"Absence of Malice" and Why Some Movies Are Timeless

How does one produce a film that becomes a timeless classic?

Well, despite three decades of trying, I have no idea… if I did, I’d be the richest most successful man in Hollywood and you’d be able to see my mansion from space. Lately I’ve been quoting William Goldman’s famous observation that “nobody knows anything” quite often and I do so here, again, to point out that I sit squarely in the middle of that “nobody” category.

But I do know at least one important thing about how you do not create a timeless classic… you make the mistake of anchoring your film in the specific political moment in which it is made, and then you spoonfeed a grating political message to an audience which is already in on the joke.

Back in 2021, I sat down one night to watch “Don’t Look Up”, a Netflix original which had been generating a lot of buzz in the entertainment press, and which would go on to receive four Oscar nominations as the streamers continue to try to muscle their algorithmic “content” into a category of award once reserved for the great theatrical motion pictures of our times.

While the movie certainly had moments that made me laugh, “Don’t Look Up” was so desperate to deliver its message about Trump and climate change, that it felt rote, predictable and generally insufferable.

And now, here we are four years later and the movie has had no lasting cultural impact… because a funny thing happened on the way to the movie premeire. The United States of America did indeed face a scientific crisis, but it wasn’t climate change, it was a pandemic… and the putative heroes of the movie, the American Left, the people of the “in this house, we believe in science” yard signs, got everything about COVID wrong… and I mean, everything.

By the time “Don’t Look Up” premeired, it had already been overcome by events. The movie which pointedly took the piss out of Trump and his “anti-science” followers no longer seemed to understand that it had become the butt of its own joke. Certainly no one talks about “Don’t Look Up” in the same way that we talk about the great satirical movies of the past, like “M*A*S*H”, “Dr. Strangelove”, “Being There”, “Network” and “The Player” which tackled enduring universal themes and ideas, and which work as well now as they did on the days they were released.

When a great satire is made, one that touches on themes that are endemic and universal to the worlds of which they make fun, what happens is that reality keeps coming back around and making those movies relevant all over again. Our tragicomic withdrawal from Afghanistan echoed the futility of the daily lives of the drafted surgeons of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (M*A*S*H). Our seemingly aimless and ineffective attempts to counter Putin in the Ukraine can sometimes make us believe that nothing much has changed in the halls of the Pentagon since Buck Turgidson, President Muffley and General Ripper hammed it up in Dr. Strangelove’s “War Room.” And “The Player” and “Network” so perfectly skewer Hollywood and the News Media that all these years later, they remind us that almost nothing about those industries has changed over the ensuing decades.

But it’s not only comedies and satires that can achieve this kind of cultural resonance… history rhymes, if it does not repeat, as they say, and so dramatic thrillers like “Serpico”, “All The President’s Men”, “Three Days of the Condor”, “Taxi Driver” and “Death Wish” also seem more relevant than ever, these days.

In the same vein, Sydney Pollack’s 1981 masterpiece “Absence of Malice” is one of those movies that perfectly skewers its subject, an unholy alliance between the press and the very government the press is meant to hold in check. It is so well done, that the drama is timeless. A movie that seems more prescient now, than it did when it was made.

The opening credits of “Malice” show us a full edition of a local Miami newspaper being written, typeset and printed. As the paper evolves into its final form, the headlines tell us that a powerful union boss has been missing for six months and is presumed dead, and that the Justice Department, the Miami PD and the DA are under trememdous pressure to solve the case.

Post credits we meet the Federal Prosecutor in charge of that case, Elliot Rosen (Bob Balaban), who has decided that a successful liquor wholesaler named Michael Gallagher, played by Paul Newman who was still one of the best looking men in the world even at age 56, must himself be involved in the disappearance in some way. Rosen doesn’t believe this because of any evidence he’s collected, he has none at all, but because Gallagher’s deceased father was affiliated with the local anti-union mob and so, therefore, his son must also be “connected”… quod erat demonstrandum.

Later, when the Miami Dade DA asks him which crime Gallagher is suspected of committing, Rosen answers “what’s the difference?”

“So you’re squeezing him?” asks the DA.

“You got somebody better?” is Rosen’s chilling response.

Unfortunately for Rosen, the US Consitution exists, and he cannot arrest Gallagher, put him in a deep dark hole, and sweat it out of him. So, he decides to put public pressure on the businessman in hopes he will break. To do this, he targets a young cub reporter named Megan Carter, played by Sally Field, as his weapon of choice. He leaks the existence of his “investigation” to Carter who writes an article that comes up just short of accusing Gallagher of the crime, an inferred accusation which Rosen knows will embarrass the man and destroy both his social standing in Miami as well as his business… eggs, meet omelette.

By now this should all be starting to sound very familiar.

And indeed there is a fascinating “modern” moment that occurs just after Rosen leaks the story to Carter. She takes the draft of her first story to her paper’s in-house counsel. Carter is a dogged reporter and has no way of knowing she’s being used, of course, but she has a nagging sense that she doesn’t have the whole story. The lawyer advises her to provide Gallagher with a chance to respond. Why, she demands to know, not liking the idea of calling “the mafia” for comment, which elicits the following response:

“if he talks to us we’ll include his denials, which create the appearance of fairness. If he declines to speak we can hardly be responsible for errors which he refuses to correct. If we fail to reach him at least we tried. As a matteer of law the truth of your story is irrelevant. We have no knowledge the story is false, therefore we’re absent malice. We’ve been both reasonable and prudent, therefore we’re not negligent. We may say whatever we like about Mr. Gallagher and he is powerless to do us harm. Democracy is served.”

