Currently on Slate, a photo album from Magnum Photos of the Mad Men era, including this shot of a 1963 literary cocktail party at George Plimpton‘s Upper East Side apartment. Plimpton is seated at left with literary agent Maggie Abbott next to him. At top, left to right: Jonathan Miller, Gore Vidal, Ricky Leacock, Robert Laskey, and Paul Heller. In background, left to right: Ralph Ellison and Peter Matthiessen. Center: Walter Bernstein (seated on couch with back to camera), Sydney Lumet (behind Bernstein to right), Mario Puzo (leaning against mirror), Jack Richardson (tall man, front, right foreground), Arthur Kopit (foreground, right), Frank Perry (left of Kopit), Eleanor Perry (left of Frank), Arthur Penn (obscured behind Eleanor), and Truman Capote (center on couch), 1963.
© Cornell Capa C / Magnum Photos

Or more properly, the man of the year is Paul, the character Mark Rufalo plays in the The Kids Are All Right, the perceptive, wise, winning new film co-written and directed by Lisa Cholodenko. The reason is simple: there hasn’t been a male character like Paul in the movies in, like, forever.

The Kids Are All Right is about a long-married lesbian couple, Nic and Jules, played by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, and their two teenage children, Joni, played by Mia Wasikowska, who is about to head off to college, and Laser, played by Josh Hutcherson, who is basically a fine young man who has some questions. Joni and Laser are half-sibs: one was born of Nic, the other of Jules, but both were the result of an anonymous contribution made at a sperm bank. Laser persuades his sister to find out the identity of the donor, who turns out to be the laid-back hipster Paul.

For a couple of decades now, Hollywood has not known what to do with male sexual energy. Time and again, it is sublimated, repressed, channeled, tamed, punished, mocked, ignored, or agonized over. In this movie, it is celebrated. Paul is the life-giver, even apart from his relationship to Laser and Joni. He has a farm on which he brings life from the ground; he is an entrepreneur who owns a restaurant where he feeds people. Right from the moment we meet him we are shown that women find him attractive and enjoy him as a lover. As the movie progresses, we see him in other roles: he is the one who coaxes a song from the lips of the taut, controlling Nic (and in Joni Mitchell’s Blue, a perfect match of song and the character’s better, largely forgotten self); who revives passion and confidence in the neglected and underappreciated Jules; who encourages the simmering Joni to assert herself, even as he casts a fatherly cloak (or, literally, a hat) of protection over her; and who provides a model of cool masculinity for the searching Laser, who amid his female-surrounded surroundings, has latched onto a highly inappropriate role model for guidance. It is true that Paul is, as Nic correctly observes, “a bit full of himself” ( a fairly forgivable fault in the cock of the walk) and is no intellectual. But he is vibrant, interesting, considerate and ultimately decent. And never in the film is he required to punch anyone or pull a gun.

He is, unfortunately, disruptive. That is, of course, the ironic underside of creativity. The life-giver is the destroyer, and Paul instigates a disorderly rebelliousness in Joni and almost breaks up Nic and Jules’ stable marriage. This near-demolition is not entirely of Paul’s making; if there weren’t already tinder, Paul probably wouldn’t have been able to start a blaze.  Cholodenko and her co-writer Stuart Blumberg do a fair and unsentimental job of showing the problems that gradually emerge within a marriage and a family–Julianne Moore’s splendid speech near the end of the film is a description both unsparing and generous–and there is little wonder that the freedom offered by the Unattached Male is such a threat to a way of life that demands such discipline and sacrifice. What’s fascinating is that the film doesn’t give us a Paul who is selfish and self-absorbed; as the movie progresses, he begins to conclude that despite the creativity he offers and the joy he both gives and takes, his greater fulfillment awaits his entrance into the deeper commitment of marriage and family. That would leave him with a big question–can he remain the man he is in an institution that requires him to give so much of himself away? But that’s a topic for a different movie. Right now, at a moment when an eminent magazine like The Atlantic can publish with a straight face a bit of silly provocation called “The End of Men’‘, The Kids Are All Right gives us the great gift of Paul, the very model of modern masculinity.

