The Passion of Ayn Rand

by Les Phillips

The Passion of Ayn Rand was worth waiting for. Of course I would have preferred a big-budget musical, starring Barbra Streisand (Anthony Hopkins as Lenin? Keanu Reeves as William F. Buckley, Jr.? Leonardo DiCaprio as the young Alan Greenspan?). I guess part of me had also hoped for some extravaganza of overacting and bad taste. What I got instead was a surprisingly good movie. The screenplay seemed pretty close to Barbara Branden's book, and the acting, I thought, was quite good. I don't think it's any particular trick for an actress to portray Ayn Rand (subtlety would be wasted) but Helen Mirren got some playfulness in, when needed, and was appropriately dominatrix-like in the big rage scenes without going over the top. I thought Julie Delpy was particularly good as Barbara - played as a "nice girl" in over her head morally and emotionally - and I'm glad the screenplay made the movie, in essence, her story. Peter Fonda played Rand's doormat husband, Frank O'Connor, with nuance and dignity.

For the uninitiated: The film concentrates on Rand's relationship with her "intellectual heir" Nathaniel Branden, particularly their love affair (both spouses were essentially told that Rationality required their accepting the situation), and the volcanic Rand-eruption which occurred when Branden tried to break off the affair.

I think I'm a little too close to the material to know whether the film is plausible. But I think both the book and the film share a problem: Barbara Branden seems to want to communicate, quite sincerely, that she thought AR was a brilliant intellectual and in some ways a great human being, but she also can't help but show the megalomaniac and destructive side of her character, and (though she doesn't say so) can't help but signal the hurt and rage she must feel at the damage Rand did her (with her own acquiescence, to be sure). The book was full of sympathy and even worship. The film begins and ends with Barbara Branden essentially venerating Herself at Her grave. Yet in the film particularly the picture of Rand is distinctly unpretty: the scenes that establish her brilliance or sympathetic nature get pretty short shrift (having bit players walk into the movie for the purpose of saying, "Wow, Miss Rand, you changed my life" doesn't make up for this very well) and the scenes of Rand as monstrous autocrat/adulterer are of course quite well developed and staged. Rand's own ironic term for her closest colleagues/followers was The Collective. The term resonates after the scene in which Branden is made to confess his sins and misdeeds before an audience at the Nathaniel Branden Institute - Rand's very own Stalinist purge and show trial!

Nathaniel Branden comes off as a bit of a playboy as well, much more so than in the book, from what I can recall. Of course he's also being played by Eric Stoltz. If Eric Stoltz and Julie Delpy did in fact spend their time giving philosophical lectures at some night school, people probably would show up to hit on them with great regularity. One doubts that the actual Nathaniel and Barbara were as successful in this regard as the movie indicates.

Thirty to forty years ago there was a lot more smoking, and a lot more smoking in public places, and Ayn Rand smoked a lot, but today it's still a little jarring to see people smoking while they're giving philosophical lectures.

One last incongruous note - the movie (mostly shot in Toronto) begins with shots of retro-forties/fifties Manhattan against a suave jazz soundtrack. I don't usually associate suave jazz with Ayn Rand, and I don't think she had any interest in jazz. Nice music though.

 

CineScene, 1999