The Tea Party’s Atlas Shrugged: TPM Goes To The Movies

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What do you get when you cross Tea Party politics with a movie adaptation of a critically-panned but bestselling dystopian novel from the 50s?

TPM went to see Atlas Shrugged: Part One on Friday and found the answer: Nothing good.

The film adapts Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel of the same name, which over the years has achieved some cult status among conservatives, and recently became relevant again with the rise of the Tea Party. It’s intended to be part of a trilogy, and was released on April 15, which also happens to coincide with the traditional Tax Day.

About 25 people made it for the 11:30am showing in Union Square in Manhattan (spoiler alert: they all applauded at the end). The 7:00pm and 9:30pm showings at this particular theater were sold out, according to the ticketing agent. After some previews for Cowboys & Aliens, Bridesmaids and, oddly enough, Fair Game, the movie about Valerie Plame that was released in late 2010 to little box office success, the movie began.

The plot takes place in 2016, and follows Dagny Taggart (Taylor Schilling), an executive at her family’s railroad company, who’s fighting against the odds to keep her business from going under. Some of those odds: A terrible economy, nefarious, social welfare-promoting forces in Washington, Dagny’s lazy brother who heads the company and is in cahoots with those nefarious, social welfare-promoting forces in Washington, the nefarious State Science Institute, and a mysterious-but-not-necessarily-nefarious man named John Galt who keeps snatching the best and brightest away into the night.

Taggart finds an ally and romantic interest in steel mogul Henry Rearden, a married man who unapologetically proclaims: “My only goal is to make money.” Together they work to rebuild train tracks running through Colorado while overcoming the forces in Washington who seek to bring them down.

Even without having read the book, it’s easy to see why the Tea Party might champion this movie, with dialogue like: “You’d be surprised how quickly things get done when you do some actual work and don’t rely on political favors.”

And the basic Tea Party themes were trumpeted over and over (and over and over) again. John Galt describes himself as “someone who knows what it’s like to work for himself and not let others feed off the profits of his energy,” and says he’s “simply offering a society that cultivates individual achievement” — all of which squares with the Tea Party disdain for a large federal government. And the big-business types, rich and swanky as they are, are glorified. Dagny and Henry attend posh parties, ride in chauffeured cars, and have beautiful homes. But since they did it themselves, without the help of government, it’s a good thing.

This is different from the portrayal of fat cat politicians, mostly middle-aged white guys, who sit around and plot how to redistribute wealth and screw over the better-looking heroes. They put a moratorium on wage increases, “equalize the national economy,” and introduce legislation to make it illegal for one person to own more than one company. They’re frequently referred to in amorphous terms, like “your guy in Washington,” “your friend in Washington,” “his cronies in Washington,” because obviously they’re all interchangeably evil.

And lest the audience forget about the unions – they pop in every once in a while to throw a wrench in Dagny’s plans to save her company. Shortly before the maiden voyage of the new railway line, one union boss tells Dagny that he’s going to tell his railworkers not to work for her because he thinks it’s too dangerous. “You want me to provide the jobs,” Dagny tells him, “but you won’t let me run the train that makes the jobs.”

Thematic bludgeoning aside, the movie was just…bad. The acting was stiff. The cinematography was heavy-handed, with one extra-extended sequence showing the finished rail running through the Colorado mountains, as if to say, “look at how beautiful business can be if only you would let it!” The dialogue was on-the-nose and occasionally laughable — at the end, Dagny looks out over a burning oil field and cries, “Nooooooooooooooooo!”

The supporting characters were cartoonish — Rearden’s brother-in-law a jerk who repeatedly insults Rearden to his face (it all makes sense though when it’s revealed he works for a do-gooder type company called the “Friends of Global Awareness.” The horror!). Or there’s Rearden’s wife, who’s characterized as a greedy harpy who just doesn’t understand why he works all the time, or why the only jewelry he gives her is made from the steel he builds in his factory.

Atlas, the movie, has been widely promoted by Tea Party groups like Freedomworks, who see it as a natural extension of Tea Party principles, and hope to use the release to pick up some momentum. The group has promoted the film and pushed to get it into more theaters in more cities — they got it up to a few hundred for opening day. It reportedly earned $1.7 million across its opening weekend.

“It becomes an excellent vehicle for them to broaden their base,” Harmon Kaslow, who produced the film, told the National Journal. “They subscribe to the philosophy of the book and believe in the writing of Ayn Rand and her view of individual liberty.”

“The book and the movement share a common faith in supremacy of individual liberty and the importance of limited government,” FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe wrote recently. “Both recognize, as leaders like Ronald Reagan did, that great American thinkers and entrepreneurs-not government bureaucrats-are the driving forces of American exceptionalism.”

He continued that it “is not a book or film about the tea party, but it could be,” and that “the timely film adaptation presents a portrait of what could be if we neglect to rein in government and restore the freedom and entrepreneurial spirit that have made America great.”

Here’s the official preview:

The film was independently produced, and funded by John Aglialoro, who chairs of UM Holdings Inc., and optioned the rights to the book 18 years ago.

So far the reviews have been pretty unflattering: Rotten Tomatoes has it at 9% (really rotten), out of 23 reviews so far. Metacritic gives it a 27 Meta Score out of 100, based on 15 critics.

But Kaslow is not fazed. “We expected that the critics would have a fear of embracing this film,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “We knew that there was a substantial likelihood that they would not view the film as to whether we got the message right, but would look at it comparing it to what Hollywood would have done. I don’t think our audience is persuaded at all by those reviews.”

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