The oddest entertainment story of the week reports that Aaron Sorkin has agreed to write the screenplay and direct the film of The Politician, Andrew Young‘s account of his disappointing time as an aide to the vain, dishonest and dishonorable Senator John Edwards, and Young’s complicity is hiding the extra-marital affair  and pregnancy that Edwards and his ditsy gal pal Rielle Hunter that the conducted while running for the presidency. This seems like an unlikely pairing of artist and subject matter. I admire Sorkin quite a bit; I’m a loyal fan of The West Wing. But Sorkin, though hipper and occasionally cynical, is really very romantic about politics.  Nobody likes a hero more than Sorkin; nearly every character he created for The West Wing had a clean mind and a full heart and a staunch belief in America, and suffered a crisis of conscience if he or she so much as deposited a gum wrapper in the wrong recycling repository. (The same was true with A Few GoodMen! And for The American President, in which even Michael Douglas played a square-jawed hero! It was even true of Sports Night, which practically oozed integrity!) Even Charlie Wilson’s War, for which Sorkin wrote the screenplay, sanitized the coke-snorting, skirt-chasing congressman of the title, rendered him an innocent bystander in all those hut tubs he frequented, and had him tear up over poor Afghan orphans. How much of that transmogrification can be blamed on Mike Nichols and Tom Hanks is an open question, but I didn’t see Sorkin take his name off the whitewash of the wascally Wilson. But there are no heroes in The Politician. Edwards comes across as an odious charlatan, Elizabeth Edwards as a harridan and a user, Hunter as a homewrecker, and Young as pathetic, self-deluding, enabling, complicit doormat. If ever a subject called for the talents of black-hearted satirist like Armando Ianucci, this was it. Instead, it goes to a man who is only slightly edgier than Steven Spielberg.

If this doesn’t make you smile, you’re dead. . . or a teenager.

Hands down, my favorite perk of being a writer has been screenings. Slipping out of the office, ensconced in plush private rooms with friendly publicists hovering nearly, seeing things before everyone else–pretty sweet. Yesterday I rewarded myself for a couple of weeks sustained good work by venturing into a broiling city for a double feature. At the opener at the Sony Building, I saw Tamara Drewe, the new Stephen Frears‘ film based on a Posy Simmons graphic novel which itself is based on Thomas Hardy‘s Far From the Madding Crowd. This is a reasonably diverting way to spend a couple hours, although I kept waiting for it to get sharper and funnier, and it never did. You can see that the ambiance of the graphic novel and the stunt of updating Hardy increased the cleverness quotient. The film’s greatest attraction is the entirely peachy Gemma Arterton as the title character. We’ve noticed her appeal before–Pirate Radio, A Quantum of Solace, St. Trinian’s)–here revealed more fully than ever before. In the nightcap, we say the John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy at Magno. An excellent Aaron Johnson excels in this revealing treatment, but the real scene stealer is the customarily brilliant Kristin Scott-Thomas, who’s just the most marvelous and versatile actress.

Jane Fonda, 28 years old, in a photograph taken by Dennis Hopper, at Malibu in 1965. Thanks to Vanityfair.com.

Headed down to DC yesterday to meet Cliff Etheredge, the rattlesnake-hunting, poetry-writing, one-armed Texas wind magnate whom I am privileged to be assisting on a memoir he is writing. Over a very fine lunch of lalibera rib and yesom wot at the Lalibela Ethiopian Restaurant on 14th Street (first time with that cuisine for either of us), we spent a very enjoyable couple of hours talking about wind and writing. Cliff is a pretty amazing guy, smart and witty, who has made this rather incredible late career move into wind energy. He was in Washington because Carbon Nation, a documentary in which he is featured, was being shown as the closing feature in the 18th annual Environmental Film Festival in Washington, and after lunch, we went to a reception where I met the director Peter Byck and his wife Christa, and producers Peggy and Henry Sharp, Craig Sieben, Karen Weigert, Artemis Joukowsky and his lovely wife Annie, and Cliff’s fellow doc star, Dan Nolan, and expert in bringing energy efficiency to the military. Being among this group of intelligent, committed, well-heeled activists made one feel like one was among a group of Abolitionists. We then went over to the beautiful Carnegie Institution for Science, where I got to see about half of the very interesting documentary before I had to zip over to Union Station to grab the last Acela back to New York. (See a preview of the film here.)

Most of the obituaries of Fess Parker, the actor who famously portrayed Davy Crockett on television in the fifties and who died yesterday, placed him at the center of genuine coonskin fad, part of the crazy quilt of crazes of that period that included Elvis, hula hoops, drive-ins and that made up pop culture during that decade. I prefer to think Fess as being one of the key figures in the fifties and sixties who were entertaining children and adults with stories directly taken from or based on American history.

