The Debt (Tuesday, September 27, 2011) (83)

This is an American update of a little-known Israeli film from a few years ago. It's a story about a Massad group from the '60s who was supposed to kill a Nazi doctor but actually botched the job. They said they did the job, and thought they got away with it, until there is a small possibility that their lie might get out. They try to fix the job, but that opens up all sorts of other ethical questions that had previously been closed. It's basically The Man who Shot Liberty Valance, but if Ransom Stoddard had tried to make it right with Tom Doniphon for no particular reason. It's a good movie, but not a great one. It does continue Jessica Chastain's amazing year of acting (this time she's a ginger Jewess! Sigh.). It's a bit better than meh, and hurt mostly by it's moral grayness.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Robber (Tuesday, April 26, 2011) (25)

I hate movies that open with titles saying that they are based on true events. Most things that happen to most people are really dull and mundane and the idea of something being "ripped from the headlines" is overstated. After all, film is a creative art and something that has many hands touching it. A representation of a real event is no more real than a fantasy film of other wolds and unknown sciences. I see such caveats as a shield beneath which bad writers and directors generally hide. It's easy for someone to say, "well, you didn't like that section, but that's how it really happened, so you can't complain." This is stupid. Regardless of the genesis of a story, it has to be compelling and interesting to viewers. The Robber is based on a true story, but is neither compelling nor interesting. It's one of the dullest films I've seen in awhile and totally unoriginal.

This true story is about Johann Rettenberger (Andreas Lust), who is serving time in jail for a botched bank robbery and is also an avid runner and marathoner. When he gets out of jail he begins training as a runner and stealing cars and robbing banks. He surprises everyone by winning the Vienna Marathon as an amateur (not one of those guys who starts ahead of the pack) and then goes off an robs another bank.

He continues to train and rob banks (and carjack people to get getaway vehicles). He moves in with a social worker who he knows from the past and they begin a torrid affair. She catches on to his dealings but loves him so much that she helps him get away (several times). If he's caught, he escapes... and, of course, he's really good at running away from cops (get it?!).

This film is very... Austrian. It's absolutely humorless, there's a very clinical, cold sex scene (the social worker girlfriend, played by Franziska Weisz is actually quite comely), it plods along with no twists or surprises, it has no score and aside from a washed-out palette, it has no flashy visual/optical techniques. Writer/director Benjamin Heisenberg actually has one very nice shot as he shows the beginning of an ultramarathon from a great distance. All you see is a small village in darkness in the middle of the night, and slowly a line of headlamps the runners are wearing coming up the road.

Lust is good, but the character is barely two-dimensional. He has only two interests in life: running and bank robbing. He seems compelled to rob banks the way an alcoholic is compelled to drink. It's something he does and he doesn't really look to stop doing it. He never shows remorse or guilt, gets upset with the girl when she discovers him and bolts. There's nothing in this film to grab a hold of. The story is so dispassionate that it's hard to feel anything for any of the characters really.

I've always thought of movies about thieves to be some of the most fun and romantic. Bresson's Pickpocket, Penn's Bonnie and Clyde and Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven are all fun to watch (and learn from) and simple, beautiful love stories (well, less so with O11, but there's that thing between Clooney and Roberts). This is not really a romance at all - it's just an unfeeling look at what one guy did at some point in time in Austria. You would get more emotion out of a newspaper article about the guy.

It's a totally boring, cold story that doesn't give any perspective into a greater human context, let alone Johannes's character. This film is a binary sketch of some events that once happened. Who cares?

Stars: 1 of 4

Carlos (Sunday, October 17, 2010) (136)

Just a quick note about this film before I begin: I saw the full three-part 5.5-hour version of this film. I know there is a shorter 2.5-hour version of it and I cannot comment on that. All I will say is that I can't imagine it would be improved by being shorter and I do think it would run the risk of truncating some of the longer-format story development. Having seen the full version, I don't know what could be obviously cut out. I'm sure one could pull out several chapters from a long book and read them and enjoy them, but that would not be tantamount to reading the whole book.

