'Sound of Freedom' And The Inescapable Shadow Of Politics At The Box Office
#236: "Sound of Freedom," "Talk To Me," "The Third Man," "Bones And All"
Edition 236:
Hey movie lovers!
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This week: I wade carefully into the political discourse surrounding surprise smash hit Sound of Freedom, then recommend A24 horror movie Talk To Me, tell you why you should watch my favorite movie of all time, and then shift gears entirely to a rom-com about cannibalism. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” a steamy erotic thriller coming to…Netflix??
Sound of Freedom
While Barbie will go down in the history books as one of the great movie marketing success stories ever, Sound of Freedom might be an even more impressive sales job.
The thriller, which centers on a man’s attempt to rescue children from sex slavery, is an advocacy project that positioned itself not as popcorn entertainment but rather something that could make a real difference in the world. It spawned not just fans but disciples for its message, beginning with an online crowd-funding campaign to help supply part of the $14.5 million budget and ending with $166 million grossed at the U.S. box office, an unbelievable domestic sum, more than Mission: Impossible, Fast X and Transformers.
In an impassioned “special message” that plays as the credits roll, the movie’s star Jim Caviezel (more on him in a second) begs moviegoers to promote the movie because of its important message, going so far as to ask them to pull out their phones and buy additional tickets on the spot for the sake of those who cannot afford to buy them on their own. The goal was 2 million free tickets. The movie’s website says they’ve sold more than 15 million. Reports of “sold out” screenings in empty theaters have popped up around the country.
Do I think steering viewers toward donating to charities and nonprofit organizations actually fighting sex trafficking would have a bigger positive impact on the world than buying movie tickets? For sure. But moral pissing contest aside, I can’t deny it’s brilliant marketing.
To be fair, it would be difficult for even the most cynical viewer not to be affected by the story at the heart of Sound of Freedom. The movie is, in execution, incredibly earnest and big-hearted. We can hear statistics about modern day slavery all we want, but experiencing the horror of two young children being abducted in Honduras and shipped around the world for the pleasure of pedophiles is hard to stomach.
There isn’t a whole lot of filmmaking pizazz applied to the proceedings, a limitation of the production but also an appropriate choice given the graveness of the subject matter. The movie aspires to be, if not a documentary, than at least a dramatization of the true story of Tim Ballard, a homeland security agent who makes it his mission to rescue as many kids as possible.
His journey is cast as a pure thriller, ending in what is essentially a heist sequence in the jungles of Columbia. It’s as exciting as it is harrowing, told with the moral clarity of a John Wayne movie. There’s white hat heroes and black hat villains and no such thing as gray area. No past trauma, no inner demons. And yes, yes, of course it’s an example of the white savior trope — Ballard literally has blond hair and blue eyes — but unlike The Duke, a self-described white supremacist, I’m doubting too many people will want to argue on behalf of the pedophiles.
Having seen the film, I can tell you there’s nothing explicitly political or “right wing” in the material, other than two inessential references to Christianity (which has become unfortunately polarized) and the audacity to call one side pure good and the other evil. A “left wing film” like this year’s How To Blow Up A Pipeline, by contrast, calls its protagonists terrorists rather than crusaders.
Sidenote: every movie set in present day now must be a political movie. That’s the reality of our current hyper-charged environment. Even Barbie took sides in the culture war, apparently. Perhaps that’s why most of our modern masters have all opted to make only period pieces in recent years (Scorcese, PTA, Tarintino, Spielberg, Fincher, Nolan (sigh), Ridley Scott, Wes Anderson, Alfonso Cuarón … it’s basically every single one).
Regardless, it is impossible to untangle Sound of Freedom’s truly unbelievable commercial success from the political firestorm that has fueled it. There’s been controversy — one of the crowd-funders got arrested for child trafficking, the lead actor Caviezel has spoken at conferences affiliated with QAnon, and so on. It’s hard to tell if that’s chicken or the egg. None of it has to do with the movie itself, but the sentiment that “the liberals don’t want this movie to succeed!” has certainly boosted the buy-it-forward program and box office receipts.
I’m not here to be a scorekeeper for these things. We’re grown ups. We don’t call every Tom Cruise movie a scientology manifesto. If I’d knock Caviezel for anything, it’s that he’s not a very good actor, and in this movie gets blown out of every scene by Bill Camp, the only mainstream Hollywood talent in the cast (which is painfully obvious).
I’ve always believed, as Cold War German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbiner once said, “The revolution doesn't belong on the cinema screen." Modern filmmaker Todd Haynes, referencing that quote, added this: "There’s a good reason to have suspicion about direct truth being presented in narrative film."
