Why I think that Argentina 1985 is not a very good movie
(Please read before throwing into garbage)
Now when the passions have receded a bit after I got an incredible number of critiques and insulting emails because I did but think that Argentina 1985 is a very good movie I would like to explain my reasons.
First, let me say that the critique of a film or a book is totally separate from whether we think the events that are described in a film or a book are important and worth describing. There are many mediocre books or films about extraordinary events.
So I fully understand the importance of the trial. It is even more impressive than Nuremberg trials (with which both the movie and several people on Twitter compared it) because Nuremberg was done by foreign military powers and the Argentine trial was done by the domestic tribunal.
I also understand that some people may not care about the quality of the movie so long as many people in Argentina and elsewhere like it, and get emotional about it. It may be also politically expedient, as a person mentioned, to make it at the current time. Or it may be useful for Argentina’s perception in the world as the events of the trial become better known internationally. All of these are valid points, but none of them has anything to do with the quality of the film.
Before I explain what I do not find appealing in the movie, let me dispense with two points. First, when I wrote that the movie is “predictable”, clearly I did not mean that it is predictable in the sense it should twist historical events which happened and which are obviously known. Any film that deals with historical events has to stay within these historic events. It does not make sense to write “La chartreuse de Parme” where Napoleon wins at the Waterloo. What I meant, and clarified in the second tweet, is that the character development in the movie is entirely predictable. And it is predictable because it is based on well-known clichés. Thus anyone who has seem these clichés applied before knows exactly what to expect.
The second point is rather absurd. I was told, “el gringo de mierda”, that if I did not understand the movie I can go and watch Hollywood Mickey Mouse movies. But my critique was precisely that Argentina 1985 is entirely Hollywoodesque and that this is its weakness. It is a gringo movie, if you will. In fact, had Steven Spielberg been asked to make the movie about the Argentinean trials, he would come with exactly with the movie as was produced.
What are the clichés and what is the problem with the clichés? There are at least four (and I listed them already in my Tweet). A reluctant prosecutor who is really not sure whether to take the case or not but when he does he becomes a hero to his family and country and his fundamentally honest nature is revealed. This is the cliché of a reluctant hero. Each of us is really a hero: we just fail to discover that.
There is next the cliché of the young enthusiastic assistants who come from well to do families that were, in one or another way, involved with the dictatorship. The young assistants reject their family values, but the movie finds it too hard to drive this point to its logical ending (where for example the family would disown the son) because it needs to show that even “bad” families are fundamentally good. Hence the mother’s phone call. That a person who knew of the atrocities, but (as most of us would do) would either ignore them (“this does not concern our family”) or justify them (“they are the subversives, they want to destroy the country, family and nation”, “no punishment is too strong”) would, based on a single testimony, change the opinion, widely held in her social circle—family, relatives, husband—probably from the time when she was born, stretches credulity. Here is the next cliché: even seemingly bad people are really good. We can all, from one day to the next, overcome dozens of years of socialization. There are no moral or class issues because fundamentally we all agree.
A final –extreme—cliché takes place at the end of the movie when all the mothers, after the first one puts back her scarf, do the same and show their solidarity in dignified silence. The scene has been played and replayed hundreds of times and its obvious objective is to elicit applause from the public at the end of the movie and to make everybody feel righteous. To be brutal, I would say it is a cheap thrill.
All of these are clichés from central casting. They are not naive though. Their objective is (as in Hollywood movies going back to the original Westerns) to avoid asking two hard questions: what are the social underpinnings of every dictatorship, and what are the difficult choices that people must make under a cruel system? Argentina 1985 avoids asking either of these two questions. This is why we are treated at the end with a picture where only 6 or 7 admirals and generals, villains about whom we know nothing but who must have been intrinsically evil, have kept a whole nation in thrall for a decade. They had no accomplices, no social base, no nothing: everything in reality was so simple.
This makes Hollywood movies, and movies like Argentina 1985 popular. It makes them popular because they avoid difficult questions, and allow us to go home feeling convinced that we too would have made right ethical choices. Even more, that it is not difficult to choose. Between us and happiness stand only 7 cardboard villains.
The movie makes us happy. Justice triumphs. But to be a good movie, it should make us unhappy. It should make each of us wonder what are the decisions we would have taken. And how hard this would have been.
As an Argentinian, I agree with many of your comments. Although, the main local critique has been erasing the role of the Alfonsin’s government to make it happen, with all the trade offs involved in the process. As you well mention, it was a rough, complicated process and not a work of a lone wolf prosecutor that reluctantly becomes the hero.
