After reading Michael Perino‘s The Hellhound of Wall Street, I was wondering if we would ever see the likes of a Ferdinand Pecora who would explicate the figures and practices behind the financial crisis of 2008 as well as Pecora, the Manhattan prosecutor, did during the Depression for the Crash of 1929. Well, opportunities for a Congressional hearing may have come and gone; private lawsuits and actions by the attorneys-general of the various states may or may not bear fruit. Thank goodness we have Inside Job, the excellent documentary film by director Charles Ferguson (just short-listed for an Oscar). Clearly, succinctly, and pointedly, Ferguson shows how peeling away years of banking regulation left the financial system defenseless against people manipulating the mortgage lending process, twisting the securitization process, dealing in new and complicated financial products they only dimly understood, and generally accepting a ludicrous amount of risk. Among those most responsible are the government officials and regulators who moved as though in a revolving door between Wall Street and the government. Ferguson shows us that there was a terrible failure of common sense regulation complemented by a terrible explosion of greed. It shouldn’t have been a surprise; it wasn’t new. All the chicanery that Pecora uncovered returned to be uncovered once again by Ferguson. One of the points made most clearly by Ferguson is that all the investment banks have been guilty of major transgressions in recent years. They have all paid major fines, and gone on their way. Only a few, mostly if not exclusively involved in prosecutions by Eliot Spitzer when he was the Attorney General of New York, paid criminal penalties. It’s high time white collar crime should lead to people serving orange jumpsuit time. Three cheers for Ferguson, for so clearly describing how we got where we are, identifying the malefactors, and exposing the fatal flaws in the pro-market ideology promulgated these last three decades by Ronald Reagan and his followers.

Paul Newman, Natasha Richardson and Lauren Bacall, enroute to a party for Talk magazine, August 1999. Photograph by Daffyd Jones. Found on Jeff Wells‘s site Hollywood Elsewhere.

We went to see the film Secretariat yesterday. It was a fairly standard sports story, full of the usual sports story pleasures–a plucky lead character, colorful supporting characters, beautiful pictures of competition. Diane Lane and James Cromwell had some swell scenes involving business dealings. The big let down for me came when they showed Secretariat winning the Belmont Stakes. For some bizarre reason, director Randall Wallace chose to play “Oh Happy Day,” the joyful, uplifting soul spiritual by the Edwin Hawkins Singers, over Secretariat’s triumphant sprint to the finish line. It’s a great song, but it totally diminished the moment in the film, at least in the mind of someone who remembers watching the race on television. Never before or since have I heard a crowd cheer so unreservedly as the crowd at Belmont did that day. They knew they were seeing something that hadn’t been done in 25 years, that five times in the previous decade horses had won the first two legs only to falter in the Belmont, and that they were witnessing Secretariat seize a place in history with an almost mythic display of power. The ever-increasing crescendo of noise was the perfect accompaniment to Secretariat’s unparalleled accomplishment, far better than any song, and I’m sorry Randall Wallace didn’t have the wit to realize it.

Allow me to join the chorus praising The Social Network, the new film directed by David Fincher from Aaron Sorkin‘s exceptional screenplay, loosely based on the creation of Facebook. I’m not sure if Mark Zuckerberg is exactly like the character depicted on screen, but as he has been written, and as he has been portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg (whom we have loved ever since Roger Dodger), Zuckerberg is an undersocialized brain who yearns for popularity and recognition but who can’t get out of his own way. When he finally gets to do something cool–to be cool–he grabs with both hands, even if he ends up being despised and friendless. I particularly like the way he ends up–still on the outside, with an online experience instead of real relationships, the creator of something cool but alone and lonely. The movie lets you see something else–how Facebook itself is a reflection of Zuckerberg’s idea of social relationships–narcissistic, status-oriented, mostly one-way. (Although what do I know? I don’t live on Facebook like my kids do.) Fascinating. One more thing–an exceptionally well-cast, well-acted film.

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.