So, I was most of the way through Joe Dante's filmography when I went through the overall list of everything he'd done again. He'd done a whole lot of television work, especially since the box office failure of Matinee, and it was a bit difficult to sort through stuff that could be pretty easily ignored (like C. S. I. Episodes) and other stuff that may or may not need attention. I settled on three things, the two Masters of Horror episodes Dante directed (mostly just because I had done the episodes that John Carpenter had directed), and this, The Second Civil War, an HBO movie he made just before Small Soldiers. Well, I mostly chose to do it for two reasons (as opposed to something like The Warlord: The Battle for the Galaxy, a television show pilot that didn't get picked up). The first was because it did get a limited theatrical release in Europe. The second was that Dante reportedly thought it was the best movie he'd ever made. Well, I couldn't just ignore that.
And what I found was a searing bit of omnidirectional political satire set in a future (though still 1998?) where America has spent at least a decade being overrun by immigrants and refugees from across the planet to the point where the governor of Rhode Island, Chinese by heritage, ends up calling for the end of immigration into America because it's changing the Chinese hybrid version of Rhode Island that he and his constituents call home.
The actual focus of the film's dramatic action is a standoff between the President of the United States (Phil Hartman, which should give you a clue about the tone of this film) and the governor of Idaho (Beau Bridges) after a nuclear blast in Pakistan displaces a large segment of the population and a charity is flying a planeload of children from Pakistan to Idaho as refugees. One of the smaller issues with the film is that the history of the wild, out of control immigration is only addressed in fits and starts, not coming up for about half an hour, actually, which may be the point and I'm wrong.
Anyway, the drive of the action comes from the NN newsroom run by Mel (Dan Hedaya) who talks about how their job is to put to trains on the same track and get them to crash. In a film where everyone comes out bad except a couple of characters, it's the media at large, especially those in charge, that comes out worst. They're manipulative, dishonest, and they do everything they possibly can to make sure that the train crash happens.
The comedy of the film is really consistent and often laugh out loud funny, digging in a knife into everyone in the film, from the person running the charity complaining about the cameraman (Dick Miller) using the wrong lens and dreaming of more donations to the governor being more concerned about his affair with a newscaster to the president needing to constantly find comparisons with previous presidents (the funniest being when he misunderstands the suggestion for FDR as Teddy Roosevelt).
The movement of the plot escalates in the standoff with the governor putting up roadblocks into the state with the National Guard, the army facing them down (a great little scene as two old generals insult each other mercilessly to their face while people watching on TV, unaware of what is being said, waxing poetic about the beautiful things they must be talking about), and a potential standdown that gets misunderstood leading to shooting. All of this is happening while no one really seems to care about it, the issue gets pushed aside constantly, and the governor unwittingly ends up collecting supporters from other states (like the aforementioned Chinese governor of Rhode Island).
There are also fairly isolated funny bits like the Hispanic mayor of Los Angeles giving a fiery speech in favor of the refugees, turning it into a call for repatriation of California into Mexico, and a race war breaking out because the African American parts of Los Angeles don't want it. Or, when James Earl Jones, the sage, older newsman who remembers when news was news (yeah, sure, I've seen Ace in the Hole), interviews a Congressman from Alabama who is a Sikh with this absurd Southern/Sikh accent combination.
I think Dante was skewering everyone here, and I wouldn't presume to use this to determine his own political outlook, but it really does feel like the anti-immigration side comes out better here. Yes, they're still skewered (there's a militia in Idaho that gets some satirical attention, in particular), but the actual plotline's winning moment is when the coalition of states forms and becomes public. I kind of get the sense that Dante really doesn't care that much about politics, and he was just out to skewer everyone, though.
And I think it works. I grate at the effort to make the "good" newsmen the heroes (Denis Leary plays the other) and the attempt at character-based pathos around the governor and his girlfriend (Elizabeth Pena), probably the film's actual dramatic and thematic point about combining cultures since she's Mexican and it's been a subplot through the whole thing about how she wants to break it off with him because of the whole immigration thing, but I also see the same sort of attitude here as I saw in Matinee, about leaving behind the troubles of the world to just live a little life away from it all.
It's really funny. It's got real satirical bite. It's omnidirectional in its scorn. It's got that anarchic spirit that Dante brought most obviously in Gremlins 2. This is a small gem in Dante's filmography, and I'm glad I didn't skip it.
