The Current Cinema June 5 & 12, 2017 Issue “Baywatch” and “Letters from Baghdad”

An adaptation of the iconic television series, starring Dwayne Johnson, Zac Efron, and Kelly Rohrbach, and a documentary about Gertrude Bell.

By Anthony Lane

Dwayne Johnson, Zac Efron, and Kelly Rohrbach star in Seth Gordon’s movie. Illustration by Bendik Kaltenborn

here are so many things you can do with a beach in the movies. You can clear it by shouting, “Shark!” You can storm it in the T face of German guns. If you’re Steve McQueen, you can race around it in an orange dune buggy. If you’re Elvis, you can stand on the sand, in little white shorts, and pluck at your ukulele. And, if you’re Gérard Philipe, in “Une Si Jolie Petite Plage” (1949), the saddest of all beach lms, you can mooch along the strand, in the rain, with a face like rolling thunder.

Then there is “Baywatch,” where no rain falls. The television series started in 1989 and, after a hiccup, ran for most of the following decade, earning “a wider audience on the planet Earth than any other entertainment show in history,” according to a Times report, in 1995. “Baywatch” aired in more than a hundred and forty countries and was dubbed into many tongues: a triumph of metamorphosis, since the dialogue was only just recognizable as English in the rst place. There were three attempts to promote the show from the small screen to the big, including “Baywatch: Hawaiian Wedding” (2003), whose plot is anyone’s guess, but, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/05/baywatch-and-letters-from-baghdad 1/3 tragically, all three swam straight to video. Now, however, we have the real deal, which bears the naked title of “Baywatch.” How can it hope to ll the trunks of the original?

The role of Mitch Buchannon, head lifeguard and lord of all he surveys from his watchtower, passes from David Hasselhoff to Dwayne Johnson, who rescues a kite surfer from certain death before the opening credits are complete. Kelly Rohrbach steps into the part of C. J. Parker, Mitch’s thoughtful sidekick, although Pamela Anderson, in the eyes of some experts, has never truly vacated it. New recruits to the squad include the beaming Summer Quinn (Alexandra Daddario) and Ronnie Greenbaum ( Jon Bass), who is tanless, tubby, and good with computers. Asked where he acquired his skills, he replies—wait for it—“Hebrew school.” In one sequence, which goes on as long as a Mahler adagio, Ronnie’s genitals get trapped in the slats of a sun bed. You’ll just die.

The narrative is a complex mechanism. On the one hand, there is the villainess, Victoria Leeds (Priyanka Chopra), who is a drug dealer and a property developer: double bad. On the other hand, there is Matt Brody (Zac Efron), surely no relation to the noble Chief Brody, in “Jaws.” Matt has two Olympic gold medals in swimming; he blew a third, in the relay, by barng in the pool, and has since hit rock bottom. Only by working in a team can Matt’s ravaged soul be redeemed, although I like him most when he points out—correctly—that the lifeguards aren’t proper police officers and should stop behaving as if they were. And I like Mitch most when he returns re, peppering Matt, who is young and pretty, with a barrage of snarky vocatives. “Hey, Fresh Face!” “Where you from, One Direction?” We also hear “Troubled Youth,” “Bieber,” and, my favorite, “Baby Gap,” though everything turns a bit weird when Matt is addressed as “High School Musical”—which is, of course, where Efron made his name.

Can a movie ironize itself to death, snipping away at its own reasons for existence until there is nothing left? “Baywatch” certainly skirts that risk, as when Matt listens to his pals at lunch and remarks, “Everything you guys are talking about sounds like an entertaining but far-fetched TV show.” The sight of C.J. running in her swimsuit, in slow motion, is followed by the line “Why does she always look like she’s running in slow motion?” The plan, I guess, is to make the audience feel momentarily smart, with a jolt of knowingness, the only hitch being that the lm itself is as mindless as anything produced in the Hasselhovian era.

