I paid to see "An American Carol"...

Still, I retained an affec­tion for the boys, and when I heard that Zucker, a former self-described “Kennedy lib­er­al” (boy, that poten­tially cov­ers a lot of ground, does­n’t it?), had become a post‑9/11 con­ser­vat­ive, I did­n’t hold it against him. Hell, I was a “lib­er­al hawk” myself for about twenty minutes, until…well, nev­er mind. 

Zucker col­lab­or­ated with the above-mentioned Friedman (and man, now we’re nev­er gonna share cigars and single-malts) and one Myrna Sokoloff. I’m reas­on­ably cer­tain you’ve read quite a bit about it by now. Yes, it was worse than I expec­ted. Frankly, I was already too bored to con­tin­ue to be offen­ded by the “liberal=traitor” meme pretty much about the 7,000^th time that jerk Glenn Reynolds used the phrase “Not anti-war, just on the oth­er side,” to describe any­body who deigned ques­tion the Bush admin­is­tra­tion. Although it is a new twist to have a ten-or-so-year-old girl use the phrase “trait­or­ous sack of shit.” Little girls using cusswords—never not funny! Even to con­ser­vat­ives. And while I fear that to note this is to take the film entirely too ser­i­ously, I thought it was inter­est­ing that Zucker and com­pany’s por­tray­al of ter­ror­ists, funny names and men­tions of Allah aside and sui­cide bomb­ings aside, pos­its that these people think pretty much exactly as Westerners do. That their ideas of rights and what con­sti­tutes responsible/responsive gov­ern­ment are exactly the same. “Democracy! Freedom! A pres­id­ent who is held account­able!” one fake Afghani exults when asked why he is par­tak­ing in an elec­tion. Yes, it would be damn pretty to think so. It is not con­des­cend­ing to point out that there are sub­stan­tial cul­tur­al dif­fer­ences between the east and west which can­not be papered over with post-Enlightenment plat­it­udes. Zucker seems entirely unaware of this. I ima­gine were someone to point it out to him, he’d say that per­son was being condescending.

What’s finally most inter­est­ing about An American Carol is its inco­her­ence. This lies not so much in the fact that, in cheer­lead­ing for the War on Terror, Zucker seems to have embraced a num­ber of con­ser­vat­ive talk­ing points that have noth­ing to do with said war—in one scene, it appears that the film is very ser­i­ously call­ing for the abol­i­tion of the sep­ar­a­tion of church and state, which I’m not cer­tain that Zucker, as a Jew, would really really want—than it does in the fact that the anarch­ic humor Zucker and com­pany spe­cial­ize in tends to work against the propaga­tion of an exten­ded polem­ic. At one point, it’s revealed that the anti-American film­maker Michael Malone’s hatred of his coun­try stems from a trau­mat­ic adoles­cent exper­i­ence, in which his high-school sweet­heart fell for his best friend: an Army enlistee. “I love a man in a uni­form,” she explains as a heart­broken Malone leaves. Outside her door, police­men, fire­men, even astro­nauts are lin­ing up. “She did an astro­naut?” Malone asks his guide, the ghost of George Patton. “She did the whole [insert name of space mis­sion here—I for­got it!] team!” Patton says. And in the next shot, she’s mar­ry­ing Malone’s sol­dier ex-friend. Okay. Nice girls are patriotic…get gang-banged…and then marry their firsts. Works for me. 

Then, as the film is try­ing to hew to DIckens, it gives the Malone char­ac­ter a (yes, pat­ri­ot­ic, and Navy-joining) neph­ew, who him­self has about half a dozen kids, all with dif­fer­ent amus­ing ail­ments, each of whom is always ask­ing if their “fat-ass” great uncle is ever going to cough up the money needed for their var­ied oper­a­tions. It per­haps nev­er occured to Zucker that the spe­cif­ics of this par­tic­u­lar scen­ario per­haps make an oblique com­ment on our own health care sys­tem. Doesn’t mat­ter any­way, because at the end of the film—spoiler alert!—Zucker wipes out that whole fam­ily in an elab­or­ate sight gag placed smack-dab in the middle of an extra-treacly “God Bless America” moment. The guys can­’t help it.

Too bad the gag’s not par­tic­u­larly funny, in keep­ing with much of the rest of the film. It is not entirely bereft of laughs—Kevin Farley got me to chortle dur­ing his many “why are you slap­ping me moments,” Geoffrey Arend, as a would-be sui­cide bomber, is amus­ing in a Stoogey way, and Robert Davi is reli­ably dry. 

“Terrorism isn’t our fault!” Malone’s char­ac­ter exhorts an anti-war crowd at the end of the film. Maybe it isn’t, and maybe it is (and one’s answer will always have a lot to do with how you define “fault”), but in the world­view of this movie, that is ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW. And after you know it, what you should do is shut up and let the people in charge do their jobs. To do any­thing oth­er­wise is to “abuse” your free­dom of speech. Yeah…9/11—which, in case you were won­der­ing, I do not believe was “our fault”—really did cause some folks to lose their minds.