Cinema
Red and dead
Peter Ackroyd
Daniel
('15', Gates Bloomsbury and Notting 'Hill)
This exercise in the rewriting of American history opens with a lecture on the meaning of electricity (a force that the film itself noticeably lacks), thus setting a pedagogical tone which will re-emerge on more than one occasion. The little homily is delivered by a young man who sports long hair and a wispy beard in the Christ-like fashion of the Sixties, thus also introducing a sanctimonious note which will turn out to be the defining characteristic of Daniel. As soon as the usual scenes of peace demonstrations in Washington, police brutality, Dr Spock, everyone linking hands, are displayed one knows pretty well what kind of film it is going to be. It will be a 'film with a heart', although it is often forgotten that a heart, when displaced from 'I see that the World War III section is 200 feet underground.'
the rest of the body, is a useless and somewhat unattractive organ.
The Christ-like figure is Daniel himself, who is next seen arguing with his sister about her plan to establish a foundation for `revolutionary studies': 'here we are in this horrible imperialist war,' she explains before being consigned to a mental hospital after attempting to commit suicide. It turns out that the siblings are in fact the children of the Isaacsons, who 15 years before had been sentenced to death for passing atomic `secrets' to the Soviet Union. The daughter believes them to have been 'murdered', and much of the narrative is concerned with the conflicting reactions of the children to their inheritance. The film, although based upon a novel by E. L. Doctorow, is clearly designed to represent the fate of the Rosenbergs and becomes in part an historical reconstruction of America in the late Thirties and beyond. Here, in scenes shot in a peculiar amber light, we find the Isaacsons to be idealistic communists who wave 'Fight Fascism' banners, listen to the songs of Paul Robeson and discuss 10 solemn terms 'the good common sense of the masses' and 'the dignity of the ordinary man'; it is somewhat ironic, perhaps, that the 'masses' and the 'ordinary man' could hardly wait to see them electrocuted when the time came. It is all sufficiently tedious., in any event, a film in which melodrama Is the direct consequence of the director's 111- ability to work in anything other than two dimensions. The scene, for example, 10 which the communist activists sing 'We Are The People's Soldiers' while being 'bussed to the latest protest march is too embarrass- ing to watch; there are occasions in the cinema when the only decent action is 10 avert one's eyes. Although the theme concerns Daniel's rather belated attempt to investigate the truth about his parents' conviction, it is clear from the beginning that we are meant to regard them as the innocent victims of other people's paranoid fantasies. Those whose knowledge of the affair was derived solely from Daniel itself would have no idea why they were arrested, what they were stir posed to have done, and what evidence was used to incriminate them. They seem to have spent their time attending demonstra- tions, and making pie-eyed speeches on the themes of racism and the oppression of the working class — but they could hardly have been indicted for that, except perhaps on the charge of humourlessness. The direc- tor's justification for this selective account of the circumstances surrounding the Isaac" sons' arrest would no doubt be that he wished to present the case from the point f view of the children themselves (the Rosenbergs in fact had two sons, and are" cent television interview with one of the; suggested that they were more sanguin about their parents' fate than the imaginarY, characters portrayed here); but Sidney Lumet has gone one stage further and treats the audience itself as if it were compose. primarily of children. The essential point is that it does not matter whether the Isaac
sons are 'guilty' or not — they are not suffi- ciently well portrayed to elicit any interest In their fate, and so the film loses its point rather quickly.
The title of the film suggests, also, that we are meant to consider the fate of the Children — lost, unhappy, almost frantic with fear and rage. But although Timothy Hutton in the title role tries his hardest to invest the part with something approaching conviction, he has very little to work on — and this despite the preponderance of serious thoughts about the world. 'I forget what you're expected to get from being alive,' someone or other confesses, and, She cannot stand the torment of her life... It IS a calamity.' It is the easiest thing in the World to reduce political analysis to the level of melodrama, but this form of cinematic special pleading is not agreeable to watch; superficial allusions are foisted 111)0n the audience as a sonorous reality, and a few cheap appeals to sentiment are disguised as serious statements about the nature of American life. It is not a success.
Previous page
