Andrzej Wajda's new film Walesa: Man of Hope is a biography poised between critical historiography and hagiography. It presents Walesa as canny but (comically) arrogant and seemingly uneducated except by his experience, and it poses the question, who is the real hero, Walesa himself as Solidarity's leader or the social movement of which he was a part? With the closing scene, Wajda abandons all efforts at a critical perspective, which in any case were during the previous two hours entirely focused on questions of biography, the larger setting of the conflict between the state apparatus and its functionaries and the striking workers (to my mind the more interesting aspect of the film; documentary newsreels are seamlessly mixed with recreations involving the title character and some clips from the far-superior Man of Iron, similarly a semi-documentary but made while the events were in progress) having been simplified into obviousness. The film ends with Walesa appearing to speak before an adulatory US Congress and saying something about freedom. By invoking the central ideolegeme of the United States and its empire, which appropriated the consequences of the workers' revolution in Poland as constituting its own triumph in the Cold War, an ideology's that, notwithstanding its real if limited truth, is usually wielded in an empty and cynical manner (as it had been in attacking third world movements for socialism and national liberation in the name of countering the power of the USSR), Wajda plays into the hands of a regime that he like many Eastern Europeans understandably prefers, perhaps because the Poles were effectively occupied by the Russians, unlike, for example, the people of Vietnam or Chile. Communism was not ended by a great man, neither Walesa nor Pope John Paul nor Gorbachev nor Reagan, but by the struggles of Polish workers, and later the peoples of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere who followed them, and the film does acknowledge this, presenting Walesa as as much an embattled figurehead as anything. The great comic irony is that in a self-proclaimed worker's state it was the workers who brought about change; this was a worker's revolution in a society built on the lie that it was based on one. You want a worker's state? We'll show you worker's power! But this film has too much to say about one man and not enough about history and politics. Though Walesa says at least one very interesting thing in his interview with the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, herself a celebrity: he became an activist because all his life he has been angry, and paradoxically his anger, which he never really displays in the film, though he does show resolve and determination, gave him, he reports, the ability to master all kinds of situations and to be a leader. He says some cynical thinks about the leader's relationship to the people he leads; there are faint hints in this film of a critical perspective on Poland after the end of Communism, but even more than the events depicted on the screen, these are entirely filtered through the character of one man, who is tragically flawed in ways that happily prove comic. This is an excellent film about the struggle of the Polish workers against the Communist state, and a merely very interesting one about this one great man. Since everyone agrees that he is that, this portrait of him may have some value and some appeal. Thank God Walesa isn't shown to be perfect; great men and women rarely are, and perhaps when we advance to the point that all people showing signs of alienation mixed with resolve and creativity are caught in early childhood and sent to therapists for behavioral correction, maybe then people will have to make history without extraordinary leaders. Maybe his flawed character is the reason his role in these events was different from that of the Pope. The film also is notable for showing a busy political leader whose pretty wife mainly wants to live an ordinary life, and knows that politics and everyday life are in principle incompatible.