The sheer callousness of this quip could not help but freeze cold the blood of anyone who has been paying attention to the antics of our justice system and its willing accomplices in the press over the last decade. The “appearance” of fairness… as opposed to actual fairness? The truth of the story is irrelevant as a matter of law? They may print what they like and we are powerless to do anything about it? Democracy is served?

One is tempted to ask if this is the fabled “Our Democracy” about which we’ve heard so much lately, or if it’s something more like “Their Democracy.” Regardless, somewhere on the ashen plains of Hell, Lavrentiy Beria must surely be smiling.

Later in the story, after the DOJ’s indirect accusations, backed up and amplified by Carter’s reporting, have begun to destroy Gallagher’s life and business, it will turn out that Gallagher had an alibi for the day of the union boss’ disappearance all along. The reason he did not divulge that alibi and clear his name is that the details would be very embarrassing for a fragile young woman named Teresa Perrone (Melinda Dillon) who is his closest friend.

Nevertheless, in order to spare her friend any more distress, Teresa works up the courage to go to Carter and tell her the whole embarrassing story, not understanding, innocent naif that she is, that by speaking to Carter she is inadvertently giving up her right to keep the matter private. Sadly, poor Teresa commits suicide after the story appears in print, launching a distraught and angry Gallagher on a campaign to avenge himself upon the men (and woman) who did him and his friend dirty.

Whether Gallagher’s attempts are sucessful or not I will leave to you to discover, but in the end, amidst the wreckage of several lives, all of the major players are summoned to an inquiry with a US Assistant Attorney General (Wilford Brimley, stealing the show as he often did) who has been made aware of most, but not all, of the sordid details.

“Who do I see about that?”

“There ain’t no one to see.”

If there could be a more appropriate epitaph for the media environment in which we’ve lived for the last 10 years, I cannot think of one… which is why ‘Absence of Malice” remains as vital, as timeless today, as it was when it was made.

For almost the entirety of our country’s 250 years we have had a press that was definitionally adversarial to its own government. Even in “Absence of Malice”, a movie which takes place in an America only 40 years distant, Megan Carter had no idea she was being used until it was too late, and likely would not have done what she did if she’d known the truth. What’s different about the press here in the early 2020’s is that it has largely abandonded its adversarial role in order to protect those government administrations which they perceive as being “on their side.” Instead of speaking truth to power, the modern media has turned the full force of their fury on the powerless who would challenge the orthodoxy of the Deep State actors with whom the media are now permanently aligned.

And the last ten years have borne this out. We watched as teachers were shamed by the press and ultimately fired for objecting to Critical Race Theory programs which gave the green light to psychologically abuse disfavored children. Parents were placed on domestic terror watch lists and publicly ridiculed in the press for daring to stand in front of school board meetings and suggest that it might not be a great idea to let boys who identify as girls compete against their daughters in contact sports or invade their locker rooms and showers. Respected physicians were attacked in print and on TV, and had their careers threatened by government licensing bodies for daring to object to capricious COVID regime edicts. This occured even when those edicts completely reversed themselves in truly Orwellian ways, and without anyone in the Press ever daring to point out the discrepancy. Joe Rogan was accused by CNN of ingesting “horse dewormer” after taking a commonly prescribed human medication to fight his COVID infection, a claim which the reporter would later admit on Rogan’s show he knew to be nonsense at the very moment he was making it. Mark Judge had his name dragged through the mud because he wouldn’t (or couldn’t) give the government or the press any dirt on high school pal Brett Kavanaugh. Like Teresa Perrone, Judge had a past which he was not proud of and which was cruelly leveraged against him by his government and the media. Libs of Tik Tok founder Chaya Raichik had a WaPo reporter show up at the front door of her parents’ house after her tactic of embarrasing the hyper-partisan Left by reflecting its insanity back at them without comment, began to achieve just a little bit too much culturally notoriety.

It is only my respect for your valuable time as a reader, as well as my friend Michael Walsh’s repeated entreaties to “keep it short” (too late!) that prevents me from adding a hundred more such incidents to this ignominious list. But in each case, you will find that the target has committed no crime beyond political apostasy. Like Elliot Rosen’s pressure campaign against Michael Gallagher, these examples of our own government colluding with a hyper-partisan press to destroy private citizens were acts of intimidation, aimed not only at the targets in each individual case, but at anyone else who might dare to follow in their footsteps.

At the end of “Malice”, everyone in that inquiry room is either fired, quits, or is demoted… but it makes no difference to Gallagher (or Teresa Perrone) because the system endures. No matter how many Fani Willis’, Jack Smiths, Peter Strozks, George Gascons, Lois Lerners, Don Lemons or Taylor Lorenzs are fired, no matter how many times News Organizations like CNN and NBC are forced to pay multi-million dollar settlements to people they have defamed, there will always be others waiting, and eager to take their place.

The system is eternal… it lives on, to punish and oppress those unfortunates who fall under its gaze, forever. The cruelty is the point. Gallagher didn’t really win, he took his pound of flesh and a few nameless faceless bureacrats were forced by the system to give it to him, but the system itself lives to fight another day, to destroy people’s lives simply for the crime of daring to live in a way of which the system does not approve.

In many ways, the 2024 elections can be seen as a repudiation of that system. It remains to be seen if the Left and its preatorian press agents have learned any lessons from that repudiation, but if we could ask Michael Gallagher what comes next, I think he would say something like this… “the 2024 election was the polite request… if lessons are not learned, the next request will not be so polite. Because fear is a street which runs in both directions, and in a world where there ain’t nobody to see, a population fed up with being bullied might just decide to come and see you. And then where will we be?”

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