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      Visions of America: 25 films to help understand the US today

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      This is a dire moment in the US. It’s a moment where there’s an opportunity for people with a lot of money to rip apart all of the guidelines enacted by the Roosevelt administration, way back in the day, to guard against the brutality of unfettered capitalism. Capitalists like to have all the power that they want, whenever they want it. They’re not much interested in democracy either, it turns out. Nor, apparently, the rule of law. The government is not the solution – it’s the problem. And now a vengeful president who just wanted a get-out-of-jail-free card is going to punish his enemies and show us all how to destroy the American administrative state by using the big stick of Elon Musk’s chequebook.It reminds me of that moment in Once Upon a Time in the West, when Henry Fonda sits behind the rail tycoon’s desk and says: “It’s almost like holding a gun, only much more powerful.” The US has always been about money. That’s been our blessing and our curse. It’s the land of great opportunity, but that obsession with money over everything else has now taken us to a very bad place. We’ve reached the dark side of the American dream.As a film-maker at this moment, I feel defeated in one sense: you always look in the rear-view mirror and wish your films had had a more lasting impact. Yet the fight for liberty and democracy is a never-ending one, so I’m still very much engaged. I’m reminded of what Salman Rushdie said at the Pen America World Voices festival in 2022: “A poem cannot stop a bullet. A novel can’t defuse a bomb. But we are not helpless. We can sing the truth and name the liars.”Art can always have an impact, but it isn’t Pavlovian. It isn’t a vending machine. A film won’t make someone go out tomorrow and pass a law. What you hope for is that it will be a kind of a slow-motion timebomb in the psyche of the audience, where they begin to reckon with essential human values. When I made The Crime of the Century, my documentary about the opioid crisis, I wasn’t thinking to instigate a particular kind of change. That wasn’t the purpose of the film. I was concerned that people tended to look at the crisis as something that just “happened”, like a hurricane. I wanted to emphasise that it was an intentional crime, in which people were literally killing people for money. It wasn’t something to be endured, but to be reckoned with. I wanted the film to help reorient the vision of the viewers.I’ve got a diptych of films coming out next month called The Dark Money Game, all about the power of dark money and how that’s become part of the American system. It’s about how white-collar crime is now almost legal: so long as rich people are stealing, it’s OK. And I’ve also been working for two years on a film about Elon Musk, to get at some deeper understanding of not only who this man is and why he’s doing what he’s doing, but also why we’re letting him. A lot of my films are crime films, in a way. It was Chekhov who said that if there’s a gun on the mantel in the first act, it had better go off in the third act. So very often I’m faced with the spectacle of a gun going off. My job is to look back to find the guns on the mantels.I’m naturally drawn to the film-makers who explore the dark side: the Scorseses of this world. And at a time such as this, you want to engage the darkness of the moment – but you also want films that reaffirm your sense of humanity. It’s not an American film, but I was deeply inspired recently by Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here, about surviving a military dictatorship: it was so finely observed and so deeply human. There’s always a way out. This is a pendulum and it swings back and forth. But, you know, if we don’t wake up, then it’s going to be a very long, dark period. Alex Gibney (as told to Guy Lodge)American Factory(Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, 2019)Best for: a look at what the American workforce faces in a globalised economy.View image in fullscreenAn Oscar winner for best documentary feature and the first film acquired by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground production company, this perceptive, humane film examines the initial promise of a modified, modernised American dream, as an abandoned General Motors plant in Ohio is reopened by a Chinese company, only for the new owners’ labour practices and values to clash sourly with those of their working-class American employees. Shot between 2015 and 2017, it captures a country’s growing insularity at the outset of the Trump era.The Apprentice(Ali Abbasi, 2024)Best for: a primer on how the Trump mythos began.View image in fullscreenFew were especially looking forward to a Donald Trump biopic from Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi when it premiered at Cannes last year: don’t we see enough of him as it is? But this period-perfect, video-grainy portrayal of his rise to celebrity in the 1980s is caustically gripping and insightful, as Sebastian Stan’s dead-on performance captures the chronic insecurity behind his bluster, while Jeremy Strong’s venal lawyer Roy Cohn models the behaviour of a toxic sociopath. A stark, shattering scene of Trump raping his former wife Ivana, meanwhile, was a gutsy inclusion.Bisbee ’17(Robert Greene, 2018)Best for: understanding how the US confronts its history, or doesn’t.View image in fullscreenIn 1917, in the small Arizona mining town of Bisbee, more than 1,200 immigrant mine workers were kidnapped and illegally deported to the New Mexico desert 200 miles away. Robert Greene’s highly original hybrid documentary studies how the Bisbee of the 21st century processes this shameful history, as local people mark the centenary of the event by staging a grand-scale re-enactment that raises debate and dissent in the general community. It’s a wise, eerie reflection on how Americans can compartmentalise or rationalise the past – but also acts as a mirror for anti-immigrant sentiment in the present day. History is never fully over.Bowling for Columbine(Michael Moore, 2002)Best for: fuelling rage against US gun laws.View image in fullscreenThe obnoxiously hectoring documentary style of Michael Moore might now seem of a previous era, but in the 22 years since this ferocious polemic won an Oscar, the frank absurdity of the US gun crisis hasn’t been more vigorously addressed on screen. By now, mass school shootings such as the Columbine massacre are distressingly commonplace stateside; Moore’s restless, roving examination of its causes and effects still hits hard, and bitterly underlines just how little has been done to prevent such occurrences in the intervening decades.The Brutalist(Brady Corbet, 2024)Best for: a timeless dissection of the soured American dream.View image in fullscreenBrady Corbet’s Oscar-winning, three-and-a-half-hour-plus epic might be set between the 1940s and the 1980s, but it has plenty to say to the 2020s, as it unfolds the plight of a Hungarian immigrant architect whose personal fortunes and creative ideals are gradually stymied by the Faustian allure of American capitalism. As a miserable east coast mogul seeking to own not just art but the artist, by dint of sheer wealth, Guy Pearce unnervingly encapsulates the ruinous entitlement of the 1%.The Crime of the Century(Alex Gibney, 2021)Best for: a journalistic exploration of the continuing US opioid crisis.View image in fullscreenWeighing in at nearly four hours overall, Gibney’s two-part documentary is as comprehensive a film as has been made on the opioid epidemic plaguing the US today, beginning with a look at how the Sackler family got OxyContin approved by the Food and Drug Administration, before getting into the mass marketing of fentanyl – taking on all manner of corporate corruption and human devastation along the way. If you can handle more rage against big pharma after watching it, pair it with Laura Poitras’s more emotive, award-winning All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.Don’t Look Up(Adam McKay, 2021)Best for: summing up the divided US stance on the climate crisis.View image in fullscreenAdam McKay’s brash, broad social satire split critical opinion a few years ago, but there’s resonance in even the silliest aspects of its farce, as it captures the grating, oppressive cacophony of a population at war with itself, even in the face of universally impending disaster. The environmental crisis isn’t directly addressed, but the metaphor couldn’t be clearer: a planet-destroying comet is headed towards Earth, but scientists can’t make Americans take heed over a din of debate, denial and political spin.Election(Alexander Payne, 1999)Best for: American electoral politics brought down to brass tacks.View image in fullscreenAny number of films have been made about the complex vagaries of American electoral campaigns, but have they ever been summarised as simply and cruelly as they are in Alexander Payne’s lethally dark high school comedy? The stakes might be comparatively low in this anatomy of a midwestern student body vote, but try telling that to Reese Witherspoon’s indelible overachiever Tracy Flick – an analogue for every ambitious, capable woman ever deemed too unlikable to succeed by dominant male mediocrity.A Face in the Crowd(Elia Kazan, 1957)Best for: a prescient vision of the US media landscape at its most cynical.View image in fullscreenNot a great success upon its release in 1957, Elia Kazan’s nearly 70-year-old media satire has enjoyed quite a revival in recent years – even being adapted into a stage musical at the Young Vic last year. That’s because, its mid-century milieu notwithstanding, it speaks directly to the modern era of faux-populist celebrity construction and public manipulation. Its protagonist, Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, a drifting Arkansas hayseed discovered by a New York radio producer and turned into a merchant of increasingly hypocritical homespun wisdom, is an idiot savant monster whose popular touch calls Joe Rogan to mind.The Florida Project(Sean Baker, 2017)Best for: a slice of life on the poverty line.View image in fullscreenSeveral years before he stormed the Oscars with his sex worker story Anora, Sean Baker received less than his due for one of the definitive modern portraits of poor white America, turning