Outing Sanctimonious Celebs

by Caryn James Info

Caryn James is a cultural critic for The Daily Beast. She also contributes to Marie Claire and The New York Times Book Review. She was a film critic, chief television critic and critic-at-large for The New York Times, and an editor at the Times Book Review. She is the author of the novels Glorie and What Caroline Knew. As a film commentator, she has been a guest on Charlie Rose, Today, CBS Sunday Morning and MSNBC.

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Astrid Stawiarz / Getty Images A hot new documentary by Wag the Dog director Barry Levinson tackles the ugly truth about celebrities' misguided political interventions.

We always knew that Obamamania would have to give way to realism, like it or not. And on the evidence of PoliWood, Barry Levinson’s piercing new documentary about the mingling of politics and Hollywood, the director may be the ultimate realist for our media-centric, still-hopeful yet still-polarized age.

The film (which premiered Friday at the Tribeca Film Festival) first took shape when the Creative Coalition, the advocacy group of artists, asked Levinson to follow its members to the 2008 Democratic and Republican conventions and the inauguration. The project morphed so much it is now billed as “A Barry Levinson Film Essay,” and a good thing it did. What might have been a valentine to an admirable group (snooze) is now an eye-opening meditation, with Levinson appearing on camera to frame trenchant questions about the “unholy alliance” as he calls it, of politics, celebrity, and media.

“Everyone is selling something,” Levinson says matter-of-factly onscreen. “And that’s the democracy we have today.”

It’s territory Levinson understands well, having directed Wag the Dog, the prescient 1997 movie in which a political strategist wages a bogus war entirely on television to distract the nation from a White House sex scandal. PoliWood plays as if Levinson were explaining how we got to be such a Wag the Dog country—he casts TV as the villain—and why the media hounds keep getting more rabid.

The camera watches as Spike Lee challenges Gov. David Paterson about funding arts education in New York and actor Giancarlo Esposito speaks movingly about his mother’s emotional breakdown and the need for better mental-health care. Anne Hathaway plays the ingenue, worried about how to combine stardom with political responsibility.

But the two episodes of high drama come from events Levinson himself set in motion. At the Democratic convention in Denver, he asked pollster Frank Luntz to run a seminar advising Creative Coalition members how to convey their support for issues such as arts education more effectively. When Luntz mildly suggests that the actors tone down any in-your-face rhetoric, perhaps use language to sway opponents not antagonize them, actor Josh Lucas turns as red-faced as a kid whose toy has been taken away on the playground; he’s indignant at being told what to say. Actress Gloria Reuben actually compares Luntz’s advice to stomping on her First Amendment rights. Huh? This from people who make a living creating images.

Here we get an illuminating peek inside the bubble at least some stars occupy. Susan Sarandon is a voice of reason as she patiently explains, in what amounts to a Bush flashback, “I don’t talk about impeachment, I talk about accountability.”

Levinson took a more conciliatory approach during the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, asking Luntz to bring together actors and ordinary citizens to talk across the Hollywood-Main Street divide. Face to face with actors including Hathaway, Tim Daly, and Ellen Burstyn, the people in St. Paul (not all of them Republicans) were—what’s the opposite of star-struck? They practically spit venom. They are furious that showbiz millionaires get what one man calls “undue influence”; they angrily call the stars arrogant and out of touch; another man accuses them of not allowing everyday people to think for themselves. (Maybe he thought he was in a sci-fi mind-meld movie.)

The political gulf between Middle America and Hollywood is hardly a new idea. What’s fresh is this closeup view, so visceral it finally makes that abstraction real (especially to some of us in celeb-central New York).