Iron Man
I read in a primer on improv recently about a director who liked to point at your partner on stage – you are an actor for the length of this anecdote – and tell you, “Your work is over there!” Meaning, your partner. Pay attention to him.
When critics and viewers say, correctly, that Iron Man is the best-acted superhero movie yet, that’s what they’re talking about.
The cast is uniformly good, and uniformly attentive to each other. Take Terrence Howard’s effort at Jim Rhodes, the Air-Force liaison. Howard’s a big-deal star, but as Rhodes he’s totally in the moment at all times. He doesn’t just play off Robert Downey Jr. like a dutiful supporting actor should, he’s wrapped up in his fellow officers and subordinates in the various control rooms. His transformation from upbraiding Tony like a bellicose Jiminy Cricket early in their charter flight to Afghanistan to drunken cameraderie with him later in the same flight has as its unity his selfless focus on Downey. Jeff Bridges makes Obadiah Stane work by completely underselling his jealousy of his business partner. Bridges gives Stane the relaxed self-assurance of rich white guys everywhere. He hates Tony Stark and wants him dead, but life is good! And Gwyneth Paltrow and Downey have some wonderful rallies of emotion and body language. Paltrow’s Pepper Potts orients her entire life around her boss, but no man is a hero to his valet, so she puts across her condescension with her loyalty. We understand how much professional pride she has in being seen as the one who does not sleep with her boss. Downey is the star, but Stark is a seducer, and Stark works, like a good actor, by riveting his attention on you. He’s only a tyrant to his robots. (At least two different characters utter the line “I’m not Tony Stark.”)
You just have to remember how we praised Jack Nicholson for shamelessly mugging his way through two hours worth of Batman to see how far our standards for superhero-movie acting have risen.
I am not prepared to agree that Iron Man is the best superhero movie yet. I think Spider-Man 2 keeps the title in a decision. But Iron Man is a damn good movie, a worthy edition to the “[cinema] of ethics.” And I think it’s hands down the best presentation yet of Iron Man the character.
The funny thing about Iron Man is, it’s a first-tier concept that has mostly resulted in second-tier comics. The super-genius whose power is in his machines, who cloaks himself in a cybernetic warsuit? The embodiment of the “civic-minded” cold-war defense contractor? That’s primal stuff! As a concept, it ranks with Superman and Batman and the Hulk and Captain America – it’s like someone pressed Silly Putty to the American Unconscious.
And yet, no sooner had Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the concept than they handed it to Larry Leiber (Lee’s younger brother) and Don Heck to write and draw. Heck had real virtues as an artist: while his figures were very much in the Kirby mold, his line was smoother. You couldn’t beat Jack for invention and kineticism, but Heck could give you a humanizing grace to face and figure that kept him from being just a Kirby clone.
But very few first-rate creators had extended runs on Iron Man. Probably the closest the book comes to having a signature run is the numbers by David Michelinie and Bob Layton in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Michelinie and Layton introduced Stark’s alcoholism and his variant armors. They also created the character of Jim Rhodes. I remember liking the Michelinie/Layton Iron Man a lot, but if I were guiding you through the Best of Superhero Comics I’d probably give you a lot of other books first.
The movie does a nice job of re-envisioning the Iron Man Overstory, Part I, in which a noted weapons manufacturer grows to rue his handiwork and determines to turn his genius to other things. In the comics, this happened as the Sixties became the Seventies and the Silver Age turned to Bronze. In the business, this happened as the Cold-War Liberals who built the comics industry, including Marvel, gave place to the hippie kids who started out as their fans and became their successors. “Billionaire playboy arms dealer hero” was a decidedly problematic concept to the new writers and artists. SO they trashed it. (Fan-historians argue all the time over just what distinguished the Bronze Age from the Silver. It was just this: for the first time, kids who grew up as fans were running the show.)
Just as Mister Fantastic could have been Victor Von Doom if he’d taken a different attitude to his misfortunes, Tony Stark is the light-side twin to the Norman Osborn of the movies. Both are entrepreneur armaments designers maneuvered out of control of their own companies. One of them keeps his sanity and ethics about the situation.
It’s to the movie’s credit that even in the GWOT era it will traffic in the idea that a heroic character could see the American weapons industry as a concern, that there could be a qualm about it that transcends sides.
Is the movie perfect? No. I think the climactic battle between Stane and Stark lacks a little oomph. (Nate writes, “Usually with these superhero movies there’s some cheesy character moments that you put up with in order to get to the good action-y stuff. With this movie there was some action and it was all right but I found myself impatient to get to the next character moment.”) I cede the need for them to somehow get the masks off the antagonists – it’s a trope superhero movies just require: you hire actors for their faces and then put masks on them? Got to get the masks off. And it wouldn’t be an Iron Man story without the suit running out of juice, darnit. But starting the only Big-Bad-vs.-Protagonist fight with the Iron-Man armor already running out of power means too little Smashy.
