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DNC: Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story
“Lee Atwater destroyed the business of politics by going negative,” said Terry MacAuliffe yesterday, introducing an Impact Film Festival screening of Stefan Forbes’ Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story. “Democrats don’t fight hard enough. They play tougher on the other side. The bottom line is that these guys will do anything to win.” Forbes’ film, which […]

“Lee Atwater destroyed the business of politics by going negative,” said Terry MacAuliffe yesterday, introducing an Impact Film Festival screening of Stefan Forbes’ Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story. “Democrats don’t fight hard enough. They play tougher on the other side. The bottom line is that these guys will do anything to win.”

Forbes’ film, which caused such a ruckus at its premiere in June at the Los Angeles Film Festival, essentially functions as an ideological ink blot––people see what they want in it. It’s possible (and, based on the director’s comments after the film, probably preferred) to see Boogie Man as a vicious indictment of the political operative who mentored Karl Rove and George W. Bush whilst helping the latter’s father overcome the Iran Contra scandal to win the presidency, destroying Michael Dukakis’ political career in the process. But Forbes, to his credit, also clearly explicates Atwater’s appeal. You might need to put blinders on a bit, but it would be possible to walk away from this film cheering McCain to turn Obama into the new Dukakis

In fact, after the screening, Forbes acknowledged that there are lessons the left could learn from the enemy. “When a fight gets dirty, do you have to join? If you just play defense, you end up looking guilty. You have to turn the attacks into a referendum on the other party.”

That is, if you can get beyond emotions. The partisan crowd here at the DNC was loudly demonstrative of their feelings towards the players on screen. They giggled and jeered at slow-moed images of Atwater walking with the Bushes or Reagan, set to the kinds of cheesy blues rock riffs that Atwater himself cranked out to prove how “down” he was with black people. They groaned when W first popped up on screen, and literally hissed and booed for footage of a younger Dick Cheney lying on behalf of Bush the Elder. Maybe the loudest reaction came to footage of George H.W. saying of Dukakis, “I’m not questioning his patriotism, I’m questioning his judgement.” That one produced a number of audible gasps of deja vu. The IFF, according to a statement by co-founder Jody Arlington, was sparked by the “idea that the artistry and urgency reflected in these films could have a real impact on political discourse [and] rally leaders and citizens attending both conventions to engage in nuanced discussions about the domestic and international priorities explored in these exceptional films.” But sometimes a choir is so eager to be preached to that the nuance temporarily gets lost.

That IFF is presenting same basic slate of films to radically different crowds at the DNC and RNC could prove to be a fascinating experiment in knee-jerk partisanism: considering how warmly the Democrats embraced its message, will Boogie Man’s RNC screening on Wednesday incite Republican rage? Forbes says “the other side” is surprisingly receptive to the movie, because Republicans “don’t get why Democrats don’t fight back. They’re like, ‘We’re punching you. If you don’t want to punch back, okay, but we’ll win.’”

It’s hard to imagine, however, that an Atwater fan wouldn’t get a little riled up by the film’s subtext that, as one talking head puts it, “life gets even with you in the end.” It’s said to foreshadow Atwater’s demise and eventual death, and it’s not the only time that Forbes’ subjects suggest that Atwater’s brain cancer came as punishment for his crimes against Democrats. But by the same measure, the idea that the ends we come to is the result of what do or chose not to do could be twisted into a comment on the failure of Democrats. Towards the end of the film, we see a somewhat aged Michael and Kitty Dukakis benignly puttering around their very middle-class looking home, reduced to mediocrity by an inability or unwillingness to fight back. When the images of Atwater at 40 dying of brain cancer, his face puffy from radiation, come on the screen, I heard more than one murmured, “Jesus.” Even if Forbes wants to sell the idea that Atwater got his just deserts (and I’ve not entirely decided that he does), the crowd most primed to walk away with that reaction can’t help but feel the humanity of what that entails.

