I don’t blame people in their teens and 20s for mistaking liberal Hollywood propaganda as anything new—how would they know? Politics became pop culture the moment that Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton, and with Harvey Weinstein’s fall less than a year later, the Millennial generation followed their hysterical and dim-witted elders into an era that not only produced nothing of note or value, but also destroyed what was left of film, music, and publishing (video games got hit hard, too, but I don’t give a shit). If you were born in 2010, you’ve never known a diverse Hollywood, with all kinds of movies for all kinds of Americans. In 2002, the film industry’s most profitable year, there were hundreds and hundreds of movies released, the byproduct of a SAG strike in the summer of 2001 and delays/reshoots in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
Along with Spider-Man, Minority Report, The Bourne Identity, Austin Powers in Goldmember, Punch-Drunk Love, and new installments in the Harry Potter, James Bond, and Lord of the Rings series, 2002 offered plenty of the moralistic and didactic demonstrations of Hollywood’s soft liberal politics. John Q, starring Denzel Washington as a poor, dumb father whose son needs a heart transplant, could’ve been produced in 2015, 2020, or 2025; from Tender Comrade to One Battle After Another, Hollywood has made political movies that frustrate everyone and satisfy no one.
Nick Cassavetes, son of John, directs; he’d go on to direct the most successful movie any Cassavetes has ever been involved in—The Notebook—just two years later. John Q didn’t achieve iconic status, but was successful enough in its day ($102 million against a $36 million budget) to endure into the 2020s, when it was commonly cited in the wake of Brian Thompson’s murder and Luigi Mangione’s arrest. Washington, as John Q. Archibald, and his wife take their son to the emergency room after he collapses at a Little League game. After a while, they’re taken into a boardroom and given the bad news by surgeon James Woods and administrator Anne Heche. “Your son is going to die without a heart transplant,” they tell them, and the parents are in such shock that they don’t get it; things get even more volatile when they realize that their insurance won’t cover a transplant, and they’re about to run of money just to keep their son in the hospital.
Washington scrounges up $75,000, then $30,000, then another $15,000… but he comes up short. Heche tells his wife that his son is being discharged—there’s nothing they can do. Furious, she lays into Washington and tells him to “do something.” Washington grabs a gun and holds the emergency room, and the rest of the hospital, hostage. He corrals and quickly endears himself to the motley crew in the waiting room (including an ultra-slick Eddie Griffin, one of the most underrated comic actors of his time). Some of them have bleeding fingers, others have babies about to be born, but Washington improbably directs the staff and their patients into some kind of order while the entire Chicago PD waits outside the hospital, guns drawn and megaphones blasting.
“This is all my fault,” the wife tells head honchos Robert Duvall and Ray Liotta, “I told him to do something.” Duvall and Liotta quickly sympathize with Washington, and soon the entire waiting room is erupting into a universal healthcare op-ed. Unable to find a heart for his son, Washington eventually decides to shoot himself so that the doctors present can take his heart and give it to his son. Woods refuses at first, “it’s been years,” but with a gun to his head, he snaps into focus. “Gimme 10,000cc’s of Demerol, 20,000cc’s morphine, alright scrub down, let’s go.” All of a sudden he’s a man of the people, ready to ruin his career to perform an operation that strains even the credulity of Hollywood movies around the turn of the millennium. What was recognized at the time as “a didactic, shrill cartoon” (Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly) was nevertheless a popular entertainment, not a piece of homework or the kind of movie that the powers that be were pushing at the time.
In 2002, Hollywood was war crazy, offering one battle after another to a traumatized nation looking for revenge and someone to blame. Very few of the war films of the 2000s explicitly involved Iraq, Afghanistan, or Al Qaeda; instead, they went back to World War II, the most unambiguous conflict on offer. In the immediate wake of 9/11, studios pulled films like Collateral Damage, Big Trouble, and Bad Company because they involved terrorists, nukes, airplanes, or all three—but by the end of the year, the directive had gone out: we are at war, and we are doing our part, reminding Americans what they stood to lose and how far they’d come. Besides those who enlisted immediately after the attacks, like Adam Driver and Jack Osbourne, a not insignificant number of young men joined the Army because they saw Mel Gibson, Harrison Ford, Nicolas Cage, Owen Wilson, Ben Affleck, Gene Hackman, and many others fighting for their country. No matter the war, it was understood that these men were fighting the same fight, whether in Germany, Korea, France, or Iraq. They were fighting for America, American values, the American Dream, and the American way of life.
Twenty-four years later, the veil’s been lifted, and the public has been disabused of abstract, load bearing beliefs that, unquestioned, allowed our consumer society to enjoy itself with an underlying sense of purpose and belonging. In 2002, the assumption that the government and the powers in corporate America had the best interests of the country, if not its people, in mind; no one of any political affiliation is that naive today. Just as the Public Service Announcement tenor of John Q scans as a spoof today, the rah-rah war movies that filled multiplexes in 2002 were made for an audience that doesn’t exist anymore: people in believe in America, who will fight for a country that protects their rights and their way of life. “We live in fictitious times,” said Michael Moore at the 2003 Oscars, drawing jeers and boos from a crowd of Hollywood liberals firm in their belief that America, and an American war, was “non-partisan.” The unity of the time, taken for granted, allowed a diverse slate of films, some more didactic than others; if John Q wasn’t only tolerated but a considerable hit, it may be because it wasn’t the only kind of film being made, nor one that everyone in Hollywood agreed with. But it was on the menu, when the menu had more than ever before.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith