Robert De Niro, George Wendt
Righteous indignation and self-conscious nobility oozing out of every frame, this admirably intentioned but dutiful film is about the House Un-American Activities Committee's forays into Hollywood in the McCarthy era of the late '40s and early '50s.
De Niro portrays, with his usual insight, a director who becomes a target because he had attended two Communist Party meetings. After he defies the committee's demand that he implicate others, his career is ruined. (In real life the committee pressured or subpoenaed actors, directors and writers into testifying; those who "confessed" to often loosely defined Communist activities or informed on other supposed transgressors were usually allowed to continue their careers. Those who didn't cooperate were often imprisoned or put on blacklists and kept from working in films.
Of course it was shameful that so many members of Congress and their ex officio allies in the Communist-dreading paranoia of the time ruined so many people's lives. Of course the events of the era remain a lesson that can't be reexamined too often.
But this movie presents the situation in predictable, mechanical terms, except for an exchange in which De Niro confronts committee member Gailard {Hard Country) Sartain, bringing the cynical injustice the movie keeps alluding to into focus.
One problem is that writer-director Irwin Winkler makes De Niro such a saintly figure. His worst sin is that he's a workaholic, and it's not clear why he and Annette Bening divorced. (Their reromance is a subplot that's as bloodless as the main story.)
Winkler, a producer (Raging Bull Rocky) directing his first film, puts his ducks in a row and then takes potshots at them with metronomic regularity. Patricia (thirty-something) Wettig, as an actress whose husband has turned informant, goes crazy by the numbers. Cheers' Wendt, as De Niro's best friend, heads for the kind of trouble you knew he was heading for all along.
Meanwhile, Winkler shows a capricious approach to naming real people who were involved in the HUAC Goes to Hollywood scandal. He suggests that producer Darryl Zanuck, for instance, was a sellout and hints that Humphrey Bogart was at least a HUAC fellow traveler. Yet the character clearly modeled on Roy Cohn, the McCarthy protégé whose enjoyment of the extortive power of his role helped escalate the crisis, is called Ray Karlin.
This distraction hardly helps an audience focus on Dc Niro's plight. Even the ironic casting of Sam Wanamaker, who was blacklisted 40 years ago, backfires; he (albeit understandably) displays no feel for his role as a lawyer who tries to talk witnesses into cooperating with the committee.
Director Martin Scorsese plays a filmmaker who flees to England to avoid testifying. His performance has a nervous, grim flippancy that's intriguing. But as it turns out, everybody might have been better off if Winkler had cast himself in Scorsese's role and let Scorsese handle the film. (PG-13)
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