Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Iron Man / USA / 2008

Maybe it’s because they were working with a second-tier superhero, but Marvel’s certainly taken some interesting risks with this movie, starting with hiring director Jon Favreau, best known for snappy dialogue comedies. Iron Man is remarkable in that it pushes the superhero-movie genre in two seemingly incompatible directions: toward contemporary political allegory on the one hand and mid-90s indie nonchalance on the other. This should result in a pretty schizophrenic movie, but Favreau’s film brilliantly avoids generic dissonance by achieving in cinema what it fantasizes about in the political realm: namely, violence with heart, or weaponization with a human face. The plot turns on Tony Stark, a leading military arms supplier, having a crisis of conscience and deciding he’s been complicit in terror and murder, all of which is somehow resolved by his invention of suits that can fly and shoot missiles. (“How about a pilot without the plane?” is the way he puts it.) The theme is the image of America abroad, whether we’re to be regarded as peacekeepers or “merchants of death,” even whether one necessarily entails the other.

Lest this political subtext get too depressing, though, Favreau slathers on the charm, with Robert Downey Jr. undercutting every possible moment of solemnity and Gwyneth Paltrow somehow managing to make a character named “Pepper Potts” relatively believable. Thus we get a film which is about 40% snappy dialogue-comedy, 60% CGI robots and explosions, with each pleasure balancing out and guaranteeing the other: we don’t feel so irresponsible enjoying the carnage knowing that it’s being supervised by a morally conscious and moreover unpretentious US citizen, one who can distinguish terrorists from civilians and kill only the latter at the touch of a button. Stark, in other words, is the kind of arms manufacturer you’d like to have a beer with, and the archetype Downey inaugurates here — the witty, socially responsible, cheeseburger-loving engineering genius — is as good a summation of how Americans now wish to think of themselves as we’re likely to get this decade.

by Evan Kindley | Source: 35mm print
14 May 2008 10:36 PM | Submit Comment