Rotten apple-pie

Rating: Null/10 (7 September 2011)

It is not just that we have been lied to, the film suggests; that the average schmuck plucked off the street, or even the photogenic all-American pillar of ethos that followed him, did not grasp the Dream with hard work or quick wits, but were rather the corporate stooges fashioned to con viewers. This is fine, Hollywood actors were groomed after all in the stardom that was meant, in one of many ways, to represent the plausibility of that Dream.
But these people, so the story goes, conned viewers out of the reality of the frame; this is where it begins to really hurt. It is not that people expected television to be reality, a show was understood to be a product of fancy. But more, that people implicitly trusted their eyes to tell them what's what. Remember, all this was back in '57, and for the most part there wasn't even a New Wave to challenge erudite film-goers at Cannes or Venice about the artifice of the filmed image, much less the broad American audience sitting down at nights to watch a quiz show.
So, it was all thought to be true as far as the eye considered. Into this staged reality about ephemeral glories and vain fixations comes the Redford film; by recasting the staged image inside another staged image - the TV show inside a detective film murking for truth against artificial realities propped up by an immaculate surface -, it re-appropriates what is essentially scathing about the actual events.
Oh, the final vision is a user-friendly cynicism, such as has infused everyday life since the days when we discovered just how powerless, pointless we could be in the face of the grand schemes. It is very fittingly staged as a court-room trial; where, once again, there seems to be a script, audience participation, and actors performing, seducing with treacly soliloquy or stentorian morals. The important battles being fought are swept aside into the spectacle, the purely superficial, as in TV.
So, eventually the unimportant fall-guy assumes all the blame, and the powerful higher-ups at the network and sponsor get away scott-free. And this is why it's all so scathing in both directions, up and down; they get away, but we know - and can, with hindsight, make the films about it. The cost has been our disillusionment with the media landscape. They're all meddling with the truth, of course, or are in cahoots with who serves their interest. This has been our revenge; even the slightest hint of rumor can damage public opinion, the network owner explains. So, the apple-pie has been rotten to the core.
It is a fine film, story-heavy, the era minutely recreated, with some little imagination that moves. When the quiz show whiz scheduled to lose looks out from his box, about to answer wrong, we see the promise of TV lights reflected on his glasses.
And there is some marvelous stuff about a son who has lived life with borrowed images from the father and now has to re-assert his own - by investing himself into a TV fantasy where every image is a fake. His deliberately wrong answer that would extricate him from the self-indulgent fantasy is about Belgian kings; he answers King Leopold who is the father, when the true answer - which he knows - is the son.