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Further Robert Redford adventures: Three Days of the Condor, All the President's Men, and Brubaker!!
You know that scene in The West Wing with Danny and CJ where... here, this bit:
Danny : CJ, I'm not staying in the penalty box forever. I have covered the White House for
eight years and I've done it with the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time
Magazine, and the Dallas Morning News! And I'm telling you you can't mess me around like
this!
CJ : Danny, I just gotta tell you, that was - seriously - that was a turn-on when you said
that, though I don't know why you decided to be your most haughty on the Dallas Morning
News in that sentence.
...Yeah, that's me and Brubaker in this post. I REALLY LOVED BRUBAKER YOU GUYS. IT'S OKAY IF YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF IT. I DON'T CARE. IT WAS GREAT.
(For those playing along at home: due to the ongoing collective Robert Redford breakdown afflicting the #hydratrashparty chat room, I'm catching up on a lot of Robert Redford movies I'd for some reason never seen. Before embarking on the plan, I'd seen Butch & Sundance, The Great Gatsby (in high school--I really only remember how much I hated everyone), Up Close & Personal, Spy Game (♥♥♥♥♥) and of course Cap 2. I've now also watched--in approximate chronological order, because I'm a nerd--Barefoot in the Park, Jeremiah Johnson, and The Candidate, The Hot Rock and The Way We Were and The Sting, plus the three in this post, so my remaining list is:
The Natural
Out of Africa
Havana
Sneakers
Indecent Proposal
The Horse Whisperer
An Unfinished Life
Three Days of the Condor (1975) - So what I knew about this, going in, was that it was a partial inspiration for the plotline of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, that there was a moment when Robert Redford said "What if there's another CIA inside the CIA?" and that there was a (to say the least) dubiously consensual sex scene where Turner has sex with a woman he's been holding hostage, tied up and at gunpoint.
Sooooo yeah. That may not have been the best way to go into the movie in terms of... anything. I knew the call was coming from inside the house, so the suspense was a bit lost, and my "oh Condor honey" reaction was kind of damped down by the whole, you know. Drafting sex partners at gunpoint. Thing. (I spent approximately half the movie going "oh this is like Bourne Identity except--" and I REALLY LIKE BOURNE IDENTITY, so this is what I get for encountering my cultural antecedents out of order.)
By the final sequence, with Faye Dunaway having made good her escape, I mostly did have the woobie reaction: oh Condor, you are in so far over your head you are never going to see daylight again. At the very end, feeling a bit bad for Condor that he didn't have an internet to dump all the information directly to, I was mostly hoping that Joubert would put him in the way of a US-based assassin (played, necessarily, by Paul Newman) who would take him on the run and mentor him into a life of virtuous vigilantism or something. That would be fun, right? Things are supposed to go in threes. By rights there should have been a third Newman/Redford movie somewhere around 1978. In my head maybe it will have been that.
All the President's Men (1976) - I spent pretty much the whole movie waiting for the part where either Deep Throat or Woodward got shot in that parking garage. THANKS, THE X-FILES.
Anyway, it was a great movie--obviously A Great Movie--but it suffered from the whole "movie about real life" problem where, you know, you don't actually get a big narratively satisfying ending, just... hey, then real life continued happening in the way you already know it happened!
Also I cannot tell how bad I should feel, on a scale of whatever to whatever, about wanting Woodward/Bernstein slash. Like. Probably pretty bad, judging from the fact that there are all of four fics for it on the AO3, but... probably not that bad, given my standards?
Brubaker (1980) - Okay so the thing you have to know about my reaction to this movie is that if given a little bit of prompting I could probably recite every word of The Shawshank Redemption. I saw Shawshank for the first time at fifteen or sixteen--almost certainly before I was technically old enough to be checking out R movies from the video store, but my parents had given permission for some reason and nobody cared--and although I rarely rewatched things I'd already seen when I was in my teens, I rewatched Shawshank kind of a lot. I LOVED IT. I STILL LOVE IT. A LOT. I HAVE SO MANY ANDY DUFRESNE FEELINGS THERE ARE NOT EVEN WORDS. SECRETLY ULTRA-COMPETENT WOOBIE, YES, I HAVE FEELS.
