- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
Of course political art doesn’t ”have to be didactic and uninvolving”. But it can be. Why not? A wake-up call to get off the pot and actually engage in the world maybe sometimes needs to come in the form of a bludgeon.
I was deeply moved by this movie. It was didactic, yes. Uninvolving, definitely not. I didn’t care for Redford’s performance at all. He had too much of a twinkle in those bright blue eyes, and he seemed too self-aware – almost as if he too was embarrassed by his earnest preaching movie. But good for him that he made it anyway. The university scenes between Redford’s professor and his privileged and promising but coasting-on-his-laurels student were kinda hokey, but rendered very powerful in contrast to the scenes of his previous students – hard-working, minority kids who chose to forego any graduate school in the country – to put their lives on the line in Afghanistan.
Thomas Malkin said it – in this age of irony and relativism it’s considered, by privileged liberals especially, uncool and embarrassing to talk straight about truth and belief, to consider the really big questions of how one is going to use one’s gifts in the world, to “ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” Very uncool indeed.
Feel free to pan the movie. But actually go and see it before you open your mouth, and try to watch it with an honest openness to the penetrating questions it asks. And then pan away.
Didactic lines that no actor should be made to utter, visually static, extremely boring in places – maybe so. But Zacharek still finds herself thinking about it for days afterward, and so will I.
