Tucker: The Man and His Dream

One of my favorite YouTube channels is Mic The Snare, a music discussion channel. The host has a sub-series called Deep Discog Dive, where he goes over an artist or band's entire history, with reviews of each album serving as the connective tissue. In his review of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here, he commented on how the album's featured suite, a 25 minute, 9 part epic in tribute to their former bandmate Syd Barrett, paints him as a complete person, listing both things they loved and things that drove them nuts about their mercurial former friend. It is not meant as a dig, he says, but the summation of a man in total; his hopes and dreams, the traits that made him lovable and those that made him irritating, what he did to give Floyd life and what he did to almost kill it. It is as a biography should be: a holistic review of a human being. Tucker: The Man and His Dream (I'll be shortening it to Tucker from here on out) is the opposite of that, and not without reason. You so often see articles about this business or that innovation "disrupting" an industry; Preston Tucker did that, innovating on the American automobile with his designs so much that it scared the Big 3 into using political connections to drive him out of the business. He was, without hyperbole, a rabble-rouser, a rogue, a lone wolf bucking the establishment's way of doing things because he saw a better way. The men behind the movie, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, were equally disruptive forces in Hollywood, refusing to be part of the Hollywood hit machine, pushing for artistic freedom over commercial concern. A blind man could see the parallels in the story of Preston Tucker's quixotic quest to become an auto manufacturer, and practically in the Big 3's backyard. And to be fair and give the movie its due, Tucker tells that story with energy and flair. Coppola's direction is unique, starting off the movie like a full-color news reel from the 40's, complete with sweeping graphics and overly enthusiastic voiceover, and it just never stops. A scene in which Tucker calls his wife from a phone booth to tell her they got the factory building uses a split diopter shot to place her in the foreground of the scene, even though, geographically, she's hundreds of miles away. A scene later in the movie where Martin Landau's character calls Tucker from a diner to warn him about the police coming to arrest him has the diner and Tucker's office separated only by a wall, so we the audience can see them at the same time without resorting to a deliberate split screen. Tucker is full of this kind of shot composition, and when it isn't, it's the acting and the almost frenetic rush of the narrative keeping up the energy. There are so many actors in Tucker to point out, it could take a thousand words on its own, but Tucker is really Jeff Bridges' movie. Bridges gives Tucker an unkillable life, imbuing him with equal parts movie star charisma, carny sideshow smooth talk, and an unflappable idealism that is infectious. My wife, whose father worked for one of the Big 3 for 40 years, turned to me at one point and said that, given how they conspired to crush Tucker, the Henry Ford Museum shouldn't be allowed to have one of the few existing Tuckers in their collection on principle. That's how well Bridges does at getting across Tucker as a man and the movie's message about how The American Dream is supposed to encourage innovation and aspiration, not seek to crush it if it inconveniences the powerful. The only problem with all of this is what I alluded to before: Tucker is not a measured biography. It is hero worship in celluloid, an unabashed hagiography that flattens its subject and turns him into the rough sketch of a folk hero. The Preston Tucker of this movie isn't just an idealistic and a dreamer, he's a relentless bulldozer of optimism, to the point of embarrassing obliviousness to the perils and pitfalls around him. He doesn't come off as a driven businessman; he feels like a naive man-child, believing he can make his dreams come true on belief alone, and these are portrayed as virtues, not weaknesses, If Coppola is to be believed, Preston Tucker is so entirely without fault, he isn't just a little guy standing up to the system, he's Jesus Chevrolet, persecuted by Pontius Detroit for preaching the blasphemy of better car design. By the time the movie gets to the climactic court hearing, Tucker delivers his own closing remarks in a speech so naively cloying and whimsical, Tucker the movie ceases being a biography and morphs into a modern Frank Capra/Jimmy Stewart movie. All of this would be slightly more tolerable if somebody, anybody in his sphere (wife, business partner, eldest son, lead designer) served as a pragmatic counter-balance, but not only do they not try to check him, they are in awe every time he pulls a rabbit out of the hat. Everyone in Tucker's life, if this movie is to be believed, existed in a constant state of rapture. Any sense of friction or tension comes from the resistance met by the auto industry itself (and the historically inaccurate treasonous chairman of the board). Tucker never seems to suffer or even feel bummed out; he always finds a way to pull out a win. Nobody seemed to want to tell Coppola or Lucas that it's hard to sympathize with someone who doesn't seem to be affected by anything. If he can't be bothered, why should I? Tucker is the kind of movie you watch for the performances and the innovative cinematography, and as a primer on the topic so you can do some reading for the more complete story. Tucker is entertaining in its own way, entirely on the back of Bridges and the direction, but its shameless, simpering, hero worship renders what could have been a compelling biopic into a flabby, formless fable that uses history as window dressing. I imagine it's hard to make a biopic and not be invested in the subject, but Tucker the movie suffers from the same problem that the Tucker in the movie does: nobody in the creator's orbit had the gumption to say they needed to take off the rose-colored glasses and be a little more reasonable. Loving something doesn't mean ignoring negative aspects to focus on the positive.