Carlos, directed by Olivier Assayas and written by Dan Franck and Assayas, is a very long and beautiful film. It follows the life of Carlos the Jackal, a 1970s-era super terrorist whose life story is almost a high crimes and espionage version of Forrest Gump. He was directly involved in or very closely connected to some of the major terrorist crimes of the late 1960s and 1970s. Born in Caracas, he was educated in Moscow and ultimately in London. He ultimately got involved with the group called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was trained in their camps in the Middle East and ultimately rose up their ranks through a series of violent crimes.

The first part of the film follows Carlos as he beings his work with the PFLP and gains traction with an assorted band of Leftists (from the Japanese Red Army to the German Revolutionary Cells). They are basically the gang that can't shoot straight and despite their devotion to the liberation of Palestinians and anti-Zionist rhetoric, they mostly screw up their attacks, rather than executing them well. This doesn't stop Carlos who is wildly self-impressed and sees himself as one of the most significant people in the political world of the era.

The second part of the film shows the gang's highest profile job, taking over and kidnapping the 1975 OPEC meeting. This was a job paid for by Saddam Hussein in an effort to wrest control of the organization away from the Saudis and bring it closer to Baghdad. After the get-away was bungled by Carlos, he was demoted by PFLP head Wadie Haddad. It was because of this demotion that Carlos was not involved in the PFLP hijacking of a plane that ended in Entebbe, Uganda (an operation that was also screwed up).

The third part of the film focuses on Carlos trying re-group and operate is organization from Budapest. He was becoming more and more a mercenary-for-hire, once taking a meeting with the KGB and top officials from the Iraqi regime to organize the assassination of Anwar Sadat of Egypt. Ultimately Carlos found no safe harbor and after he was booted from Hungary (who had previously turned their back on the fellow communist comrade) and then Syria, he moved to Sudan, where he was ultimately captured by French officials.

Assayas' story here is really about a wild psychopathic narcissist. The film opens with Carlos (played beautifully by Edgar Ramirez) posing naked in the mirror and marveling over his beautiful body. He continues this self-love throughout the film (despite his ever-growing and shrinking waistline), never catching on to the outside world's feelings about him, never self-aware enough to know how his friends and allies fear or hate him. Sadly, there is not a lot of depth to the character development throughout the film. Carlos is in the end exactly what he was at the beginning, a self-diluted maniac with a strong self-righteous streak of violence.

Technically the film is beautiful. The photography by Yorick Le Saux and Denis Lenoir is beautiful and moves beautifully from the slightly richer palette of the late 1960s (somewhat reminiscent of New Wave films of the era) to the more washed out colors of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Assayas also uses a rock 'n' roll soundtrack throughout the film, frequently employing punk rock to convey an emotion and not just a time marker. When we hear The Dead Boys' "Sonic Reducer" played over a montage of Carlos' gang getting ready for an attack, it's more an aesthetic connection to wildness, freedom and youth (Carlos was only in his mid-20s at the time) than it is a time marker of the late 1970s.

Somewhere in the moments between part 2 and part 3, Carlos' tone changes a bit and he becomes a bit darker than he had been before. This is a bit of a shock and makes this guy who is previously very charismatic and compelling into a supreme self-centered asshole. He speaks nonstop of himself in glowing terms, not realizing that by this point, in the late 1970s, he has already become almost totally forgotten.

There is an interesting scene that takes place in Damascus in the early 1990s where Carlos goes on a diatribe about how George H.W. Bush is out to ruin him, to which one of his friends explains that they are dinosaurs and have been entirely relegated to history books. This scene is particularly reminiscent of the scene in Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall, where Hitler is planning on his final attack against the allies, to which his generals and associates have to tell him that the war is lost. Carlos is so wrapped up in his own cult of personality (to which he is the only subscriber), that he has lost track of the fact that he is no longer a political radical, but merely a former thug who won't throw in the towel.

