CINEMA FORUM ON AMERICAN CINEMA – ASPECTS TO CONSIDER WHILE VIEWING THE FILM FOR SUBSEQUENT DEBATE: SMOKESCREEN
One of the most important films of director Barry Levinson. Born in Baltimore in 1942, he began as a journalist, later working as an actor and television producer; he began directing for the cinema in 1982, and excelled with such hits as The secret of the pyramid (Pyramid of Fear, 1986), a Steven Spielberg production about the adolescence of Sherlock Holmes, and the rain man (RainMan, 1988), with the star duo Dustin Hoffman/Tom Cruise.
Based on a novel by Larry Reinhart, American Hero, with a script by David Mamet, a playwright, screenwriter and also a film director of great prestige in recent years, who began directing in 1987, with house of GAMES. Produced between the director himself and one of the actors, Robert De Niro.
A landmark of self-critical American cinema in recent decades, which, although it has its own personality, sometimes recalls films by directors such as Oliver Stone and Robert Altman. It presents a plot of political fiction in a satirical tone, consisting of how a popular distraction maneuver is created on a spectacular national scale to cover up a sexual scandal that could ruin the career of the president of the United States.
The aesthetic and ideological key to the film lies in acid humor and even political-social sarcasm, ensuring that satire does not degenerate into caricature or become too unlikely. Different realities (cinema, political campaigns, war interests) are homologated under a common prism of alienation and manipulation at the bottom of which there is nothing more than economic ambitions.
Commercially, it is based on the contrast between the characters of Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman, who consequently interpret them differently (the first sober and suggestive, the second exhibitionist and funny), but alternating hilarious scenes with dramatic ones. They embody contrasted prototypes within the media world, De Niro the anonymous manipulator, Hoffman the assumed narcissism, with the link of lack of scruples and submission to God Dollar.
