Janeane Garofalo Almost Steals Steal This Movie
The strategy distinguishes Steal This Movie from the zillions of other movies and tv dramas about The 60s & What They Meant. Most filmed tales of the counterculture fall into two categories. One can be summarized as "I was in the middle of it and I want to tell you about it." This type of film, typified by Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July, is furiously passionate and unabashedly didactic?part Official Version, part personal memoir. It summarizes the era's clashing social forces in the manner of a high school history text, but it simultaneously tries to reimagine the past in visceral terms, as if it were happening right this second?the fear and hallucinogenic intensity of protest and street violence, the wonder and confusion of drug-altered perception, the mix of defiance and anxiousness that accompanies the decision to reject the values of one's parents.
The other kind of 60s story is panoramic, anecdotal and politically more evenhanded, to the point of trivializing one side or the other. I'm thinking of Forrest Gump and the NBC miniseries The 60's, with their jukebox soundtracks and "Where's Waldo?" games of multimedia hide-and-seek. Subtext: "All that stuff happened a long time ago. It was crazy, and bigger than any one of us, so let's not be too judgmental, okay?"
The early sections of Steal This Movie borrow equally from both types of 60s tale. The script states its political point of view clearly: Abbie was a serious social critic, wrongly maligned as a clown or a menace; the left deserves respect for its passion and patriotism even if you don't agree with what its adherents said and did. But the style is a K-Tel compilation of familiar devices: fake news footage integrated with real news footage, Abbie's friends and loved ones recounting Abbie to a Citizen Kane-style disinterested reporter, etc. Post-Oliver Stone, this is the default style for movies about 20th-century history. And in our image-saturated culture, it's probably hard to avoid.
But once Abbie gets busted, jumps bail and goes on the lam, Steal This Movie becomes an entirely different kind of movie?stranger and more involving. The fugitive section retroactively justifies the more cliched early stretches, enlarging on what we know, or think we know, about the era and films that purport to explain it. Steal This Movie is about the 60s, its cultural fallout and how both the era and its aftermath affected a marriage of radical equals. But there's another story running underneath, about how the diehard baby-boom left has struggled over the years to universalize its own story without trivializing its politics?to make the story relevant to their children and valid to generational peers who either fought them or didn't take a side.
Hoffman liked to repeat the phrase, "The personal is political"; Steal This Movie treats it as a mantra. Abbie and Anita's politics came out of personal conviction; their political activities invited persecution from The Man, which in turn made a shambles of their personal lives. During Abbie's fugitive period, Johanna and Anita share him, acknowledging their discomfort while accepting that Abbie is both a famous fugitive and a flesh-and-blood man who needs love, sex and attention to survive. Abbie's bipolar disorder gets worse and worse; Anita has to go on welfare and suffers nonstop harassment at the hands of the FBI. Informants and tails are everywhere; husband-wife letters must be routed through friends to avoid FBI interception; every phone call could be bugged. But they refuse to give up or give in.
As the Hoffmans-versus-America grudge match grinds on into the late 70s, we realize that even paranoids have real enemies. By the late 70s, when Abbie is really starting to crack under the strain, other prominent members of the counterculture have either joined straight society or become irrelevant fringe characters. But the government is still expending time and money to flush Abbie out of hiding, to stand trial for a drug bust that reeked of political entrapment. Abbie can't bear not seeing his son, america, but he can't risk being exposed, either, so he contrives to meet the boy while pretending to be Barry Freed, a "friend" of the boy's father. Their moments together are exquisitely real and painful, with america bitterly grousing about his absentee dad, and Abbie defending himself while pretending to be a pal defending Abbie. Rarely has the personal cost of political passion been so vividly illustrated.
Greenwald, who specializes in "issue" movies for television, handles the stylistic tricks confidently, treating them as functional devices rather than showstoppers?the right approach, considering it's all been done before. Abbie's heroism is never in doubt, because in the scenes with the reporter, supporting characters keep reminding us of it. (Jumping off from Hoffman's 1971 Steal This Book, the script also draws on the couple's personal letters; Hoffman's longtime attorney Gerry Lefcourt is credited as an "adviser.") But it's not a hagiography. Except for some hemming and hawing about the drug bust?Anita insists Abbie was only buying cocaine so he could do "research" for a book, and the movie practically dares us not to believe her?Graham's script acknowledges the man's less savory side. His womanizing, his mood swings, his drug use, his temper, his love of the spotlight?it's all touched on, often in detail.
Despite its flaws, Steal This Movie works. The performances deserve much of the credit. As Jerry Rubin, Kevin Corrigan cunningly balances fervor and arrogance. Tripplehorn makes a tough, sympathetic, intelligent Lawrenson, whose role in the Abbie Hoffman saga is treated with much more dignity and thoroughness than anyone could have expected. As Lefcourt, Kevin Pollak is restrained, smart and convincing; he proves how good he can be when he's not trapped in a sidekick/clown part. Actor Troy Garity, son of activist-turned-politician Tom Hayden, plays his own dad and the result is eerie as hell.
The two leads are even more impressive. The towering D'Onofrio uses his bulk as an actor's metaphor for Hoffman's bigger-than-life reputation, and lets his deep-set, shadowed eyes conceal the connections between what Abbie sees, what he thinks and how he chooses to act. D'Onofrio's accent slips a bit?sometimes he seems to lapse into his Texas accent from The Whole Wide World?but he never loses emotional focus. The result is a performance that's at once transparent and enigmatic?as vibrant, sexy and mysterious as Val Kilmer's work in The Doors, but richer, fuller.
The real surprise here is Garofalo. This comedian and actress has always relied too heavily on her Self-Aware Wisecracking Outsider persona. This time she gives herself over to a meaty dramatic part, and she's terrific. The jaundiced skepticism of her stand-up work and the earthy warmth of her talk show appearances are rechanneled to create a real woman, surviving pressures that would send even the strongest among us to the nuthouse. She takes a lot of risks here?a love scene, a couple of confrontations with FBI agents, tons of political sloganeering?yet none of it feels contrived. D'Onofrio is the film's heart, but Garofalo is its guts. She nearly steals Steal This Movie.