Will this movie change the world? Almost certainly not. That’s a marketing scheme. But Sound of Freedom a legitimately good movie with a good message, which brings exposure to an important issue and absolutely brings more light into the world than it takes.
That, in my estimation, is more than enough to endorse it.
Something New
Talk To Me (Theaters): It’s incredible when you stop for a second to think about the degree to which trauma dominates modern movies (and all of modern life, if you believe NY Mag). It’s an overstatement to say “therapy has ruined movies,” even if there are a few cases where that’s true, but you’d be hard pressed to find a movie these days in which one of the characters is not haunted in some explicit way by a traumatic moment in their past…even big dumb blockbusters like the latest Mission: Impossible!
This trend is most obvious in the horror genre, where daddy or mommy issues is a shortcut directors use to try to make their movies “about something” more than just scaring people.
In Talk To Me, a group of friends find the embalmed hand of a psychic and figure out if they give it a handshake, they can talk to dead spirits. That’s a classic horror premise, especially after things inevitably go wrong and the spirits invade their lives. But an added layer, in which one of the girls becomes obsessed with the hand to communicate with her dead mother, signals the movie’s ambition to be a part of the “prestige horror” category.
The strategy works and this movie is excellent, but more because it passes the binary quality test I always mention with comedy and horror (tldr: scary/funny = good, the only criteria). The movie is just flat out scary. Very scary. During no less than a half dozen moments in the film, I found myself having to close my eyes and/or turn my head away.
The directors, a pair of twin brothers from Australia who cut their teeth as content creators on YouTube, show off their talent in making a movie with a $4.5 million budget look as high quality as any big studio movie, and more impressively, finding a way to satisfyingly end a horror movie (no easy feat). A24 knows they’ve got something special in the duo, already announcing this week that a sequel is in the works.
So once again, promising young filmmakers are using the horror genre to jumpstart their careers. It’s why, despite my scaredy cat tendencies, I continue to keep my eye on the best horror indies every year. And this is definitely one of them.
Something Old
The Third Man (1949): I probably recommend this movie once a year in this newsletter, and have recently fully embraced it as my current answer to the commonly asked question of what my favorite movie of all time is. This week, I got a chance to see the movie for the first time in a theater, with a crowd, on a beautiful 35 mm film print, at the New Beverly Cinema (owned by Quentin Tarintino!). I loved it as much as ever, but I think the expectation level I had presented to the friends I brought along (my No. 1 all-time fav!) threw them off.
Usually, people pick for their favorite movie something that feels substantial, epic even. It has to feel big enough to be worthy of the weighty title, like Citizen Kane, or There Will Be Blood or even something like Inception. The Third Man isn’t quite that, it’s more of an adventure movie, meant to be breezy and exciting while executing at the highest possible technical level. But its depiction of post-war Vienna is stunningly beautiful and its story is tightly wound and expertly unspooled. Orson Welles gives an iconic performance, but appears on screen for less than 10 minutes, leaving Joseph Cotten and Alida Valli to steal the spotlight in their investigation of their dead friend. It’s perfect, in my estimation. I wouldn’t change anything, not even the zither-led musical score (which my friends were not a fan of).
If you’re the type that’s usually scared of a black-and-white movie from the 1940s, this is a great place to start.
Something to Stream
Bones And All (Amazon Prime): From the moral high horse of Sound of Freedom to a movie about cannibalism. This newsletter has range! I’m quite certain almost none of you went out to see this movie in theaters in December, and I’ve got $15 million worth of box office receipts to prove it. But if you’ll recall my FULL REVIEW, I actually really really liked this movie, and now it’s just a tap away on streaming. From the sensual mind of Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, Suspiria), Timothée Chalamet stars — do I have your attention now?! — alongside Taylor Russell (who I loved in Waves) in a romantic comedy between two young cannibals. It’s gross, for sure, and a little upsetting, but this movie holds a viewer in a vice grip from beginning to powerful end.
Trailer Watch: Fair Play
Ok obviously we don’t have a lot of confidence in Netflix’s movie department at the moment, but I’m loving everything I’m seeing from this erotic thriller starring “Bridgerton” star Phoebe Dynevor and Mr. Young Han Solo himself Alden Ehrenreich. It’s a genre in desperate need of a revival, and especially one from a female perspective, in this case writer/director Chloe Domont, a TV veteran getting her first shot at a feature. The high stakes hedge fund is a perfect setting for a story like this one, and the idea of a dude being unable to get over the fact that his secret girlfriend got promoted ahead of him feels like fertile ground for both tension and comedy. This one goes directly onto my radar for September.