an attentive and compassionate gaze to a demographic often dismissed with cruel stereotypes. Playing out largely through the eyes of Moonee, the six-year-old daughter of an unemployed stripper barely surviving day to day in an Orlando fleapit motel, it avoids condescension as it shows us the wonder that the young girl routinely finds in squalor.Hale County This Morning, This Evening(RaMell Ross, 2018)Best for: an immersive, unsensationalised view of everyday life in the south.View image in fullscreenBefore switching to fiction with his recent, radical adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Boys, RaMell Ross made his name with this exquisite, Oscar-nominated mosaic of daily routines and rhythms among the predominantly Black residents of Hale County, Alabama. Interspersing carefully observed vignettes with more lateral poetic meditations, it was described by Ross as an “epic banal” work, aiming to “bring elation to the experience of blackness”. The film’s calm lyricism and granular detail stand out against other, more vocally political modern docs on that experience.Here(Robert Zemeckis, 2024)Best for: a telling boomer viewpoint on the US past and present, for better or worse.View image in fullscreenRobert Zemeckis’s kitschy, AI-assisted graphic novel adaptation about centuries of American life playing out on one patch of land bombed in cinemas, and not undeservedly so – but I’m not sure I’ve seen a film recently that captures the stiflingly conservative family values of the modern US with more inadvertent accuracy, or the political overreach of white liberal worldview. (Its passages on Indigenous trauma and the Black Lives Matter movement are a veritable time capsule of cringe.)I Am Not Your Negro(Raoul Peck, 2016)Best for: bringing a fresh context to the history of US racism.View image in fullscreenThis Bafta-winning documentary from Haitian film-maker Raoul Peck is based on Remember This House, an unfinished manuscript by trailblazing Black writer and activist James Baldwin, and brings vital visual information to his literary examination of racism in the US. Told via Peck’s own experiences and through reflections on the work and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, among others, it’s a fascinating history lesson bristling with modern relevance.In Jackson Heights(Frederick Wiseman, 2015)Best for: a celebration of American diversity.View image in fullscreenVeteran documentarian Frederick Wiseman is the foremost US chronicler of the country’s institutions and communities, whether in his midwest portrait Monrovia, Indiana or his exhaustive administrative study City Hall. But his most vital recent work is this vast cinematic patchwork of life in the teemingly diverse New York City neighbourhood of Jackson Heights, as its gaze takes in everything from a Muslim school to an LGBTQ support meeting to a Jewish community centre – adding up to a compelling study of how the US, at its best, can evolve to meet the needs of a changing population.Joker(Todd Phillips, 2019)Best for: a popular touchstone of current American masculinity.View image in fullscreenWhen Todd Phillips’s unexpectedly artsy, ambitious superhero spinoff movie premiered at Venice, scooping up the Golden Lion, the heated critical debates began: had he made the ultimate “incel” manifesto, or a snarling critique thereof? Six years and one flop sequel later and there’s still no consensus, not least because some audiences adopted Joaquin Phoenix’s downtrodden, mentally ill, ultimately murderous Arthur Fleck as an anti-woke icon and others recoiled from his toxic villainy. Phoenix’s Oscar-winning performance makes him disturbingly sympathetic in either light.RoboCop(Paul Verhoeven, 1987)Best for: a not-so-futuristic projection of where the American police state is heading.View image in fullscreenForget the various meat-headed sequels and increasingly kid-targeted cartoon violence. Verhoeven’s original action blockbuster was an ice-cold, viciously satirical vision of American capitalism and militarisation heading towards an unholy worst-case scenario: a privatised corporate police force staffed by ruthless droids, with predictably dire consequences for humanity. Nearly 40 years later, it’s ageing horribly well: under Trump, its dystopian world-building seems only slightly far-fetched.Shy Boys IRL(Sara Gardephe, 2011)Best for: a snapshot of the origins of incel culture.View image in fullscreenGardephe’s viral short is scrappily shot and only half an hour long, but remains a definitive visual text in our understanding of what, in 2011, had not yet been popularly named “incel culture” – an online community of young men, frustrated by their failure to meet and date women, whose involuntary celibacy seeds an increasingly toxic view. Gardephe’s film, which has recently enjoyed a resurgence on TikTok, treated incels as a subculture then, but today looks prescient in identifying a far broader social phenomenon.Sound of Freedom(Alejandro Monteverde, 2023)Best for: an insight into rightwing blockbuster heroism.View image in fullscreenOn the face of it, Alejandro Monteverde’s sentimental search-and-rescue thriller is straightforwardly gung-ho stuff, following an intrepid homeland security agent (played by The Passion of the Christ star Jim Caviezel) as he sets out to crack a child sex-trafficking ring in Colombia. But as produced and marketed by conservative faith-based entertainment company Angel Studios, the film became laden, intentionally or otherwise, with intricately coded QAnon conspiracy theories, and was championed by the right as a rejoinder to the supposedly reprobate output of leftist mainstream Hollywood. Sure enough, it was a sleeper hit, and there’s a lot to be learned from watching it.Stillwater(Tom McCarthy, 2021)Best for: a canny distillation of the culture gap between the US and Europe.View image in fullscreenPlainly inspired by the Amanda Knox case, Tom McCarthy’s quietly potent culture-clash thriller was unfairly written off by many critics, but there’s some acute wisdom in its portrayal of a gun-loving, blue-collar Oklahoma dad navigating the intricacies of the French legal system – and eventually taking his own roughneck revenge – to save his imprisoned daughter. It’s a criminal melodrama with blunt contrivances softened and complicated by Matt Damon’s knotty, humane portrayal of a character who would be easier to demonise.Strong Island(Yance Ford, 2017)Best for: a searingly personal account of the struggles of social integration.View image in fullscreenIn 1992, Yance Ford’s brother William, a young, unarmed Black man, was shot dead by a white 19-year-old who claimed self-defence and was subsequently acquitted by an all-white jury. That might have been more than 30 years ago, but Ford’s pained, unflinching documentary points to enduring unequal treatment in its first-hand portrait of a Black family who anticipated a better life on moving to the suburbs of Long Island, only to find, ultimately, they were unwelcome outsiders. Ford, a trans film-maker, has a sharply intersectional understanding of minority identity; his film is both an elegy and a plea for change.Support the Girls(Andrew Bujalski, 2018)Best for: A snapshot of labour politics with a side of lively feminism.View image in fullscreenThere may be no brand more absurdly and quintessentially American than the lurid, unabashedly chauvinist “breastaurant” Hooters, and it gets a wicked send-up in this breezy but bittersweet workplace comedy, starring a wonderful Regina Hall as the world-weary manager of one such institution. Following her across her last two days of employment, and glancing upon the various crises of its female staff members, it’s a casually piquant skewering of unjust labour practices in a still-patriarchal society, and a warm valentine to the women who endure them.13th(Ava DuVernay, 2016)Best for: a thorough breakdown of the US prison-industrial complex.View image in fullscreenThe title refers to the 13th amendment to the US constitution, abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude – except as punishment for convicted criminals. In her first documentary, Ava DuVernay uses this caveat as the basis for a compelling argument that slavery continues to this day in the US prison system, further challenging the corporations that profit from it. With interview subjects ranging from activist Angela Davis to politician Newt Gingrich, it’s the most expansive and searching work of DuVernay’s career.Time(Garrett Bradley, 2020)Best for: an unromantic, long-view take on fighting the power.View image in fullscreenIf 13th offers an essayistic takedown of the prison-industrial complex, Garrett Bradley’s heart-wrenching documentary takes a more personal view of the subject, portraying Black abolitionist Fox Rich, AKA Sibil Fox Richardson, and her 20-year campaign for the release of her husband, Robert, sentenced to 60 years in prison for his role in an armed bank robbery. It’s a powerful study of systemic dysfunction and the lives caught up in it, but also a hard, realistic view of the exhausting grind of long-term activism.Us(Jordan Peele, 2019)Best for: an allegory for the class divide in the Black US.View image in fullscreenJordan Peele’s 2017 smash, Get Out, immediately established him as a leading Hollywood merchant of political commentary as entertainment, as it probed the threat posed to the Black population even by supposed white liberals. But this even better follow-up film got into thornier, more nuanced territory with its ingenious examination of American privilege, classism and gentrification, alongside its ramifications as visited upon a bourgeois Black family terrorised by their “tethered” underclass doppelgangers. It’s witty, frightening and rings violently true.White Noise(Daniel Lombroso, 2020)Best for: explaining the rise of the far right.View image in fullscreenIt’s cold comfort that the three principal subjects of Daniel Lombroso’s upsetting documentary on the surge of the “alt-right” movement in the US – Richard Spencer, Mike Cernovich and Lauren Southern – are no longer as prominent in the news as they were when the film was made five years ago: they’ve simply been surpassed by other toxic celebrities as white supremacy has expanded from the fringes to the mainstream. Produced by news publisher the Atlantic, the film works as an excavation of the movement’s roots, and is suitably pessimistic about where it’s heading. More