But the very end is perfect. By “end” I mean the conclusion of the final press conference. The Easter Egg (spoiler!) is not perfect. It gets credit for what it is rather than how it is that thing. All that stuff at the top of this review about good acting being a matter of mutual emotional attention between actors? Missing from the Easter Egg. Completely missing. Downey and Mister Cameo are both great big comics fans, and the irony of Mister Cameo performing in the role that was literally drawn for him is a huge pleasure, but as a scene it’s inert. They give each other nothing. There’s nothing there that you, the fan, haven’t brought yourself.
PS. The full version of Ann Hornaday’s Post review was much better than the edited version I trashed the other day. She undersells the movie in my opinion, but she’s pretty clued-in to the material.
Comment by Mike Kozlowski —
May 4, 2008 @ 11:17 pm
Reading about the Easter Egg, one of the more astute comments I read (based on a preview showing to which it wasn’t attached) was that if Favreau took it out of the movie, knowing how anticipated and nerdgasmic it would be, it was because it was ABSOLUTELY NOT WORKING in the movie. Which I can completely believe, and I’m saying this as someone who had a nerdgasm at it.
Comment by Mike Kozlowski —
May 4, 2008 @ 11:25 pm
Also, the one thing that the film writers did that I didn’t like was bringing in the whole father-issue part of it. That makes gallons and gallons of sense in Spider-Man; it makes sense with the kids in the X-Men; it was kinda dodgy in Ang Lee’s Hulk; but in Iron Man, it seems particularly out of place. The one distinguishing feature of Tony Stark has always been that he was a full-on grown-up facing grown-up problems. Giving him daddy issues too seems unnecessarily repetitive.
Well, that and the omission of the ultra critical sliderule and rollerskate elements.
Comment by Alex Knapp —
May 4, 2008 @ 11:34 pm
Jim,
I agree with you for the most part on the movie as a whole, but I frankly thought the last fight scene was a lot better than you did.
The best superhero fight scenes are not just about the action, but when the action becomes a metaphor for the battle between the hero’s and villain’s characters (see e.g. Spider-Man 2, where Peter Parker wins not through fighting skill, but rather his willingness to make himself vulnerable and reach Doc Ock’s humanity).
In the case of Iron Man, Tony doesn’t win because he has a better suit, but because he’s (a) cleverer than Stane (”How’d you solve the icing problem?”), and (b) a good enough person that he was able to inspire loyalty in his close friends (Rhodes calling off an airstrike; Pepper risking her life to activate the arc generator).
That’s a superhero battle.
Also, I loved that the movie ditched any pretense of a secret identity for Stark. It just wasn’t in character for the Stark of the film.
Comment by Mike Kozlowski —
May 4, 2008 @ 11:38 pm
It’s also completely preposterous in the comics from minute one, which is alluded to in the film dialogue. Maybe nobody notices when random guy Peter Parker ducks out of a room when there’s danger, but Tony Stark isn’t exactly inconspicuous and low-key, and when there’s a dozen people whose first reaction to danger is “We need to get Tony to a safe place,” his absence will be commented-on.
Comment by Avram —
May 5, 2008 @ 12:28 am
I’d have to watch it again to be sure, but I think Downey and Mr Easter Egg don’t even appear onscreen at the same time. It’s possible they weren’t on the same set at the same time.
I also thought that the only weak point in the movie proper was the climax of the Big Fight. It provided the FDA’s recommended allowance of the old Explodo, but didn’t really make sense. Tony’s got to get off the roof to keep the blast from frying him! Only, he doesn’t get off the roof! And worse still, his precious head is unprotected! But it’s OK, because, uh, something, I dunno.
Comment by Doc Nebula —
May 5, 2008 @ 9:47 am
On the subject of why an ‘A’ concept like Iron Man has always had trouble supporting itself (and it has; of all the ‘big’ Marvel characters, Iron Man has most likely had his own title cancelled and rebooted more than anyone else, even Thor), my own two cents is that it’s a simple matter: Iron Man has ‘fake’ powers, by which I mean, he has no natural super powers.
This is an emotional thing, but one that seemed very real to me when I was a kid; however much I might want to like a character like Iron Man, or Green Lantern, there was an emotional hurdle there that I did not have with characters like Spider-Man, Superman, or the Flash.
The fact that Hal Jordan had no super powers without his jewelry, and/or that Tony Stark was pretty much useless in a firefight if he lost his briefcase, made those characters seem a notch or two less appealing to me than most of the other superheroes, who, after all, merely needed to toss off their outer garments to become Stupendous Man!!!! — and KICK ASS!!!!
As an adult I’m long over it and can certainly appreciate the beauties and strengths of the Iron Man concept; IM and Green Lantern (and Hank Pym, another character I couldn’t like in childhood because his ‘powers’ were dependent on pills he took and/or gasses he exposed himself to) have long since become some of my favorite characters ever (Tony and Hank especially because their powers derive directly from their intellects; they engineered the stuff that empowers them, unlike Hal Jordan, who simply got a piece of omnipotent jewelry handed him by a dying alien).