Consider all these influences which appeared between 1955 and 1965: Parker first played Crockett, one of the first national smashes in the young days of television, and then later played frontiersman Daniel Boone on an NBC series ran for six seasons after its 1964 debut. Parker’s show, The Adventures of Davy Crockett, was produced by the Walt Disney Company, which during this period also made a film version of Esther Forbes‘ Revolutionary War novel Johnny Tremain, and created a TV programs based on the adventures of the Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, starring Leslie Nielsen, of a drummer boy who served at the battle of Shiloh, and of the 7th Cavalry’s only survivor of the Battle of the Little Big Horn (Commanche, a horse.) Disney wasn’t the only television producer that tried to mine history: in 1961, there was a short-lived television series called The Americans about a pair of brothers from Virginia who ended up on the opposite sides of the Civil War, and in 1963, an anthology series on CBS called The Great Adventure, also short-lived, which depicted key moments in the lives of people like Harriet Tubman, Jefferson Davis, Nathan Hale, Sam Houston, John Brown, Jean Lafitte, Boss Tweed and others (one wonders if this approach was inspired by President Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage.) At the same time, Hollywood, whose longstanding interest in historical epics had ebbed, once again began pumping them out in earnest: The Alamo (Crockett again!), The Buccaneer (Charlton Heston as Andrew Jackson), The Horse Soldiers (John Wayne playing a cavalry officer loosely based as a Union cavalry officer Judson Kilpatrick), The Longest Day, PT 109, The Great Escape, The Bridge Over the River Kwai, and many, many more westerns and World War II adventures (and this wouldn’t include non-American-based films like Cleopatra, Ben Hur, El Cid, Khartoum, Spartacus, Lawrence of Arabia, The Fall of the Roman Empire, Becket, The Lion in Winter, and so on, which fed an interest in history.) On the radio, country singer Johnny Horton had a hit single with “The Battle of New Orleans,” and a hit album that includes songs about the sinking of the Bismarck, Snowshoe Thompson and Jim Bridger. Our bookshelves were filled with Landmark Books, non-fiction biographies and accounts of battles, events and discoveries, and “You Are There. . . ” books, which showed us large historical events through the eyes of child participants. For a lighter read, Topps put out a line of Civil War trading cards, with grisly battle scenes drawn by Woody Gelman, who also drew Topps’ famous Mars Attacks! series. Best of all, we had toys. Toy guns, sure–flintlocks, Winchester repeaters, Colt revolvers, Lugars, .45 caliber automatics, and carbines, but all kinds of playsets full of toy soldiers and accessories that allowed us to imagine for ourselves what the Alamo, Gettysburg, Omaha Beach and the Little Big Horn must have looked like, had they been waged on the colorful linoleum tiles of my mother’s basement.

It’s not that kinds today get no history-based entertainment–American Girl dolls are an obvious example–but kids are far more steeped in fantasy and science fiction. I just think of myself as very fortunate to have been brought up during a very brief period when so much of pop culture enthusiastically communicated and reinforced the idea that the past was place that was exciting, and inspiring, and well worth getting to know.

I finally caught up with The September Issue, R.J. Kutler‘s documentary about Anna Wintour and the making of Vogue‘s large, vital September issue, this time in 2007. I thought it was great. I loved seeing Anna Wintour–I have never met her, but she reminded me of some of the great editors that I worked for, a person whose insistence on quality was so strong and uncompromising that she is considered tough and unfair and monstrous by the less perceptive, less committed people around her. I thought the movie captured very well the enormous pressures that she alone at the magazine carries on her narrow shoulders–meeting with the designers, the advertisers, the retailers, her publishing colleagues, even as she captains this complex, creative enterprise called Vogue magazine, demanding not only that it produce but lead, not only that it appear but that it astonish. I actually found her a sympathetic and approachable figure. I also loved the film’s depiction of Wintour’s relationship with Creative Director Grace Coddington (pictured left, with Wintour), which is often depicted as tense or testy, but which is clearly one of mutual respect and affection where the tension is a product not of ego (well, not altogether of ego) but of fierce commitments to slightly different imperatives (Coddington’s is to artistic vision, Wintour’s is to the overall success of the enterprise) that are usually but not always in sync. But the film was great–my stomach clenched, my heart raced, and I found myself wishing I had a magazine to go to work for.

Drove up to my house last Friday afternoon, found a guy in a car with Virginia plates in my driveway. This isn’t exactly a vision we’ve never experienced before. We’re the first driveway off the first street off an exit of a reasonably busy road that forbods people from making a left hand turn and going on their merry way. Hence: a right turn, a left onto the first street, a left into the first driveway; reverse course, and off they go. But this guy was different; he wasn’t turning, he was sitting–gabbing on his cell phone. I hovered nearly and honked–once, twice–but got nada: no wafted fingers promising an imminent response. So I elaboately turned around (in my neighbor’s driveway), parked on the street, grabbed the two big shopping bags I had with me, and went over and rapped on his window. So absorbed in his conversation was he that he leaped in his seat, and then turned to me. “I’m just turning around!” he blurted. The blatant lie of an excuse angered me. “Bullshit!” I said. “You’re talking on my phone. Now get the fuck out of my driveway.” And he immediately did so, and drove away. So: nastier phrasing than that used by Clint Eastwood‘s cranky old man in Gran Torino (“Get off my lawn!”) and probably less provocation. But then I wasn’t brandishing a gun.