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      FCC to investigate Disney and ABC over potential violation in diversity practices

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      The US’s top media regulator on Friday said it was opening an investigation into the diversity practices of Walt Disney and its ABC unit, saying they may violate equal employment opportunity regulations.Brendan Carr, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair, wrote to the Disney CEO, Robert Iger, in a letter dated on Thursday that the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts may not have complied with FCC regulations and that changes by the company may not go far enough.“For decades, Disney focused on churning out box office and programming successes,” Carr wrote in the letter. “But then something changed. Disney has now been embroiled in rounds of controversy surrounding its DEI policies.“I want to ensure that Disney ends any and all discriminatory initiatives in substance, not just name,” Carr wrote.He has sent letters to Comcast and Verizon announcing similar investigations into diversity practices.Disney has come into conflict with Republicans in recent years. In 2023 the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, clashed with Disney over its opposition to the state’s so-called “don’t say gay” law and rightwingers have attacked the company for being “woke” – most recently for the casting of Rachel Zegler, an American actor of Colombian descent, in the titular role of its Snow White reboot.“We are reviewing the Federal Communications Commission’s letter, and we look forward to engaging with the commission to answer its questions,” a Disney spokesperson said.Disney recently revised its executive compensation policies to remove diversity and inclusion as a performance metric, adding a new standard called “talent strategy”, aimed at upholding the company’s values.Carr said the FCC’s enforcement bureau would be engaging with Disney “to obtain an accounting of Disney and ABC’s DEI programs, policies, and practices”.Carr, who was designed chair by Donald Trump on 20 January, has been aggressively investigating media companies.In December, ABC News agreed to give $15m to Trump’s future presidential library to settle a lawsuit over comments that anchor George Stephanopoulos made on air involving the civil case brought against Trump by the writer E Jean Carroll.Days after Carr took over as chair, the FCC reinstated complaints about the 60 Minutes interview with Harris, as well as complaints about how ABC News moderated the pre-election TV debate between then president Joe Biden and Trump.It also reinstated complaints against Comcast’s NBC for allowing Harris to appear on Saturday Night Live shortly before the election.Trump has sued CBS for $20bn, claiming that 60 Minutes deceptively edited the interview in order to interfere in the November presidential election, which he won.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      And the loser is … politics: why was this year’s Oscars so reluctant?

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      Twenty-two years ago, the last time Adrien Brody won the Academy award for best actor, film-maker Michael Moore accepted his own Oscar for Bowling for Columbine, a documentary about America’s obsession with guns, by offering a preview of sorts of his next feature, Fahrenheit 9/11. He decried then president George W Bush as “fictitious” (alluding to his fishy, supreme court-assisted election win a year and a half earlier) and excoriated the Bush administration for sending the United States to war with Iraq – just three days earlier, in fact – for “fictitious reasons”. It was received with a mixture of applause and boos, probably the most memorable moment of the night, give or take Brody planting a kiss on Halle Berry.Two years later, when Fahrenheit 9/11 might have been similarly honored (and almost certainly would have been, as it became the highest-grossing non-music doc ever in the US, a record it still holds after two decades), Moore wasn’t on stage. Months earlier, he had decided not to submit his movie for consideration, nominally because he didn’t feel like he needed to steal focus from other, less widely seen docs, and also because he was negotiating an airing of the film on TV, which would scotch its eligibility anyway. By the time the Oscars rolled around, however, the presidential election Moore had hoped to affect with that television airing was long over; Bush won again, and maybe a documentary designed to prevent this from happening wouldn’t have seemed worth all the fuss, anyway. The administration’s worst policies were still in place, but protesting them seemed less urgent. Better to just put on a fun show.Politically speaking, this year’s 97th Academy Awards felt more like that ceremony 20 years ago: we lost; let’s forget about it. But considering that the second Trump administration is embarking upon the most destructive and illegal government purge seen in modern US history while also shifting alliances toward strongman figures overseas, it felt conspicuous that it was barely commented upon, beyond host Conan O’Brien’s joke that Anora was well-received because it featured a character actually standing up to Russians. Even this felt more like a typical (if barbed) current-events laugh than a direct rebuke of fascism, a remnant of Brien’s dutiful-late-night-monologue days.Brody, returning to the stage for his work in The Brutalist and lacking Berry to clinch (though she did find him on the red carpet for a revenge smooch), rambled on about career pitfalls, the less glamorous side of acting, and … what was he on about, exactly? Nevertheless, he shushed the encroaching orchestra for an emotional crescendo that never quite arrived. Through this record-setting speech, literally the longest in Oscar history, Brody never seemed to land on anything in particular to say; he thanked his co-stars and his partner and his parents, like most people do, but on a more roundabout path. The closest he came to making a bigger-picture statement was a sort of mealy-mouthed pro-peace, pro-tolerance lip service that’s intentionally difficult to ascribe to any particular things happening in the real world (perhaps in keeping with the ambiguities of The Brutalist, the thorny but sometimes elusive movie he won for).That’s not to put the lack of politics at the Oscars purely on Brody – or even to say that politics at the Oscars make a bit of difference beyond burnishing their self-styled reputation as an important event, and perhaps confirming some rightwingers’ perception of Hollywood as a haven for condescending far-left elites. Of course, the political makeup of Hollywood is more complicated than that; for one thing, it’s collectively about as revolutionary as the most entrenched centrist Democrats. (In New York terms: more Schumer than AOC.) But this also means that anything to the left of “We love you, Dear President Trump” will be received in certain corners as leftist rhetoric anyway. In other words, there’s nothing anyone can say – including nothing itself – that will turn the event into the “apolitical” ideal rightwingers claim to long for. As such, it was a little bit strange to see this particular time, of all times, being treated like business as usual. No one famous had anything more specific than allusions to Trump and other sources of global discord, beyond Daryl Hannah saying briefly supportive words about Ukraine in the wake of their president’s disastrous encounter with Trump’s bulldozing?Admittedly, these gestures don’t necessarily affect much, if any, change. In the past, some of them have been downright clumsy or self-important. But movies are about image-making, and at a time when so much rightwing radicalism is being passed off as normal, there were plenty of opportunities to refute that narrative, rather than just referring vaguely to “divisive” times. Though there’s something charming about Sean Baker’s single-issue campaigning on behalf of the theatrical experience, certainly an appropriate topic to address at the Academy Awards, it’s also a bit mordantly funny that the director of Anora, one of the more provocative best picture winners in recent history, has so little appetite for controversy (regardless of his much-discussed-online Twitter habits). And for those addicted to bragging about their 65-inch TVs providing a better experience than a giant movie screen, “take your kids to the movies for real” could still read as controversial anyway.View image in fullscreenPerhaps appropriately, the most political moment of the night was in Moore’s old category, best documentary feature. The Academy awarded No Other Land, a film that sounds, on paper, like an act of healing: it was made by a collective of both Palestinians and Israelis, about the friendship between a Palestinian activist and a Jewish Israeli journalist. But the movie is also about the displacement of the Palestinian people by Israel, and its pro-Palestine point of view was considered radioactive enough that (despite months of acclaim and awards) it hasn’t yet secured official US distribution, instead booking its showings through its PR handlers. The Academy, not always known for their bold choices in this category, will most assuredly bring more eyes and ears to No Other Land, more so even than the platform the film-makers received as winners on the telecast.That’s ultimately the kind of Oscar politics that can make a difference; any movie fan should know that actions do often speak louder than words (or, specifically: movies are louder, and more memorable, than most acceptance speeches). Yet it’s still possible to take something chilling away from this year’s ceremony: “politicizing” the Oscars with a speech is known as something that typically has no greater consequence than, well, more complaints about politicizing the Oscars. Yet even with the risk far lower than, say, anyone who works for the government right now, most were too cowed, or maybe too exhausted, to bother speaking up. Actions speak louder, but the silence can still be pretty deafening. More

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      Afflicted with liberal angst in the age of Trump? Take a leaf from Bridget Jones’s diary | Rafael Behr

