He's So Money

War-torn Afghanistan. An enemy army is ruthlessly murdering innocents with their technologically-superior weapons. One American, a habitual boozer and womanizer, has seen the carnage first-hand and vows to stop it. He's got a sidekick with military ties. He's got the support of a pale but exquisite woman, whom he genuinely loves but can't have. He's got gumption, and God knows he's got more than enough money. Can he turn the tide and become a hero?

But enough about Charlie Wilson's War. Mike Nichol's film, based on a true story, died at the box office, and most pundits pointed to its topicality -- 9/11, the Iraq war -- as its downfall. I respectfully disagree. It's slick and compulsively watchable, simplified enough for the complexity-impaired (i.e., me) to follow the ins and outs of backroom political deals and subtle enough to not totally hammer its "chickens come home to roost" punchline. The main problem is that the film never reveals anything under the surface of our eponymous hero; there are no demons there, just Tom Hanks' patented (and shopworn) aw-shucks charm.

That, simply put, was never going to be a problem for Iron Man. Robert Downey Jr. has made a career of playing hyper-intelligent and charismatic characters who use their gifts to hide their narrow, strangled souls, and his Tony Stark is no different. The strange thing here is that same character is now flying around in power armor and fighting bad guys. He's a bold choice on director Jon Favreau's part, and it pays off scene after scene, from the opening -- a decadent, cocktail-swigging Stark holding court in an Army Humvee -- to the final line, that Downey somehow makes both big and group-therapy intimate. Downey, a survivor of Stark-like excess, clearly responds to the second-chance story and attacks the role with everything he has. It's impossible to imagine the movie with someone else; luckily, he's the one we got.

While the story, in the broad brushstrokes, is no great paradigm shift -- hero must defeat evil father-figure, heard that one before? -- it's in the margins that Favreau and the writers (Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby and Art Marcum & Matt Holloway) really have fun upending expectations. Favreau injects a bit of screwball in between the action setpieces -- Downey is a natural quipster, but Favreau gets everyone on the same wavelength, overlapping each other's dialogue and making it feel spontaneous and alive. Gwyneth Paltrow, who looked lost and disengaged in her last action movie, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, sparkles here as Stark's long-suffering secretary Pepper Potts. The relationship between Stark and Pepper forms the love story, but for once it's touched by adult realities-- the obstacle holding them back isn't a secret identity or a supervillain, but simply that he's her boss. It's also very, very funny -- one hilarious scene not only literalizes Stark letting Pepper into his heart (which involves more pain and goo than either would like), but also has Pepper's first intimate encounter with her bed-hopping boss revolve around her penetrating him.

Favreau got his start penning and starring in Swingers and has since become a talented director of comedy (Elf still reigns as Will Ferrell's best work to date, and the improvised Made is underrated). He specializes in stories about adolescence, arrested or otherwise, and how it eventually falls away into maturity. Iron Man is his biggest canvas yet, and Tony Stark his most adolescent -- Richie Rich as superhero. Unlike his peers, Iron Man is the one most defined by wealth -- a bulletproof wallet who's essentially a metaphor for throwing money at a problem. Batman's rich too, of course, but he's defined more by his nearly-inhuman will to succeed; if all he had was a trenchcoat and a hat... well, you see where that's going. Green Arrow's billions are undermined by his Communism, and he'd get by with regular arrows if he had to. No, Iron Man without the cash is just a guy with a bad ticker.

And it's where that money comes from that makes the character so unusual, so interesting, and so problematic. It seems unthinkable that anyone, even in these pro-war times, would try to make a hero out of a war profiteer. Favreau and his writers, to their credit, stay true to the source material and make that issue the core of their story. (How much easier, and more boring, it would've been to make Tony an apolitical Bill Gates-like genius.) However, there's so much tension between the character's conservative origins and the liberal leanings of Hollywood artists interpreting him that the end result is contradictory as hell. So we end up with a hero, created through capitalism and tax-payer money, who is a representative of the military-industrial complex but is also an individual who acts on his own initiative, who rejects selling weapons while turning himself into the ultimate one, and goes off to fight wars without any oversight but his own conscience.

I don't know if this particular square can be circled, which is probably why the film focuses so much on Stark's change of heart. Still, they come about as close as they possibly can. Superheroes are (usually) vigilantes, and it's only off-putting because we aren't used to our fictional characters conducting vigilantism on a national scale. (Our real-life politicians are another story, unfortunately.) Stark's sudden personal change isn't about the morality of war and violence, but simply about his personal responsibility about how those things are used -- and he decides the best thing to do is keep his toys to himself. It's borderline fascist, yes, but that's the EULA we all sign when we say yes to superheroes.

The one thing that Iron Man does wrong is what makes it the most American, circa 2008. At the end of Charlie Wilson's War, Charlie has succeeded in getting superior armaments to the Afghans, which ultimately leads to the Soviet Union's withdrawal. But when it comes time to pick up the pieces, Wilson finds the U.S. government has lost interest. In a way, the same thing happens in Iron Man. After making short work of a rogue army's platoon in the Middle East (the only characters presented as straight evil, and naturally, they're all dark-skinned), Iron Man leaves -- and the villain dispatches what's left of the army, taking the final battle back to America. The real victims of the conflation of money and bombs, standing amidst the ruins of their destroyed village, are left behind and never heard from again. But hey, the Iron Monger was defeated, so what have they got to complain about?