Ed Harris Campaign

Family entertainment versus violence is the meat and potatoes of domestic conflict. It’s worth having cable just for the wrestling match over the remote. What’s appropriate, versus who’s going into therapy.

In NATIONAL TREASURE, BOOK OF SECRETS, Nicolas Cage and Ed Harris pair up once again to demonstrate good against bad, just like they do in THE ROCK. Cage plays a PG-mouthed good guy, exactly as he does in THE ROCK, versus Ed Harris, except Ed’s swallowed a bar of soap and presents menace minus profanity. He’s the thinly disguised heir of Lincoln assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Both men are trying to make honor for their ancestors’ names.

The first NATIONAL TREASURE movie I kept crying out, “Why are these actors doing such a poor job of acting?!” I do recognize that a star-spangled cast is often a recipe for disaster (from Nicolas Coppola Cage, Jon Voight, Harvey Keitel, Chris Plummer…), but I was really more complaining about the lines they had to say. The plot was unbelievable and stupid.

Unbelievable I could handle. I am an American. I have lived under the reign of George Bush W. Sometimes it doesn’t always work out for me, but I am well practiced at suspension and disbelief. Comes naturally as shock and awe.

Stupid, I could also manage (the President goes without mentioning). RETURN OF THE PINK PANTHER was stupid, but I laughed anyway.

However, unbelievable AND stupid was like going cold weather camping in the rain. Cold you can take; and wet is messy but survivable, yet the two conditions combined make a misery of marshmallow roasting. ALIEN does not try on elements of ACE VENTURA, PET DETECTIVE. DUNE and UNCLE BUCK are not related. HAPPY FEET and RAMBO have little neutral ground. As the first NATIONAL TREASURE movie progressed and I kept choking down facts, I realized this is a children’s movie, not just an historian’s wet dream of antiquities.

The second NATIONAL TREASURE movie is no different. NATIONAL TREASURE, BOOK OF SECRETS puts Harry Potter’s singular CHAMBER OF SECRETS to shame. NT has MANY chambers, all secret; the scenes are chain-linked, one secret chamber to the next. The book, the all-important documentation—is simply a prop along this chain, a gateway from one set of chambers to the next.

Both NT movies are primarily educational in nature, to pique the interest of young minds, to inspire kids to look beyond the facts they get in school. Big-name actors have bent their talents toward a charitable cause in value of this nation’s youth. Otherwise no one would go to see these movies. Very similar to EMPIRE FALLS.

I tried to read EMPIRE FALLS years ago. It’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Richard Russo. I picked it up again recently. By page 63, I knew why I’d put it down at page 59.

They’ve made a movie of it, an HBO special, so I’ll watch that. Believe me, I would have never gotten through the story without cinematic form. Paul Newman, Helen Hunt, Robin Wright Penn, Aidan Quinn, Joanne Woodward, Dennis Farina, all the way down to the Disney darling, Danielle Panabaker—without them, the story would not have made it. It has some interesting scenes of dialogue, where tension is sustained without resolution, but over such subtle qualities. Most people would have given up on similar circumstances and stormed out long ago, but not these characters.

I kept watching. I kept drinking caffeinated beverages and watching one useless flashback into another, each revealing something I didn’t care about for a character with whom I didn’t identify, until at the end—finally at the end!—the Boo Radley-type wakes up and shoots a bunch of people in the school.

Light bulb.

That’s why it’s Pulitzer Prize-winning. A work boring enough to be literary, yet dealing with a modern problem. Literary breaks into mainstream by means of a cheap device of tacked on trauma. Anybody could have written that. The plot, however, does not suggest this ending. The story fails to write itself. Boo hiss. Boo hoo.

The main character, Miles Roby, is unbelievably depicted by…Ed Harris. He’s supposed to be overweight. Harris is not. He’s supposed to be out of shape. A-hem. When Dennis Farino whips off his jacket to challenge Harris to an arm wrestling match, it’s a good thing Harris doesn’t accept or there would be a shattering loss of disbelief. Harris’ hair is another non sequitur. What baldish guy in that good of shape would grow hair like a fur stole for his pate? Harris looks more like an actor trapped in a movie that’s supposed to be good, rather than a man stuck in a small town with big problems.

Harris is probably the worst actor among the cast. He always plays himself, though convincingly so. He’s good with his short-cropped military roles, like APOLLO, RIGHT STUFF, THE ROCK. His unforgettable blue hand emerges with a wedding ring in THE ABYSS, as he blatantly defies the proverb: That which you have thrown into the toilet, probably you should not retrieve. (This applies in TRAINSPOTTING as well, and is equally disregarded to large comic effect.) There is a certain luxury, though, of watching an actor who is behaving as an actor, whom you know is acting and he knows he’s acting, and he’s not being false.

Madam Bovary lied even when she didn’t need to lie.

Holly Golightly was so good at being a fake, she didn’t know she was a fake.

I’d elect Ed Harris for president, certainly over Nicolas Cage.