Sooooo, Robert Redford, you say, in a movie where he becomes warden of a violently corrupt prison and fights to reform it. After first posing as a prisoner to see the situation firsthand. WELL THEN.
AUUUGH IT IS SO GOOD. SO HORRIBLE AND SO GOOD. The movie is based on a book written by Tom Murton, who was fictionalized as Henry Brubaker--Murton was hired to reform two prison farms in Arkansas in 1967. The farms were run (by the state) for profit and had no salaried prison guards, so all security was in the hands of trusty prisoners armed and turned against other prisoners, so it was maybe not wholly surprising that it promptly turned into the Stanford Prison Experiment's very own special hell: rapes, murders, torture, various extortions and generally horrific conditions. Murton never actually went undercover in the prison, that was a movie embellishment, but.
THE MOVIE IS SOOOOOO GOOOOOOD. And features a young Morgan Freeman as the prisoner who makes Brubaker reveal himself--between that and the swaggering sunglasses-wearing young inmate who Brubaker takes under his wing (and who winds up much the way Tommy did, trying as earnestly to help Brubaker as ever Tommy tried to help Andy) the Shawshank echoes were really strong. (And Brubaker came out two years before King published "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," so that may not be wholly accidental.)
IN CONCLUSION there is a part where Brubaker finds an electrical torture device that trusties used on other prisoners, and he's left alone with it in his office, and the trustie he's worked most closely with stands and watches while he holds the wires in his own hand and winds it up and jolts himself, and it's this silent little moment and it just. Kills me. (And if I actually wind up writing the story where Steve puts himself in the chair and has himself wiped to assist Bucky's legal defense by demonstrating the effects on another subject: that's why.)
Also, 1000% shallow observation, I think Brubaker is Peak Robert Redford Attractiveness for me--he's lost the slightly unnerving smooth-faced golden boy look that's still kind of hanging on in All the President's Men, but he hasn't started getting really craggy yet, and he's just. So earnest. And trying so hard. And occasionally carrying a shotgun.
Sooooo yeah. Of those three, Brubaker was my favorite (despite also having the narratively unsatisfying "...and then I guess hopefully things got better?" ending due to real life not actually being amenable to tidy triumphant endings, although Murton obviously did successfully expose the horrific prison conditions and caused a national scandal and then, presumably, effective reforms).
Also now I really want to rewatch The Shawshank Redemption, it's been ages. Everything's going to look so idyllic in comparison to the prison in Brubaker. o.O
Also I've decided, now that I'm down to seven movies on my Robert Redford list, that I should do a Meryl Streep project next. (I realized I've only seen a few of her movies despite her being, you know, Meryl Streep, and then realized that the total is, at most, five, and that's counting my quite vague memories of having seen Defending Your Life and Death Becomes Her sometime in the mid-90s. And the other three movies are Mamma Mia, Julie and Julia, and Into the Woods, soooooo. I have some catching up to do!
Danny : CJ, I'm not staying in the penalty box forever. I have covered the White House for
eight years and I've done it with the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time
Magazine, and the Dallas Morning News! And I'm telling you you can't mess me around like
this!
CJ : Danny, I just gotta tell you, that was - seriously - that was a turn-on when you said
that, though I don't know why you decided to be your most haughty on the Dallas Morning
News in that sentence.
...Yeah, that's me and Brubaker in this post. I REALLY LOVED BRUBAKER YOU GUYS. IT'S OKAY IF YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF IT. I DON'T CARE. IT WAS GREAT.
