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A Utopian Society Made Up of Business Moguls in Fedoras
By CARINA CHOCANO
Could anyone have guessed, way back when it was published in 1957, that “Atlas Shrugged,” Ayn Rand’s grandiloquent doorstop of a masterwork, would one day reach the big screen as high-camp comedy? Because stilted prose and silly plotting notwithstanding, Rand’s unrelentingly popular book has exerted a powerful ideological hold on the culture, an influence that has only intensified in recent years with the emergence of the Tea Party. Still, for unintentional yet somehow boring hilarity, the novel can’t touch the cinematic adaptation, which shifts the action to 2016 and presents Rand’s ham-fisted fable of laissez-faire capitalism as something C-Span might make if it ever set out to create a futuristic, proto-libertarian nighttime soap. In the 1980s.
“Atlas Shrugged: Part I” may be set only five years from now, but the world it portrays is completely unrecognizable. It imagines an America in the stranglehold of a Soviet-style government, given to legislating equal opportunity and making it illegal for profitable corporations to lay off employees. An opening TV news panic montage lets us know that the country is in the grip of an economic crisis and plagued by oil shortages and rampant unemployment. It’s also apparently beset with bizarre aesthetic forays into the past, when mysterious men in fedoras skulked past hobo trashcan fires on their way into diners where waitresses served homemade pie, and socialites took their hair-styling cues from Aaron Spelling.
In this backward-glancing world, it makes sense that trains should once again become the preferred mode of transport of the future. This anachronism should mean good news for the steely blond railroad executive Dagny Taggart (Taylor Schilling) of Taggart Transcontinental, if only her spineless brother James (Matthew Marsden) didn’t insist on letting his friends in Washington tell him how to run his business.
Finally tiring of James’s incompetence, Dagny teams up with the visionary metallurgist Hank Rearden (Grant Bowler) and the blustery oil magnate Ellis Wyatt (Graham Beckel) to update an old railway line through Colorado. Meanwhile, magnates, moguls, business titans and captains of industry are vanishing, each fresh disappearance marked with a murmured question, “Who is John Galt?”
“Atlas Shrugged: Part I” never flinches from its mission to portray those more fortunate as victims of a lazy, parasitic society that would bleed them dry and leave them for dead, given the chance. (“Why all these stupid altruistic urges?” Dagny asks Hank at one point. “What’s wrong with people today?” Hank doesn’t know. He’s just happy to be with someone who hates humanity as attractively as he does.) It’s a hard sell, and you’ve got to admire the gumption and the commitment, but it would take a far smarter, more subtle movie than this even to approach pulling it off.
This project was in development for 18 years, and was finally rushed into being by one of its producers, John Aglialoro, who wrote the script with Brian Patrick O’Toole and reportedly spent about $10 million of his own money, before the option ran out. (The movie, which is envisioned as part of a trilogy, opened on April 15.)
The resulting film, directed by Paul Johansson, feels rushed, amateurish and clumsy. It’s not just the ideologies that feel oddly out of step with the present day, but the clothes, hairstyles and interiors — which are meant to register as lavish — instead come across as low-rent and sad. The idea that a billionaire industrialist like Hank Rearden would submit to the mean-spirited harping of a frigid, frizzy-haired wife who despises him feels like a relic from another era, before trophy wives were invented. If this is how the mega-rich live in Ayn Rand’s America, they might want to take a tip or two from the Russian oligarchs.
“I’m simply cultivating a world that celebrates individual achievement,” says John Galt, the Pied Piper of the business-class set, as he lures away yet another top business leader to his utopian society consisting entirely of, uh, top business leaders — and if that sounds appealing to you, you may form part of the intended audience.
Because it takes some serious brand identity to get away with dialogue like that, or this:
“Midas Mulligan!” a man in a fedora calls out to a passing banker on a shadowy street.
“Who’s asking?” says the banker.
“Someone who knows what it’s like to work for himself and not let others feed off the profit of his energy!”
“That’s funny,” replies the banker. “Exactly what I’ve been thinking.”
It is funny, especially considering the derivative nature of his job. But “Atlas Shrugged: Part I” is in many ways charmingly oblivious to its inherent contradictions and the fact that its capitalist titans appear to be squatting in old, abandoned “Dynasty” sets, eating food-court baked potatoes.
“Atlas Shrugged: Part I” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Some very bland sexuality and near-lethal levels of exposition.
ATLAS SHRUGGED
Part I
Opened on April 15 nationwide.
Directed by Paul Johansson; written by John Aglialoro and Brian Patrick O’Toole, based on the novel by Ayn Rand; director of photography, Ross Berryman; edited by Jim Flynn and Sherril Schlesinger; music by Elia Cmiral; production design by John Mott; costumes by Jennifer L. Soulages; produced by John Aglialoro and Harmon Kaslow. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes.
WITH: Taylor Schilling (Dagny Taggart), Grant Bowler (Hank Rearden), Matthew Marsden (James Taggart), Graham Beckel (Ellis Wyatt) and Edi Gathegi (Eddie Willers).
http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/04/29...tml?ref=movies
Guns? Of course, it's for an American audience
But would Ayn have approved . . . .