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      When future generations study creative works that capture the unsettled spirit of our age, they might easily neglect Bridget Jones 4: Mad About the Boy. The movie isn’t about the historical inflection point that coincides with its release. It doesn’t feature Donald Trump, his vandalism of US democracy or his dissolution of the transatlantic alliance. Such things are not the stuff of romantic comedy. Also, they hadn’t yet happened in 2013, when Helen Fielding wrote the book on which the film is based.But the lack of intentional allegory doesn’t prevent us projecting one on to the story. Or maybe it was just me, experiencing a sentimental hallucination induced by events outside the cinema. Indulge me a moment (and forgive any plot spoilers), as I explain.The first three volumes of the Jones diaries are picaresque chronicles of professional and sexual misadventure that resolve themselves in the reassuring arms of Mark Darcy, a human rights barrister: stolid, emotionally reticent, honourable and kind. That on-and-off romance sweeps Bridget from twentysomething anxiety to thirtysomething neurosis; from post-adolescent insecurity to early midlife crisis, unplanned pregnancy and, in the happy ending, marriage.Allowing for some chronological elasticity (with lags between books being written and adapted for cinema), Jones’s relationship with Darcy unfolds against a political and economic backdrop that hindsight reveals to be exceptionally benign. It is that period sometimes called the Great Moderation: roughly from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the global financial crisis in 2007-09.Democracy sprawled eastwards across Europe. Captive peoples were liberated from communist dictatorship. The dissolution of the Soviet threat generated a “peace dividend” for western governments, permitting a diversion of budget resources from defence to social spending.There was a viable Middle East peace process. In 1993, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands over the Oslo accords on the White House lawn. Apartheid was dismantled in South Africa, which held its first free, multiracial elections in 1994. The Good Friday agreement brought peace to Northern Ireland in 1998. The UK was then well into an economic boom that had another nine years still to run.View image in fullscreenLondon was basking in its status as capital of “Cool Britannia” – a powerhouse of art, music and self-congratulation. This was the context in which Bridget Jones’s diary first appeared as a weekly newspaper column in 1995. Her avid readership was the same generation that hit their young adult stride in that bright springtime of liberal metropolitan complacency.Jones was not very political, which made her an eloquent exponent of the zeitgeist. “It is perfectly obvious that Labour stands for sharing, kindness, gays, single mothers and Nelson Mandela,” she wrote on the eve of Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide election victory. The Tories were “braying bossy men having affairs with everyone shag shag shag left right and centre and going to the Ritz in Paris then telling all the presenters off on the Today programme.”We know also from a one-off column published in 2019 that Jones was a remainer in the Brexit culture wars. To break the legislative deadlock in parliament, she proposed that Queen Elizabeth, David Attenborough and Joanna Lumley join forces, urging the nation to reconsider the referendum question.It makes perfect sense that the love of Bridget’s life should be a distinguished lawyer who battles global injustice. It was a match made in the late 20th century, when human rights were a byword for all that was virtuous in western democracy. A career dedicated to their defence was the obvious device for a comic novelist wanting to signal intimidating levels of moral uprightness in a character. (It is often said that Darcy was modelled on a younger Keir Starmer. Fielding acknowledges uncanny likenesses in profession and manner, while insisting they are coincidental.)In the opening minutes of Mad About the Boy, we learn that Darcy is dead. He was killed in the line of duty, of course, on a humanitarian mission overseas. His widow is struggling to restart her life and raise two children alone.If, like me, you succumb easily to cinematic schmaltz, this is already an affecting scenario. What I found unexpectedly poignant was the thought that Darcy’s untimely death also functions as a metaphor for the demise of political certainties that defined the world in which Bridget Jones’s generation came of age. Her heartbreak is a parable of political bereavement, describing liberal angst at the sudden unravelling of institutional and legal norms underpinning European security. (Plus sex and jokes.)In the week that the movie was released, the US president reached over the heads of his country’s former Nato allies to embrace Vladimir Putin. He sketched the outline of a deal to end the war in Ukraine that was part territorial capitulation to the aggressor, part gangster extortion – offering Kyiv protection in exchange for mineral wealth. Vice-president JD Vance gave an ominously unhinged speech at the Munich security conference. He claimed that freedom is more imperilled by imaginary culture-war spectres haunting European democracies than it is by a Russian dictator whose tanks are churning up the sovereignty of a neighbouring state.In case of any lingering doubt that the Trump regime has authoritarian ambitions, the president also asserted on social media last week that “he who saves his country does not violate any law”. It is a signal that judges, courts and constitution should all be subordinate to a leader whose personal preference is synonymous with the national interest. Coming from the man who fomented insurrection to overturn the 2020 election, Trump’s aphorism should be read as a hint that the spirit of Maga patriotism is vested in thugs and militias, not statutes.This was the advertised programme. None of it should surprise the US’s allies. But it was easier to hope there might be momentum in the old order than to work out how to live in the new one. Now European leaders are scrambling to convene summits, scraping the sides of their depleted defence budgets, flexing atrophied military muscle in panicky gestures of continental solidarity.There is no going back to Darcy’s world. The idea that human rights are universal and the principle that no one is above the law are losing ground to older axioms – big nations extract tribute from smaller ones; a strongman ruler makes the rules.Pained by these existential challenges, it is hard not to reach for the anaesthetic balm of nostalgia, mythologising the late 90s and early 21st century as a golden age of liberal democratic primacy. In reality, that was a cosy bubble around one generation in one corner of the world: a historical fluke. To move on, we have to get through denial, anger and the other stages of grief to acceptance. We need to recognise that we live for the foreseeable future in a world without a friend in the White House, and that this points to a destiny for Britain much closer to Europe.And we need politicians who will dare to say as much aloud. This, too, is something that occurred to me as I left the cinema last weekend. Maybe if we had leaders capable of expressing the magnitude of the crisis, and rising to the challenge, I wouldn’t have to look for messages of solace between the lines of Bridget Jones’s diary.

      Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist More

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      Lessons for Elon Musk from the original Doge | Brief letters

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      As Elon Musk’s unelected “Doge” troops slash and burn US federal departments (Elon Musk appears with Trump and tries to claim ‘Doge’ team is transparent, 12 February), it is ironic to note that the Doges of ancient Venice were always elected, and by a process that was designed to avoid wealthy families taking too much power.John JacobsAlton, Hampshire I agree with your correspondents about the difficulty of hearing the lyrics in musicals (Letters, 13 February), but there’s little mention of the problem in cinemas, where conversations are drowned out by background music. In the recent film about Bob Dylan, Timothée Chalamet perfectly captured the musician’s mumble. What words he actually said remain A Complete Unknown.Joanna RimmerNewcastle upon Tyne Re the letters on analogue photography (14 February), there is a good compromise. I use a digital camera, which means I can go “snap happy”. Then I can look at all the images, select what I want and get them printed.Peter ButlerRushden, Northamptonshire I’m not entirely convinced that the Guardian style guide does a lot for women’s rights in advising that actresses should always be called actors (Editorial, 14 February). Why not the other way around?John OwensStockport, Greater Manchester My school report read: “Angela has influence, unfortunately in the wrong direction.” I became a probation officer (Letters, 16 February).Angela GlendenningNewcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire More

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      ‘Another woke disaster from Hollywood!’ How Captain America joined the culture wars