(For those playing along at home: due to the ongoing collective Robert Redford breakdown afflicting the #hydratrashparty chat room, I'm catching up on a lot of Robert Redford movies I'd for some reason never seen. Before embarking on the plan, I'd seen Butch & Sundance, The Great Gatsby (in high school--I really only remember how much I hated everyone), Up Close & Personal, Spy Game (♥♥♥♥♥) and of course Cap 2. I've now also watched--in approximate chronological order, because I'm a nerd--Barefoot in the Park, Jeremiah Johnson, and The Candidate, The Hot Rock and The Way We Were and The Sting, plus the three in this post, so my remaining list is:
The Natural
Out of Africa
Havana
Sneakers
Indecent Proposal
The Horse Whisperer
An Unfinished Life
Three Days of the Condor (1975) - So what I knew about this, going in, was that it was a partial inspiration for the plotline of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, that there was a moment when Robert Redford said "What if there's another CIA inside the CIA?" and that there was a (to say the least) dubiously consensual sex scene where Turner has sex with a woman he's been holding hostage, tied up and at gunpoint.
Sooooo yeah. That may not have been the best way to go into the movie in terms of... anything. I knew the call was coming from inside the house, so the suspense was a bit lost, and my "oh Condor honey" reaction was kind of damped down by the whole, you know. Drafting sex partners at gunpoint. Thing. (I spent approximately half the movie going "oh this is like Bourne Identity except--" and I REALLY LIKE BOURNE IDENTITY, so this is what I get for encountering my cultural antecedents out of order.)
By the final sequence, with Faye Dunaway having made good her escape, I mostly did have the woobie reaction: oh Condor, you are in so far over your head you are never going to see daylight again. At the very end, feeling a bit bad for Condor that he didn't have an internet to dump all the information directly to, I was mostly hoping that Joubert would put him in the way of a US-based assassin (played, necessarily, by Paul Newman) who would take him on the run and mentor him into a life of virtuous vigilantism or something. That would be fun, right? Things are supposed to go in threes. By rights there should have been a third Newman/Redford movie somewhere around 1978. In my head maybe it will have been that.
All the President's Men (1976) - I spent pretty much the whole movie waiting for the part where either Deep Throat or Woodward got shot in that parking garage. THANKS, THE X-FILES.
Anyway, it was a great movie--obviously A Great Movie--but it suffered from the whole "movie about real life" problem where, you know, you don't actually get a big narratively satisfying ending, just... hey, then real life continued happening in the way you already know it happened!
Also I cannot tell how bad I should feel, on a scale of whatever to whatever, about wanting Woodward/Bernstein slash. Like. Probably pretty bad, judging from the fact that there are all of four fics for it on the AO3, but... probably not that bad, given my standards?
Brubaker (1980) - Okay so the thing you have to know about my reaction to this movie is that if given a little bit of prompting I could probably recite every word of The Shawshank Redemption. I saw Shawshank for the first time at fifteen or sixteen--almost certainly before I was technically old enough to be checking out R movies from the video store, but my parents had given permission for some reason and nobody cared--and although I rarely rewatched things I'd already seen when I was in my teens, I rewatched Shawshank kind of a lot. I LOVED IT. I STILL LOVE IT. A LOT. I HAVE SO MANY ANDY DUFRESNE FEELINGS THERE ARE NOT EVEN WORDS. SECRETLY ULTRA-COMPETENT WOOBIE, YES, I HAVE FEELS.
Sooooo, Robert Redford, you say, in a movie where he becomes warden of a violently corrupt prison and fights to reform it. After first posing as a prisoner to see the situation firsthand. WELL THEN.
AUUUGH IT IS SO GOOD. SO HORRIBLE AND SO GOOD. The movie is based on a book written by Tom Murton, who was fictionalized as Henry Brubaker--Murton was hired to reform two prison farms in Arkansas in 1967. The farms were run (by the state) for profit and had no salaried prison guards, so all security was in the hands of trusty prisoners armed and turned against other prisoners, so it was maybe not wholly surprising that it promptly turned into the Stanford Prison Experiment's very own special hell: rapes, murders, torture, various extortions and generally horrific conditions. Murton never actually went undercover in the prison, that was a movie embellishment, but.
