If these new films are coming at social upheaval by indirection, they are behaving in a way typical of American movies. During the divisive Vietnam War, few Hollywood films addressed the conflict overtly. Important pictures about Vietnam -- Coming Home, The Deer Hunter and Platoon among them -- were made years after the war ended. But you could sense the rebelliousness, nihilism and despair of the era in such films as Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch and Easy Rider.
Non-American films are far more likely to tackle volatile subjects with directness and dispatch. Shortly after the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan, director Siddiq Barmak made Osama, a drama about the regime's oppression of women.
A new Spanish documentary, Zahira's Peace, about a survivor of the Madrid train bombings last year, is already on national television in Spain. American moviemakers and studio executives have always been slower to respond to social unrest, perhaps out of fear that controversy will scare away audiences. So hot-button issues find their way into our films circuitously.
Of course, the current movies were often shaped by their directors' experiences with grief. Dan Harris, the writer-director of Imaginary Heroes, lost his mother, an aunt and a cousin in a short period of time, and what he endured was not at all what he had observed in the movies.
"In movies you see neighbors bringing over soup," Harris wrote in an e-mail message from Australia, where he is working on the final script of the new Superman movie for Warner Brothers. "I saw women walk up to me, stare me directly in the eyes and run away crying. I've heard about women hitting on men at the funeral of their wives. Tragedies have this amazing ability to make people lose their sense of appropriateness, and I wanted to capture the unpredictability of people's response."
Bereft marks the directorial debut of the actor Tim Daly, who also co-stars in the film with Tim Blake Nelson, Marsha Mason and Edward Herrmann. Daly said that the movie drew on his still-
unresolved feelings about the sudden death of his father, the actor James Daly, more than two decades ago.
"It's an odd world you find when you are grief-stricken," Daly observed. "My dad died the day we were to begin rehearsals for a summer stock production of Equus, which was my first professional job. Within two days we had the funeral, and I came back and went to work in the play. It wasn't until six months later that I fell apart. In making the movie, I wanted to suggest that grieving is a longer and deeper emotional experience than people sometimes acknowledge."
Harris saw parallels between the family in Imaginary Heroes and the country at large.
"In the late 90s, everything seemed great," he said. "But the world was hanging by a thread, the same way the Travis family is hanging in balance at the beginning of the film. Tragedy strikes in both cases, and everything spills into a sense of anger, hate and vengeance. The family in our film ultimately starts healing. I don't know when that's going to happen in this world. One thing I do know is that our country is like a family, and we're a bit dysfunctional right now."
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