Oscars time is here, and as usual, the Best Film crop includes some gut-wrenching dramas to get you reaching for the Prozac (Manchester By the Sea, Fences, Moonlight, Hell or High Water), along with some Hollywood-fluffing fluff (La La Land) and a couple inspiring “true life” films (Hacksaw Ridge, Hidden Figures).
It’s the latter two I’m concerned with today, as they’ve both hit Manila screens just in time for the upcoming Oscars telecast.
Hacksaw Ridge is Mel Gibson’s latest “comeback,” one of many for an Australian actor/director who has sought to mend fences in Hollywood after indecorous outbursts, both drunken and anti-Semitic. His comeback vehicle deals with a pacifist during WWII, a Seventh Day Adventist who refused to pick up a weapon yet proved himself truly heroic by saving the lives of wounded fellow soldiers as a field medic. Andrew Garfield plays Desmond Doss, a Virginia man who enlists despite strong religious convictions against violence. His refusal to submit to rifle training creates a rift with his barracks mates, who taunt and abuse him, both physically and mentally, though they come to grudgingly accept his peculiar outlook. (Of course, in the tradition of every single WWII movie ever, the barracks mates all have cute nicknames bestowed upon them by drill sergeant Vince Vaughan, like Greaseball, Hollywood, Ghoul and Teach.)
Of course, this is a Mel Gibson movie, so the second half is devoted to graphic carnage on the battlefield — as though Gibson were trying to consciously etch his name up there with Spielberg, Kubrick, Oliver Stone and other cinematic chroniclers of The Hell That Is War. Severed hands, feet, piles of intestines, beheaded bodies and rat-infested skulls are just part of the scenery as Private Doss enters his own private hell. In the movie, Hacksaw Ridge is a tough hillside swarming with (one-dimensional) Japanese that the US Army just has to capture, despite the number of dead-eyed US casualties that Doss and his barracks mates see retreating regularly from the hill. As Doss leaves behind a sweet gal who’s a nurse (Teresa Palmer), his father (Hugo Weaving) is a man haunted by the violence of WWI, the so-called Great War, so he has misgivings about his sons enlisting, which doesn’t prevent him from inflicting violence upon his family.
Gibson’s peculiar affinity for violence — and specifically, the violence that can be inflicted on the male human body— goes back as far as Mad Max and Lethal Weapon movies, not to mention the evisceration of Scottish hero William Wallace in Braveheart and the intense flesh-flaying of Jesus in The Passion of Christ. So it’s no surprise that the director finds new ways to dismember and dis-incorporate the human body in Hacksaw Ridge.
The movie is also peculiar in that it employs a very conventional cinematic style to tell the story of a rather unconventional hero: you can count the beats until the barracks mates stop using Doss as a punching bag and the movie shifts to battle mode. You can count the number of times he says “One more” while hoisting his wounded buddies to safety before you want to tell Mel to stop already.
If this sounds cynical, it’s because the movie — though based on a true-life hero who shows up in the closing credits in an interview, humbly talking about his acts of heroism — doesn’t go very deeply into the things that might have led Doss to hold such deep religious convictions against killing. Garfield, though strong in the battlefield scenes, plays his early scenes with an “Aw, shucks” quality that resists any deep analysis. Maybe the actual Doss never thought about the source of his own convictions; I don’t know. But I feel a movie can take us deeper into character than Hacksaw Ridge does. A film like Platoon, though fictional, at least frames the duality of war — its attractions and its evils — in a convincing psychological manner. Doss never goes that deep, so we just register his heroism as a simple wartime impulse. Nevertheless, his exceptional acts at least never went challenged by haters, as did those of the heroines in Hidden Figures.
Putting the ‘race’ into space race
It was largely unknown to most viewers of Oscar nominee Hidden Figures, and most Americans, but a whole division of African-American number checkers were quietly working in a segregated wing of NASA back in the early ‘60s to help put a man on the moon. In segregated Virginia, home to NASA research at the time, advancement for both women and blacks was pretty limited, a situation made clear to Dorothy Vaughn (Octavia Spencer) by her white supervisor Vivian Mitchell (Kirsten Dunst). Dorothy supervises a roomful of black women “computers” — human number crunchers in the days before IBMs were installed. The movie makes it clear there were plenty of white “computers” as well — though they’re in a separate wing, and even the bathrooms are segregated.
Dorothy’s closest buds are Mary Jackson (a feisty Janelle Monáe) and math whiz Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson). They all vow to uplift one another and make it in a largely white, male-dominated world by doing the best possible work they can for NASA. Costner plays a no-nonsense director of the Space Task Group, which is charged with calculating precise flight trajectories and re-entry points for America’s first astronauts.
He nonetheless sees the “hidden” talents of Katherine, as do other savvy NASA engineers and supervisors.
As Hollywood-ized as Hacksaw Ridge, you can actually count the minutes until Costner tears down the “WHITES ONLY” signs from the restrooms, and you sit waiting patiently until Big Bang Theory’s Jim Parsons (ironically playing an ungifted mathematician) is unmasked as mediocre. Yet it’s still entertaining and uplifting to watch, even as it plays against a threatening backdrop of a Russian space race, civil rights unrest in the South, and the advent of computers taking jobs away from humans.
Hidden Figures is basically a feel-good movie based on a true-life trio of NASA pioneers, black women who became the agency’s first female engineers and supervisors and did actually provide key calculations for early space missions.
So why are some people claiming it never happened?
Oscar nominee Spencer, interviewed recently by New York Times, claimed that “a few idiots” — Trump fans, apparently — are denying such events ever took place in NASA’s history, pointing to a lack of any mention in books like Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff and John Glenn’s memoir. This, despite a collage of actual photos of the three black heroines, Johnson, Vaughn and Mary Jackson, shown in the closing credits. A building at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia was even posthumously named after Johnson in 2016.
“It’s the Trumpites who think people are bending the truth,” she told the Times. “It’s mind-boggling to me that we have totally regressed to this whole labeling and colorism and just ridiculous racist bigotry that is percolating in society right now.”
Of course, she could have simply told the Trumpites that that’s why the damn movie is called Hidden Figures: almost nobody knew of their contributions — or the wartime valor of Desmond Doss, for that matter — until they each got their Hollywood moment.