The 11th Green: Oddball Time-Travelling Drama Captures Paranoid Political Moment
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
Independent filmmaker Christopher Munch’s new film The 11th Green is a fitting subject for the ultra- paranoid political moment. This eccentric, low-budget science-fiction allegory offers a conspiracy theory buffet, including an alternative history of the post-War United States that involves the military and intelligence community’s Deep State, Area 51 aliens, and summits between time-travelling presidents.
The film is framed by a naturalistic investigative journalism story starring Campbell Scott as Jeremy Rudd, an old-school investigative reporter for a Washington-based outfit. Along with his partner Lila (April Grace), Jeremy operates a Democracy Now-style left-wing news outlet. Jeremy, who hammers out stories on a typewriter to avoid having his files hacked (and checks rental cars for bombs from his enemies) is on a hot story about the military providing new “anti-gravity” technology to the private sector.
Jeremy is dragged into the heart of the intrigue by the sudden death of his long-estranged father (Monte Markham), a former military brass who lived in a Southern California timber-and-glass edifice known as Valhalla, set on a golf course (thus the movie’s title). The palatial modernist pile was once a hangout for top military and spies, including President Eisenhower in his retirement.
Jeremy soon meets the comely Laurie Larkspur (Agnes Bruckner), a computer whiz who held the job as his dad’s personal assistant. Despite their considerable age gap, and Jeremy’s caution, Jeremy and Laurie fall into a quick romantic connection. Laurie helps him arrange a cocktail party/wake for his father’s old military friends.
As the booze flows (the drink is Eisenhauer’s favourite cocktail known as a “Transfusion”), lots of secrets and hostilities emerge. At one point, Jeremy gets punched in the eye by a racist, right-wing former U.S. Airforce head (David Clennon). He is also eagerly befriended by Larry (Currie Graham) a former spy, over-anxious to reveal op-secret film footage of disk-shaped objects in the sky.
Back at home in Washington, the pragmatic Lila issues some warnings: Be wary of romantic entanglements and, especially, any credibility-killing mention of flying saucers.
The 11th Green is presented in a deadpan, naïve tone of a fifties’ B-movie or a low-budget X-Files knock-off. The smeary sci-fi effects are deliberately hokey, in contrast to the authentic home movies and newsreel footage. Indeed, the sci-fi story is a kind of feint.
The serious subject here isn’t aliens, but the concentration of dark powers by the U.S. military state and intelligence agencies, a nightmare promoted by left-wingers like The Intercept’s Glen Greenwald and the loony right of Infowars’ Alex Jones.
In practice, paranoia gets exhausting and the solemn absurdity of The 11th Green wears out its welcome. We soon find ourselves in the midst of a time-portal summit that somehow materializes between Dwight Eisenhower (George Gerdes) and the movie’s contemporary lame-duck president, Barack Obama. (He isn’t called Barack Obama, though that’s who is impeccably impersonated by Leith Burke.)
The Obama president wants to know what Ike can tell him about the “ET Deep State,” about the pact between “the Visitors” and the military “backroom boys.” Like every president since the war, he wants to spill the top-secret beans, but the powers that be are too strong.
The aliens, who only appear in human male form, are apparently benign, if excessively passive in their attempts to steer our planet away from disasters. In some scenes, the two presidents are joined by another figure, an androgynous Jesus-like hippie (Tom Stokes) who drones a message of peace and promises that all will be revealed when humans are ready.
Writer/director Munch has previously shown a proclivity for deadpan explorations of tabloid subjects. His first and best-known film is The Hours and Times (1991) a speculative drama about John Lennon’s 1963 trip to Barcelona with his gay manager, Brian Epstein. His sixth and most recent, Letters From the Big Man (2011) traced the relationship between a woman forest worker and a Sasquatch.
The grimmer aspect of The 11th Green includes a subplot about the film’s dedicatee, James Forrestal (played in a few scenes by Ian Hart) who in 1947 became the first U.S. secretary of defense. Shortly after being fired by Truman, while under psychiatric care, Forrestal fell to his death from a hospital window. Earl Morris’s documentary Netflix series, Wormwood, among other sources over the decades, have speculated he was the victim of a CIA assassination.
The truth, presumably, is out there… just not quite this far out.
The 11th Green. Written and directed by Christopher Munch. Starring Campbell Scott, Agnes Bruckner, George Gerdes, Ian Hart and Currie Graham. Tickets for The 11th Green can be purchased here.