Honoring Our Dead

HBO's premiere this weekend is more than a movie. "Taking Chance" has all the elements of a feature film--actors, plot and dramatic form--but it is an act of reverence and respect for young men and women who go off to die for their country in distant places.

As the Hollywood elite dress up to congratulate themselves at the glitzy Oscars tonight, this 90 minutes, based on the experience of a Marine colonel accompanying the coffin of a fallen young man home for burial is a reminder of the power of the medium to move us deeply with simple truths.

"Taking Chance" comes at a time when the President and the Pentagon are deciding whether or not to let cameras record the arrival of coffins from the Middle East. (Dorian De Wind has an excellent review of the arguments on both sides at The Moderate Voice.)

What is so heartbreaking about the film is seeing the love and care lavished on those who lives end before their time in hate and violence. There are no special effects, no swelling music to cue our emotions, no grandiose speeches, just the simple truth of how hard it is for all of us to lose them.

It should be required watching for all politicians.

Recounting the 2000 Recount

HBO wasted two hours of viewers' lives tonight with a docudrama, "Recount." To the painful injury of the original experience itself, it added the insult of gratuitously inventing dialogue and caricaturing some of the principals to no dramatic purpose whatsoever. (Howard Kurtz explains it all in the Washington Post.)

A Russian expatriate once told me about the night he was thrown out of a theater back home for interrupting a boring production of "The Cherry Orchard" by yelling at the actors, "Stop talking, sell the furniture and go to Moscow."

The writer of "Recount" is no Chekhov, and dramatizing the Florida fiasco with invented details and no new insight offers no emotional catharsis for those who were either disgusted or gratified by the original on the TV and cable networks.

Forgive me, Kevin Spacey, but a well-made documentary would have been a better idea.

Lust and Logorrhea on the HBO Couch

A new series, "In Treatment," is trying to do for psychotherapy what "The Sopranos" did for organized crime. But from the evidence thus far, Dr. Melfi and her star patient can rest easy. Talk alone, without Bada Bing pole dancers and bloody on-camera murders, won't cut it.

In our time, HBO has provided a sociological index of upper middle-class anxieties and guilty pleasures from "Sex and the City" to "Six Feet Under."

Now comes "In Treatment," half-hour sessions confined to consulting rooms and self-absorbed talk-talk-talk.

In one story line, the therapist has to fend off the sexual advances of a gorgeous patient and, while trying to help a hostile couple decide about aborting a pregnancy, has his couch stained by a miscarriage, which leads to his wife's cleaning up the mess and, in passing, unloading her rage about his indifference and taunting him with news of her affair with a divorced business type. This sends the therapist to his therapist who recommends unloading the gorgeous sexual predator and is rewarded by accusations about her mishandling of an ancient case of counter-transference.

Holy Freud! In an interview this week, George W. Bush dismissed a question about his relationship with his father as "shallow psychobabble." If the President has a taste for deep psychobabble, HBO has just the thing for him.

Arrivederci, Sopranos

With neither a bang nor a whimper, David Chase just pulls the plug.

OK, as in other season enders, the family is having dinner, this time in a diner, Meadow is having trouble parking the car, there is talk of a turncoat going over to the Feds, a shifty character goes to the men’s room and...Silence and darkness. It’s over.

Traditionally, gang bosses end up in pools of their own blood.

In 1931’s “Little Caesar,” a bullet-ridden Edward G. Robinson breathed, “Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?”

In 1949, James Cagney, a mother-loving psychopath in ”White Heat,” went out atop a burning oil refinery, screaming, “Made it, Ma! Top of the world.”

In 1983’s “Scarface,” Tony Montana walked into a storm of bullets with a machine gun, yelling “Say hello to my little friend!”

Not our Tony. Is his creator (small “c”) telling us that “The Sopranos” level of art does not call for melodrama? Is Uncle Junior’s Alzheimer the metaphor for real life swallowing eight years of our involvement with these people? Do we turn off the set and fuggedaboutit?

Arrivederci, Sopranos. It was great while it lasted, even though a little weird how it ended.