Stark mad.(FILM)(Iron Man)(Movie review)

THE script for Iron Man, this summer's first successful popcorn flick, belongs atop the syllabus for a class that some enterprising film school ought to offer: How to Write Action Movies in a Polarized Climate. Ever since 9/11, and especially since the invasion of Iraq, Hollywood has veered between action heroes who embody the movie industry's left-wing take on world affairs (with the Bourne cycle being the most prominent example) and action heroes who exist at a vacuum-sealed remove from minor matters like the Iraq War and the Islamist threat. The superhero genre has been ideal for the latter purpose, since the cape-and-tights set is famous primarily--at least among non-aficionados--for handling dangers either mundane (petty street crime in Gotham) or fantastic (supervillains, superweapons, etc.), while leaving the day-to-day business of geopolitics to ordinary mortals.

But Tony Stark, the wealthy industrialist turned armor-plated avenger, is a different case, since American foreign policy is more or less his raison d'etre: His Stark Enterprises is Boeing crossed with DARPA, the high-tech arms-producing heart of the military-industrial complex. Which means that adapting Iron Man for the screen would seem to involve making a highly politicized choice: Is Stark's day job the Lord's work or the Devil's? And once he steps into the bulletproof, rocket-propelled suit that makes him a superhero, will he be the scourge of America's foes abroad, or a newly enlightened enemy to the military-industrial baddies he used to serve?

The genius of the Iron Man adaptation is that it chooses both at once. (This "genius," I hasten to add, might be the entirely accidental result of the Hollywood habit of piling screenwriter atop screenwriter: The movie's credits give four scribes credit for the finished product, and heaven knows how many uncredited doctors worked it over on the side.) Depending on which details you highlight and which villains you emphasize, it's easy to imagine making the movie sound like it was adapted for the screen by the editors of The Weekly Standard--but then again it's just as easy to imagine a plot summary that would sound like it was hashed out by Lewis Lapham and Chalmers Johnson over cocktails at the offices of Harper's. If anyone reading this is a neocon dating a Nation reader, or vice versa, congratulations: This is the date movie for you.

When Iron Man kicks off, Stark is a businessman-inventor by day and a fast-living, hard-drinking, model-bedding playboy by night; his nights, inevitably, are considerably longer than his days, to the despair of the three people he keeps closest to him--his devoted assistant, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow); his pal and military liaison, Colonel Rhodes (Terrence Howard); and his mentor and second-in-command, Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges, bald, bearded, and bearish). Stark is played with rakish aplomb by Robert Downey Jr., who knows a thing or three about living life at unsafe speeds, and part of the movie's charm is the way it crosses Superman with an episode of E! True Hollywood Story. It's the fantasy of being rich ...