Throughout the film I was struck by the similarities in how Assayas dealt with Carlos' psychopathology and how David Fincher dealt with Mark Zuckerberg's sociopathology in The Social Network (whether he is or is not a sociopath, I think Fincher presents him as one). Both directors gave us fully formed psyches in their lead characters right out of the gate. These are characters who never totally grow or change much throughout their stories. Clearly Zuckerberg was not as dark and violent as Carlos, but both of them are diluted by their own strong feelings of themselves. In both cases we see the characters at the end almost exactly as they were when the films began. I think this is a bit of a disappointment in both cases. I would have preferred to see some growth or development in each one. Perhaps this is the nature of such character disorders, that they don't change much, but it doesn't make for the most interesting film.

What this film did very well, though, was to tell a very long and complex story in a very straightforward, beautiful way. We are never confused about who different characters are and what their motives are. Considering the grand scope of the picture, it is impressive that everything makes perfect sense.

Stars: 3 of 4

The Town (Friday, September 17, 2010) (117)

The Town is Ben Affleck's latest Boston-based crime/action film and much like his last film, Gone Baby Gone, it is adapted from a novel by him (and a few others). Having not read the (Prince of Theives by Chuck Hogan) it is hard to say whether what is wrong with the script is Affleck's fault or if some of the problems are also in the novel. What is clear is that this is a decent film with a really bad, facile script that I've seen a million times.

Part of the problem with the film is that there are just too many parts to the story. Doug (Affleck) is a bank robber who lives in Charlestown, Boston, a neighborhood known for producing some of the most prolific thieves and criminals in the area. He and his best friend Jem (Jeremy Renner) along with a few friends have a successful operation, knocking off banks in the Boston region. At one point when a robbery goes wrong they kidnap bank manager, Claire (Rebecca Hall) only to let her go a few blocks away. Once they discover she lives around the corner from them, Doug moves in to romance her and try to find out what she saw of them during the stick up. Of course the two fall in love and begin dating.

Meanwhile the gang is being pursued by FBI agent Adam Frawley who is hot on their heels, but always comes up just short. He basically has no leads on them, but they make his job easier and easier by continuing to rob places under his nose. There are a few other sorta dumb and unnecessary plot items: Blake Lively plays Jem's sister who has had an on-again-off-again thing with Doug and has a young kid who is maybe Doug's kid, but probably isn't; Pete Postlethwaite is some sort of mob/gang boss who organizes the robberies and then hands them off to Doug; Chris Cooper plays Doug's dad who is in jail also for robbing banks.

Mostly this is just a really messy story with way too much going on. At it's core, it is pretty dull fare that is not all that interesting. Doug is hiding his identity from Claire in a pretty pitiful way - and we watch knowing that at some point the truth will come out and ruin the relationship. There is a thing with the "one last score" that Doug and Jem will run before Doug retires from his criminal life and moves to Florida where he can spend his stolen money alone. Ugh. (Oh - and sorry to ruin it, but the last score is in Fenway Park - possibly the holiest place in Boston. Nothing like being careful. What a dumb mess.)

I think the acting is pretty good throughout the film, despite the silliness of the story. Rebecca Hall is very good and pretty sympathetic. We see her getting bamboozled into her relationship with Doug and know that she's just a victim of her own situation. Affleck is also good, though his character is much more straightforwardly dull.

The film moves pretty well, but is just so recycled that it becomes frustrating. Did Doug never watch movies as a kid and see that the "one last score" is never as easy as it sounds? If he doesn't have that perspective and I do, why do I have to watch him making the same mistakes I've seen hundreds of times before in other movies and books?

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Mesrine: The Killer Instinct (Saturday, August 28, 2010) (109)

The Killer Instinct is the first of a two-part biopic on French super criminal Jacques Mesrine who tore across France and Quebec from the late 1950s through the 1970s robbing banks, kidnapping billionaires and killing scores of people.