THE MOVIE IS SOOOOOO GOOOOOOD. And features a young Morgan Freeman as the prisoner who makes Brubaker reveal himself--between that and the swaggering sunglasses-wearing young inmate who Brubaker takes under his wing (and who winds up much the way Tommy did, trying as earnestly to help Brubaker as ever Tommy tried to help Andy) the Shawshank echoes were really strong. (And Brubaker came out two years before King published "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," so that may not be wholly accidental.)
IN CONCLUSION there is a part where Brubaker finds an electrical torture device that trusties used on other prisoners, and he's left alone with it in his office, and the trustie he's worked most closely with stands and watches while he holds the wires in his own hand and winds it up and jolts himself, and it's this silent little moment and it just. Kills me. (And if I actually wind up writing the story where Steve puts himself in the chair and has himself wiped to assist Bucky's legal defense by demonstrating the effects on another subject: that's why.)
Also, 1000% shallow observation, I think Brubaker is Peak Robert Redford Attractiveness for me--he's lost the slightly unnerving smooth-faced golden boy look that's still kind of hanging on in All the President's Men, but he hasn't started getting really craggy yet, and he's just. So earnest. And trying so hard. And occasionally carrying a shotgun.
Sooooo yeah. Of those three, Brubaker was my favorite (despite also having the narratively unsatisfying "...and then I guess hopefully things got better?" ending due to real life not actually being amenable to tidy triumphant endings, although Murton obviously did successfully expose the horrific prison conditions and caused a national scandal and then, presumably, effective reforms).
Also now I really want to rewatch The Shawshank Redemption, it's been ages. Everything's going to look so idyllic in comparison to the prison in Brubaker. o.O
Also I've decided, now that I'm down to seven movies on my Robert Redford list, that I should do a Meryl Streep project next. (I realized I've only seen a few of her movies despite her being, you know, Meryl Streep, and then realized that the total is, at most, five, and that's counting my quite vague memories of having seen Defending Your Life and Death Becomes Her sometime in the mid-90s. And the other three movies are Mamma Mia, Julie and Julia, and Into the Woods, soooooo. I have some catching up to do!
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Have you watched The Sting yet?
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I guess this means I should check out Brubaker? *g*
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I mean. If you want to. It's obviously a precursor movie--Shawshank definitely pulls off the triumphant ending in a way Brubaker does not and also there are some "whoa this was made in 1980" moments, but. YESSS WATCH ITTTTTTTT.
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Yes! Adaptation is on my Streep list. :D
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Yes! That is on my list in an OH GOD THIS IS GONNA HURT BUT I GUESS I HAVE TO kind of way. /o\
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I think The French Lieutenant's Woman is my favourite Streep film, her favourite performance. I think it's the best possible adaptation of Fowles work for the screen. Also, Jeremy Irons. They are breath-taking.
Kramer vs Kramer and Silkwood are good movies, as I remember, while The Iron Lady is comletely overrated, in my opinion. The Hours, Marvin's Room and Adaptation are kind of heavy to watch, each in their own way, but there are things to enjoy from each experience.
As for the comedies, I thought Streep was really funny in Death Becomes Her and She-Devil, while Prime, The Devil Wears Prada and It's Complicated left me kind of cold.
Two romance movies are worth mentioning: The Bridges of Madison County (1995) and Falling in Love (1984).
The first is kind of mushy but both Streep and Eastwood, her love interest, are really good in it (Eastwood had not completely lost his sense and turned into a right-wing radical at that point, so there is no poisoning aura of "angry white man yells at everything" around him yet).
In the second Streep's love interest is Robert de Niro, so it's interesting to watch since she said that his performance in the Taxi Driver was an inspiration for her at some point, that she wanted to be that kind of actor? The thing that I remember most distinctly from Falling in Love, though, is thinking that most of the plot drama could have been avoided if they had cellphones. I was literally yelling at the screen 'use your damn phone! oh, wait...'
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