Progressives Will Always Have Casablanca — Unfortunately

I t’s more than coincidence that the Brad Pitt–Marion Cotillard World War II spy romance Allied starts out in Casablanca. The love story between Canadian airman Max Vatan (Pitt) and French resistance fighter Marianne Beausejour (Cotillard) begins in French-occupied Morocco during an Allied-forces mission. Director Robert Zemeckis and screenwriter Steven Knight contrive a convoluted love story, but they are clearly working under the influence of the 1943 Hollywood movie Casablanca, and this is where the coincidences begin. Its several contemporary political parallels are more instructive than the film itself.

The original Casablanca, about a pair of political allies who sacrifice their amatory happiness for the good fight, always flattered the romantic fantasies of leftist dissidents. Ironically, that self-flattering delusion won new fans in the 1960s, which saw a counterculture vogue for Hollywood figure Humphrey Bogart (who played nightclub owner Rick in Casablanca). Bogart’s iconic insolence meshed well with both student-radical impertinence and hippie pacifism. This Baby Boomer self-satisfaction appears in new form in the petulance of contemporary protesters — as displayed in last week’s tantrum by the Broadway cast of Hamilton, who delivered a curtain-call diatribe (co-written by the show’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda) aimed at Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who was in the audience.

The Hamilton cast’s indefensible ambush of Pence clearly demonstrated the Millennial Left’s thrill at the thought (delusional as it is) that they live in the world of Casablanca. In this fever dream, the Broadway stage is the proscenium version of Rick’s Saloon and the well-paid actors are members of the resistance, defiantly singing “La Marseillaise” in the face of Nazis. By evoking Casablanca in Allied, Zemeckis and team reduce politics and personal motives into insufferable, childish self-justification.

As Forrest Gump proved, Zemeckis is not a political filmmaker. Allied similarly trifles with history but merely as a pretext for various Zemeckis special-effects stunts. Max enters in the North African desert on a CGI parachute; Marianne gives birth dodging bombs and klieg lights in the London Blitz. But this flashy nonsense still has political resonance. It’s trite and trashier than Bridge of Spies, but Allied’s re-imagining of World War II as a conflict between warring parties with equivalent treachery and equivalent guilt shares the same absurd political ambivalence Spielberg was peddling about the Cold War.

This is the worst kind of hippie-pacifist revisionist fantasy, and it conforms to the now trendy condemnation of Western imperialism and history by progressives. Zemeckis and Knight don’t spend much time examining that juvenile political notion; their exposition ignores the irony of Vichy Catholics lording their privilege over Islamic natives. Instead, Zemeckis and Knight veil international complexities with sex-business and violent distraction. Marianne warns Max: “It’s not f***ing” that gets people in trouble. “It’s feeling.”

https://youtube.com/watch?v=a_QiAunKtxo%3Fshowinfo%3D0

Attempting to make an adult love story in an age of juvenile culture (to which Zemeckis’s gimmickry is all-too suited), Allied wastes its first hour setting up Max and Marianne’s wariness of each other. The love story angle is designed for popular appeal because most people’s “politics” are actually emotional — not ideological — which is why the attitudes dramatized in Casablanca get repeated even by the naïve, non-ideological saps responsible for Hamilton. Still, this romantic part of Allied is uninteresting, mostly because it lacks the sensual, existential suspense that made Josef Von Sternberg’s Dishonored and Morocco transcend politics. Staging an assignation in the front seat of jeep during a CGI sandstorm does not compensate; neither does Zemeckis’ awkward penchant for lurid sexuality during a party scene featuring lesbians, bare breasts, brazen humping, and coke-sniffing that merely recall his ribaldry in Flight.

It’s as if Zemeckis was recombining Casablanca with Mr. & Mrs. Smith to deliberately spite Angelina Jolie. Mr. & Mrs. Smith (which co-starred Pitt and Jolie) was Left Hollywood’s cynical, anti-American response to 9/11, a decadent, jokey burlesque of our intelligence agencies’ ruthlessness. By adding-on romanticism borrowed from Casablanca, Allied posits millennial nihilism. Its two sentimentalized killers are self-righteous in a new offensive way, born of the same superficial identification with Bogart’s Casablanca insolence as well as the merciless self-justifications that we read in today’s hoaxing media and the brutality seen in today’s fake protestors/rioters and those Hamiltonians who brazenly take the pleasure out of theatrical experience. These Casablanca coincidences are part of the nostalgia for old-time politics that has replaced fresh political thinking. To quote Bogart’s Rick: Today’s political brats are misinformed.

***

Warren Beatty’s relationship to political filmmaking is even more casual than Zemeckis’. When he produced Shampoo (1975), Beatty underscored the sex-farce plot with TV broadcasts about Nixon’s 1968 election. Now in Rules Don’t Apply, writer-director Beatty underscores a biography of eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes’ sexual escapades with religious TV broadcasts. Here, Beatty satirizes how America’s puritanical religious ethics supposedly repress sexual instinct. By the time his plot (set in the 1960s, pre-sexual revolution) skates by the abortion issue, the film’s would-be radical political message is as outdated and unfelt as the miscegenation issue in Loving.

In his eccentric attempt to re-create the era when his own career as a Hollywood heartthrob and playboy began, Beatty stumbles over an unsettled concept. Hughes’s imperial business dealings in and out of Hollywood include keeping a harem of starlets and a support staff of chauffeurs and chaperones (Lily Collins and Aiden Ehrenreich play ingénues who romance each other behind the boss’s back). As Beatty shuffles plot and subplot, politics and sex clash with Oedipal, cultural, and entrepreneurial themes.

#related#As in his overweening Reds (1981), an epic tribute to the same kind of romantic and political naïveté seen in Allied, Beatty buries his political insight, such as it is, in glossy anecdotes. An early description of Hughes is almost Trumpian: “You represent what is great about capitalism as opposed to consumerism. They’re not afraid of you, they want to be you.” But what might seem prescient gets lost in Beatty’s narrative indecision. He even second-guesses his own performance as Hughes: He’s in surprisingly good, deep voice while walking on a pier and discussing business with Ehrenreich, ending with an obsessive-compulsive all-American meal. He briefly brings the old man out of the shadows but then backs off from reflecting on politics and culture. Rules Don’t Apply starts out by creating a context for an icon of American entrepreneurial lust, then gets increasingly vague, sentimental, and less personal.