The story opens as Mesrine (Vincent Cassel) is in Algeria in the late 1950s torturing a few insurgents along with his fellow French soldiers. When he gets back from the war, his loving father has arranged a nice, respectable job for him in a factory. He wants none of this and falls back in with his childhood best buddy, Paul, who introduces him to crime-boss Guido (Gerard Depardieu).

Mesrine stars running small jobs for Guido (robbing houses, beating up rogue pimps) and builds his reputation and his lust for blood and violence. At some point he goes to Spain with Paul and knocks up a woman there who he marries and has three kids with. Ultimately he has to leave France on the lam and ends up in Montreal with his new girlfriend Jeanne. There they keep robbing, kidnapping and killing, ultimately getting caught and locked up in maximum security prison. Mesrine breaks out, of course, and then returns to the prison to take out his frustrations on the warden.

More than a proper narrative, the story is simply a string of action pieces, one leading to the next, leading to the next. There is very little motivation for these sequences. Mostly he commits a crime, gets away from it, and just when you think he'd be wise to stop, he commits another crime - as if addicted to the thrill. Characters come and go with little explanation (only minutes after his wife leaves him to return to Spain, we meet Jeanne who picks up with him on a robbery with no explanation), and locations change dramatically from one moment to the next.

Vincent Cassel is good in the role, however the writing of the character is so limited there's not very much for him to work with. We never really understand what drives Mesrine or what he gets out of the violence. We see that he gets bored with a simple domestic lifestyle, but we never totally understand why he does what he does. Depardieu is also a good enough actor to make Guido work enough, but in the end he is just another banal "type" - the crime boss - and not really three-dimensional.

Director Jean-Francois Richet has some very elegant moving camera moments and adds some rather nice touches to the work. At moments in the early going of the film, it feels like we're watching Goodfellas. We see the back-room deals that run the crime world and see the access that criminals have in Paris (especially with pimps and whores). What follows is mostly fun, but it's all over the place and hard to follow. I would hope the second film will have a bit more structure and a bit more insight. At least it will have a lot more Ludivine Sagnier. Thank god for that!

Stars: 2 of 4

Inception (Saturday, Jul 17, 2010) (77)

Inception is a complicated, but beautifully presented blockbuster that is a lot of fun to watch, but is a bit too clever and a bit too neat and tidy in the end. What we get is a very interesting puzzle-world where we follow three coincidental stories involving a group of people as they move between different layers of consciousness and dreams.

Dom Cobb (Leo Dicaprio) does what is called "extraction," where he is paid to go into people's dreams and steal things from deep inside their subconscious. He works with a team of people including an "architect" and a fixer. The architect designs the world that this "group dream" takes place in - the spaces and buildings of the world in the dream, so the extractor can interact with the subject in a more predictable dream space. The fixer is there to assist the extractor in anything he needs done inside the dream.

The dreamer subject would be unaware the extraction is occurring, but just think they're in a normal dream of their own. In order to go into the dream world, all the team members have to be sleeping and dreaming themselves - but, of course, this shared dream state is really their office... and it can get rather hairy.

As the extraction goes along, the subject gains more and more sense that the dream is not really their own. Their subconscious begins to put up boundaries so at some point all the people in the dream begin looking at the extractor and his team or actually fighting him (especially if that person has had training to guard against extraction - which rich and important people do). Ultimately the world of the dream, the world the architect has built, will begin to crumble, killing the people in the dream and waking them up (if you die in a dream, you wake up).

On top of this, sometimes the extraction requires going into a dream inside the dream, a meta-dream, for secrets that are hidden even deeper in one's brain. As the team goes to the second level the timing of the world slows down, so what is a minute in the real world, becomes five minutes in the first level of the dream, which becomes 25 minutes in the second level of the dream. The deeper dream level, the more unstable the architecture of that world is and more violent the people in the dream world become.

As the film opens, Cobb is working on an extraction from Saito (Ken Watanabe), a rich Japanese industrialist. On his team is his right-hand man and primary fixer, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Saito is testing their abilities and trying to find their weaknesses. It turns out he has a job for Cobb and his crew. He wants to make a business rival sell him the competing company. To do this, Cobb and his team must do the opposite of what they normally do. Rather than extracting an idea, they have to plant one - a process called inception.

