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Wednesday, Dec 3, 2008
Paul Schrader's "Patty Hearst" tells the story Americans didn't want to hear.
Sep 23, 1998 | "I'm basically an example, a symbol," says Natasha Richardson in the title role of "Patty Hearst." An all-purpose symbol. To middle-America, Patty Hearst was a symbol of their own kids who'd gone to college and come back unrecognizably radicalized. To the tatters of the New Left, she was a symbol of the bourgeois who dabbled in radical politics, then cravenly attempted to evade responsibility. To the prosecutors who insisted on trying her for her "participation" in a bank robbery while being held captive by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and to the jury that convicted her, she offered a chance to prove that the rich weren't given preferential treatment. It's perhaps the blackest irony of a Kafkaesque case that the courts finished the job the SLA started: They punished Patty Hearst because she was rich.
Public animosity toward Patricia Hearst can't by itself be blamed for the murderous reception given Paul Schrader's 1988 film. It's hard to think of another commercial movie as difficult and austere as this one. Schrader and screenwriter Nicholas Kazan (who based his script on Hearst's "Every Secret Thing," written with Alvin Moscow -- an articulate and sometimes bitterly humorous account of her ordeal) are stubbornly, uncompromisingly true to their conception. "Patty Hearst" is formalized, intellectualized, distanced, whittled down to bone-and-sinew. The excitement comes from what might be called the common-sense audacity of the movie's ideas. The hostile tone of the reviews suggested that critics weren't ready for Schrader and Kazan's answer to the big question of whether Patty Hearst really joined the SLA and was reborn as the gun-toting revolutionary Tania or whether she was just playacting to save her life. "Patty Hearst" is a devastatingly thorough demonstration of the question's ludicrousness. Of course she meant it, the movie says; if the stakes are your life, you damn well better be able to offer something more convincing than "just playacting."
Schrader's method is deceptive. At first, the movie can strike you as too narrowly focused to answer anything. Following the kidnapping (which comes right after the credits) Schrader spends the next 27 minutes -- a full quarter of the movie -- replicating the way Patty, locked in a closet, experienced the first weeks of her captivity: as an exercise in sensory deprivation. During many of these brief, fragmented scenes, we're in the closet with her. We see the SLA only as black outlined figures against a blinding white background whenever the door opens. Nearly all words spoken to her are harangues from "General Field Marshal Cinque" (Ving Rhames) about the fascist system of "Amerikkka" (you can hear those three k's in his voice) or threats that she'll take the first bullet if the FBI discovers them. She's watched when she goes to the bathroom and when she bathes, and kept blindfolded the entire time. You know exactly the toll this treatment is taking when Patty imagines that she's back among her family sitting at the dining room table: In her fantasy, she's still wearing a blindfold.
This harshly stylized section sets up everything that follows. By the time Patty "accepts" her captors' offer to join them, we already understand -- as she later testifies in court -- that, in her head, she had nowhere else to go. When she's told it's only "comradely" to have sex when "asked," we understand she's being set up for rape. And when she watches on television the shootout that left most of the SLA dead and sees the police firing into the house without bothering to ascertain whether she's inside, we understand that Patty believes one of Cinque's crazy predictions has come true: She's now a police target because she's been "turned."
Schrader uses our memories of the case to shame the judgments and assumptions we made about it. Patty's participation in the bank robbery, which formed the basis of her eventual conviction, is staged just as we saw it on the network news: in a herky-jerky succession of security-camera stills. The difference is that we also see that Patty is so terrified she can't recite the speech the SLA has prepared for her. Schrader and Kazan make hash of the claims used against Hearst that the SLA would have had to use incredibly sophisticated psychological techniques to brainwash her. All the SLA needed, the movie shows us, was persistence and the elimination of any alternative but death.
Other movies have evoked the creepiness and rot that attended the implosion of the counterculture and the radical left ("Who'll Stop the Rain," for one). Schrader and Kazan have the nerve to treat it as deadpan black comedy. The movie's view of the SLA as the Keystone Revolutionaries -- a group of middle-class white kids in thrall to their fantasies of black power as the path to the revolution -- is ominously funny. They take everything Cinque says as an article of faith, even when he warns them to switch the TV off at night because the FBI can use televisions to spy into people's homes. As the endlessly bickering Bill and Emily Harris, the couple Patty goes on the lam with, William Forsythe and Frances Fisher are Maggie and Jiggs by way of the Days of Rage. There's a wild comic moment when Bill, who desperately wants to be black, does himself up in blackface and Afro, and a priceless one when the SLA moves into a new safe house in Watts and Emily gushes, "At last, we're really poor!"
The burden of drawing us inside Patty falls almost totally on Richardson, and she's phenomenal. Richardson suggests how Patty used the social skills that were part of her upbringing in order to fit in with the SLA, to seem obedient, eager to learn and eager to please. And, beneath the flat Western accent Richardson employs (the best American accent I've ever heard from a non-American actor), we hear a wafer-thin edge of irony that's Patty's only means of hanging on to something of herself ("You're all so attractive," she tells the SLA when they finally remove her blindfold). Richardson's performance works on an interior, at times nearly subterranean, level. She pulls off the incredibly difficult task of playing an unformed character discovering who she is by being forced to be who she's not.
"I finally figured out what my crime was," Patty says in the film's final scene, "I lived. Big mistake." Unable to be summed up as either kidnapped heiress or radical fugitive, she became inconvenient. To its credit, this film's insistence that something complex happened to her for very simple reasons is just as inconvenient. Richardson's performance honors the lack of self-pity that's one of the most distinctive qualities in Hearst's book. Patty finds herself when she's stripped of any illusions about what kind of place the world is. At the movie's end, she lays out her plan to change the public's perception of her through press interviews. Her father says, "You sound like your grandfather." She's not a victim anymore.
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