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      Of all the times to recast the most iconically American comic-book character with a Black actor and then pit him against a violently angry supervillain with an unnaturally reddish skin tone, who also happens to be the new US president … Sorry if that’s a spoiler, but it is in the trailer for the new Captain America: Brave New World, just released into a tumultuous Trump-run America that’s itching for another culture war.If Marvel was looking for some attention to reignite its beleaguered movie franchise, it seems to have found it – but not necessarily the good kind. If nothing else, the image of a raging red superbeing rising up from behind the presidential podium and then trashing the White House is sure to provoke a reaction. As Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson takes up the star-spangled shield passed on to him by Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers, his casting has already incensed a certain bracket of social media: “The new Captain America! DEI hire!”; “Sounds like another woke disaster from Hollywood”; “Boy, did you not get the memo? America just voted for Trump – your film is dead on arrival.” It’s a wonder Trump hasn’t signed an executive order banning the film yet.Mackie gave his adversaries even more ammunition a couple of weeks ago when he told the Italian press: “To me Captain America represents a lot of different things and I don’t think the term ‘America’ should be one of those representations.” Again, you can imagine the reactions – even if, as fans pointed out, Mackie’s predecessor in the role, Chris Evans, made very similar comments when he was promoting Captain America: “I’m not trying to get too lost in the American side of it. This isn’t a flag-waving movie,” Evans said in 2011. Mackie had to walk back his comments the next day on Instagram: “Let me be clear about this: I’m a proud American and taking on the shield of a hero like Cap is the honour of a lifetime.”These are not the only battles the new Captain America finds itself caught up in. Attention has also focused on Ruth Bat-Seraph, aka Sabra, a minor character in the movie played by Israeli actor Shira Haas. In the original comics, Sabra was “the first Israeli superhero”; a mutant with superpowers who was formerly a Mossad agent. She’s had a bit of a makeover for the movie: no longer a mutant or a Mossad agent but very much a combat-ready operative. In a joint letter, some Palestinian cultural groups complained: “By reviving this racist character in any form, Marvel is promoting Israel’s brutal oppression of Palestinians.” They have called for a boycott of the movie, and pro-Palestinian protesters picketed the Hollywood premiere this Tuesday, holding up signs saying things such as “Disney supports genocide” – again, necessarily not the good kind of attention.View image in fullscreenAs if that weren’t enough, Brave New World has been plagued by reports of rewrites and reshoots, as well as recastings. William Hurt, who was set to play the US president, Thaddeus Ross, died in 2022 and had to be replaced by Harrison Ford. It was originally slated for release in May 2024. According to one insider, late last year it had gone through three rounds of test screenings and was still getting negative feedback. The film-makers have denied this, although director Julius Onah acknowledged: “Every movie of this scale has additional photography baked into the creative process. There are things you’re going to refine and the story is going to evolve.”Without those delays, the movie might well have come out in the late Biden era, rather than the febrile first few weeks of Trump 2.0. At least they changed the title – the original, Captain America: New World Order might have been too much for the conspiracy theorists to handle.It was somehow inevitable that all this would befall Captain America, rather than any other superhero. He’s always been the moral conscience of the Marvel universe, and by extension, the nation. The character was created by Jewish writers Jack Kirby and Joe Simon in 1940, primarily as a wartime propaganda tool – the US actually entered the war a year later, so perhaps it worked. The cover of issue #1, showing Captain America socking Adolf Hitler on the jaw, told you exactly where his loyalties lay. Now, 85 years later, we find him socking the fictional US president in the jaw instead. And this at a time when the real-life president is happily dining with white supremacists and Nazi sympathisers such as Nick Fuentes and Kanye West (whose recent X post declaring “I’m a Nazi” ought to clear up any ambiguity). Not to mention Trump’s ubiquitous righthand troll Elon Musk, who has done nothing at all to correct impressions that he gave a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration a few weeks ago. It leaves you wondering who the real good guys are.View image in fullscreenTime and again, it’s been down to Captain America to figure that out. While other Marvel movies have gadded about in weightless fantasy realms (Thor, Guardians of the Galaxy, Deadpool), the Captain America movies have often reflected off-screen political reality – and despite his ludicrously patriotic get-up (often worn by Trump supporters, or Photoshopped on to Trump himself), Cap has never been afraid to turn against his own government.It’s worth recapping the saga so far. Origin movie Captain America: The First Avenger, released in 2011, explained how weedy army recruit Steve Rogers (Evans) was given an experimental superhero-creating serum in the 1940s, and riffed on his deployment as a wartime propaganda mascot. Things got interesting with 2014’s The Winter Soldier, in which Rogers is thawed out in the present day and finds the US about to instate a global surveillance regime that would predict and preemptively eliminate threats. This was the era of the Edward Snowden leaks, so the paranoid conspiracy element was not too difficult to swallow. But good old Cap wasn’t having it: “This isn’t freedom – it’s fear,” he said, stepping away from his quasi-military role. He was right: it later transpired that the US government had been infiltrated by the neo-Nazi organisation Hydra – again, a concept that’s no longer too difficult to swallow.And by his side in his fight to de-Nazify the government was Mackie’s character, Sam Wilson, aka Falcon, a modern-day Iraq war veteran who befriended Rogers. In 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, Rogers and Wilson again fell out with the authorities, refusing to agree to UN oversight of “enhanced individuals” – those with superpowers. They trusted their own judgment above that of the politicians.View image in fullscreen2019’s all-conquering Avengers: Endgame culminated with Evans’ Captain America retiring, and passing on his shield to Mackie’s Falcon. After that the saga headed into race politics and Black history – possibly blown in that direction by the cultural winds post-Black Lives Matter. In his small-screen spin-off Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Falcon hands the shield back to the government – “It feels like it belongs to someone else,” he says. Not only does he deem himself unworthy, his patriotism to a country that enslaved and discriminated against his forebears is understandably conflicted. Another Black character tells him: “They will never let a Black man be Captain America, and even if they did, no self-respecting Black man would ever want to be.” Sure enough, a new, white Captain America is anointed: John Walker, played by Wyatt Russell. But to cut a long story short, it turns out he’s unworthy, and Wilson ultimately winds up with the shield again.Politics were very much in the minds of the Russo brothers, who jointly directed Winter Soldier, Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. “Those movies are very much about what went on in this country over the past four years,” Joe Russo told me in 2021. “Some of the worst people were being attracted to politics and were representing us collectively … We believed strongly that the reach in those movies was so significant that they could be influential in helping people potentially make better decisions. We thought that they were a really powerful tool, at exactly the right time.”Brave New World should at least satisfy fans who wanted a political action thriller along the lines of Winter Soldier, with no space people turning up from parallel universes. Mackie’s fledgling Cap initially agrees to work with Ford’s new president, but before long, he’s disobeying orders and going rogue once again to investigate a conspiracy. Despite the raging Hulk “reveal”, and the president surviving an assassination attempt, Ford’s character is not all that Trump-like: he cares about international cooperation, he has a Black female head of security, and he even gets on an exercise bike on Air Force One. Depending on how you see it, this is either a bullet dodged or a punch pulled. This president does, however, outsource tech and military innovation to a shifty, unbiddable genius scientist who’s described as “his own personal thinktank” – remind you of anyone?There’s no telling how any of this will play in today’s movie landscape. Marvel movies have been at the vanguard of Hollywood representation in recent years but this has not translated into box-office success lately. Recent movie outings such as The Eternals and The Marvels – neither of which were directed by or centred on white men – were met with opposition by some fans (especially the vehement “Everything is woke” brigade), but also by some critics (for not being very good). Meanwhile, Marvel’s franchise-milking small-screen offshoots (Loki, Wandavision, Ms Marvel, She-Hulk, etc) and confusing “multiverse” storylines have turned off even more viewers. It’s telling that Marvel’s only recent box-office success was the more flip and irreverent Deadpool & Wolverine (led by two white guys).View image in fullscreenSo perhaps the message is: nobody’s in the mood for superheroes getting too real and political any more, and the era of applauding movies for representation has been killed by Trump’s anti-DEI edicts. Marvel seems to be hedging its bets: next up, in April, is Thunderbolts – the first outing for a new bunch of (overwhelmingly white) superhero misfits, including Florence Pugh and Wyatt Russell’s John Walker.But ultimately, Mackie was right when he said Captain America was not really about “America”. Unlike the cosplaying Trump supporters, he’s more loyal to American values than to the flag, and over his long history, he’s often had to remind the nation what those values are. In one comic-book story (What If … #44), 1940s Captain America wakes up in 1984, where he finds a fascist “America first” president who is persecuting minorities and promising to make America great again. Cap lays it down in no uncertain terms: “Without its ideals – its commitment to the freedom of all men, America is a piece of trash! I fought Adolf Hitler not because America was great, but because it was fragile! I knew that liberty could as easily be snuffed out here as in Nazi Germany!” Maybe they can use that storyline for the next movie, if there is one. More

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      ‘I feel I’ve upset a few people over the years’: actor Brian Cox on overrated co-stars, charmless politicians and the joy of smoking weed