Apparently this is something that extractors have worked but never achieved. It's the most powerful way of harnessing the power of dream control, but because of human psychology, it is very hard to do. Cobb and his team hire a new architect, Ariadne (Ellen Page) who is a gifted American student in Paris. They hire a "forger," Eames (Tom Hardy), whose job it is to forge documents in the real world, but also create fake devices in deeper dream worlds. They also hire a chemist who can give them a strong tranquilizer so they can sleep deep enough to get down three levels of dreams (an extremely unstable level of the psyche), Yusuf (Dileep Rao).

Everything goes swimmingly until Cobb's now-deceased wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard) haunts his subconscious and corrupts the dreams that he and the team share with the subject. As he tries to plant the idea of selling his company in the subconscious of billionaire Robert Fischer, Jr. (Cillian Murphy), he and his team have to fight Fischer's own defenses as well as the roadblocks Cobb and Mal put in the way. One unlucky twist is that if you die in a dream while under significant sedation, rather than simply waking up you drop into a deep world of "limbo" where you can live for decades with no hope of returning.

This is clearly a complex world filled with a long list of rules and contingencies to those guidelines. Every time you think you have figured out what is going on, there is another bump that re-confuses you. This method of storytelling also feels like a bit of a gimmick - that you're never really comfortable and writer-director Christopher Nolan always has three thoughts ahead of you. It's beautiful in the way a finely woven tapestry is, but it's a bit overdone. I think we would have been fine with a bit of a less baroque narrative. I think much of the detail and embellishment is showy and beside the main point of the story. (I fully realize this is a stupid argument on my part - that the story is complex is what it is... but it felt a bit like gilding the lily...)

Ever since I saw this movie, I have been trying to figure out if it's a really slick and smart movie or if it's just a gimmicky puzzle where once you figure it out, the fun is lost and it becomes pedestrian. It is a lot of fun and seems "intellectual", but I don't know how worthwhile it is. I tend to think it's more of a game that becomes humdrum the more you think about it. I don't think Nolan is really "saying" anything. I think it might just be fun and it's my mistake for making more of it than that.

The film is really great on a technical level. The look of the work is very smart, sexy and refined. Nolan works well with frequent collaborator, cinematographer Wally Pfister. The colors are generally subdued and frequently gray, brown and blue. This works well in a film about dreams(I can't remember the last time I had a dream in vivid color). The score by Hans Zimmer is really powerful and impressive. There are all sorts of non-musical themes that come along throughout, more sounds and noises than pure music. It's reminiscent of Michael Giacchino's score for the Lost television show or Philip Glass' brilliant score for Godfrey Reggio's Koaanisqatsi.

The costumes, sets and interiors are also sumptuous and felt particularly tangible and realistic. Every room was beautifully designed and every costume looked great (like James Bond, it's pretty awesome to get in a gunfight in a suit).I read one reviewer who wrote that its good that everyone has a unique costume - because it's not like the bad guys would go shopping together or have a bad-guy uniform. I agree with this.

Some of the CGI special effects were less crisp and clean than I would have hoped for. In one particular scene when Cobb is explaining "architecture" to Ariadne, he shows how things can explode. Sadly the exploding fruit and flower stands just looked like cartoons, shocking me back into my seat in the movie theater. I wish Nolan had used real effects with real explosions or redesigned this sequence differently.

(One weird thing is that the sound mix seemed off to me as the dialogue in many scenes was much too quiet compared with other sound effects and music. This made for a difficult experience, where I had to struggle to hear what the actors were saying. I don't ever recall this happening before. It's not a naturalistic use of low sound like in Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, I think it's just a mistake. For a while I thought it was a problem with my theater, but then I heard similar complaints from friends.)

