Late to the Party: Breach

Billy Ray, the writer-director of Breach and the excellent Shattered Glass, has already carved out a very specific niche for himself. His tightly-wound, politically-engaged movies - not quite meditative enough to be character studies, not quite quick-paced enough to count as thrillers - are shockingly well-crafted, but don't quite qualify as either box-office candy or Oscar-bait (although they should - but I'll get to that in a moment.)

Breach is a step-by-step recounting of the takedown of FBI mole Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper), a computer and information expert who sells state secrets for over $1.4 million to the Russians over a 25-year period. It's told almost exclusively from the point of view of Eric O'Neill (Ryan Phillipe), an agent-in-training who is assigned by a superior (Laura Linney) to shadow Hanssen (under false pretenses) and gather information about his activities. The atmosphere of the movie is a ferocious bummer - half-lit D.C. skies, dank basement offices, fluorescent lights that make everyone look pale and mottled. As with Shattered Glass, Ray creates an atmosphere where mistrust sits like a sticky film on top of everything surrounding Hanssen.

One common problem between both of Ray's movies is a lead actor who can't quite rise to the level of the excellently-written material. Hayden Christensen struggled admirably against his characteristic blandness in Shattered Glass; as disgraced New Republic writer Stephen Glass, he came quite close to capturing a sense of relentless momentum in the face of moral unmooring. Phillipe doesn't fare quite so well. I like his choices as an actor, which have generally been bold and interesting, but here he's a bit blank. In numerous scenes he plays with Cooper, his covering-up lies are so confidently asserted that there isn't any sense of his character's fight to stay afloat in unstable waters.

Cooper, on the other hand, is a godsend. In his hands, Hanssen is as unsettling a cinematic creation as I've ever seen. The true story is more than enough material for any actor to work with - Hanssen was a fiercely conservative Catholic affiliated with Opus Dei, and a porn addict who filmed sexual encounters with his wife and sent them to his friends; a self-styled patriot given to pointing out his own self-abnegations in the service of his country, and an egomaniac willing to sell out secrets and livees in order to prove his own importance. In a lesser actor's hands, this would come off as a multiple-personality disorder. Cooper, though, swallows this toxic, contradictory brew, and never lets too much out. His contempt and resentment (and intelligence) are written across his lemon-puckered face.

In many ways, Breach will service not as a defining movie of the Cold War (where, indeed, Hanssen's worst violations occurred), but of the Bush administration. The landscape of cynical, gun-obsessed company men, sneering at the simpletons working below them, seems to me a richer evocation of the world seen through Dick Cheney's lenses than any straight recounting of that era could possibly give.

In Which Oskar Schindler Punches Foreigners

One of the truly interesting things about Taken, the new joint from Liam Neeson and the guy who made the much-lauded (but as-yet-still-unseen-by-me) French action flick District B-13, is that such a multi-national cast managed to make a movie so wholly rooted in the American tradition of xenophobic paranoia. Neeson plays a negligent ex-CIA dad looking to re-connect with his virginal, estranged daughter (Lost's Maggie Grace), who - in the quickly-dispensed-with exposition - is whisked off from L.A. to Paris by an imprudent friend, and promptly kidnapped (and sold to high-level international pimps) by gangsters of a suitably ominous and anonymous (Albanian!) national origin. Since he's both negligent and ridiculously over-protective, Neeson immediately applies his special CIA freaky-styley to the situation, combating a range of furners (ranging from corrupt French bureaucrats to the henchmen of Arab sheiks), slowly slicing, bashing, and shooting his way down to the guys at the top holding his daughter.

Already, we have a pretty potent array of awesome moral lessons to be taken from Taken:

1) Your shotgun-toting dad, who kept you under lock and key to preserve you from unexpected assaults on your fortress of chastity? Guess what? He was totally right!

2) Any highly-trained American operative has the wherewithal to best dozens of (presumably) moderately-trained brown-skinned sorts in hand-to-hand combat, and the wherewithal to escape unscathed and unarrested from the mayhem he's caused.

3) Torture totally works! (Incidentally, I just figured out what Taken really is: a condensation of the first season of 24! Really! Maggie Grace's character is named "Kim" and everything! How did they not notice this?!)

