It’s getting harder to coopt reality for entertainment. Columnist Ross Douthat proposes a Dominique Strauss-Kahn epic—“one of those sprawling, complex, kaleidoscope-of-globalization movies that aspire to Oscar glory. Think ‘Traffic’ or ‘Syriana,’ ‘Crash’ or ‘Babel’”—but he has the wrong genre.
The boffo box office gold may be in a remake of low comedy.
Imagine the poster for the 1988 flick “Twins”–identically dressed Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito leaning against each other, and then put in the head of Strauss-Kahn for DeVito’s.
The script practically writes itself: Two disparate self-made Europeans in their early 60s suddenly find, in the words of the old Spy Magazine, they were “separated at birth” and are dramatically reunited by revelations that they share DNA to make headline dicks of themselves at the height of fame and wealth.
The parallels are remarkable. Both marry women journalists from rich and aristocratic families—a Kennedy TV newswoman and the daughter of a wealthy French family described as “a combination of Charlie Rose and Barbara Walters” by Elie Wiesel, for whom one of the Strauss-Kahn children is named.
Both come a cropper in encounters with housemaids…