TEARS OF A DEMAGOGUE
By Joel Stein
Most antihero movies wuss out. Studios figure that audiences need someone to root for, that the real Larry Flynt, say, would be too unpleasant to watch for two hours. But the TNT mini-series George Wallace (Aug. 24 and 26, 8 p.m. ET), like its subject, isn't afraid to give it to you straight, unpleasantness and all.
Based on the 1968 biography by Marshall Frady (who also co-wrote the teleplay), the four-hour political biopic is a dark, powerful study of a populist so desperate not to be a common man that he peddles a racist ideology that, surprisingly, he doesn't even subscribe to. Gary Sinise, in one of his best performances, portrays the four-term Governor and three-time presidential candidate's Faustian descent from liberal to conservative rabble-rouser as a human tragedy. And director John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, Birdman of Alcatraz) uses all his old tricks (handheld cameras, black-and-white scenes, jarringly quick cuts and time jumps) along with some newer ones (slipping Sinise, Forrest Gump-style, into real TV footage) to keep the history immediate.
But more than the acting or directing, it's Wallace's story that fuels the film. Staying away from the personal life of a man who wasn't particularly interested in his own (his kids barely appear in the film), the story focuses solely on Wallace's political career. Opening with the day he was shot while campaigning in Maryland for his 1972 presidential bid, the movie then hops back to his first gubernatorial campaign, slowing down to fill in some background before taking off with his infamous 1963 inaugural speech: "Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!" From here the film whirls through key moments in Wallace's career: blocking the door at the University of Alabama to prevent two black students from entering; ordering the use of tear gas and billy clubs to oppose Martin Luther King's march from Selma; and falsely blaming Black Muslims for the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham that killed four young girls. Frankenheimer is particularly adept at capturing the mayhem Wallace causes on the presidential campaign trail. An inspired bit of casting has fat, hirsute porn star Ron Jeremy playing a working-class Bostonian, yelling his support for Wallace when the Governor is attacked by students at Harvard.
Yet the film does have moments when it reminds you that it is, after all, a made-for-TV movie. The dialogue can get cheesy. In an early scene, Wallace's mentor, Governor "Big Jim" Folsom (Joe Don Baker) warns him: "It's almost like your connection to the folk is all you feel gives you any personal meaning. Like it's all you really feel you are yourself." And, unfortunately, those are just the moments when the background music swells. But Sinise manages to keep the story on track.
The rest of the cast lends excellent support to the star's one-man show. Clarence Williams III (The Mod Squad's Linc) does a fine job, considering that he is saddled with the film's silliest part: Archie, the black servant who represents an amalgam of all the black people Wallace has ever known. And Mare Winningham is convincing as the loyal first wife Lurleen, who runs for Governor when the law prevents Wallace from succeeding himself.
Still, it is Sinise's nuanced performance that makes Wallace more than a one-dimensional figure. By the final scene, when Archie wheels Wallace into the church where King once preached so he can beg the congregation's forgiveness for his past transgressions, Sinise has convinced us that Wallace's sins are redeemable--that there is, after all, something good in the man that makes the people of Birmingham, as Lynyrd Skynyrd says of him in Sweet Home Alabama, still love the Gov'nor. TNT's Wallace is a villain all right, but a villain who chooses his evil not out of malice but out of weakness. He's a demagogue whose paralysis humbles him to the point where he can finally understand the pain he caused others. And that's more cathartic than cheering for Hustler magazine.