One frustrating thing for me about the presentation is that even understanding how the time is decompressed the deeper you go into the dream world (which explains why you can have a really vivid dream, even though you're only asleep for a moment), there is not a consistent ratio of time from one dream level to another once they get into the inception phase of the story. According to the rules, there should be a lot more time in the second dream level than the first - and an even greater amount of time in the third level. Instead all the story-times seem to function co-incidentally with all the stories climaxing at the exact same moment. This was disorienting and a bit annoying. Don't give me a rule and then make an exception right away - and then not explain the exception.

There are a ton of detail questions left unanswered, and not to create mystery and intrigue, but just because Nolan seemed to not get to these issues. Most of these things don't matter too much (for instance: who is the company that Cobb works for and are there other companies who do this too?), but one thing that frustrated me is that Fischer seems to know a lot about extraction because he has been trained to fight it off in his dreams. Meanwhile, Ariadne has never heard of it and needs it explained to her (and to us). If extraction is so widespread in this world to the point that there are specific defenses against it, everyone should know about it. This exposes Ariadne as a clumsy cypher and a device for Nolan to move the story along. She really serves no other purpose than to poke and prod and ask questions. I think such information could have been presented better.

This film leaves me with a lot to think about, but almost all of what I’m considering relates to the narrative or the chronology of the story rather than the meaning behind those situations. There’s just not that much about why characters do things; it’s much more about what they are doing. This is ultimately is a rather shallow sandbox.

I'm pretty sure this is just a very clever and fresh heist movie and nothing more. Nolan clearly gives us a few small tidbits to use to spin off a whole other story and explanation of our own, but I don't think that's necessary. I think it's enough to read the film exactly as it is given: A rather Matrix-y action film that begins to question the borders between dreams and reality, but doesn't have an answer to that question.

I think it doesn't really go near anything Freudian or anything deep in terms of dream interpretation (which is amazing considering it's literally about dreams). I don't think it really takes a serious look at any deep issues, but just presents little slices of depth and moves on... for more spectacle. Perhaps a bit less polish and a bit more gritty realism would have been nice - but I guess that is simply not what this film is.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Holy Rollers (Saturday, May 22, 2010) (42)

I will admit that I went to this movie because I thought the trailer was ridiculous and terrible. Jesse Eisenberg, the lead actor, looks like he's wearing a terrible wig (though after watching the film, I do think it's his real hair) and the story looked silly and over-earnest. I was basically not wrong at all. This is a ridiculous movie that tries too hard to make me give a crap about an utterly boring story.

Eisenberg plays Sam Gold, a Hasidic kid in his late teens/early twenties living in his parents' house in Brooklyn in the late 1990s (I think it takes place in Williamsburg, though it's never really clear - which is one of the many problems with the film. I guess it could be Crown Heights, but I don't think so). Sam is rather bored with his life and looking ahead to marrying the neighborhood hottie (who he, of course, can't speak to because, well, they're Orthodox and all) and ultimately becoming a rabbi or taking over his father's fabric store on the Lower East Side.

His best friend and next door neighbor is Leon, a super gooddie-two-shoes who is the star of the rabinical class they take together. Leon's brother Yosef is a misfit and soon recruits Sam into his business of smuggling extasy from Amsterdam into the the U.S.

At some point Sam is making more money than he knows what to do with, has lost the chance of a good marriage, has been kicked out of the house by his family and has become much more successful at drug running than he ever would have been, had he gone down a good path.

I guess the tension throughout the film is based around the split between Sam's Orthodox religion and the free, modernness of his life style - including pushing drugs that specifically lead to sexual liberation. The problem I had with this dichotomy is that Sam never comes across as all that serious a Hasid in the first place. He does not want to become a rabbi - that's what his parents want him to do - he wants to work for his father in the secular world. He screws around in his Yeshiva class. He's smart and knows talmudic stuff, because he's a smart guy, but he's never really seems like a true believer.

What you get, then, is a guy who is basically just going into an illegal business - and doing well at it. So what? Why is that interesting to watch? I never really saw that he was all that regretful that he was doing what he was doing. He was much more interested in the new crazy lifestyle he was leading and the new access he had to sex and women.

