Boy has America gotten a lot of mileage congratulating itself for being a big, diverse, inclusive land of opportunity. The American Dream as melting pot, wherein our differences don’t define us so much as make us stronger, more complex, more united, etc. All too often, these sentiments are offered –and sold– by those with the most incentive to keep everything exactly the way it is, with a might white America the official narrative, despite all the flowery bromides.
While we might take for granted the genuine breadth of voices, faces, stories, and cultures now represented by our art, those of us old enough to remember a pre-Internet world can recall that our creative spaces used to be pretty uniform, which is to say, Caucasian. To give just one example that ably illustrates an entire century: it was considered not only genuinely groundbreaking, but risky for Francis Ford Coppola to cast actual Italian actors to play…Italian gangsters. Up til the 1970s, most “ethnic” roles were played by Jewish actors (itself an advancement of sorts, considering white folks used to play everyone, including African Americans, and before that, men played everyone, including women).
Which brings us to Norman Jewison. It’s not just that he broke refreshing and welcome ground as a prominent director who routinely featured disparate casts, it’s that he relished doing so. More importantly, he was good at it. Over the course of five successful decades, Jewison showed us who we were, and who we could be if we did a better job of recognizing what we weren’t (yet). It says a great deal about America that an agenda so authentic, so unimpeachable, so American, could be considered controversial. Jewison, among other accolades we might offer, was an Insider who celebrated outsiders.
Also, he managed to embody both artistic and American ideals as a creative who pushed both boundaries and his body of work as a matter of principle; he never repeated himself and there are few major directors who made so many classic movies so unbelievably different from one another. Just read these titles and marvel: The Cincinnati Kid, In The Heat of the Night, The Thomas Crown Affair (and that’s just the ’60s!), Fiddler on the Roof, Jesus Christ Superstar, Rollerball, …And Justice for All, A Soldier’s Story, and Moonstruck. There are careers and then there are careers.
A selection of personal favorites that emphasize the quality
Special props, from me, for this masterpiece, which celebrates an extraordinary cast and boasts a director at the height of his powers, a director capable and confident enough to (mostly) stay out of the way and let the story — and this miraculous collective of young, hungry studs– work its magic. A Soldier’s Story is movie as showcase, movie as history lesson, movie as first-rate entertainment, movie as provocation, and movie as soul-affirming testament to humanity. We are better, as an audience, and as Americans, for Jewison’s efforts.