The rule of the game, I accept, is that two-thirds of all Hollywood movies released after mid-May should be aimed at fourteen- year-old boys, but “Baywatch,” if you study the frequency of breast jokes, was made by fourteen-year-old boys. One possibility is that Seth Gordon, who is listed as the director, got a nasty case of sunburn, poor guy, and had to stay away from the set. That would explain a lot, except there’s not enough sun; the continuity is so inept that we get whisked directly from a bright and glorious day, in one shot, to another that looks gray and morose. Thank heaven for Dwayne Johnson, whose foot-wide smile will not be switched off, and who saves the life of the movie. Whether it deserves to be saved is another matter.

here is a celebrated photograph, taken in Giza, Egypt, in 1921. In the background are two pyramids and the Great Sphinx, T keeping itself to itself. In front, mounted on camels, is a row of people, including a trio of, let us say, notable characters. On the left is Winston Churchill, coolly sporting a pair of smoked shades that resemble 007’s snow goggles in “Spectre.” On the right is a small, trim gure, gazing down, as shy as Churchill is pugnacious, and clad for the heat in a three-piece suit and a stiff collar: T. E. Lawrence, also known as Lawrence of Arabia. Between them is a woman, half smiling at the camera, wearing a hat and—can this really be true?—what appears to be a fur stole around her neck. Her name is Gertrude Bell, and she is by no means the least of the three.

The picture shows up in a new documentary about Bell, “Letters from Baghdad,” directed by Sabine Krayenbühl and Zeva Oelbaum, both of whom are based in New York. Much of it consists of archived material: diary entries, correspondence, newsreel footage and other cinematic records, plus many evocative stills—Bell was, among her other accomplishments, a ne photographer. If her reputation lingers, it is thanks to the almost comical breadth of those accomplishments, and to her grappling with issues that continue to bedevil us today.

She was born in 1868, into a British family of great industrial riches. (That cushion of wealth should not be forgotten, as you ponder the brio of her escapades.) Her mother died when Gertrude was three, and it was her father, Sir Hugh Bell, of whom she was enduringly fond, and to whom she sent hundreds of absorbing letters. She was educated at Oxford, where she was one of the rst women to take a rst-class degree in modern history. After college, she travelled widely—twice around the world, and up so many Alps, displaying such nerve in apocalyptic conditions (“You set your teeth and battle with the fates”)—as to earn the https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/05/baywatch-and-letters-from-baghdad 2/3 veneration of her guides. But the trip that established the pattern of Bell’s existence was made to an uncle in Tehran, in 1892; thus began her xation on the Middle East. Again and again, she returned there, traversing desert lands, mapping unfamiliar provinces, learning Arabic and Persian, writing books about her experiences, and working at archeological sites. Indeed, her nal achievement, before she died, in 1926, was to found an archeological museum in Baghdad—the one that was ransacked, in the wake of the American invasion, in 2003.

No lm could hope to encompass so multitudinous a life. Werner Herzog directed a bio-pic of sorts, “The Queen of the Desert” (2015), starring Nicole Kidman, yet Bell, despite her peregrine impulse, lacks the untamable quality that Herzog craves in his protagonists. Her briskness and her breeding are more aptly captured by Tilda Swinton, who supplies the voice of Bell in “Letters from Baghdad.” The title is unenticing and inaccurate, since much of the movie covers her deeds elsewhere: a pang-laced love affair with a married man who was killed at Gallipoli; detention in the fabled city of Ha’il; or her posting to Cairo, in 1915. There, with the honorary rank of major, she served alongside Lawrence in the Arab Intelligence Bureau, using her intricate grasp of tribal customs to foment an Arab uprising against Turkish rule. She and her colleagues labelled themselves the Intrusives.

Still, her roving did lead her to Baghdad, from where, beginning in 1917, she was instrumental in what we would call nation- building: composing an official “Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia” (1921), and, in essence, dening the borders of modern Iraq. The parallels with events at the start of this century are plain to see, yet the movie, to its credit, does not belabor them. Nor does it plunge into the debate as to whether Bell, for all her learned love of the region (“I never feel exiled here; it is a second native country”), and despite her misgivings (“How can we, who have managed our own affairs so badly, claim to teach others to manage theirs better?”), was doing much more than upholding the colonialist cause. Scholars of Bell will be exasperated, but “Letters from Baghdad” is not for them; it is for viewers who may know nothing of her, and for whom the basic shape of her exploits will be astounding enough. You emerge from the lm with a divided heart: thrilled to hear of a woman who, ignoring the dictates of the age, lled her days to overowing, yet ashamed to measure your own days and to nd them, by comparison, hollow and bare. Is it too late to follow Gertrude Bell’s example? First, hire your camel. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the June 5 & 12, 2017, issue, with the headline “Lines in the Sand.”

Anthony Lane has been a lm critic for The New Yorker since 1993. He is the author of “Nobody’s“Nobody’s Perfect.” Read more »

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