Michael Winterbottom's Road Pictures for Our Time (American Prospect)
August 22, 2007
Right now a political filmmaker of great talent is
making more than one film a year -- 17 in the last 15
years. That's the good news. The bad news is that his
work has yet to be viewed by a substantial audience.
That filmmaker is Michael Winterbottom, director of
this summer's A Mighty Heart, an adaptation of Mariane
Pearl's memoir of the kidnapping and murder of her
husband, reporter Daniel Pearl. The red-carpet
attractions of its star, Angelina Jolie, have helped
publicize the film, but they have not brought it high
box-office returns. The same was true for another of
Winterbottom's films, In This World (2002): It
received so little distribution when it came out
stateside four years ago that if you saw it, you were
probably a film critic.
Despite his still small following, Winter-bottom
deserves to be known as a filmmaker for our time. At
46, the British-born and London-based director can
handle, without apparent strain or sanctimony, themes
of religious radicalism, national boundary crossing,
and poverty. Unlike Sicko's Michael Moore,
Winterbottom is interested in conditions and
situations rather than in single issues, single
villains, or a single dim-witted, belligerent
president who dodged the draft and mangles grammar.
Moore and Syriana's radical-chic writer/director
Stephen Gaghan are parochial in comparison, pale
descendents of a previous generation of filmmakers who
offered unique investigations of political corruption
-- Alan Pakula's The Parallax View (1974),
Costa-Gavras' Z (1969), or Gillo Pontecorvo's Battle
of Algiers (1966) -- films in which the corruption was
centered on a couple of bad guys with mustaches or on
the regime of a nation in colonial upheaval.
In contrast, Winterbottom's best film to date, In This
World, is about an entire part of the world and how it
is linked to Europe through money, labor, and
geography. The film's leading characters, two young
Afghan men, leave a refugee camp where children make
bricks for a living, smuggling themselves via a
migratory silk route to London. They buy their way
onto trucks, buses, and, most terrifyingly, a nearly
airless ship container, traversing Pakistan, Iran,
Turkey, Italy, and England. Here, as in other films,
Winter-bottom appropriates the road movie, creating
and becoming the master of a new genre, the political
road movie.
Dispensing with the road movie's typical coming-of-age
or square-turning-bohemian story lines, the leads of
Winterbottom's best films hurtle between the populous,
violently devout cities of newspaper headlines --
Tehran, Sarajevo, Karachi -- places where living, let
alone making a movie, is an extreme sport. Among those
films are Welcome to Sarajevo, about the war in
Bosnia, and The Road to Guantanamo (which he
co-directed), a docudrama about three British Muslims
captured in Afghanistan, turned over to U.S. forces,
and jailed for two years as alleged enemy combatants
in Guantanamo. He tends to cast as many
nonprofessional actors as he can manage. The leads in
In This World were non-actors; after making the film,
one of them went as a refugee to the U.K., where he
was told he would have to leave before his 18th
birthday.
It would seem that Winterbottom, with his production
company Revolution Films, sees himself as an activist,
or at the very least, an advocate. But trying to get a
bead on his ambient politics isn't as easy. In one
interview, in that irritating,
I-am-a-cipher-movie-person way, Winterbottom
resentfully shrugged off the suggestion that he made
"political films." Yet he has also said, "If you want
to be political, you have to do something in the
mainstream, something that is going to affect a number
of people." He has derided the Labour Party in print
for being too disconnected from the people it
represents and, last month, echoing the relativism
that is now a habit of mind for the European Left in
an interview with The Washington Post: "There are
extremists on both sides who want to ratchet up the
levels of violence, and hundreds of thousands of
people have died because of this."
Winterbottom's lyrical, equalizing Leftism, a
proclivity that Judea Pearl, Daniel Pearl's father,
took issue with on The New Republic's Web site this
summer, suits him in a way: The last time great
political filmmakers stomped the earth, during the
1970s, the story was literally binary, in the fashion
of all Cold War tales. Winterbottom has come into his
talents in a period when it's hard to get a fix, when
there seem to be a multitude of evils, some good, and
a whole lot of blur.