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Team Picture on DVD Today
Team Picture has been referred to as the last in the Benten DVD boys’ trifecta of Mumblecore releases (numbers one and two were LOL and the Aaron Katz two-for, Quiet City and Dance Party, USA). It’s a fitting way to cap the distributor’s institutional affiliation with this movie moment, which inspired more words from journalists […]

Team Picture has been referred to as the last in the Benten DVD boys’ trifecta of Mumblecore releases (numbers one and two were LOL and the Aaron Katz two-for, Quiet City and Dance Party, USA). It’s a fitting way to cap the distributor’s institutional affiliation with this movie moment, which inspired more words from journalists than were probably articulated across all of the films’ running times combined. Surfacing right at the peak of the M-word hype, Team Picture may be the picture that was bot most helped and most hurt by its association with that generic name.

As the legend goes, after director Kentucker Audley (who is the same person as Team Picture star Andrew Nenninger) had his short Bright Sunny South play at Sundance in 2006, he fell in with Joe Swanberg. Soon Team Picture, a barely-feature-length feature, shot in Memphis for $1500, was booked at last summers’ mythic mumblecore double-header at the IFC Center and the Harvard Film Archives. Team Picture thus got to premiere in New York alongside some of the most covered genuinely independent films of the last decade, without having to put in time on the festival circuit first.

That was the good news. Unfortunately, that platform had its disappointments. Most of the press on the events brushed over Picture in order to concentrate on the Swanberg supergroup collaboration Hannah Takes the Stairs, and future festival play was out of the question because, for most premiere-obsessed programmers, a movie that had already premiered in New York was old news. In that sense, regardless of the film’s pedigree by association, Benten’s release of Team Picture is directly in line with their stated mission to give second life to “overlooked gems that deserve greater recognition.”

Viewing Team Picture a year removed from Mumblemania, and aside from the fact that the film’s director/star does, in fact, mumble, both in character and on the commentary of the DVD, it seems as solid an object argument as any that these films make for an uneasy package deal. As I noted during the New Talkies era, films like Hannah Takes the Stairs often feel like dispatches directly from the lives of people who would go see a movie like Hannah Takes the Stairs. Team Picture may be a portrait of the same generation depicted in Hannah, but it feels less wedded to What We Look Like Now, and more of a universal portrait of a stumble towards adulthood.

Nenninger’s David, shirtless in denim cutoffs, rocking a straw hat  as if in knowing parody of a yokel at leisure, is at once a recognizable little boy lost type and an idiosyncratic hero. His drift away from comfortable complacency via step-by-step destruction of his droney job, relationship with a cranky girlfriend and kiddie pool “enjoyment” zone is as timeless as post-adolescent frustration gets. And Audley’s heavily saturated video images, from sun-soaked Southern foliage to the matte pastels of a Chicago motel room, are stitched together with an economy that feels a bit more controlled––if still threadbare––than the improv-oriented, serendipity-dependent narratives that are starting to become the gold standard of American super-indies.

The Benten box includes the 62 minute version of Team Picture which screened last summer, as well as an epilogue called Ginger Sand. Shot with the help of Frank V. Ross and Joe Swanberg in Chicago and again starring Nenninger and his Team Picture sidekick Timothy Morton, the short catches up with the two boys on a wintry weekend at an indeterminate length of time after the action of Team Picture ends. Both the boys and their friendship seem to be in a very different place since we’ve last seen them. Their easy chemistry together has disappeared, a kind of weary responsibility has replaced the nervous excitement of their common blank slate futures, and a melancholic realization is starting to set in: we become grown-ups on our own.

There’s maybe an easy metaphor to pull out of this sack, about the dissolution of Mumblecore both as a buzz word and as a community, but the great thing about these movies when they work is the refusal to traffic in false conclusions. If we are, then, at a reckoning point for this moment, it seems only appropriate to drift off on an ellipsis…

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