More Treasure Hunting

Fools Gold earns $29 million opening weekend

By D.K. Holm

Month after month this column has attempted to prove how easy it is to predict the big movie hit of the week, the film that is going to bring in the most money.

“It’s simple,” I repeat until I’m blue in the face. “You look at three facts. One is the level of popularity of the stars involved. Next you look at the accessibility of the story, its ‘popularity’. Finally, you look at how much money the studio has spent on advertising, i.e., are the television networks inundated with commercials for the film?”

And yet month after month you affect surprise. “Why was The Game Plan such a hit?” you shake your head.

This formula is easier to employ in the so-called slow months from January to April, when Hollywood is mostly focused on awards and uses the slow time to release, to their mind, questionable products.

It is easy because Hollywood tends to release a certain kind of movie: sentimental, kid-oriented, romantic, low-budget. It’s also a time when anomalous movies such as Juno spring forward. But the types of films that win the weekly box office “gamble” (quotation marks because Hollywood does everything within its power to reduce its risks) also say something about the popular imagination, what the masses like, what Hollywood thinks the masses like, and what Hollywood seeks to endorse in its product—all of which tend to be different.

Take the film that “won” the Feb. 8 box office sweepstakes, Fool’s Gold. The film was relentlessly advertised on TV. The cast consisted of medium-level draws (Matthew McConaughey, Kate Hudson, Donald Sutherland), people who may not be mega stars (that is, who can “open a picture”), but who have a personality that the public finds agreeable. And though the commercials made the film seem action-filled, its basic premise (a romantic comedy set against an oceanic treasure hunt) was clear. The film went on to earn almost $29 million its opening weekend, and added about $18 more million as it slipped in rank in successive days.

With stars like these and a seemingly silly plot, reviewers probably walked into the theaters preparing their jibs and insults in their heads, film unseen. (In fact, the film received only a ten percent approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes.)

Yet among the multitude of tomato-hurling reviews available on the page, I didn’t manage to find any that linked Fool’s Gold to a long tradition in Hollywood cinema, the good old screwball comedy of remarriage. At the very least, Fool’s Gold’s popularity suggests that the old formulae are still viable.

But first a necessary digression. The 1970s loom large in the film world just as much as they do in politics. Those who lived through the times assumed from their experience that change was always possible (for a quick dip into disillusion, read Robert Caro’s chapter on the history of the Senate in the third volume of his LBJ biography). In the arts, the ‘70s made everything seem possible, and when the kids raided the studios, for a time it seemed that “adult” dramas connected with the real world would be a possibility, that a European influence would finally take over. However, the ‘70s (cinematically speaking) only lasted from about 1967 to 1974, and the popular films of the time were just of the genres and types you’d expect from any generation, films such as The Towering Inferno and Airport sequels. In fact, we revere the ‘60s or ‘70s movies so much we neglect to remember that they were not as popular as we think they were. The most successful, such as The Godfather, were prestigious, basically non-innovative variations on the types of films people had always been seeing (with stories they had been expecting to see repeated) since the birth of the commercial art cinema.

Now take Fool’s Gold. At root, it is a romantic screwball comedy out of the 1930s tradition, with almost all of its basic elements. Main among them is what philosopher Stanley Cavell called the “comedy of remarriage,” that is, a plot-generating device he found in many screwballs in which one party to a divorced or divorcing couple attempts to reverse the process or get re-married. Finn (Matthew McConaughey) and Tess (Kate Hudson) start out the film in the process of divorcing, and for the usual reasons that American movies give: Finn is an arrested adolescent we are meant to find lovable because he is a dreamer, while Tess is serious and tired of bailing him out of trouble. The thrust of the romantic plot is that they are still in love with each other; it’s just that it takes a little material success to create a different context or backdrop for their marriage (i.e., being rich is a nice gloss on a bad union).

A second element of the plot involves rich industrialist Nigel Honeycutt (Donald Sutherland), who is vacationing on his yacht, shortly to be joined by his Paris Hilton-esque daughter Gemma (Alexis Dziena). The theme of this plot is the reconciliation of father and daughter. The upper social class makes a better backdrop for this acting-out, and also fulfills a viewer fantasy that the rich are as unhappy as we are.

Third, there is the McGuffinish plot about the location of a large cache of Spanish treasure. Already in pursuit of it are a rap star (Kevin Hart) who owns the island off whose coast the treasure may reside, and an irascible treasure hunter named Moe Fitch (Ray Winstone, underused). The bulk of the treasure competition plot is a re-hash of the old Nick Nolte film The Deep, one of the most popular but less remembered films from the 1970s.

As Kristen Thompson has shown in her book Storytelling In the New Hollywood, screenwriters are using the same broad story structuring arcs (coming roughly in 20 minute units or “acts”) that have been in place since the 1920s. But as the similarity of Fool’s Gold to the old comedies of remarriage as defined by Cavell suggests, the mass audience is also still responding to the same broad themes or ideas they liked in the 1930s, with some variations (more swearing, nudity). By contrast, compare Fool’s Gold, or at least the idea of it, to Michael Clayton. Released in October 2007, here was a serious film about contemporary issues, written and directed by Tony Gilroy in homage to the films from the ‘70s that everyone says that they love, like The Parallax View, Scarecrow, The Paper Chase and so on. It did about $11 million worth of business upon initial release, and steadily increased its take through January after it garnered some expected Academy Award nominations (it stands around $50 million as of this writing; Juno has made $150 million). It is unlikely that Fool’s Gold will be nominated for any Oscars next year. But it’s a more popular film than Michael Clayton. Why?

Let’s call it the Obama factor.

Mr. Obama has become a political front runner because he is spreading a vague and platitudinous message of hope and change. As a political pundit pointed out on the tube the other day, no candidate has ever won the presidency by evoking gloom, stasis, and despair. The opposite message, no matter how vague, is the one that wins. Obama is charismatic enough to thrill crowds with a hope-filled vision of a better America.

If movies were candidates, Fool’s Gold would be the Obama candidate. Michael Clayton, noble in its efforts to speak some kind of truth about corporate greed and the corruption of the legal system, still comes across like a downer, from its paperback novel-inspired poster to its trailer filled with images of super serious conflict against a despairing backdrop. Fool’s Gold is a happy movie. It says things can be worked out and everyone can win.

Hollywood didn’t plan it this way, but for the next several months, throughout the rest of the political campaign, the studios will be releasing “Obama movies,” films with messages of hype and change, and they will just happen to be the same kinds of films that have “won” the weekends since movie-time immemorial.