Monday, November 30, 2015

A Second Chance

Suzanne Bier’s A Second Chance is an emotionally complex expansion of the buddy cop genre. Buried in the rich psychological texture of the four main characters remains the classic whodunit. Who killed baby Alexander?
Hero Andreas is a unique film cop because he’s so open to his emotions, both as he caresses his lovely wife Anna and as he’s dedicated instantly to the infants, the psychotic druggie’s beshat waif as well as the cop’s own helpless son. This cop dotes on babies. Andreas is a man strong enough to show his feelings, which of course prompts the irate Tristan to call him “faggot.”
It’s hard to recall another film hero, especially in the crime genre, who shows such tenderness to babies and women. This softness leads Andreas over the line into his own irrational action: swapping his dead son for the druggies’ neglected one, to give that kid a second chance.
Andreas’s motive is not entirely generous. Through that swap, his hysterical wife Anna would also get a second chance to be a parent, as he will as a father. Instead she gets a second chance to lose control. The new baby doesn’t keep her from the suicide she threatened if Andreas were to call the ambulance to take away their Alexander, however dead. 
At risk of sounding clinical, both Anna and Tristan’s Sanne have forms of postpartum depression. Sanne’s life is further complicated by Tristan’s violence that forces her to neglect their son Sofus. Paradoxically, the downtrodden Sanne proves a better mother than the rich and classy Anna. 
In a brief scene Anna’s mother reveals an intense sunken rage at her husband’s rejection of their daughter, presumably for marrying down to a cop. One central theme is the power of male authority and its maddening effect on women. With his remarkable sensitivity, though, Andreas experiences a grief and disorientation as profound as his wife’s. Hence his plan to swap babies, fine for Sofus’s second chance but an unwarranted cruelty to Sanne.
Simon, Andreas’s partner in crime-fighting, is typically his opposite. The bad cop and the good cup switch roles. When Andreas is initially stable and ethical, Simon is a basket case, drunken and belligerent, living a bum’s life since his wife left him, taking their son. 
As Andreas goes to pieces Simon recovers his character, self-respect and discipline. He even tidies his flat. He deduces Andreas’s secret and leads him to return Sofus to Sanne, confess his crime, take his punishment and start a new life, however smaller. The drunken Simon and maddened Andreas prove as hysterical as the women. 
The happy ending completes the theme of justice and proper compassion. We share the busted Andreas’s satisfaction when he glimpses a clearly rehabilitated, stable Sanne and meets the bright young Sofus. The once helpless infant has a hammer now and his mom is buying screws. Andreas had to abandon his plan and his career to give Sofus and Sanne a true second chance.
     This buddy cop film is less about law and order than the pain of emotional commitment and vulnerability. 

Sunday, November 29, 2015

Spotlight

Spotlight opens on a closure and ends on an opening. Shining light on the shadows is the film’s purpose and thrust. In the pre-title scene a child-molesting priest escapes exposure, arraignment and suppression by being transferred to another diocese. Cardinal Law protects his predators instead of the child victims. Church and police conspire to cover up the crime -- and repeat it. In the last scene the Boston Globe's Spotlight investigating team is flooded with calls from other victims, encouraged by the paper's exposure of the church.
This film serves several functions very well. At its most literal it provides a thorough analysis of the Catholic church's scandalous record of child abuse and protecting the abusers. We learn with the journalists what the priests did, about the helpless on whom they preyed, how the system created the predation and then perpetuated it, how the putative celibacy requirement encouraged it. The information this film delivers -- all in densely scripted dialogue and brisk, compelling scenes -- would fill a comprehensive study. A post-credit series of titles lists the global replays of this Boston story. What had been conventionally passed off as “a few bad apples" proves a.massive criminality and corruption.
  The film's most bitter irony: when Cardinal Law resigns in shame for having transferred his abusive priests to other parishes, he is himself promoted to an important sinecure in the Vatican. Don't tell me Jesus didn't weep.
  The film also celebrates another endangered institution, investigative journalism. Several scenes of the mechanics of journalism -- the meetings, the interviews, the library research, the filing system, the whirring presses, the delivery trucks -- evoke a tradition of journalism films. Democracy needs independent investigative journalism as a check on the powers that conspire for their own purposes. And that's the very first cut that surviving papers make to trim their expenses to fend off internet competition. 
The film's broader target is that wider complicity of evil. As one character remarks, if it takes a village to raise a child it takes a village to abuse one. Of course many people knew what the priests were doing and turned a blind eye -- which is not the other cheek Jesus advised. Some of the best scenes show oily respectable citizens, civic leaders, churchgoing pillars of the community, tacitly colluding to hide the horror. It takes two outsiders — the Jewish editor and the Armenian lawyer — to discover the evil that the lapsed Catholic reporters track down. Indeed, even more appalling than the priests' transgressions are the good citizens who enable and protect it. 
The film's ultimate target, beyond the church, is any institution that preserves itself by living with evil instead of fighting it. The villain here, in addition to the Catholic Church, is also the Globe that five years earlier missed the story, the police, college alumni and business community that let innocent children suffer rather than embarrass the institution.
     This film is so densely scripted and shot that incidental phrases accrue potent pertinence, like "Fifty fuckin' priests" and "holy shit." A sign on the printing press enjoins both the printers and the journalists, plus anyone who values a humane responsible society: "Stay clear."