4) Lastly, do not travel, ever. Instead of heading for the dangers of Western Europe, you're better off staying in that famed idyll of security, Los Angeles.

Despite being regressive, ridiculous, and derivative, I am ashamed to admit that Taken - when taken on its own slightly-odious terms - works like gangbusters. The director, Pierre Morel, obviously knows his way around a heart-pounding, bone crunching flight scene. And Neeson's commitment to this nonsense elevates the movie to a level of quality it doesn't deserve; in this role, his humorlessness and his intensity counterbalance the film's profusion of absurdities. Even while the early expository scenes don't entirely work, the sight of Neeson standing uncomfortably at his daughter's ritzy SoCal birthday party perfectly conveys what's going on. With his unkempt hair, and his ostrich-like, oversized Piers Plowman frame, he projects a sense of being out of place - beyond looking lost amid the party's surface-obsessed excess, he looks like he's been beamed in from a more rigid, righteous historical era.

Guh.

After years upon years of disappointments and hilariously inept choices, I don't know why the Oscar nominations continue to bum me out on an annual basis. It's a fairly widely-held opinion that the Academy Awards are to some extent a system of rewarding the movie-that-most-resembles-an-Oscar-winner ("social issues" are addressed; somebody dies in some sort of slow, noble fashion; broad themes are telegraphed to the audience at an earsplitting volume.)

Maybe it was last year's bumper crop, with the eminently worthy (and, not for nothing, entirely harrowing and un-uplifting) No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood taking nods; even the big swooshy "Oscar" movie (Atonement) was actually really, really good. This year, there is one inexplicably overpraised favorite (Slumdog), the best biopic in a decade (which isn't saying much, but still: Milk is pretty solid), a tony filmed play that everyone likes but no one loves (Frost/Nixon? Really?), and two movies that almost everyone seems to have the same "eh" reaction to (Benjamin Button and The Reader). There were a couple of masterpieces this year: Rachel Getting Married is a genuinely new-looking film, and has better performances on average than any other movie I can think of this year; and WALL-E is nothing short of a minor miracle - a kids' film which teeters on the edge of a really scathing pessimism, and had the balls to stage its first act as a Chaplinesque silent love story.

Jungles & Jungles & Jungles

I was lucky enough to see Steven Soderbergh's Che in its "Roadshow" iteration last night, which was a little surprising. The "Roadshow" screenings consist of both halves of the film (which are separate narratives, if pretty similar in tone) shown back-to-back with an intermission; it's a total of 4 1/2 hours for the whole shebang. I say it was surprising because outside of the annual film fest, nothing cool in cinema ever happens here in Philly. The Ritz chickened out on showing David Lynch's 3-hour Inland Empire a year or two ago, and it's generally moved toward extra-middlebrow fare after being bought up by Landmark Theatres.

A four-and-a-half hour film viewing experience might seem like a particularly purposeful act of masochism, especially when that film comes with the buzz that Che does - it's resolutely un-entertaining and detail-focused, with the big action set-pieces interrupted by revolutionary-theorizing voice-overs. (Although it would have been quite the different film, you can picture what one-time director - and voiceover obsessive - Terrence Malick might have done with this movie.) The long slog, however, gives the film its full hypnotizing power; you feel yourself drifting away a little at the beginning, but by the second part you've acclimated to the meticulous rhythms of the movie and you lose your desire for (indeed, expectation of) the big payoff.

So - where does the virtue lie in making a film this long, with this little "human interest"? The real miracle of Che is its dismantling of the endlessly-noted irony of Guevara's posthumous career: that a man who preached subsuming yourself into a revolutionary cause has become far more widely loved and glorified than the cause itself. Soderbergh's film doesn't have much to say about the practicality of Che's politics or the moral character of his operating methods. It endorses his view of the Latin American dictators as brutish oligarchs, but it doesn't leave you with any certainty that Che's government is going to be any better (Castro plays a big part in the first movie, and his mercurial jitteriness leaves you uneasy every time he's onscreen.)

