A NEW movie called “crazy/beautiful” offers a cautionary tale about what happens when Washington politicians try to influence Hollywood moviemaking to make motion-picture product more “moral.”
The teen drama was re-edited on orders of the Disney studio in the wake of last year’s ominous rumblings by Sen. Joe Lieberman and others that if the movie business didn’t clean up its act, the Federal Trade Commission would be sicced on Hollywood.
Director John Stockwell removed scenes in which leading actress Kirsten Dunst bought and used drugs and behaved in a wild sexual manner.
The idea was to eliminate images of illegal or illicit conduct and thereby spare Disney the ire of attention-hungry politicians who know they can always get a few minutes of airtime on “Entertainment Tonight” and other shows bashing pop culture.
But “crazy/beautiful” is not a teen movie that glorifies, romanticizes or glamorizes the behavior on display. Far from it. Stockwell’s sensitive, tasteful and very painful film is about what happens when a teenage girl spins out of control – and what kind of threat she can pose to a responsible peer tempted from the straight and narrow by the wild libertinism she displays.
Carlos (played by newcomer Jay Hernandez) is a kid from a poor Mexican family in downtown L.A. who travels two hours by bus every morning so he can attend upscale Pacific High School. He studies hard, sleeps little, plays football, does well in school and is trying to get himself accepted into the U.S. Naval Academy.
Nicole (played by Dunst) is a daughter of extreme privilege. Her father is a liberal congressman, her stepmother a young matron rich from the proceeds of her first divorce. In the course of the film, she falls for Carlos, who knows she’s trouble and avoids her – but is finally sucked in to her wild, unpredictable life of high drama.
The movie you can see today at the multiplex clearly intimates that she has a problem with drugs and drink. Her father says so. She’s also willing to engage in unprotected sex.
But thanks to the cuts made by Disney, we never see her doing anything really wild except driving fast. We see her drunk or stoned, but we don’t see her drinking or taking pills or smoking dope.
As a result, a great deal of the movie’s power has been removed – as well as its moral core. For “crazy/beautiful” is a deeply moral, even profoundly conservative film about responsibility and the abdication of responsibility. But how much more effective it would have been in its unedited version!
“Has the film been gutted? No,” director Stockwell has said. “Has its message been tempered? I would say yes.”
This is the problem with the one-size-fits-all attack on pop culture of the sort Joe Lieberman likes to engage in. It tends to lack nuance.
Not all violence on screen is immoral. Not all depictions of sex encourage promiscuity (I’d say, for example, that the topless scenes in “Sex and the City” are usually the opposite of an aphrodisiac). Not all depictions of drug use onscreen are glorifications.
What matters is the context. And that’s where the efforts made to prove that popular culture has a direct effect on real-world behavior almost always fail.
In the first study of violence on television, completed in 1968 by George Gerbner of the University of Pennsylvania, he listed a horrifying number of violent acts that could be witnessed on television that year. And what do you suppose was the most violent show on television, according to Gerbner?
It was “I Dream of Jeannie.”
Disney’s Lieberman-inspired panic has led the studio to take a movie for which the term “positive moral values” could have been invented and make it less clear, less distinct – and therefore a little less moral and positive.
Once again, Washington proves that the law it really knows how to enforce best is the law of unintended consequences.
E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com