Trumbo

Perhaps America’s most shameful period remains the Red Scare years of the 1950s, when Senator Joseph McCarthy stoked up the nation’s paranoia about a Communist invasion. The wholly unAmerican House UnAmerican Activities Committee persecuted, blacklisted, jailed, and ruined the careers, families and lives of many good intelligent people. They declared them traitors not because of anything they did but because of what they thought, in effect, their rather idealistic vision of what human society might be. Given the evidence, the issues and the total abdication of American values, that may well remain America’s most shameful period — though the Republican nomination and upcoming election may challenge for the title. 
For all its historical accuracy and its championship of free thought and expression, Trumbo remains a compromised, mushy American film. A European-style art film it ain’t.  Director Jay Roach makes a considerable advance on his work with Austin Powers and the Fokkers but he’s not there yet. 
The film succeeds in reliving the period’s paranoia and in chronicling the terrible cost to American liberals when the government outlawed free thought. We get justified exposures of such figures as right-wing gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, the cowardly Hollywood producers, the principled turncoats like Edward G. Robinson and the odd hero like Kirk Douglas. Douglas offers the blacklisted Trumbo a screen credit on Spartacus but only after he’s tempted to fire the pariah. 
An acrid scene between Louis B. Mayer and Hopper exposes the culture’s bedrock antisemitism — which the Jewish moguls were discretely reluctant to confront on or off screen. 
Bryan Cranston plays Trumbo as a collection of mannerisms and eloquence. (Haven’t seen so much smoking in ages!) Both the character and the performer are impressive, as is the documentary postscript of the real Trumbo. He’s as close to a saint as America has coughed up in recent years. In an attempt to preserve his humanity, the film gives us too conventional an image of US family life, but for Dad’s bullying idealism and megalomania. Briefly mute the politics and this is another episode of Father Knows Best (and Mom just stands by her man).
Initially this film is about 1950s American paranoia, its suspension of its citizens’ traditional rights and values, the politicized and split Supreme Court, and the danger of an foreign threat. But it’s also about America today. A savage power bent upon global domination — Communism, radical Islam — plus ca change…. the meme shows. 
Ultimately this film falls far short of European art cinema and remains commercial American. In order to provide a ending it sacrifices historic complexity. We leave cheered at our hero’s perseverance and success. Hollywood justice was done when he was finally recognized for his two Oscars and was openly credited in major films again. 
And yes, we’re reminded of the good peoples’ suffering and losses and the shameful participation of Nixon and Reagan. (Hilary Clinton’s early involvement in Senator McCarthy’s project is discreetly omitted.) It mentions the issue of fashion: screenwriters who extolled Russia when it was our ally against Hitler were later persecuted for that work when Russia turned foe.
But the film still simplifies the issue. It represents Trumbo’s “communism” at its purest, as in his daughter’s instinct to share her theoretical favourite sandwich with a lunchless kid. What’s missing is the Left’s willful blindness to the blatant horrors of Stalinism. 1950s Communism was  far different from the liberals’ original socialist ideals. The film gives no sense that its freethinking heroes may have been wrong. When actor Robinson tells HUAC he was duped it’s not about the Russians’ corruption and brutalizing of the socialist ideal but about his buddies meeting at his house — where the only plotting was not to bring down America but to protect their constitutional rights. The liberals here are whitewashed, made more valiant, innocent and intelligent than Lenin’s sobriquet for them, “useful idiots.” This omission weakens the film’s message for our present rationalizers and supporters of terrorism.
What’s also missing here is nuance. It should be possible to be a Communist insofar as it rejects the current monstrosities of capitalism. It should be possible to defend the speech and thought of someone as wrong-headed as a 1950s Communist without agreeing with him. It should be possible to think beyond knee-jerk labels. 
So, too, today, it should be possible to name ISIS as one of the radical forms of terrorist Islam without rejecting the entire religion. And to confront ISIS without being willfully blind to its Islamic roots and claims. It should be possible to learn from the European example to be vigilant in evaluating Syrian refugee applicants without being immediately targeted as racist. Nor should the entire Syrian refugee body be barred because of the activity of some, however many. To avoid opposite extremities we need nuance. This film missed the chance to demonstrate that.
This Trumbo finally succeeds because of two antithetical film-makers. Otto Preminger is the Teutonic martinet who hires Trumbo to write Exodus with the promise of a full screen credit.  John Goodman plays a trash producer who hires the blacklisted writers to churn out his schlock. High culture, low culture, both these characters present an effective humanity and principle based on pragmatism, not blinded by a smug ideal.
      The two key Trumbo films are also emblematic. Exodus depicted the birth of the Jewish state after centuries of the uprooted Jews facing global persecution. Spartacus is the lowborn slave who leads a populist rebellion against the Roman Empire. Clearly Trumbo is presented as the slave who revolted against the repressive culture and led bis people back to the promised land — credits on major flicks.