By CARINA CHOCANO
Could anyone have guessed, way back when it was published in 1957, that “Atlas Shrugged,” Ayn Rand’s grandiloquent doorstop of a masterwork, would one day reach the big screen as high-camp comedy? Because stilted prose and silly plotting notwithstanding, Rand’s unrelentingly popular book has exerted a powerful ideological hold on the culture, an influence that has only intensified in recent years with the emergence of the Tea Party. Still, for unintentional yet somehow boring hilarity, the novel can’t touch the cinematic adaptation, which shifts the action to 2016 and presents Rand’s ham-fisted fable of laissez-faire capitalism as something C-Span might make if it ever set out to create a futuristic, proto-libertarian nighttime soap. In the 1980s.
“Atlas Shrugged: Part I” may be set only five years from now, but the world it portrays is completely unrecognizable. It imagines an America in the stranglehold of a Soviet-style government, given to legislating equal opportunity and making it illegal for profitable corporations to lay off employees. An opening TV news panic montage lets us know that the country is in the grip of an economic crisis and plagued by oil shortages and rampant unemployment. It’s also apparently beset with bizarre aesthetic forays into the past, when mysterious men in fedoras skulked past hobo trashcan fires on their way into diners where waitresses served homemade pie, and socialites took their hair-styling cues from Aaron Spelling.
In this backward-glancing world, it makes sense that trains should once again become the preferred mode of transport of the future. This anachronism should mean good news for the steely blond railroad executive Dagny Taggart (Taylor Schilling) of Taggart Transcontinental, if only her spineless brother James (Matthew Marsden) didn’t insist on letting his friends in Washington tell him how to run his business.
Finally tiring of James’s incompetence, Dagny teams up with the visionary metallurgist Hank Rearden (Grant Bowler) and the blustery oil magnate Ellis Wyatt (Graham Beckel) to update an old railway line through Colorado. Meanwhile, magnates, moguls, business titans and captains of industry are vanishing, each fresh disappearance marked with a murmured question, “Who is John Galt?”
“Atlas Shrugged: Part I” never flinches from its mission to portray those more fortunate as victims of a lazy, parasitic society that would bleed them dry and leave them for dead, given the chance. (“Why all these stupid altruistic urges?” Dagny asks Hank at one point. “What’s wrong with people today?” Hank doesn’t know. He’s just happy to be with someone who hates humanity as attractively as he does.) It’s a hard sell, and you’ve got to admire the gumption and the commitment, but it would take a far smarter, more subtle movie than this even to approach pulling it off.
This project was in development for 18 years, and was finally rushed into being by one of its producers, John Aglialoro, who wrote the script with Brian Patrick O’Toole and reportedly spent about $10 million of his own money, before the option ran out. (The movie, which is envisioned as part of a trilogy, opened on April 15.)
The resulting film, directed by Paul Johansson, feels rushed, amateurish and clumsy. It’s not just the ideologies that feel oddly out of step with the present day, but the clothes, hairstyles and interiors — which are meant to register as lavish — instead come across as low-rent and sad. The idea that a billionaire industrialist like Hank Rearden would submit to the mean-spirited harping of a frigid, frizzy-haired wife who despises him feels like a relic from another era, before trophy wives were invented. If this is how the mega-rich live in Ayn Rand’s America, they might want to take a tip or two from the Russian oligarchs.
“I’m simply cultivating a world that celebrates individual achievement,” says John Galt, the Pied Piper of the business-class set, as he lures away yet another top business leader to his utopian society consisting entirely of, uh, top business leaders — and if that sounds appealing to you, you may form part of the intended audience.
Because it takes some serious brand identity to get away with dialogue like that, or this:
“Midas Mulligan!” a man in a fedora calls out to a passing banker on a shadowy street.
“Who’s asking?” says the banker.
“Someone who knows what it’s like to work for himself and not let others feed off the profit of his energy!”
“That’s funny,” replies the banker. “Exactly what I’ve been thinking.”
It is funny, especially considering the derivative nature of his job. But “Atlas Shrugged: Part I” is in many ways charmingly oblivious to its inherent contradictions and the fact that its capitalist titans appear to be squatting in old, abandoned “Dynasty” sets, eating food-court baked potatoes.
“Atlas Shrugged: Part I” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Some very bland sexuality and near-lethal levels of exposition.
ATLAS SHRUGGED
Part I
Opened on April 15 nationwide.
Directed by Paul Johansson; written by John Aglialoro and Brian Patrick O’Toole, based on the novel by Ayn Rand; director of photography, Ross Berryman; edited by Jim Flynn and Sherril Schlesinger; music by Elia Cmiral; production design by John Mott; costumes by Jennifer L. Soulages; produced by John Aglialoro and Harmon Kaslow. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes.
WITH: Taylor Schilling (Dagny Taggart), Grant Bowler (Hank Rearden), Matthew Marsden (James Taggart), Graham Beckel (Ellis Wyatt) and Edi Gathegi (Eddie Willers).
http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/04/29...tml?ref=movies
Guns? Of course, it's for an American audience
But would Ayn have approved . . . .