Stark mad

National Review, June 2, 2008 by Ross Douthat

THE script for Iron Man, this summer's first successful popcorn flick, belongs atop the syllabus for a class that some enterprising film school ought to offer: How to Write Action Movies in a Polarized Climate. Ever since 9/11, and especially since the invasion of Iraq, Hollywood has veered between action heroes who embody the movie industry's left-wing take on world affairs (with the Bourne cycle being the most prominent example) and action heroes who exist at a vacuum-sealed remove from minor matters like the Iraq War and the Islamist threat. The superhero genre has been ideal for the latter purpose, since the cape-and-tights set is famous primarily--at least among non-aficionados--for handling dangers either mundane (petty street crime in Gotham) or fantastic (supervillains, superweapons, etc.), while leaving the day-to-day business of geopolitics to ordinary mortals.

But Tony Stark, the wealthy industrialist turned armor-plated avenger, is a different case, since American foreign policy is more or less his raison d'etre: His Stark Enterprises is Boeing crossed with DARPA, the high-tech arms-producing heart of the military-industrial complex. Which means that adapting Iron Man for the screen would seem to involve making a highly politicized choice: Is Stark's day job the Lord's work or the Devil's? And once he steps into the bulletproof, rocket-propelled suit that makes him a superhero, will he be the scourge of America's foes abroad, or a newly enlightened enemy to the military-industrial baddies he used to serve?

The genius of the Iron Man adaptation is that it chooses both at once. (This "genius," I hasten to add, might be the entirely accidental result of the Hollywood habit of piling screenwriter atop screenwriter: The movie's credits give four scribes credit for the finished product, and heaven knows how many uncredited doctors worked it over on the side.) Depending on which details you highlight and which villains you emphasize, it's easy to imagine making the movie sound like it was adapted for the screen by the editors of The Weekly Standard--but then again it's just as easy to imagine a plot summary that would sound like it was hashed out by Lewis Lapham and Chalmers Johnson over cocktails at the offices of Harper's. If anyone reading this is a neocon dating a Nation reader, or vice versa, congratulations: This is the date movie for you.

When Iron Man kicks off, Stark is a businessman-inventor by day and a fast-living, hard-drinking, model-bedding playboy by night; his nights, inevitably, are considerably longer than his days, to the despair of the three people he keeps closest to him--his devoted assistant, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow); his pal and military liaison, Colonel Rhodes (Terrence Howard); and his mentor and second-in-command, Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges, bald, bearded, and bearish). Stark is played with rakish aplomb by Robert Downey Jr., who knows a thing or three about living life at unsafe speeds, and part of the movie's charm is the way it crosses Superman with an episode of E! True Hollywood Story. It's the fantasy of being rich and famous and handsome all at once--the original character was inspired by Howard Hughes--seen and raised by the fantasy of having superpowers.

Those powers are acquired in an Afghan cave, where Stark ends up a prisoner after his convoy--driven by soldiers star-struck by his mere presence--gets ambushed by a Talibanesque band of mountain-dwelling thugs. They're led by a shaven-headed megalomaniac named Raza (Faran Tahir), who's using Stark-built weapons in his terror campaign against the local populace, and who thinks that with a few more top-of-the-line models he can dominate all of Asia, Genghis Khan-style. Raza puts his prisoner to work making rocket launchers, but of course you should never leave a genius inventor alone in a cave with a blowtorch, a pile of versatile machine parts, and the raw materials for a miniature renewable-energy reactor that I dearly hope will be installed in the next generation of hybrid cars. The result is the Iron Man suit, iteration one, which is big and bad enough to bust Stark out and get him to safety, but which has nothing on iteration two, the snazzy, supersonic version he builds in the basement of his cliffhanging Malibu pad.

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Thus armored, Stark pursues post-Afghanistan adventures down parallel tracks. On one, the experience of seeing his weapons in the hands of terrorists provokes a crisis of conscience about the arms business, followed by a confrontation with the qualmless Stane; on the other, the experience of seeing his weapons in the hands of terrorists provokes him to don his suit and soar off to Central Asia for a little unilateral interventionism. These threads would seem to contradict each other just a bit, but the political tension is smoothed over by the script's breezy charms and the gee-whiz action sequences (especially the literally soaring moments in the middle of the film, when Stark is figuring out exactly what his brand-new toy can do). And there's a neat match between the liberation Stark experiences, first from captivity and then from gravity, and the sense of freewheeling silliness that Downey brings to the role--as though he's been sprung not only from prison and the addictions that landed him there, but from the "best young actor of his generation" burden that seemed intertwined with his self-destructive mode of life.