Here a great article between a jurist and the producer about the storyline decisions made: https://seul.ar/argentina-1985-gargarella-llinas/
The producers actively tried to create a heroic storyline, instead of representing the complexities of the process in a deep fashion
I apologize for what will be an extremely long comment, but it might address some of the issues you raise. My father (a militant himself in the 70s) wrote a biography of one of the indicted, and in it he made what I still think are some very acute points about the intrinsic, in a sense unavoidable contradictions and, ultimately, dishonesties of the simple human rights narrative underpinning the trials. The post-dictatorship narrative contained necessarily a significant element of dissembling about what had actually happened, and I suspect this problem would reveal itself even in cultural products less heavy-handed than, I see, this movie (haven't seen it, tho' fan of director). Translation follows (and again, I apologies for its length).
" The element of civil legitimacy of the trials was intense and deeply-felt not only because of the kind of atrocities that had been committed, but also because ideologically the proceedings were carried out under a doctrine of human rights that was itself the result of the military defeat of the guerrillas–of the transformation of the former insurgent into a citizen and of the former student or worker into a voter. The doctrine of human rights had been a powerful weapon against the military regime, but carried within itself a kind of postwar failsafe in that it simultaneously sought to institute a code of morals that effectively outlawed the use of mass violence or armed struggle. The feats of former guerrillas, the aims and militancy of the disappeared could receive the sympathy and nostalgia of family members or human rights activists, but between the two groups a symbolic death had taken place that made it impossible to think in the old terms. The insurgents, having disappeared physically, now disappeared a second time: they were stripped of their individual political identity as militants and reduced to their identity as human beings.
(…)
The trials had however a slightly farcical element, not least in that accusers and accused knew each other extensively from their joint membership in the Argentine social elites. The trial’s paradox lay in that it judged the hangmen of the Proceso, but not those who designed its economic and political policies–the military chiefs rather than the economic and political beneficiaries of what they had done. A proper Nuremberg would have required the triumph of the enemy side, but in Argentina the only victory against the Armed Forces was won by the British Army. This was why the Argentine establishment could only allow a trial that accused the military corporation of having outstayed its original welcome, of targeting members of the elite rather than the subversives they were tasked with destroying, and finally of its putting Argentina on the verge of “jumping the map” out of its geopolitical place in the West as a last-ditch effort to rescue its disastrous Falklands adventure.
The dictatorship was not under trial for being dictatorial, but rather because of its attempt to free itself from the control of its traditional masters in the civilian establishment. The institutions of the military were not placed on trial, but rather the decentralization and devolution of repressive activities that had led–by the formation of semi-autonomous “task forces” and the consequent fractal subdivision of the country into successive paramilitary fiefdoms–to the dissolution of the military’s own chain of command and its existence as a regular army under the control of the civilian ruling class. It could be said that what Alfonsín’s government was putting under trial was the Armed Forces' deviation from their own institutional norms.
(…)
The concept of “State terrorism”, like that of human rights, created more questions than answered and threatened repeatedly to expose the contradictory and problematic nature of the trials. The idea of the State presupposes a specific juridical order that is antithetical to the practice of terrorism. “State terrorism” was conceptually an oxymoron, since the State is defined by the socially legitimate administration of violence, while terrorism is called such precisely because it is violence that lacks this legitimacy.
When a State engages in terrorism, when it sets aside its own legitimate repressive institutions in favor of clandestine terror, autonomous task forces, disappearances and similar “Night and Fog” tactics, this necessarily means that the State has ceased to exist as such and is become a mere administrative superstructure dissociated from the competitive terrorist groups that now represent real power in the land. The prosecutor, by using the expression “State terrorism,” exposed the problematic nature of what was being judged and should have led to the realization that what happened between 1976 and 1983 had been in fact the disintegration of the State, the Armed Forces, and all other legitimate repressive institutions.
When real power became coterminous with the physical power exerted over a given geographical space, when this power was wielded by heterogeneous task forces consisting of officers of varying ranks and paramilitary civilians, then this necessarily meant that the chain of command had been irretrievably broken and central authority had a purely subordinate influence as a mere source of cover and legitimacy for the work of repression. The expression “I am the master of of life and death in this zone,” heard by different prisoners in different concentration camps, revealed exactly this destruction of the the chain of command and, more generally, the dissolution of the Argentine State. '
https://judgingofdistances.wordpress.com/2017/03/22/the-junta-trials-the-second-disappearance-of-the-victims-and-the-real-crime-for-which-the-accused-were-judged/