Indifferent Honest

There are exactly two ways that Antwone Fisher could have been a good movie.

First, it could have been about someone who is exceptional in some way, or does exceptional things. This is true of just about every single biopic out there. In fact, two of the best movies of the year are biopics. You have The Rookie, about a schoolteacher who finds his way into major league baseball, and 24 Hour Party People, about a TV journalist who helped create the British punk rock scene. You have two characters in these movies that are based on exceptional, interesting, real people, that are enlivened by stellar actors. (Dennis Quaid and Steve Coogan, both of whom turn out Oscar-worthy performances.) You can also throw in Mel Gibson as a cavalry colonel in Vietnam in We Were Soldiers into the mix if you’re feeling generous; it’s an interesting life and a good performance despite a horrible Randall Wallace screenplay.

But that doesn’t work here. Antwone Fisher is the more-or-less true story of Antwone Fisher, who has done one exceptional thing with his life so far. He has sold a screenplay. This — especially for us aspiring authors out there — is extremely interesting. Except that isn’t what the movie is about. Antwone Fisher is not about Antwone Fisher writing his screenplay and then selling it. It is about his earlier career as a petty officer aboard USS BELLEAU WOOD. We see him get into fights, receive psychiatric treatment, fall in love with a pretty girl, and connect with his long-lost family. There are many things you can say about this story, but “interesting” would not necessarily be one of them.

(You could say, if you were being charitable, that this is a “coming of age” story. This is true but uninteresting. You basically have the story of a young man growing up and coming to terms with his past, in the same way that all of us do. It’s a familiar enough story, all the more because it’s been a part of a thousand movies in the last century, but there isn’t anything especially interesting or different or exceptional about Antwone Fisher’s story that would make anyone take notice of it.)

There is, though, a second way. It is the more excellent way, but it is a harder and a riskier way. That is the path of total honesty. The only other way for Antwone Fisher to succeed in telling the story of Antwone Fisher is for Antwone Fisher to be totally, ruthlessly honest about his life. Because if you can be honest with yourself, and portray the events of your life in an honest and fearless way, then that in itself is extraordinary. Antwone Fisher had the potential to live up to its press clippings, had the chance to be a good movie, to tell its story in an interesting way, and to reach audiences. All that Antwone Fisher had to do to make sure that Antwone Fisher was a top-flight movie was to be completely, fundamentally, totally honest — honest with himself to begin with, and with the audience.

Antwone Fisher is not that honest, and Antwone Fisher is not that good of a movie as a result.

This is a serious charge, mind you, and I don’t feel altogether confident in making it, but there you go. I believe that the events of Antwone Fisher’s life are told correctly, with reasonable factual accuracy. I don’t dispute that he experienced abandonment and abuse and loss, and that he had difficulty dealing with his emotions as a result.

What I believe, though, is that the events in the life of Antwone Fisher are not presented as they really happened. Instead, things have been buffed and polished so much that the whole movie smells like Lemon Pledge. This is a story that has been resolutely sanitized, with the passion and emotion and honesty scrubbed away, until all that is left is a gleaming antiseptic shell.

Since I am asking Antwone Fisher to be honest, I will be honest. I am an adopted child; I never knew my biological parents. I don’t know if they are living or dead. I have not experienced a tenth — not a thousandth — of the things in my life that we learn happen to Antwone Fisher in his life, and for that I am grateful. But I share the fantasy; the idea that some day, I will meet my biological mother, talk to her, tell her about who I am and everything that I have done. This is apparently what Antwone Fisher did, and it is one of the climactic scenes in Antwone Fisher the movie.

Without giving too much away, all I can say is that I didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe it for one minute. I believed that something like this happened, fine, but I didn’t believe that it happened the way it did. From my perspective, it could not have happened like that. I don’t know exactly would happen if I were in that situation, or what really happened in Antwone Fisher’s situation, but something tells me that what happened on the screen didn’t happen in real life, not that way it didn’t.

This scene has, instead, all the earmarks of a fantasy, something that is desired but that is too perfect to actually exist. In a fantasy, people act the way you want them to. That is the nature of a fantasy. In reality, almost nobody acts the way you want them to, says the things you want to hear, are the people you want them to be. In Antwone Fisher, most of the other characters act the way they would in a fantasy. It’s certainly true of Fisher’s girlfriend (Joy Bryant), who puts up with Fisher even when she knows he’s lying, which is not typical girlfriend behavior. It is true of Fisher himself, at least while he is on USS BELLEAU WOOD. (By this I mean we never see him do a lick of work; he’s always sitting in his bunk writing his screenplay or something.) And if the portrayal of those characters isn’t honest, if the portrayal of Fisher’s confrontation with his mother is not honest… well, then, what are we to believe? What can we believe?

This is especially problematic because a large portion of the movie takes place on the psychiatrist’s couch of Denzel Washington. These scenes are the best scenes, by far, in Antwone Fisher, but they only work if we know that both actors are being honest with the audience. But if Antwone Fisher’s story is, at best, only indifferent honest, it casts a shadow over these scenes. (This is especially true of the very last scene that Washington is in, which is palpably untrue.)

I can understand that Antwone Fisher is not always going to be completely honest. I wouldn’t be completely honest in telling my life story; I don’t know that you would be either. The problem, as I see it, is not so much that Antwone Fisher is indifferent honest, but that it is almost completely self-serving. Everything that is done that seems to be a departure from reality is done to make Antwone Fisher look good, to make him look honest and noble, to make it look as though his story is exceptional, in a way that it is not.

And so we come full circle. As I said, there were only two ways for Antwone Fisher to be a good movie. It fails badly at both of them.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 8th, 2006 at 6:05 am and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.