Atlas watches own movie, shrugs

Okay, I had heard through the grapevine that Atlas Shrugged sucks ass by unanimous critical consent. I begged the grapevine not to tell me anything about what he’d heard, but he insisted.

I went anyhow. I already survived Sucker Punch this year, I figured I could sit through anything.

It turns out, Atlas Shrugged was not that bad after all. Oh, but it wasn’t that good, either.

And this is a book that should have been done properly. According to Variety’s review, this film was rushed into production in order to keep rights from expiring, which is never the best motive when creative decisions are being made. (How cheap is it? The film’s shadowy, be-hatted bogeyman, John Galt, is played by the director himself.)

At times, this film had Big Names attached; Angelina Jolie, Clint Eastwood… but over the years, interest waned, the Big Names dropped out and the decision was made to do the film in three parts, and on a relative shoestring. And right fucking now, too!

Accordingly, no-name or character actors were hired to fill pivotal roles, and the absence of any heavy hitters in the lead roles is a considerable impediment. I liked Grant Bowler, who played steel magnate Hank Rearden, but heroine Dagney Taggert was woefully miscast. Whereas the book describes its protagonist as a Katherine Hepburn in her prime-type, Taylor Shilling (of TV’s Mercy), just comes across as wan, pretty, reactive. Empty, half-lidded eyes. Uninteresting except in a leggy way. To put it politely, she is no more Katherine Hepburn than she is Dagney Taggert.

Cohen Brothers vets Jon Polito and Michael Lerner, in small roles, were excellent as always.

The only truly egregious performance in the film was by Jsu Garcia as playboy Francisco D’Anconia. He was genuinely awful. Without checking imdb, I would guess the producers hired a telenovela soap star and he memorized his lines phonetically.

Oh, and the producers might also have hired a director and cinematographer who somebody besides their families have heard of before. Atlas Shrugged is not a property to make your bones on.

But I think the film’s main mistake—besides deciding to do it on the cheap—was in attempting to contemporize Rand’s book, and setting it in 2016 (which I imagine is the year the film’s makers hope to have the third movie in the proposed trilogy out), instead of keeping it the period-piece (1950s America) it would have been by now.

But who would have wanted to watch that? The producers would have to have been Mad Men to even consider it…

It would have benefited in other ways, too, from being set in the recent past. The allegories to the present socio-political climate would have gone down a lot smoother if they hadn’t tried to shoehorn a 60-year-old paradigm into a present-day plot-line. It’s why Spock could always get away with his ad hominem criticisms of humanity—his remove gave him a more objective perspective, which this film, like its source material, ironically lacks.

Which is to say, the movie also suffers from being too faithful to its hardback origins. Most noticeably and gratingly when it repeats passages of Rand’s overheated rhetoric about titans of industry being entitled to the full fruits of their labors. When the book was written and CEOs earned a meager 10 times what their workers did, it was one thing to agitate for their financial recognition. But today, when Captains Of Industry make 300 times what the average worker-bee does, whether or not their company makes any money that year, and in the wake of Wall Street bailouts and white-collar bonus scandals… the argument rings pretty hollow. It would have worked much better in a historical context.

In the end, I thought it was an okay effort, but couldn’t help wishing that HBO had decided to pick it up and give it the Mildred Pierce treatment; as many hours as it needed to tell the story, stay faithful to the source material’s time-period, and throw some Medium-Sized Names into the cast. Jon Hamm could play almost any one of Rand’s heroes. Ellen Page would have ruled as Dagney Taggert.

So it goes…

Atlas Shrugged is definitely for fans of the book only, but most of the fans in the auditorium with me for the noon Friday showing seemed to be pretty satisfied with it. (And to all my Left-Wing friends who expect this movie to be a big draw with the Tea Party crowd, I would question the average Tea-partier’s interest—as well as the average moviegoer’s—in sitting through a 100-minute film of rich people talking to each other in sumptuous drawing rooms about philosophy and economics.)