QUIZ SHOW
A film review by Eric Mankin
Copyright 1994 Eric Mankin
Directed by Robert Redford.
Written by Paul Attanasio.
With John Turturro, Rob Morrow, Ralph Fiennes, Paul Scofield and
David Paymer.
Robert Redford's dramatic reconstruction of the 1958 Van Doren television scandals is profound, unpredictable and scathingly funny, packed from its center to its bit player edges with acutely observed, brilliantly acted characters It consolidates ideas about family and fatherhood, Gentile and Jew, celebrity and corruption that Redford has been dealing with as actor and director for years, and does so effortlessly and organically, without moralizing or contrivance. It recreates in achingly perfect detail a tail-finned, wood-veneer black-and-white TV America without ever retreating into nostalgia. It's about as good as movies get.
The audience's guide into the film's universe is young Dick Goodwin (Rob Morrow), first in his class at Harvard Law School, as he continually reminds the world; Jewish, as the late-fifties world frequently reminds him. He has come to Washington D.C., to work for the government, postponing the high money Wall Street career he sees as inevitable for reasons that aren't clear to him; unconsciously looking for a main chance that will redefine his life. He finds it in a small newspaper story about allegations of fixing in quiz shows, hit programming in the exploding new medium of television.
The film has already shown, in blistering detail, the origin of that newspaper story. Herb Stempel (John Turturro) had reigned for weeks as resident genius on NBC's "Twenty One," mopping his sweating brow inside the isolation booth, astounding the nation by knowing not only the name of the man who lent Paul Revere a horse for his midnight ride, but the fact that the horse was a mare.
But then the show's producer, Dan Enright (David Paymer) had decided, in consultation with the network and the sponsor, that Stempel had run his string; that the country was tired of a nerd-next-door with bad teeth from Queens, that it was time to find someone different: someone more graceful, better looking, classier, less Jewish--someone like Columbia professor Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes), son and nephew of Pulitzer prize winners; someone with a fresh face eager to talk enthusiastically about television's role in educating the American public. Moving Herbie out and Charlie in takes Mephistophelean abilities of manipulation. But Enright can offer not just vast sums of money, but the gleaming lure of television itself, "the biggest thing," as Herbie accurately tells his wife, "since Gutenberg." By the time the deal has soured, and Stempel has called foul, Van Doren is a national hero. Goodwin's investigation bounces off a seamless wall compounded from Enright's imaginative deceit, and Charlie's seemingly guileless charm.
"Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall," Van Doren quotes Shakespeare at a glittering literary birthday party in Connecticut, words spoken precisely at the peak of the trajectory that is carrying him to a humiliation of his own creation. The remarkable achievement of this film is the dimension it gives this fall.
The contributions to the achievement can be listed. First, Paul Attanasio's screenplay is in a class by itself. Looking back years into films, it is hard to remember one that does as many different things in as many different ways as this one. Ironically (considering the subject) television may have been a beneficent influence With the virtual preemption of film to tell stories centered on vehicles, explosions, and special effects, (and QUIZ SHOW was passed on repeatedly by other studios at least in part because of the absence these elements before being picked up by Disney) TV has become a refuge for stories centering on character, in shows like "N.Y.P.D. Blue" or "Homicide," on which Attanasio collaborated with Barry Levinson (who plays Dave Garroway in the film). TV writing in the episodic ensemble form invented by Steven Bochco long ago broke out of the old film chestnut of every film being one person's story.
Attanasio may be the first film writer to have thoroughly absorbed Bochco's lessons. While Goodwin remains at the center, the exceptionally broad focus and reach of the story, the insistence on seeing and telling the story from multiple points of view creates an amazing density of texture.
This sounds abstract, so perhaps one other note is in order. QUIZ SHOW is, quite apart from its other virtues, the funniest film of the year. Some of its characters are intentionally funny--as Herbie Stempel's anguished, eloquent rages against the gods of TV--some equally inspired unintentionally so, as when Dan Enright's cohort Albert Freedman (Hank Azaria) asks what "a grejus" is, following a conversation in which Van Doren objects to being simply given answers to questions as "egregious." In the same conversation Van Doren has previously taken a moment to think things over: "I'm just trying to imagine what Kant would make of this." "He'd go along with it," Freedman assures him.
The actors run with it. It was obvious from SCHINDLER'S LIST that Ralph Fiennes--however he wants to pronounce his name--was good; this film makes clear *how* good. As the beautiful, flawed Charlie, intrigued by the glittering new toy of television, trapped by his vanity and desire to please his father, undone by his own inability to lie about it, Fiennes turns an historical footnote into someone you seem to have known all your life.
Paul Scofield plays his father, the poet. Scofield has played Lear, and played him well; here he is given, along with much else, two transparently simple lines; one about his joy: "not till you have a son!" and one about his pain: "your name is mine," and makes each one a world.
It is no surprise that John Turturro is unforgettable as the twitchy Herbie, paranoid for the best of reasons--people are out to get him; the surprising thing is that a performance like this can't steal the film, because the acting everywhere, *everywhere*, from all sides is so seamlessly, uniformly, universally remarkable: Morrow (from "Northern Exposure") subtly shading Goodwin's internal insecurities behind a big cigar; David Paymer as Enright the wheedling fixmeister (by the end of the film, you believe that on his deathbed he tried to buy off the Angel of Death by offering him a job on a TV panel show.) And on, and on and on, through the small but completely rounded parts of Goodwin and Stemple's wives, (Johann Carlo and Mira Sorvino); or the main-battle-tank-like presence of Allan Rich as the President of NBC. If the film deconstructs conventional wisdom on unitary film story, it writes in letters of fire another old saw: "there are no small roles. There are only small actors."
This kind of texture doesn't happen by accident. Redford has always been an exceptional director of actors. Here, he orchestrates the performances with a touch so light that it doesn't seem to be there: the story seems to tell itself, to be assembling itself before our eyes, absolutely autonomous, yet reverberating with films as diverse as ELECTRIC HORSEMAN, THE CANDIDATE, DOWNHILL RACER, ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, THE WAY WE WERE, ORDINARY PEOPLE, A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT, suddenly casting all of them into a new line leading here. If Redford never exposes another frame of film, he has his place in the pantheon: this is a great movie.
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