Tarnish

    "... And I'd like to thank the members of the Academy, and all the wonderful people who worked on this film. But mostly, I'd like to admit my complete lack of conscience."
    The Academy Awards loves to humbly bow its head and pay homage to a select social or moral issue, themed to a popular movie: the Indians, AIDS, the blind, the ozone layer, autistics,
he poor.
    OK, Hollywood: here's a suggestion for this year's spectacle: Truth.
    Let's see some big name stand up and remind the world that the only filmmaker who should be using the disclaimer "Based on a true story" is Jacques Cousteau. 
    We've become sensitized to the Hollywood Effect -- the industry's overpowering influence on truth, based on the implication that a "true" story's fabricated details really happened -- because of some local controversy surrounding one of the year's hottest movies,  "Shine."
    One of the characters depicted in "Shine," Maggie Helfgott, is real alright: she lives in Beersheba. She's painfully aware that millions of people have watched the transmogrification of her family in luridly depicted Technicolor exaggeration, and that her father is, through poetic license, suggestively equated to one of the Nazi ogres he suffered under.
    No one, absolutely no one, will watch this movie -- or any such movie -- and challenge its emotive force with doubt. It is difficult, or impossible, to see such scenes on the screen and convince yourself that it didn't really happen as they say.
    There's a persuasiveness to compelling drama that makes the Hollywood Effect such a potent weapon. The Helfgotts' reputation will endure in the public consciousness exactly as fictionalized in "Shine," just as Christy Brown will always be a contorted Daniel Day Lewis in "My Left Foot," and as John Hurt played John Merrick in "The Elephant Man." For that matter, what cineast can think of Moses without conjuring up Charlton Heston?
    With "Shine," they have intruded on the right to privacy of people still living, telling a story as they saw fit to tell, with little or no regard for the harm it might cause the Helfgotts.
    They could have done what they wanted with the truth -- if they had changed the Helfgotts' names and identities. But they chose not to, which makes the moviemakers beholden to the family's sensitivities.
    At the time the film was being developed, Margaret Helfgott objected strenuously at the liberties it took with her family story. Later, after witnessing a cinema audience's disgust at her father, she launched a publicity campaign to discredit the movie, a lone voice out of Beersheba taking on the world's most influential industry -- a case of much too little, too late.