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      As I leave the office, my editor wishes me luck. “Hope he’s not too grumpy!” she says. A moment later, the deputy editor asks where I’m off to. To see Brian Cox, the actor, I say. “Oh!” she says, with a rather-you-than-me look. “Hope he’s not too grumpy!”Cox has played grumpy for going on 60 years. All sorts of grumpiness – idiot grumpy (independent candidate Bob Servant in the TV comedy of the same name), world-weary grumpy (school principal Dr Nelson Guggenheim in Wes Anderson’s film Rushmore), psychopathic grumpy (the first movie incarnation of Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter), egomaniacal grumpy (Robert McKee in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation) and, of course, brutal grumpy as media mogul Logan Roy in the TV series Succession. In recent years, he has often appeared on chatshows being grumpy about the state of the world. In 2022, he published his hugely entertaining memoirs, in which he was grumpy about method acting, useless directors, vain thesps, useless politicians, the church, capitalism, cancel culture, you name it. He was also fabulously indiscreet – Steven Seagal, whom he worked with on The Glimmer Man, is “as ludicrous in real life as he appears on screen”, Johnny Depp is “so overblown, so overrated”, Tarantino’s work is “meretricious”, Edward Norton is “a nice lad, but a bit of a pain in the arse because he fancies himself as a writer-director”, while Michael Caton-Jones, who directed him in Rob Roy, is a “complete arsehole”.‘I feel I’ve upset a few people over the years,” Cox says with an angelic smile. “The problem is, I can be quite a loudmouth. Sometimes I have been fairly volatile, and I think, ‘Why the fuck did you say that?’” He’s looking back over his epic career. “There’s a lot of stuff I’ve done which I look at and think, ‘That was crap.’” But today’s not the time for negativity. “No, I’m not going to go down that road.”Blimey, I say, we’re going to have to out you as a diplomat? He laughs – a lovely youthful chuckle. “Yes! You can out me as a diplomat!” he says enthusiastically. The thing is, he adds, certain people are overrated. We’re talking about his memoirs, and the unflinching references to the likes of Depp and Seagal. “But then they probably think they’re overrated as well. So I’m not saying anything they don’t think anyway.”View image in fullscreenWe meet at a hotel in London’s West End, close to the Haymarket theatre where he’s rehearsing The Score, about the ageing Bach, directed by Trevor Nunn. Cox stars in the play opposite his wife, Nicole Ansari-Cox, who is playing his stage wife. Cox looks so dapper in 50 shades of brown – brogues, socks, checked trousers and jacket, all offset with a purple tie. As a young man, he looked older than his years – a squat, Sherman tank of a man made for middle age. Now, at 78, with snow-white hair and a goatee, he looks surprisingly youthful.I ask him why he so often gets cast as grumps. He holds his hands up, nonplussed. Is it because he is one? “No, I’m not like that at all. It’s the antithesis of who I am, actually.” He stops to think about it. “No, that’s not entirely true. Of course, I get grumpy. Particularly about politics, I get very grumpy. A lot of that makes me angry. The failure of the Labour party in particular.” Pause. “But I don’t want to get into that.” Another pause. “Listen, I could go on for ages.” And another.One, two, three. And he’s off. “I don’t know why the Labour party is called the Labour party. It’s not labour orientated. I just think … ”He exhales with loud disappointment. “Keir Hardie, the guy who started it all, was an extraordinary man. And it was a very inclusive thing he was after – social justice. And this lot coming in now, they’re not exercising social justice. It’s true that the last lot left us in deep shit, so there’s a lot of stuff they’ve got to do, but they’ve got to be a bit canny about it in order not to alienate the folk. And Starmer is not exactly the most charming of individuals. He’s not Mr Charm. He’s not got the thing Tony Blair had, which served him brilliantly till hubris got the better of him. Starmer is minus one on that score.” Nor does he rate Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, on the charm front. “She’s had a charm bypass. There’s no question.” He laughs again. But he’s worried – for Scotland, for Britain, for Europe, for the world.Cox has been campaigning with the group Independent Age against the scrapping of the winter fuel payments for pensioners who aren’t on certain benefits, urging older people to check whether they are eligible for pension credit. “I just think it’s not on. It’s unjust. And means testing?” He hisses the word with contempt. “Means testing is something they did in the 30s. And I find that … I don’t know.” He stops, lost for words. “I can’t get with it at all.”View image in fullscreenHe loves his politics. For many years, he was a Labour loyalist. “I was a big Labour man. I was the voice of Labour for the 1997 campaign.” Eventually, he fell out with Blair over Iraq. As for Corbyn, he says, he was not cut out to be a leader. “Jeremy Corbyn is a great guy, don’t get me wrong, but he’s a professional backbencher. He’s a naysayer. And you can’t just be a naysayer, you’ve got to come up with something else in its place. That’s what progress is about.”And just to show he’s no naysayer, he’ll name the person most suited to the job. “I was all for Andy Burnham.” Unfortunately, he says, Burnham is mayor of Greater Manchester rather than a Labour MP. “But what he’s done in Manchester is phenomenal. And he’s keen on the idea that I’m keen on, which is a federal Britain. I believe the way we will survive and come out of the fucking shite that we’ve been in, and keep regurgitating again and again, is by being a federal society where each country has its own say. You can’t separate these islands off, but we’ve got to come together on a federal basis. Not as subjects.”Cox had a fascinating childhood, and is still exploring how it shaped him. He was born in Dundee, to observant Catholic parents. He was the youngest of five siblings – his oldest sister was 17 years his senior. His father, Charles, known as Chic, ran a grocer’s in a deprived part of Dundee; his mother was a spinner in the jute mills. Chic was a kind, sociable man who sold stuff on tick to the needy. “We lived in a tenement, and my dad had the grocer’s shop for 25 years, so he was lower middle class. Not working class.” The flat had two bedrooms – the three girls slept in one room in a single bed, his parents slept in the other, while Cox and his older brother bedded down in the living room.There were three landmarks within a street of where they lived – the church, the library and the cinema. He went to the church because he had to, the library because he wanted to, and the cinema because he was smitten. “My first love was cinema. There were 21 cinemas in my hometown, and I visited every single one of them.” From the age of six, he went by himself. First, he fell for Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin’s slapstick, then, by the age of nine, he was watching serious films about corruption and thwarted ambition such as On the Waterfront. There was no question, he says, that he would become an actor. “I knew this was my trade.”View image in fullscreenWere there any actors he knew, in the family or among friends? “No, but there were performers.” He looks at the biscuit next to his coffee. “D’you want it? I’m diabetic so I can’t eat it. Every Hogmanay the flat was packed with 70 people and I’d be summoned at 1am to perform.” How old was he? “I was three.” Was he the only one summoned? “No, everybody was. My second eldest sister, May, had a great voice. I’d do Al Jolson impersonations. It was weird for a wee boy to sing “Climb up on my knee. Sonny Boy, though you’re only three”! I always remember the effect on the room. There’s something about the room when it’s focused on something. The dynamic changes. Human beings get into a harmony with one another. It’s a wonderful feeling, and I thought, I want to be a part of that.”When he was eight, his father died and his life was uprooted. They discovered that Chic had given so much away on tick, he had left the family in debt. His mother never recovered from his death and their new poverty, and she had severe mental health problems from then on. Cox was farmed out to his three sisters. He left school at 15 and went to work at Dundee Repertory, and at the age of 17 went to England to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.“The 60s were amazing. It was the time of social mobility, when you were welcomed. When I came to drama school, people made it obvious they were happy that I was there. I felt so liberated. London to me has always represented freedom. I loved the sense that I was allowed to be who I was and celebrated for coming from my class.” Does he think he would have a chance of making it nowadays, coming from his background? “No, I wouldn’t. The conditions are so different now.”He really hoped to be an American movie actor, but of course that was impossible. So he settled for being a British theatre actor. And this is where his identity started to fragment. He wanted to be the best he possibly could be in theatre, and that meant excelling in Shakespeare, and Shakespeare was unambiguously English. So Cox started to think of himself as British at best, possibly even a little bit English, and he became more and more divorced from his Scottishness. He moved away from his homeland physically and mentally.Ever since he fell out with Blairism, he has been reconnecting with his Scottishness – or more accurately his Celticness. He recently had a DNA test and discovered he is 88% Irish and 12% Scottish. And it makes sense to him now.View image in fullscreenCox campaigned for Scottish independence and became active in the Scottish National party. Did he ever consider going into politics? “Yes. Alex [Salmond] wanted me to stand as an SNP candidate. I just don’t believe in the word national. It’s got too many connotations. It should be called the Scottish Independence party. SIP.” Cox became close to Salmond, the SNP’s former leader who died in October. Salmond was a controversial figure, who was cleared of 12 charges of sexual assault in 2020, with one charge of sexual assault with intent to rape found not proven. “Alex wasn’t a saint by any stretch of the imagination, but his political thinking was quite brilliant. Probably the most