“Scripts pry open hidden worlds”

A recent piece in Variety:

Some screenplays make an impression by finding drama — or comedy, for that matter — in the everyday, or at least something that looks like it. “Ordinary People” and “Kramer vs. Kramer” won Oscars portraying fairly familiar American middle class lives. But other scripts invite the audience on a journey into hidden, hermetic worlds familiar only to insiders.

The article features the Coens (A Serious Man), Jason Reitman (Up in the Air), and Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker):

Then there are ways of hooking the aud. Joel Coen points out, “It’s a hallmark of anthropological studies that the first thing they do is talk about societies that are foreign to the reader in terms of things that everyone can identify with, and then they reveal things that are weird and specific to the group. People like that.”

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The pic opens with Bingham (played by George Clooney) in an office, so the audience sees him in a familiar setting before they see him in an airport. But Reitman, who shares a writing credit with Sheldon Turner and directed the movie, notes the opening is hardly more comfortable for being in a familiar place.

“I’m actually starting the movie in the place where you’d be most uncomfortable, in the midst of a firing situation. From there, in contrast to that, I’m now taking Airworld and making it your comfort zone.”

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“The Hurt Locker” scribe Mark Boal’s travel experience was less relaxing. He journeyed to Iraq as a journalist and rode along with the Army’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal Squad. Boal doubts he could have written the story without that firsthand experience but emphasizes, “It’s not a transcription of the experience. That would probably be a little more boring than the movie. “

Think of all the great movies that explore a specific subculture — from Witness (Amish) to Bring It On (cheerleaders) to The Whaler Rider (Maori). But for those stories to be successful, they have to be able to widen the experience of the characters:

Ultimately it’s the universality of a story that makes it resonate with auds, even when the setting is as offbeat as Air World or Baghdad. Ethan Cohen recounts, “I remember a Catholic guy who said (his community) was exactly the same shit, and an Asian-American guy who said it was the exact same thing in Houston.”

I saw A Serious Man recently in a theater that was comprised by perhaps 50% older Jews. And they laughed and laughed, especially at the small details of Jewish life in America’s suburbs in the lates 60s. But by the end, I think everyone could relate to the Protagonist, everything about him relativized by his Job-like life-experience because every one of us has been crapped on in our lives.

How about you? What are your favorite subculture movies?

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