Recession meets escapism equals huge box office" became the Hollywood equation of the season when box-office analyst Paul Dergarabedian coined it to account for "the biggest start to any box-office year I've ever seen." Immediately, entertainment journalists began using it to explain the success of movies as different as Paul Blart: Mall Cop, Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail and Slumdog Millionaire.
Slumdog Millionaire?
Here is a movie that, for two-thirds of its running time, depicts squalid sectors of Mumbai, India, that outdo the London slums of Dickens' Oliver Twist for depravity and mayhem. Here is a movie that is ruthlessly unsentimental about the bonds of brotherhood and the sway of money in the halls of media and political power.
Yet, here is a movie that does leave an audience energized and hopeful because of the resilience of its hero and the ardor of his quest to win the heart and hand of his true love. That's not merely escapism. That is entertainment for hard times.
Indeed, Slumdog Millionaire jumped from a cult to a mass audience because it brings the zesty spirit of Hollywood in the Great Depression to a milieu that makes it fresh again. Old-movie lovers can see in it the influence not just of Dickens movies like A Tale of Two Cities and Dav id Copperfield but also of Jimmy Cagney gangster movies like Angels With Dirty Faces and even of screwball comedies about unlikely lottery winners and mismatched romantic partners.
Is Slumdog Millionaire a fairy tale? Definitely, but in ways that acknowledge reality. And that was the trick not just of Old School Hollywood escapism, but of the classic stories by Dickens, Stevenson or Kipling that American moviemakers loved.
Before we define escapism as two parts Paul Blart: Mall Cop to one part Slumdog Millionaire, let's think back to a time when Hollywood reversed the ratio, at least for its big-ticket items.
American filmmakers didn't retreat from reality in the face of the Depression: They alchemized it into entertainment gold with a variety and elan that wouldn't again be equaled in popular cinema until the late 1960s and early '70s. You could see contemporary attitudes echoed at each point on the movie spectrum - in urban melodramas like Public Enemy, Westerns like Stagecoach, even epic adventures like Mutiny on the Bounty. (When the American movie renaissance occurred in the '60s and '70s, it often centered on new takes on the same genres, such as The Godfather and The Wild Bunch.)