Aesthetically, Winterbottom is also committed to blur,
his jagged, on-the-run style created, in part, by
hand-held cameras and digital film and occasionally
improvised dialogue. "We didn't tell the characters to
be happy or sad, because we couldn't do that. We
didn't share their culture," he has said of the
non-actor leads of In This World. "We simply organized
the journey, the mechanics." The preference for
improvisation has deep roots in political cinema, as
if to underline how "real" and close to the ground a
particular film is, but it also suits Winterbottom's
fascination with social systems that have broken down.
As these systems waver, there's real shock and
suspense, as in one Winterbottom film scene, where
three boys climb an icy mountain at night in order to
cross from Iran to Turkey. It's shot in night-vision
film and with a hand-held camera that runs and slips
and hides with the actors, so the audience is forced
to share their physical exertion, fear, and night
blindness.
The cities he films tend to be derogated by the West
as incubators for thieves, terrorists, and zealots;
Winterbottom shows them as also sublimely beautiful.
There are dun-colored mountain passes in Iran; bright,
decaying streets in Pakistan where vendors sell giant
flatbreads to boys who will soon be imprisoned as
terrorists; and a boy seeking asylum in London using
the truck in which he is being smuggled as a jungle
gym. Even Code 46, a sci-fi film, is really about the
look and feel of the "developing" world: In that film,
some people live in protected zones, played by
Shanghai and London, and the others in unprotected
ones, played by Dubai and India, sandy places where
throngs compete to survive -- and the latter are far
lovelier.
In his latest film, A Mighty Heart, Winterbottom's
improvisational grace is on display in images of the
woman who wipes the floors at the home where the
Pearls stayed, the taxi cab drivers whose vehicles are
pressed bumper to bumper on every street, and the men
walking somberly in long cotton shirts down
detritus-lined streets. There's also a subplot in the
film that, in its internecine ambiguity, is pure
Winterbottom -- Pakistan's counter-terrorism unit's
investigation of Pearl's kidnapping while the
government stonewalls.
When A Mighty Heart falters, though, it does so
because Winterbottom deviates from his loyalty to the
street, largely to attend to the overwhelming presence
of Angelina Jolie as Mariane Pearl -- the lips, the
halo of artificial black, curly hair and tinted skin,
the Medea-like primal scream, the adopted brood
waiting in the trailer just offscreen. Whatever anyone
says about Jolie's new-found humility, she certainly
chews the scenery here. And A Mighty Heart has a
directorial issue as well. Winterbottom doesn't use
celebrities or stars particularly well in his films --
see Tim Robbins' awkward performance in the film Code
46. The director seems uncomfortable centering his
films on conventionally glamorous, romantic, famous,
or heroic people. That discomfort, bordering on
ineptitude, weakens A Mighty Heart.
Winterbottom's disregard for individuals hurt his
previous effort, The Road to Guantanamo, as well. The
film pivots on the presumption that the Tipton Three
were innocent tourists, yet one has since admitted to
having been trained by al-Qaeda. The film's lack of
skepticism and attendant psychological depth --
ostensibly Winterbottom didn't know the truth,
although there's a chance that he simply didn't care
-- now mars it.
By and large, though, Winterbottom's disinterest in
celebrated people gives his best films an oceanic feel
that American films, with their faith in singular
heroes, can't even fake. It remains to be seen when
and if Winterbottom's full promise will be realized.
It would help, I think, for him to lay off the
Jolie-style stars and hew to his small-budget
obsession with the interlocking grid of global
poverty, misrule, and transmigration. His next
feature, Murder in Samarkand, due out in 2008, will be
a pitch-black comedy centered on a real-life British
ambassador, Craig Murray, played by British television
comedian Steve Coogan. Murray struggled to expose a
murderous dictatorship in Uzbekistan, compiling a list
of his host government's slayings and other abuses.
According to the ambassador's memoir, on which the
film is based, the British Foreign Office ultimately,
and unfairly, dismissed him from his post.
With his new film, as with A Mighty Heart,
Winterbottom may be one of the few Western directors
that can enter the Arab or Pakistani street at street
level. He is good at stimulating viewers' sympathetic
imaginations, reminding those in the protected zone
about those in the unprotected one. He represents
difficult places with such urgency that Americans
watching his films are unlikely to be able to wander
mentally back to their own swaddled lives. And that
confrontation with and sympathy for the real beyond
our borders, not a fashionable film screed or a flashy
Hollywood feature with liberal leanings, is what we
need most.