brilliant we’ve had. He was a visionary. I saw a lot of Alex. He was great fun, a bon viveur.”Did he ever warn him about his behaviour? “I never got to that stage. I wish I had. Someone had asked me about his questionable relationship to women. I won’t go into the details. And I think that was problematic.” Was Salmond aware it was problematic? “He wasn’t a fool so he had to be aware of what was going on, but he got let off. He was never salacious in my company. I just liked his brilliance; his sense of the world.”One reason Cox wasn’t tempted by politics is that he has always loved his profession. Acting has been a calling; a vocation. Cox gave up on his Catholicism long ago because it made no sense to him. “If you want a real church, go to the theatre; that tells the truth. Or the cinema. Go and see the performing arts.” He talks about the great directors with awe, paying a special tribute to two who have passed on – Michael Elliott who directed him in a stage production of Moby Dick in 1984, and Lindsay Anderson, who cast him in In Celebration, his second film, in 1975, set in the Derbyshire mining town of Langwith, and also starring the great Alan Bates. “Michael Elliott and Lindsay Anderson were the two people who gave me standards – both were of Scottish extraction, it has to be said. It’s a sort of purity of vision. I loved working with both of them. I’ve still got Lindsay’s notes.”Cox, famously, can’t stand method acting. He believes it’s pointless, selfish, an enemy of the imagination and destroys the atmosphere for others on set. He has described the technique used by his Succession co-star Jeremy Strong, who plays one of his three children, as “fucking annoying”. But, today, the newly circumspect Cox would like to accentuate the positive. “He was wonderful to act with. I had no argument with Jeremy’s acting.” But? “He would be an even better actor if he just got rid of that so there would be much more inclusiveness in what he did.”Isn’t it a pain when you can’t have real conversations with a cast member because they are permanently in character? “Well, it’s not good for the ensemble. It creates hostility. That’s the problem.” Did he talk to Strong about it? “No, not in the way I would like to have talked to him, but it’s a very emotive subject for people who follow the Strasberg line.”View image in fullscreenCox is talking about Lee Strasberg, regarded as the father of method acting in America. Last year, Cox suggested that if Strong had been more relaxed about his technique it would have been helpful for the Succession cast: “Go back to your trailer and have a hit of marijuana, you know?” Does he hit the marijuana? “Oh yes,” he says. What does it do for him? “It relaxes me.” He says it was only in middle age that he discovered the joy of a spliff. He was introduced to it by the uncle of a former girlfriend. He does a Cockney wide boy impersonation of him. “He was staying with me, and I’d come home and say it’s difficult for me to switch off, and he said, ‘Have you ever tried the weed?’ I’d always been very against that because when I was young I thought drugs just obfuscated the career path. And probably it would have at that time. So he said, ‘Why don’t you try some weed?’ So I did, and I just thought, ‘Oh GOD! It’s just the best way to get rid of the day.’”Succession has made Cox more famous than he ever had been. A mixed blessing, he says. Beforehand, he would get stopped by people who recognised him, but didn’t know why. Now there’s no doubt. Strangers not only ask for selfies, they also beg him to tell them to fuck off Logan Roy style, which often he’s happy to do, with feeling.Looking back at earlier profiles, it’s an astonishing career progression. In the 1980s, when he won the Laurence Olivier award for best actor in a new play for Rat in the Skull, and Critics Circle award for Titus Andronicus and The Taming of the Shrew, we were told he was a latecomer to success. In his 70s, he has won a Golden Globe and been Emmy nominated three years on the trot for playing Succession’s dyspeptic media mogul, who some have compared to Rupert Murdoch. “There’s a lot of, ‘Oh Brian Cox, isn’t he doing well now?’” he says. “But I’ve done well my whole career. I’ve had a great career.”Succession has, however, given him opportunities that he might not otherwise have had. He has just finished directing his first movie. Glenrothan is a family saga about a whisky distillery, which he calls his love letter to Scotland. What he has learned most from the experience, he says, is that directing is the wrong word for the job. “I realised I’m not a director, but a curator.” What’s the difference? “Film is a communicative art, where you’re curating brilliant costume designs with brilliant set designs with a brilliant DP. It’s not you. You’re just gathering that together and organising it, rather than saying we must go there and do this and do that. Not me, me, me. I mean the film may be shite, but at least it’s shite on my terms.”He has worked alongside his wife, Nicole Ansari-Cox, before; he directed her in 2020 in Sinners, a play about a woman stoned for adultery. “I love directing her. Or even curating her! She’s great – so good, so open.” Before marrying Ansari-Cox, he had two children with the actor Caroline Burt, to whom he was married for 19 years. His oldest is the actor Alan Cox, now in his mid-50s, who played the young John Mortimer in the TV drama A Voyage Round My Father.Cox has straddled the classes over the years, and known both poverty and considerable wealth. Burt came from an upper middle class family, and they sent their children to prestigious public schools. He has often said he was lacking as a father first time round – impatient, absent. But now he’s not so sure. “I think that’s just to do with the fact that I got married so young first time. I was 21 and had my first kid at 24. It was all alien to me.”View image in fullscreenHe has experienced being both a young father and an old one. His two sons with Nicole, Orson and Torin (aged 22 and 20, respectively), have grown up in New York, where the family live. He becomes gooey when talking about them. “I still look at their baby pictures. I miss them from when they were small. They’re now grown adults. They’re ridiculously tall, which is embarrassing because I’m only 5ft 8in and Nicole’s 5ft 2in.” How tall are they? “6ft 4in and 6ft 3in. It’s something about America. I used to think, ‘If I go to America, I’ll grow tall. Well, I’ll be taller.’ And of course I never lived in America when I was young, so I never got tall!”As a US citizen, how does he feel about the return of Donald Trump as president? “The penny doesn’t seem to drop about him. I can’t understand it. That’s why it’s so shocking. A man known to be sexist, racist, a suspected rapist … ” He turns puce, and struggles to get the words out. “And he’s got a big Catholic vote behind him … and I kept thinking, ‘How does that tie in with Catholic consciousness?’” No wonder, he says, that he gave up on religion. “It’s all bollocks. BOLLOCKS,” he roars. I’ve never met anybody who says bollocks with such ferocity. Then he rows back. “I don’t want to be disrespectful of people who believe, so bollocks is a bit harsh.”The older he gets, the more he wants to know why we’re on Earth – what our purpose is, if there is any. And the re-election of Trump makes him even more baffled. “We don’t understand who the fuck we are. We really don’t. We have no fucking clue who we are. How did we get to a stage where 80 million Americans will elect this fucking, you know, to become president.” He says “fucking” every bit as ferociously as he does “bollocks”.Does the US election make him lose faith in people?” “No, it doesn’t make me lose faith in people. It just makes me realise people are stupid. We’re in for a pretty rough old four years coming up.” Does he think he’ll stay in the US with Trump in power? “I don’t know. I’ve got to because my sons are there. But I’ll try to spend as much time here as I can.”We change the subject to something more positive. He tells me how he got together with Nicole. He’d previously met her one evening in 1990, when he was playing Lear in Hamburg. They talked, they danced, and then eight years elapsed before they saw each other again. By now he was single, recently out of a long-term relationship, and working on Broadway. “I got this message from the stage doorman, Jerry, and he said, ‘This broad came here last night. Really good-looking broad, she left this note, and I had one of those weird thoughts, ‘If I open this note, it’s going to change my life.’ I literally had this premonition. I’ve never experienced anything like this in my life.” And it did. He had just heard there was a no-show, so he rang Nicole and offered her the ticket. “We got together over that weekend – 1998, 26 years ago.”View image in fullscreenHe has previously said the secret to a happy relationship is separate bedrooms. Did he mean it? “That helps.” Why? “Because it means we’re independent. We’re not dependent on each other. I mean it’s very hard at the moment because we’re having to share a room, as I’ve got such a small flat in London. It’s weird. The place is such a fucking mess.” Normally, back home in America, they have a totally different set-up. “We visit each other.” Does he stay overnight if he visits? “Yeayeayea. The secret of a happy marriage is to allow the person to be the person and not make them into what you want to make them.”I ask if he thinks about death. “Yes, all the time. I have a fantasy every night about how I’m going to die. I don’t think about it in a depressing way. I just think of all the possible scenarios.” What’s his favourite? “Going without fuss, wrapped up in bed with a cup of tea, maybe with the telly on.” I think you may have a long wait ahead of you, I say. “Maybe. Maybe.” I hope so.It’s time to leave. We head off together. He talks about where I grew up in Manchester, the years he spent there working in the theatre, and the people and places he loves that I may know. Grumpy? No way. Sure, he’s passionate about a better world and pointing out all that’s bad in the present one. Yes, he’s a loudmouth with a penchant for roaring “Bollocks” at the world’s shysters and hypocrites. But, whisper it, Brian Cox may just be one of life’s great enthusiasts. The Score is at Theatre Royal Haymarket in London from 20 February to 26 April 2025, trh.co.uk More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Harm to children was part of the point’: a harrowing film on US family separations

