The long-awaited — by some, anyway — “Atlas Shrugged: Part I” opens in theaters today, Tax Day. It was once rumored to have Hollywood’s hottest couple, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, attached. The names of Julia Roberts, Charlize Theron and Anne Hathaway were also bandied about to play the heroine of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel of ideas. Instead, it arrives self-financed and self-distributed, without the backing of any major studio, starring a cast of almost complete unknowns and directed by a man with no feature film credits on his resume. While they’ve produced a competently made film, they haven’t pulled off a miracle. “Atlas Shrugged” is much as you’d expect.
It’s a missed opportunity. This should be Ayn Rand’s moment. In fact, since the financial crisis began, sales of her magnum opus have skyrocketed. As the government responded to business and banking failures with piles of cash, there was renewed interest in the novel that celebrated the achievements of entrepreneurs who proudly created wealth without the help of other people’s money.
| ‘Atlas Shrugged: Part I’ |
| 2.5 out of 5 stars |
| Stars: Taylor Schilling, Grant Bowler |
| Director: Paul Johansson |
| Rated: PG-13 for some sexuality |
| Running time: 102 minutes |
The film certainly seems relevant as it opens. It’s September 2016, and America is once again in crisis. The Dow has slipped under 4,000. A Fortune 500 company vice president stands on a street in a sandwich board, looking for a job. The troubled Middle East has cut off gas imports to the United States — though we get more than half our petroleum from other countries, such as Canada and Mexico — and there are long lines at the pump, where consumers try to get what’s left at $37.50 a gallon. It’s meant to explain why the film focuses on a big company that could save the country while making its owners a tidy profit — through railroads. In the 1950s, when the novel was written, this might actually have seemed plausible.
Indeed, there’s a lot of unnecessary exposition in this film made from one of the most didactic novels ever written. When the dialogue isn’t explaining a world in which financial achievement is penalized, not honored, and businessmen start to go on strike, it’s not much better. “There is so much at stake. We have to make it,” Dagny Taggart (Taylor Schilling), who runs that train company, breathlessly says to steel magnate Hank Rearden (Grant Bowler). Those familiar with the book know that these two will end up in a romance as passionate as their love of business. Beyond that, you never sense their motivation for creating in a world that hates creators. It doesn’t help that Schilling’s face only seems capable of expressing two emotions. She can’t carry a movie on her own.
Yet there are some good scenes in “Atlas Shrugged,” and you see the cinematic possibilities of a story that moves from the skyscrapers of New York to the valleys of Colorado. Most important, though, are the ideas that have inspired everyone from Alan Greenspan to Anne Hathaway. (Really.) Most free-marketeers focus on the evils of government, but Rand knew businesses could be just as corrupt. We have a name now for what she understood then: crony capitalism.