Soderbergh's achievement, then, isn't ideological on a macro level, but it recues the practical dignity of Che's achievement from the relentless iconography that he's been made subject to. In particular, Benicio del Toro's amazing performance gives us the flip-side to Gael Garcia Bernal's in the Motorcycle Diaries; Bernal gave us the utopian dreamer and the extraordinary empathizer, while del Toro restores the relentless focus on unlocking the means to a revolutionary end. Apart from the often-stunning visuals - Soderbergh's work here is superlative - the closest Che comes to uttering anything remotely poetic is in the second half, when Che tells a young guerilla that the only way to win is to become "human waste." This is the film's vision, too, and it's a testament to the completeness of the director's and del Toro's vision that this doesn't make Che any less extraordinary; it just makes him that much closer to ourselves.

You Should Probably Watch Creature Comforts

It's like This American Life meets the California Raisins. God bless Aardman.

DH Riley Reviews: The Assasins' Gate: America in Iraq, by George Packer

If you're an American, it's pretty likely that you're completely confused by the actions of your government over the past five years. You may support the war in Iraq, you may vote Republican - maybe you have that Weekly Standard pin-up centerfold of Paul Wolfowitz stuck to your bedroom wall. Even so, I can't believe that anyone, anywhere has a completely coherent explanation for why we went to war in Iraq in the way that we did. The policy has been sort of an ugly mash-up of neoconservative idealism, post-Cold-warrior aggression, and - just occasionally - genuine humanitarianism.

Packer puts the pieces together better than anyone else I've read. As the Iraq correspondent for the New Yorker, he's officially broken the record for the number of consecutive "how the hell did he get that written?" articles in that magazine. The Assassins' Gate is partially an attempt to frame those articles in a deeper context, a panoptic viewing of the false assumptions, ham-handed mismanagement, and mutual distrust that brought us to where we are in Iraq. More than anybody writing for the purportedly liberal-elite media, Packer gets inside the heads of folks like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, who genuinely believed in the possibility of instant democracy in the Middle East. At one point in Kuwait before the war, a Rumsfeld appointee hushes an intense conversation about reconstructing Iraq's civil society by saying "We don't owe the people of Iraq anything. We're giving them their freedom. That's enough." In eradicating a totalitarian state, we assumed that democratic institutions would naturally fill the vaccuum. Why? Who knows. We read too much John Locke in graduate school, maybe.

In any event, Packer gives a lot of personal thrust to this book - because of his convincing conversations with Iraqi exiles and their accounts of the brutality of Saddam's regime, he's for the war to begin with. He still believes the war is winnable (or at least I think so - the book was written almost two years ago, a lifetime in Iraqi politics these days.) It's also pretty obvious what he thinks of the gross incompetence of the men appointed to make things work in Iraq. Overwhelmingly composed of partisan hacks and Republican bureaucrats, the reconstruction team sets out to finish Rumsfeld's war the way he wants it fought - light, on the cheap, and quickly. This works for at least a month, and then it's downhill from there. Instead of being
responsible for some notion of success or security in Iraq, Bremer and Tommy Franks are held accountable for toeing the line on terrible ideas like debaathification and failing to police Baghdad in the wake of the invasion. No one speaks Arabic; no one knows much about Iraq to begin with - but they do believe in free markets, so there's that.

Packer invests so much time and space in explaining the pro-war rationale that there are tinges of sympathy in his book; he dismisses the legitimate anti-war and Democratic opposition as unserious, which I think is unfair. I don't think a ton of people oppose humanitarian intervention in every circumstance, but there's a perfectly good case to be made that as odious as Saddam was, March 2003 just wasn't the right time to mount a unilateral invasion of an Arab nation. Even with vastly more competent people in charge of the war, I think it still goes to hell at some point, but the US failing the tests over and over and over again certainly didn't help.

The Assassins' Gate will eventually be remembered, I think, as the journalistic classic of the Iraq War. Aside from the top-level stuff I've alreay mentioned, there are great tidbits from Iraqi businessmen, politicians, students, and refugees; the book truly is a distillation of the war from every possible angle. It's a pleasure to read, and it's absolutely essential for anyone who wants to understand the weird places America's been during the Bush years.
know whos

From the Dept. of I Do Not Think That Means What You Think It Means

From Herr Simmons today:

...the overmatched player's union -- led by Billy Hunter and Patrick Ewing, who shouldn't have been trusted to handle a bake sale at an elementary school, much less a labor dispute -- had their ensalada tossed by David Stern...

I hope Messrs. Hunter and Ewing enjoyed themselves, to say the least.