Hero worship

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The versatile British actor Tom Wilkinson was talking recently about his new movie, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. It's a film about a group of senior citizens: a rare film that's actually aimed at the over-50 crowd.

"There are a lot of people over the age of 50 who really like going to the cinema and don't want to watch X-Men or Clash of the Titans," Wilkinson said. "And why should they? God. There is a big market for films that are slightly old-fashioned, in the way they used to make films in the '70s."

Later, though, he amended his view: "A good X-Men movie... A good movie is a good movie is a good movie," he said.

Amen to that. As Duke Ellington once said about music, there are two kinds: good and bad. But even given all that, the Hollywood love affair with the X-Men and their ilk -- with the genre of the superhero film -- is getting out of hand.

The latest one, The Avengers, opened Friday, and it sounds as if it might be one of the good ones, with a fine cast that includes Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo and Jeremy Renner, and an innovative director in Joss Weldon. It's been getting strong reviews, as well. It is probably a lot of fun, and if it were being offered up as a surprising change to the summer movie schedule, it would be refreshing.

But it's only the latest in a perennial parade of superhero films, with other high-profile entries like The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises still to come. They are both remountings of franchises that have been reinvented more often than the iPad. Like many superheroes, Spider-Man -- still a Johnny-come-lately to those of us who grew up with Superman as the king of the superhero universe, with Batman as a sort of weak-kneed second cousin -- is hailed as a metaphor for confused adolescence, or maybe the ambiguities of power. Batman, meanwhile, is another depressed saviour who represents the futility of nobility in a world gone mad.

There have been some wonderful Batman and Spider-Man films, but there have been some lousy ones, too. It doesn't seem to matter: If you want to talk about the great responsibilities of great power, you have to do it through the eyes of a teenager who can climb up the side of buildings. Hollywood has been taken over by fantasy, and it's almost a novelty to find a story about an everyday adult trying to solve realistic problems without benefit of Spandex or a supercar.

Like the X-Men, with their cast of heroes tormented by their extraordinary powers -- the pain of being inflammable becoming a symbol for lonely adolescence in a way that, say, Holden Caulfield never imagined -- The Avengers brings together a wide selection of offbeat creatures. Downey Jr.'s Iron Man gets by on the star's charisma, but the character himself is a juvenile trope for the misuse of military power. And do we really need more of The Hulk -- even as portrayed by Ruffalo -- as an illustration of the destructive effects of anger? It was kind of campy fun back in the 1970s, when Bill Bixby turned into Lou Ferrigno when he lost his temper, but it's a constricted kind of fun. It's the same thing every time, the temper tantrum as character development.

And that's the problem with Hollywood's superhero fetish. There's simply too much of it: indestructible warriors extending back in time (Thor is another of the Avengers) and forward into an endless future of relaunches and remountings and even more obscure comic-book characters. I know I'm mostly alone in this: Millions of fans of these superheroes can't wait to see them on screen, a nostalgic trip back to the time when (I suppose) they all dreamt of being invisible or flying or turning unconquerable.

It's a teenage fantasy that has taken over an industry that is more and more turning to familiar, pre-sold ideas -- old TV shows, bestselling youth fiction -- to fill the seats. A good movie is a good movie is a good movie, but can we please have a few more with ordinary human beings?

-- Postmedia News

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 6, 2012 A14