Is there a Right way to make a movie?
An American Carol, which opens this weekend, offers a model. Watching it this summer at a premier at the Republican Convention in Minnesota, it struck me as a bold and natural progression from a winning formula.
Adam Sandler is a consistent moneymaker in Hollywood. I’ve looked at no surveys, I’ve polled no moviegoers. But his success has always made a lot of sense to me. And it’s not because I think we’re a nation that really appreciates a “boob” joke (though, obviously, there is a considerable audience for that and more). My theory is there is just something fundamentally American about his films. That doesn’t mean that American men frequently have
Waterboy/
Billy Madison/
Little Nicky-like funny voices. Or that women wished they did. It means that while being ridiculously silly, they tend to have, at core, a decency. Sometimes — especially as he and his production company have matured — the message is more explicit. The importance of fatherhood in
Big Daddy and marriage in the more dramatic
Spanglish; both in the more off-beat
Click. The 9/11 film
Reign Over Me.
His films make you laugh. Heavens knows I could use a laugh around now during this tense election. But they never take you away — or too far away, at least, from your moral compass. You’ll roll your eyes at things, sure. But the ridiculous is so ridiculous if you’ve got the compass going in it does no harm. (This holds true for the silly but sweet recent House Bunny, which, in its way, honors virginity.)
It’s in this same spirit that David Zucker and Steve McEveety offer us this weekend
An American Carol. You will laugh. You will be impressed. You will, also, roll your eyes. It has its childish moments. But it also has Jon Voight at St. Paul’s Chapel in New York City, in the shadow of where the World Trade Center once stood, as George Washington, in a most moving scene, that will have you begging Voight to do a miniseries playing our nation’s first president.
American Carol represents the efforts of a team that wanted to put together an unapologetically American film that explains some basic truths, takes on some hard topics — including the war on Islamofascism — and really presses the Left.
Focusing around a lefty filmmaker named Mike Malone (fashioned after Michael Moore) the film is not always kind to its protagonist, but is always seeking to lead him to the light. You might wonder whether
An American Carol might worsen an already angry and crass political culture. Perhaps it will. It may also shine a light on dangerous and hurtful rhetoric. It’s a natural for all those Americans who go to Sandler movies because there’s something good in all the silliness — at the end of the movie he loves his family, he knows what’s good. You can feel good that you spent time with a movie put together by people who share your values, even if they sometimes like being a bit off-color.
And
An American Carol does something more. It’s explicitly political levity is balanced by occasional gravity. It takes on appeasement, anti-Americanism, and the party of surrender. The people behind
An American Carol are among those who will never, as long as they have any influence, let American military men and women ever get the disgraceful unwelcome our Vietnam veterans received when they returned home.
It’s a great freedom to be able to speak freely and make movies. It’s a great freedom to be able to make money and live a comfortable life in Hollywood. The people behind
An American Carol don’t take any of that for granted. And if you do, you’re so vain that you probably think this carol is about you. Well, actually, Michael . . .
I’m persuaded that names like David Zucker, Steve McEveety, Myrna Sokoloff, Jon Voight, Kelsey Grammar, Robert Davi, and
An American Carol star Kevin Farley will one day be recognized as revolutionaries. Smart, creative, patriots, who realized the market exists (or so many of those
antiwar films would have done much better) for the kind of movies they’d like to make, the cultural contributions they want to make to their country.
I know movies are expensive. I know there is a lot to do. I know we are so busy, all of us. But they’re doing something different. They’re not making documentaries, which so many conservatives who want to make a point through film do. They’re aiming to entertain — make us laugh and make us think and make us proud of our fellow Americans — in a movie that reflects their worldviews.
Adam Sandler is such a success that he can do whatever he wants, make movies that reflect what he wants to do. Not everyone has that luxury.
Airplane! director David Zucker can afford to do a movie like
An American Carol. And because he has, he sets a path for others who would like to do the same — take a chance and offer something different, even explicitly conservative to counter the typical liberal Hollywood fare. This weekend, Bill Maher’s anti-religion screed hits theatres. I know what movie I’d like to see in first place. That would send a powerful message to Hollywood’s conservatives. A month before Election Day, that would be a nice victory.
— Kathryn Jean Lopez is the editor of National Review Online. 
