Hollywood meets reality
Film industry blurred the line between art and the real world over the past year
The surprise ending has long been one of the movie’s most unsettling tricks, but 2016 was the year reality joined in. Regardless of whether you thought Brexit and the election of Donald Trump were good things, or each the real-world equivalent of a mysterious box that turns out to have Gwyneth Paltrow’s head inside, they certainly registered like shocks to the system.
Perhaps if the pollsters had spent a little more time at the movies, they would have been less taken aback. The U.S. Presidential election took place in early November, but if you visited the multiplex this summer, you’d have noticed that by mid-June, the air was already soupy with the smell of Trump.
Independence Day: Resurgence attempted to whip up the kind of chin-jutting jingoism rarely seen on screen since the ’90s, in much the same manner as the U.S. president-elect (who in one pronouncement even seemed to ape the structure and cadence of a speech given by Bill Pullman’s president in the original Independence Day film). Then there was Suicide Squad, the DC Comics adaptation and Hollywood’s first alt-right blockbuster, which made heroes of a ragtag gang of smirking deplorables who outmanoeuvre a conspiracy racked establishment.
And let’s not forget the backlash to the Ghostbusters reboot, which was guilty of the liberal-elitist crimes of casting four women in its lead roles and playing up the attractiveness of their male sidekick. Paul Feig’s film was met with a barrage of noise and misinformation from its detractors that now looks like a warm-up for the big post-truth show. The protest was about cynical reboots rather than women, but it just happened to single out a female-led film over countless alternative targets, and led to its cast being bombarded with graphic, sexually explicit and (in the case of breakout star Leslie Jones) racist abuse.
Anyone who complained that feminism had taken over Hollywood must have missed the sequence in Suicide Squad in which Ben Affleck’s Batman punches unconscious the crop-topped female villain Harley Quinn, loads her body into the Batmobile, then gives her rough mouth-to-mouth, only for her to come around, kiss him back and laugh with delight — because, well, she must have wanted it really.
If this all sounds as cheerful as a shipwreck, let’s now note that 2016 was a tremendous year for film, and some of the very best releases were fired by the same political turmoil as the worst. Back in January, Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight pared America down to a snowbound Civil War shack, in which a handful of men (and one woman) splutter with racism, prejudice and bogus claims to the moral-historical high ground.
Then came Zootopia, one of the best animated features in a benchmark year for the medium. The first of two great Disney Animation Studios releases (followed nine months later by Moana), it was a crackpot comedy set in a city of talking mammals but also a finely shaded allegory of political corruption — Busytown meets Chinatown.
When Byron Howard, one of Zootopia’s directors, first pitched the film to Disney in 2011, there was no way he could have known it would land at such an opportune moment. But great films have an uncanny way of rising up to meet history as it hits. That was never truer in 2016 than for the extraterrestrial invasion drama Arrival — the release of which, on the first weekend after the U.S. Presidential election, couldn’t have been better timed if a flying saucer had actually touched down during the world première. In Quebec director Denis Villeneuve’s film, an expert linguist, played by Amy Adams, has to fathom a language used by a fleet of otherworldly spacecraft that suddenly descend on Earth — an event that also brings global nuclear tensions to a rolling boil.
Humanity’s future, the film reminded us, rests entirely on its capacity to connect.