But superhero comics are predominantly aimed at children, and as a child, I could not get fully behind a superhero with ‘fake’ powers. If you had to put on something to be super, or take a pill, or swallow a serum that would eventually wear off, well, that was okay, but I much preferred those guys who would ALWAYS be super. I don’t know if anyone else felt this way, but I did, and I suspect it’s what has always troubled IRON MAN’s popularity.
Comment by Michael —
May 5, 2008 @ 11:57 am
Doc:
Hal’s super power is that he is a man without fear. He couldn’t have been given the ring if he wasn’t fearless.
Comment by Doc Nebula —
May 5, 2008 @ 12:56 pm
Michael,
Yeah, and completely honest, too — although Hal’s fearlessness, at least, has been subject to several ret cons since. I believe right now we’re back to every member of the Green Lantern Corps having to be, not fearless (which, as Peter David astutely notes, is an aberrant psychological condition and one that is quite contra-survival) but ‘capable of conquering great fear’, which is somewhat more sensible, as well as being somewhat more heroic (heroism doesn’t lie in fealing no fear, it lies in feeling fear and getting the job done regardless).
Nonetheless, in my extreme youth, simply being ‘fearless’, even when Hal actually was (and I was young enough to think that was cool, rather than just psychotic) didn’t get there. I’d seen GL stories where other people stole GL’s power ring and got some use out of it, and, beyond that, there were hundreds of other people in the universe with identical power rings. Clearly, Hal’s powers came from the ring; if you took the ring away, he had no powers. I was (foolishly) disdainful of him due to that.
Also, pretty clearly, Superman could wear Hal Jordan/GL for a hat any time he felt like it; hardly an important factor for judging the actual worth of superhero concepts, but one that seemed vital from the POV of an 8 year old. (The fact that Superman could similarly wear Batman for a hat didn’t trouble me much, because Batman’s ‘powers’ were ‘natural’, they simply didn’t include super strength or invulnerability. But being the World’s Greatest Detective, a brilliant scientist, and a kick ass hand to hand combatant was just as good, to my mind, and none of those ‘powers’ were artificial.)
Comment by Eric Scharf —
May 5, 2008 @ 1:05 pm
Doc, not to expose a DC/Marvel schism (not here and now, anyway), but did you feel the same way about Bruce Wayne?
Comment by Eric Scharf —
May 5, 2008 @ 1:05 pm
Curses! Foiled by obviating reply queue…
Comment by Doc Nebula —
May 5, 2008 @ 2:47 pm
In my childhood, Bruce Wayne was (as Steve Englehart rather lucidly articulated it) “a daytime mask for The Batman”. I didn’t have much opinion on him one way or another, as he was clearly all charade.
Comment by Eric Scharf —
May 5, 2008 @ 4:52 pm
Bruce Wayne was (as Steve Englehart rather lucidly articulated it) “a daytime mask for The Batmanâ€.
My son feels the same way. When we tell him he can’t wear his costume to school, he says “I’ll be Bruce Wayne and no one will know!”
Kindergartners, in the main, are a cowardly and superstitious lot…
Comment by Michael —
May 5, 2008 @ 5:44 pm
I was a big fan of Hal and Ollie (and Dinah) when I was At An Impressionable Age. Superman had it too easy. Batman was at his best when he actually had to engage in detectoring. I really believed that Ollie wanted to try to save the world. That was before Mike Grell, of course.
I did not suffer the retcons and psychotic breaks and becoming a supervillain lightly, and that was a big part of the end of my weekly habit.
Comment by Eric Scharf —
May 5, 2008 @ 9:28 pm
Michael, no one expects a ten-year-old to understand this, but we always retcon the ones we love.
Comment by Doc Nebula —
May 6, 2008 @ 8:49 am
Michael,
All the retconning broke my heart, too. BUT, that leads in to…
Eric,
Eventually, when you ret con enough, you end up with someone who both Actually Cares and Can Actually Write in charge of one of them, and, at least for a while, you find yourself back where you always wanted to be.
Yay Geoff Johns.
Of course, it is inevitable that someone will come along and retcon all the Johns stuff back out of existence again, and it may have already happened. But for a brief shining moment about a year ago, nearly all was well again.
And, yes, I always liked Dinah Hal & Ollie too. (Where Kukla and Fran got off to I could never figure out, though.)
Comment by Johnathan Pearce —
June 5, 2008 @ 9:36 am
Great review, Jim. I watched the film last weekend and loved it. Glad to see that Paltrow is back acting after having had her two children. I occasionally find her acting a bit irritating but she is perfect in this. And Downey – what a performance!
By the way, how do you fix the icing problem?