Hollywood

Malcolm X-Men

June 08, 2011

Multiple Pages
Malcolm X-Men

X-Men: First Class is the fifth screen adaptation since 2000 of the Marvel Comics series. What’s the appeal of these Homo superior mutants whose superpowers cause them to be oppressed by the bigoted and backward majority, us genetically inferior Homo sapiens?

Well, every adolescent sees himself as victim and victor.

X-Men: First Class is a prequel set during 1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis. It explains the split between former best friends: nice Professor X (played boringly by the usually charming James McAvoy, the faun in Narnia) and tormented Magneto (an impressive Michael Fassbender, who was also strong earlier this year as Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre).

At first, the handsome pair gladly teams up to recruit fellow mutants for the initial year of their new academy. Then they fight the Dr. Mengele-like Nazi geneticist who murdered Magneto’s mom at Auschwitz and who has since become a Dr. No-styled international super-villain egging the US and the USSR into nuclear war. (Kevin Bacon plays him with a cheerful lack of effort at making sense of his character.) They also combat a telepathic villainess, played (horribly) by blonde starlet January Jones (Mrs. Don Draper) as a tribute to Ursula Andress’s ice queen in the first James Bond movie.

“Ultimately, Magneto realizes Nazi ideology was right; Hitler was merely on the wrong side.”

Ultimately, Magneto realizes Nazi ideology was right; Hitler was merely on the wrong side. So he recruits all the nonwhite mutants away from the moderate Prof. X to join his radical team.

The basic conflict in X-Men between the Martin Luther King-like Professor X and the Malcolm X-like Magneto over whether to tolerate the majority’s prejudice or to give them what they have coming is similar to the struggle in the Harry Potter series between the saintly Dumbledore and the sinister Voldemort.

In contrast to J. K. Rowling’s tale, First Class sympathizes less with Professor X, the outdated assimilationist, and more with Magneto, the mutant supremacist who learned not to trust the majority during the Holocaust. In First Class, one mutant has an epiphany: “We shouldn’t try to be more like them. Society should aspire to be more like us.”

Bryan Singer, who directed the first two X-Men movies and is back to produce First Class, often explains how being Jewish and homosexual makes him an outsider, which lets him empathize with the persecuted mutants. The vastly successful Singer’s self-pity always reminds me of that scene in Garry Shandling’s The Larry Sanders Show where veteran showbiz producer Artie, played by the redoubtable Rip Torn, explains to cocky young joke-writer Phil why he should be careful making wisecracks about gays.

“Don’t you know who runs this town?” Artie thunders.

“Yeah, the Jews,” smirks Phil.

“No,” Artie glares, “the gay Jews!”

On the other hand, Singer’s director for this outing, Matthew Vaughn (director of 2010’s Kick-Ass), is highly not gay and not Jewish. His mom, a rich blonde flower child, told him he was the scion of TV star Robert Vaughn. But a blood test in the 1980s revealed the boy was the natural son of English peer George de Vere Drummond, whose surname the director has given the three children he’s had with his wife, German supermodel Claudia Schiffer.

When January Jones showed up pregnant in April, gossips immediately surmised that Vaughn must be the father. After all, they reasoned, Jones is such a terrible actress that to get the role she must have been sleeping with either the producer or the director. And since we can rule out Singer, that leaves only Vaughn. (He has vigorously denied paternity.)

First Class is difficult to describe coherently because its tone shifts frequently between Singer’s somber message (the film begins at Auschwitz) and Vaughn’s lighthearted interests. Singer’s allegory about the danger of another Holocaust if the gay Jews don’t run this town doesn’t coincide with Vaughn’s playful tribute to the early 60s, including Lockheed’s SR-71 supersonic jet and Marilyn Monroe (a bad Jennifer Lawrence, who was good in Winter’s Bone). Mostly, Vaughn displays a quasi-filial affection for knocking off James Bond movies. (The director’s ex-father, Robert Vaughn, starred in that hep mid-60s spy show The Man from U.N.C.L.E.)

Like Batman, Bond had no superpowers. But guns and gadgets look cooler onscreen than what Prof. X and Magneto are stuck with. To read minds, Professor X puts his finger to his temple like Johnny Carson playing psychic Carnac the Magnificent. To telekinetically move metal objects, Magneto squinches his face up and does jazz hands. These are pretty dweeby superpowers compared to the adamantine skeleton of earlier X-Men leading mutant Wolverine. (In First Class, Hugh Jackman has a cameo of two words, the second of which is “off.”)

Fortunately, Fassbender’s Sean Connery impression captures more than a little of that great star’s ruthless magnetism, keeping this hodgepodge on track.

 

SIGN UP
Daily updates with TM’s latest


Comments



The opinions of our commenters do not necessarily represent the opinions of Taki's Magazine or its contributors.