San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
‘In the Heights’ does not warrant an apology
Forty years ago this May, I heard a radio bulletin that Pope John Paul II had been shot in an assassination attempt and that he was receiving emergency surgery at a hospital in Rome. The announcer mentioned the surgeon’s name, Francesco Crucitti, and in the split second it takes to think something without the mind censoring it, I thought, “Uhoh, the pope’s dead.”
Why did I think that? It was because the pope was getting operated on by an Italian, and everyone knew that if you needed surgery, your doctor had to be either AngloSaxon or Jewish. An Italian would just screw things up.
Another split second later, I was mad at myself. I was Italian American. I wasn’t a moron. Neither was Uncle Tony, Uncle Nunzi, Uncle Vito, Uncle Dominic, Uncle Vic, Aunt Lena, Aunt Francey, or cousins Sal, Vito, Nina, Salvy or the other Vito. Yet against all the empirical evidence at my disposal, I somehow had it imprinted in my head that Italians were none too bright.
In that moment that I first understood the importance of representation in the arts. After all, I didn’t have to investigate where all that garbage in my head had come from. It had come from movies and television. I had never seen an Italian American physician in a movie. A lot of crooks, cops and streetwise characters, but that’s it.
And it didn’t take long for me to think how much worse for me it would be had I been born Black. With rare exceptions, African Americans in movies circa 1980 were comics, sidekicks or criminals.
Things have gotten a lot better in the past 40 years — though, that’s not to say that everything’s great. For example, when it comes to the depiction of African Americans in movies, since at least 2000, many of our biggest actors are Black, playing a variety of roles, and their efforts have been rewarded with prestigious awards and nominations. It’s not equally good for Black women, but as the fortunes of women rise, as they have in the past few years, we’ve seen the concomitant rise of Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Issa Rae, Regina King, Cynthia Erivo and others.
But Latino representation, like Asian representation, has been weirdly lacking in Hollywood. Which brings us to “In the Heights,” LinManuel Miranda’s glorious musical, released into theaters and HBO Max last month. When I left town to go on vacation, the film was glowing in critical approbation. Before I got back, there was a controversy that Miranda and its Bay Areabred director Jon M. Chu hadn’t put enough AfroLatinos in the cast.
Now in a way, this kind of controversy isn’t new. Whenever you have a large population that doesn’t get many movies made about it, there is added pressure put on whatever movie does get made to tell the full story of the population. I’m old enough to remember when Italian Americans were protesting “The Godfather” before its release, angry that Italians were about to be portrayed as mobsters.
In the late 1990s, when stories about women were rare in movies and television, “Sex and the City” was criticized for only dealing with welloff women in New York. In 2005, “Brokeback Mountain” was criticized for casting, in gay roles, straight actors who seemed straight.
However, there is something new about the “In the Heights” controversy, and that’s the quality of threat behind it — the implicit, sometimes overt, suggestion that careers could be canceled.
Rita Moreno (Rita Moreno, folks!) had to apologize on Twitter for defending Miranda on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”
“I was clearly dismissive of black lives that matter in our Latin community,” she, in part, tweeted.
Except ... she wasn’t. She wasn’t dismissive of anybody. On Colbert, Moreno merely expressed sensible frustration on Miranda’s behalf.
“You can never do right, it seems,” she told Colbert. “This is a man who literally has brought Latinoness and PuertoRicanness to America . ... They’re really attacking the wrong person.”
That warranted an apology? That is a remark that needs to be walked back, in a mea culpa that sounds like a forced confession out of a Stalinist show trial?
Miranda apologized, too. Yet imagine if, instead of saying he’s “truly sorry” for his movie — instead of saying, “I’m learning from the feedback, I thank you for raising it, and I’m listening” — he had just defended the wonderful, beautiful film that he’d made. Imagine if he’d said, “We held auditions, and it happened to work out the way it did. We weren’t putting forth a sociological treatise or trying to check boxes. We were just making a movie.”
That would have been refreshing. But he probably would have been crucified.
There’s something bigger at stake here than the representation of any particular group or subgroup in any one particular movie, and that’s the autonomy of the artist. If we get to the point — and I fear we’re already at that point — where filmmakers can’t pursue their own vision without looking over their shoulder and imagining every possible social justice critique that could be leveled against them, we’re in for a period of really bad art.
“Can’t you just wait a while and leave it alone?” That was the most incendiary thing that Rita Moreno said on Colbert’s show, but did she really say something wrong? First off, the lady is 89, so she knows a little something about the long game. But in any case, what’s the alternative? “In the Heights” has been killed dead at the box office. It’s destroyed. Perhaps it was always going to be a hard sell — it has no major movie stars, lots of theaters were still closed, and it was released simultaneously on HBO Max. But word of mouth could have sustained it. It’s really something special. Yet who’d go to a movie that its creators are apologizing for?
The “Godfather” movies gave birth to Al Pacino and Robert De Niro and all their subsequent glories. “Sex and the City” transformed the way women’s sexuality was presented onscreen, and “Brokeback Mountain” probably did more to change Middle America’s feelings about gay rights than any speech by any politician, ever.
But those titles were hits. Huge hits. “In the Heights,” by contrast, is a tombstone in the desert, warning all who approach not to try something like that again. The taking down of Miranda and Chu’s film is beyond counterproductive. It’s destructive, and it’s inhibitive. If we care about movies, if we care about artists, if we care about representation in the most influential of art forms, critics must not let this happen without saying something about it.