Iron Man
Directed by Jon Favreau
The greatest piece of editorial advice ever given about a screenplay was offered by a comedy writer named Jerry Belson. Rodney Dangerfield wanted to make a movie in which his character would enter college as a 50-year-old freshman, but no one working on it could figure out how to get him there or why he would do it.
“Make Rodney rich,” Belson said. For if Rodney’s character were rich, he would not be acting out of desperation, or self-consciousness, or a lack of self-worth, but rather as a lark. And he would feel free to do whatever he wanted without fearing the consequences. He would, in other words, live the dream life of every college student–hiring a contractor to gussy up his dorm room, and hiring Kurt Vonnegut to ghostwrite a paper for him about Kurt Vonnegut.
Belson’s three words were the salvation of Back to School, one of the most successful comedies of the 1980s. Belson understood that few things in life are as much fun as thinking about what you would do if you had unlimited resources. And that brings us to Iron Man, which earned $105 million at the box office in its first weekend and has, at long last, made the brilliant ex-con Robert Downey Jr. into a bona fide star. Its huge take ensures Iron Man will be a movie Hollywood will emulate.
But it will do so for the wrong reason, alas. Hollywood will think that the public loves Iron Man because it is a superhero movie, a fantasy in which an ordinary person finds himself endowed with supernatural abilities. In fact, the public loves Iron Man because it is a rich-guy movie–a type of movie that offers the same kind of fantasy fulfillment without the supernatural nonsense.
In Iron Man, a guy builds a suit of flying armor. It spits fire, shoots bullets, and releases missiles. When he wears it, he looks like a robot. He saves a few people in a car. He kills a few terrorists. He blows up some bombs. All in all, as super-heroes go, Iron Man is not all that accomplished, and if being a superhero were all there were to this movie, the whole business would have been a dreadful bore and a flop.
What saves Iron Man is that its protagonist is a billionaire who really, really loves his money. Tony Stark, the character played by Downey, is a sybaritic fellow who can indulge any passion he wishes and indulges all of them, all the time. He blows off a dinner where he is winning an award to play craps in Las Vegas. His private plane has a stripper pole that rises from the floor, around which his stewardesses dance. His look seems to have been cryogenically frozen in the 1970s, with Downey sporting the beard worn by Roy Scheider in All That Jazz and the sunglasses worn by Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman.
He doesn’t just spend his money on cars and planes and women; Tony is also a brilliant inventor, and can make anything out of anything. Usually he does his work in the basement of his Richard Neutra house, which sits atop a cliff in Malibu. He lives there alone, save for a chatty computer system named Travis and a robotic mini-crane equipped with artificial intelligence, which Tony treats as though it were an overenthusiastic puppy. He is looked after by three people–his assistant Pepper Potts (a charming Gwyneth Paltrow), his friend Colonel Rhodes (a delightful Terrence Howard), and his surrogate father, Obadiah Stane (an unrecognizably Gene Hackman-like Jeff Bridges). They all roll their eyes and smile at Tony Stark’s irresponsibility, because he is an amusing genius–and, after all, if you were as rich as he is, what would you do?
The fantasy wish-fulfillment that makes Iron Man so winning is not being a guy who can fly around and shoot fire from his robot suit. It’s being the guy with all the money in the world, the guy who can afford to make that suit. True, Tony goes through various trials and tribulations centering on a nuclear-powered pacemaker. And he suffers pangs of conscience because he is a weapons manufacturer and makes things that kill people, a fact that only seems to have dawned on him at some point in his early forties. But Downey’s immensely entertaining performance–which vies with Johnny Depp’s in Pirates of the Caribbean as the most notable career shift in recent history–goes easy on the tormented stuff and very heavy on the exhilarating freedom enjoyed by Tony Stark.
The movies that Iron Man evokes are not the other superhero pictures but the screwball comedies of the 1930s and the overheated Texas melodramas of the 1950s and ’60s–movies in which audiences luxuriated in the luxury on screen. It’s too bad Iron Man has to revert to form in its last 15 minutes, with two boring robots punching each other on the streets of Los Angeles. But it does conclude on Downey’s quicksilver face as Tony punctures a key element of superhero mythmaking. It’s a great kicker, perfect for the rich guy who really does have everything.
John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