It really seems that he is only incidentally Hasidic - that that is not really a relevant part of his character. Before he gets involved in the drugs, he does the things he supposed to do and says the things he's supposed to say, but we never really get a view of why that the Hasidic lifestyle is bad or good - or anything. That he is Hasidic is almost a punch-line it's so irrelevant to the events of the story.

Some details don't make much sense to me - and really hurt my connection to the story. For reasons that I couldn't figure out, Sam's family only speak in perfect English to one another. I can say from living near Hasids for awhile in Brooklyn that most that I see on the subway speak Yiddish to one another or some other Eastern European language. When they speak English, it is with a pretty thick accent (as English is their second or third language). That Sam's family at the dinner table sounds exactly like my family at the dinner table is weird.

And then there's the hair. I am sure that Jesse Eisenberg's payas were his own and not clip-on, but they are terrible. I guess this happens with curly-haired Jews (I'm sure I would have bad payas too), but these really looked like a joke. Also - is Jesse unable to grow facial hair? At what point to hassids start growning beards? Jesse remained baby-faced through the whole thing which felt weird even if it isn't.

The film is slow and dull throughout with a very predictible and uninteresting storyline. At no point was I interested in an emotional level to the story or worried that one thing or another would happen to Sam. On top of everything the execution of the film is sloppy. Director Kevin Asch and writer Antonio Macia really do a bad job with this one. It's not even fun to watch and laugh a the hair-dos. I't just boring.

Stars: 1 of 4

Duplicity (Monday, November 2, 2009) (158)

I have never been a huge fan of writer/director Tony Gilroy. Most of his previous screenplays (Michael Clayton - which he also directed, the Bourne movies, State of Play) have left me cold. Although I understand that he's a smart guy making smart movies, I never really connected to anything he's had his hands in. His stories are super elaborate and fold over and back on themselves four or five times, so that sometimes it hard to know which way is up. Here, the whole point of the story is that you don't know which way is up - and it works really well.

Clive Owen and Julia Roberts are two professional spies working at times for the CIA and MI6 or for private contractors doing corporate intel. They meet and fall in love and then hatch a plan to work for two rival multinational businesses against one another in order to steal trade secrets and sell them to outside buyers. Throughout the film, it is never clear whether what is happening on screen is an honest conversation between them or if it is a ruse as part of a greater scheme to co-opt the information they're supposed to be protecting and stealing for their bosses.

Unlike Gilroy's last writer/director effort, Michael Clayton, this is not a powerful drama about corporate malfeasance and corruption. This is a pure action heist comedy with fun characters and a tricky narrative.

The style of the film is ultra sleek with fresh and modern interiors and elegant moving camera shots. The whole look and feel, from the sets and costumes to the editing, score, structure and snappy dialogue leads to an overall clever, mature atmosphere. As we see the story unfolding in the present, we flash back at different stages to see how they got to that point from actions in the past. This before-and-after style also leads us to question the authenticity of what they are saying at almost every point - putting us in a position of doubt and paranoia just as they are. (It might be slightly more complicated than is necessary, but it is still enjoyable.)

I am not a big fan of Julia Roberts (I know, I probably shouldn't admit this), but I think she works well in this role. My problem with her normally is that she seems on-screen to be very conceited and cocky - as if she thinks she's better than everybody else, better than the character, better than us. Here, that arrogance works well: She is better than every one. She's a top spy and has all the moves figured out before we even know what the game is. She also has great chemistry with Owen (who I think is a great actor). The two are a great on-screen match and can verbally parry back and forth totally convincingly.

This is totally a movie for grown-ups - it's intelligent and intricate and also fast-moving and fresh. It also has one of the best uses of a classic MacGuffin in recent years. The story is not about the ultimate score, but is about the strategy and chase to get there. It's a smart movie for smart people and is totally enjoyable fun.

Stars: 3 of 4