      by

      He thought he was working in the past tense, making a film about what one Republican-appointed judge described as “one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country”. Then Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. Now Errol Morris’s documentary about family separations at the US-Mexico border looks like a dreadful premonition.“It’s interesting how things have radically changed,” Morris says via Zoom from a book-lined office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The movie, which presumably is recounting past history, seems to be a crystal ball into what may happen next and that was not clearly imagined at the outset. But it is clearly suggested now.”Separated is based on the NBC News correspondent Jacob Soboroff’s book Separated: Inside an American Tragedy (“one of the best collaborations I’ve ever had”, says the Oscar-winning Morris) and premieres on the MSNBC network on 7 December. It is an excruciatingly timely reminder of how Trump ripped 5,500 children from their parents (up to 1,400 of whom are not yet confirmed as reunited).The 93-minute documentary forensically details how the first Trump administration’s policy of family separations was deliberate, systematic and intentionally inhumane, leaving children in wire-mesh cages with feelings of fear and abandonment. Trump said with casual cruelty: “When you have that policy, people don’t come. I know it sounds harsh but we have to save our country.”Wearing white shirt and spectacles, sipping from a white coffee mug and speaking slowly in honeyed tones, Morris reflects: “The separations was an abomination. It was racist, was cruel, was unnecessary. As one of the interviewees in my film says, there were other levers that we could pull. This seemed to be something we did not need to do.”Trump had come into office promising a crackdown on illegal immigration including the construction of a border wall. The pre-existing catch-and-release scheme (which had allowed migrants to remain in the country until their immigration hearing) was ditched in favour of something more draconian.Family separations under his administration began as early as March 2017 under a pilot programme in El Paso, Texas. The fact it is was happening covertly undermines the notion that it could act as a deterrent.A “zero tolerance” policy, officially announced in spring 2018, marked a significant escalation. It mandated the prosecution of all adults crossing the border illegally. Anyone who did not arrive at a designated port of entry and claimed asylum would be arrested.While the policy never specifically called for children to be taken from parents, separation became inevitable because the adult was detained and charged. Since children were not allowed to be held in a federal jail, they were taken from their parents and placed in the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).Jonathan White, a civil servant who worked at the ORR and fought against the policy, says in the film: “Harm to children was part of the point. They believed it would terrify families into not coming.”Images of children held in cages in a McAllen, Texas, facility triggered outrage in June 2018. But Homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen denied that there was a policy of separating families at the border and sought to shift blame to Congress, even though the enforcement of laws happens at the president’s discretion. The Bush and Obama administrations had largely allowed families to stay together.Morris comments: “There was a totally fatuous claim that is made by Kirstjen Nielsen in the film: we’re just following the law – if you arrest a criminal and they have a child with him or her, you separate them.“There have been miserable policies towards immigrants from probably every administration, the first Bush on through to Donald Trump. But none of those administrations felt the need to do what he did. It was considered to be a step too far, a no-no, and yet they embraced it anyway.”He continues: “There are a lot of things that get to me but what really appalls me is that they would separate nursing infants from their mothers. This is clearly not right. What’s the word I’m searching for? This is wrong.”For Morris, the child separation saga pointed to a wider issue. “It’s an issue about racism and what I see as the racist rhetoric and policies of Donald Trump and his acolytes. I find it repulsive. I often like to remind people that racism is disgusting and it’s also bad manners. Haven’t we been taught not to act like that? Isn’t that part of the repertoire of being a civilised, cultured human being?“I hate analogies, but like everyone else, I can’t avoid using them. I like to tell people, as an American Jew, I always wondered what it was like to live in Germany in the 1930s, more specifically to be a Jew living in Germany in the 1930s. Now I know a lot more about what it must have been like.”Morris’s works include The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, American Dharma and My Psychedelic Love Story. Separated came with some distinct challenges. Much of the separation process happened away from TV cameras; the director compensations with dramatisations to portray a Guatemalan mother and son experiencing the border crossing, separation and reunification.View image in fullscreenIt was also hard to get interviews with those involved. Morris explains: “There are all kinds of impediments to getting people to talk; I’ve never seen anything this severe. If you’re working for the government, for example, like Jonathan White was working for the government, you’re constrained. You’re not allowed to talk without getting the permission of your superiors.“Most people who are still working in some capacity for the government simply would not talk and it didn’t matter how much begging and how much cajoling I might do. Jonathan would and that represents an extraordinary act of courage on his part.“He felt that the issues were so important that he had to talk. Call him a whistleblower. Call him whatever you want to call him. He did something that was incorrect and greatly appreciated by me. He took risks in order to tell a story which I believe needed to be told. A hero.”In his interview White describes Scott Lloyd, the head of the ORR, as “the most prolific child abuser in modern American history”, given White’s disturbing lack of awareness of the trauma inflicted on children under his care.Morris reflects: “Why is he doing the job? He’s a political appointee. He was known for his anti-abortion activism and that was his chief concern: preventing any of the women in ORR custody from ever getting abortions, even though at that time Roe was the law of the land.“Was Scott Lloyd interested very much in the care of people in his charge? I don’t know. It seems to me – I hate to make these inferences but I don’t hate them so much that I’m unwilling to make them – that he was currying favour with the administration. He was interested in self-advancement. He was ambitious and perfectly willing to do the bidding of the hardliners in the Trump administration.”Separated is also a study in the bureaucratic machinations behind how the sausage is made. “There is a very strong theme running through this about bureaucrats and bureaucracy, good bureaucrats and bad bureaucrats. Most interesting to me in the story is how pliable our morality is.“If we need to find a way to justify the most appalling behaviour, we somehow find a way to do it. You can listen to Kirstjen Nielsen braying like a donkey that she is just following the law – you wouldn’t want me to break the law, would you?“Well, I don’t look at it that way and, when it’s suggested that she might be separating families as a deterrent to immigration, she gets outraged. I can’t even believe you would suggest such a thing. This is all Looney Tunes. It’s people living in some strange nimbus of self-deception.”The film highlights the role of civil servants who challenged the policy and fought to reunite families – courageous individuals such as White and Jallyn Sualog who worked within the system to mitigate its harmful effects. And it offers a reminder of the mass street protests – plus worldwide condemnation from the pope and others – that ultimately compelled Trump to back down: the one significant policy reversal of his first term.Yet a scandal that has been called “torture”, and by Morris himself as leading to “state-created orphans”, gained relatively little attention during this year’s presidential election campaign. Democrats were on the defensive on the border issue and tried to avoid the subject.Morris says: “People were scared to talk about immigration. The Democrats were and the Republicans weren’t scared to talk about it as long as they could frame it in the most draconian, repulsive terms: we’ll deport everybody.”View image in fullscreenHe was denied a chance to help put the issue on the agenda when Separated was not scheduled for TV broadcast until after election day. Morris complained on the X social media platform: “Why is my movie not being shown on NBC prior to the election? It is not a partisan movie. It’s about a policy that was disgusting and should not be allowed to happen again. Make your own inferences.”Trump claimed that undocumented migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and asserted, without evidence, that Haitians were eating pet cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. He pledged the biggest mass deportation in US history and has already announced a team including the immigration hardliners Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, both of whom were instrumental in family separations during the first term.Will there be another public revolt this time or, given Trump’s victory in the national popular vote, are people demoralised and desensitised? Morris asks: “Did people in Germany all know that there was antisemitism? Well, yes. Did they know that they were involved in genocide? Probably not everybody.“On the part of the public, there’s a concept I’m very fond of: anti-curiosity. I sometimes say to myself, how much will it cost me to know less? There’s denial, there’s self-deception, there’s willful disbelief and on and on and on and on and on. I often say Homo sapiens: very bad and most certainly a compromised species.”But a mass deportation operation will be costly, logistically difficult and likely to produce harrowing images on TV that could reignite the anti-Trump resistance. At a recent screening of Separated in Washington, an audience member interrupted Soboroff and others on a panel discussion by shouting: “We’re not going to let him make our federal government the Third Reich of the US! We’re not going to let him make our National Guard people the Gestapo of the United States! We are not going to let that happen!”The sequel is always worse. Mass deportations would mean a return to child separations by another name. Some 4.4 million US citizen children lived with at least one undocumented parent as of 2018. The return of Trump has left Morris thinking about questions of justice.“What happens when you have crime without punishment?” he asks. “We all have this kind of quasi-religious model that moral transgressions have to be punished. There has to be some kind of societal reply. But what if there isn’t? What if crime goes unpunished?“I was just in Ukraine and I kept wondering – they’ve recorded over 100,000 war crimes by Russian soldiers – will these go unpunished? Will there ever be any kind of accountability? My answer to that is: ask America about crime without punishment and what ultimately that does to a society.”

      Separated will air on MSNBC in the US on 7 December More