Dominating the world, it would now seem, is no bad thing at all.

Reducing half the world to the status of a fridge, on the other hand, is a bad idea. This is the other message of “The Day After Tomorrow,” and it has already aroused controversy beyond the multiplex. The film begins with a section of the polar ice cap shearing away and falling into the sea, as if in the preparation of a giant cocktail. From here on, Planet Earth is on the rocks. There is snow in Delhi, and Tokyo is pummelled by hailstones the size of fists. The big chill is a mystery to everybody but Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid), a climatologist in Washington, D.C., who moonlights as a soothsayer. Having studied previous ice ages, he is now in a position to predict a new one, with some long-distance help from Terry Rapson (Ian Holm), who is stuck in a thankless subplot—otherwise known as a weather-monitoring station—at the wrong end of Scotland. Conditions are so dire there that helicopters are dispatched to pluck the Royal Family from Balmoral Castle. At this point, I cheered up, gripped by visions of a deep-frozen Prince Philip on the end of a winch, but, sadly, the rescuers never reach their goal.

Meanwhile, America is under siege on both flanks. On the West Coast, writhing twisters are polishing off selected districts of Los Angeles, laying particular waste to a tower marked “Capitol Records” (Prop., not Rupert Murdoch). On the East Coast, the temperature in New York is dropping fast. At one point, it plummets by ten degrees per second, a fall not registered since Bette Davis said “Nice speech” to Anne Baxter at the end of “All About Eve.” In answer to the catastrophe, everybody is instructed to head south, in order to find sanctuary in Mexico—“what we used to call the Third World,” in the movie’s exquisitely patronizing phrase. If there is a glint of irony here, in the prospect of a million New Yorkers having to find low-paying jobs mowing the lawns of middle-class Latino families, Emmerich does not pursue it. Irony is not a currency in which he deals.

The tradition, in any doom-mongering movie, is that two things alone are worth saving: first, the world; second, and slightly more important, a close relative of the leading character. In “Deep Impact,” the heroine sought out her dad, and now, in “The Day After Tomorrow,” Jack goes looking for his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal), who is in Manhattan for a brainteasing high-school competition. They urgently need to thrash out some brink-of-extinction issues, the nub of which, as far as I can see, is Sam’s below-average score on a recent math test. So Jack straps on his snowshoes and sets off for New York. (“I’ve walked that far before in the snow.”) This is like marching into an oversized tub of Cookie Dough Dynamo, but Jack soldiers on. Little does he realize that Sam is not merely O.K.; he is holed up in the New York Public Library with a full-lipped fellow-student named Laura (Emmy Rossum), who presses up against him, explaining, “I’m using my body heat to warm you up.” A noble gesture. As far as Sam is concerned, the longer his dad takes to show up, the better.

It was around this point that the audience with whom I was sitting began to cackle. There is no more refreshing sound than nineteen hundred people jeering in harmony at someone else’s balderdash. Even by the standards of disaster movies, “The Day After Tomorrow” is irretrievably poor: a shambles of dud writing and dramatic inconsequence which left me determined to double my consumption of fossil fuels. No film in which the villain can be measured with a barometer, and in which the most resourceful response to that villain is, basically, “Wrap up warm and run away,” will ever quite meet our narrative needs. What galls is not just the feebleness of the invention—Sam hunting for antibiotics that are in a locked medicine cabinet, in a locked room, which just happens to be prowled by escaped wolves, or his mother, a doctor named Lucy (Sela Ward), staying behind, when her hospital is evacuated, to read “Peter Pan” to a child who is bald from chemotherapy. There is also the nerve of the whole enterprise. Emmerich’s earlier film “Godzilla” came with no health caution about overfeeding our pet iguanas, but “The Day After Tomorrow” is so puffed up with ecological pride that it can hardly move.

Worse still, in some quarters, it is being taken seriously. On April 1st, nasa sent an internal e-mail to its employees at the Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland, warning that no nasa scientists should publicly discuss the movie—a caution that was reported in the Times and subsequently rescinded. On the other hand, on May 24th an environmental rally took place near the American Museum of Natural History, staged to coincide with the movie’s release and attended by Al Gore. In short, both sides of the environmental debate—those who are concerned by climate change and those who think that any such concern is a load of greenhouse gas—have been roused to action. The biggest push came from the Natural Resources Defense Council, which said, “Like any good fable, the movie taps a more basic truth: Global warming is happening today.”

That last statement is demonstrably true. All the more reason, then, not to demonstrate it in a mainstream movie. Some filmmakers, anxious to claim the high ground, will maintain that any treatment, however degraded or superficial, of an acute political or medical matter is better than none. In fact, most of the time, none is better. When I suggested, a couple of years ago, that “A Beautiful Mind” might not be an unqualified masterpiece, I got a boxful of letters accusing me of insensitivity. There are few more serious afflictions, my correspondents wrote, than mental illness. Quite so, and that is why we should be extremely wary of seeing it aired in a Ron Howard movie; the gravity that the subject bestows upon such a project is tenuous at best. (It also means that the movie will date with embarrassing speed.) And so it is with climate change, a topic that the current Administration has assiduously sought to ignore. The very silliness of “The Day After Tomorrow” means that global warming will become, in the minds of moviegoers, little more than another nonspecific fear about which they must uncomprehendingly fret. They will vaguely understand that the United States failed to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, but the reasoning behind this failure will be lost in a frosty mist. Indeed, were they to be taken aside as they emerged from the movie and asked the question “Kyoto: right or wrong?” their answer would probably be “Whatever produces those cool typhoons.”

This is the awful truth: blockbusters are not made to raise awareness. They are made to raise (a) pulses and (b) cash. The sole purpose of a disaster movie is that it should lend shape, force, and, if possible, a breath of credibility to the brand of disaster that it deals in; the worse it gets, the better time we have. W. H. Auden, writing in a pre-digital age, foresaw the predicament: “All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage.” Nobody would call Roland Emmerich a poet, but there is a certain lyrical excess to computer-generated fakery, and his folly is to presume that such vulgar grandeur is not enough. Hence the grim, puritanical deal that is struck by this film: having offered us the undoubted pleasure of watching the Empire State Building turn into the world’s tallest Popsicle, it then makes us pay for that pleasure by lecturing us on what irresponsible citizens we have been. I can just about take this from politicians, but not, I fear, from the man who directed “Stargate.”

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/?040607crci_cinema

"All truth passes through three states," wrote Arthur Schopenhauer. "First it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
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