Friday, November 27, 2015

Viola

Viola uses Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night as a starting point to pursue its own comedy about the erroneous zones of Eros. 
In the play twins Viola and Sebastien are separated by a shipwreck. To survive Viola disguises herself as a boy named Bassanio and finds work with Duke Orsino, with whom she falls in love. He dispatches him/her to deliver his love message to Olivia, who rejects Orsino altogether. Instead Olivia falls in love with “Bassanio.” After much entanglement and paradox  Sebastian returns, so Viola gets Orsino and Olivia Sebastian, the male twin of “Bassanio.” The comedy gains piquancy from the fact that Shakespeare’s theatre used boys to play women. So Orsino sends a boy dressed as a girl dressed as a boy to court the boy dressed as Olivia, and she falls in love with the boy who’s a girl played by a boy. She settles on a different boy who’s really the same boy as came to her playing a girl dressed as a boy. Still with me?
Matias Pinero elaborates on Shakespeare’s playing on being and performing, life and art. The film seems entirely focused on the performers’ faces. The closeups are so tight and pervasive that we focus entirely on the characters to the exclusion of their space.There’s no sign this is Buenos Aires and we get very little sense of the rooms beyond the character’s present space. The functional “interiors” are what we infer from the characters. Odd for a play about rehearsing a play, there is no shot of a stage. This film takes as its arena the face, in which self and pretence roil in confusion.
      The title combines theatre and life. The eponymous Viola operates in the film’s plot reality, not as the play’s Viola. She takes over the second half, playing a courier of pirated CDs/DVDs. As a courier delivering art/messages she echoes the play’s Viola but declares herself wholly free of artistic abilities and interest. That denial of artistry is merely artfulness. In the car scene she does a creditable recitation of the play’s Epilogue — which wins her an informal audition to replace a departing cast member. In the last scene she denies any musical ability but the film ends on a long musical number in which she sings, albeit with more charm than beauty. From the title to the plot Viola personifies the interdependence of art and life. That’s why, as one woman observes, everything comes so easily to Viola. 
That’s the point of the earlier scene in which one actress seduces another actress through their repeated repetition of a scene between Olivia and “Bassanio”/”Viola.” We watch the power of poetry bring women into an unexpected intimacy. Art overpowers life. 
The film’s young actress is given a different motive than the play’s for the courtship of Olivia. Shakespeare has Olivia fall for Bassanio/Viola naturally, which prepares for her pairing with Sebastian. Here the actress playing Viola declares her intention to make the actress playing Olivia fall in love with her so that she will return to her abandoned lover, whom we heard her coldly dumping on the phone in the first scene. Before we meet Viola’s partner/lover Agostin, Sabrina (who plays Olivia) describes him as a disconcertingly obsessed viewer in the audience. At the end of the film he is leaving Viola to pursue Sabrina.
This game of musical beds plays against the characters’ earnest theorizing about what love is and how it works. One woman could not love someone who did not love her. Of course, this runs contrary to the Shakespeare model and to the tangle of fleeting passions the film unwinds. Like the play the film exuberantly celebrates the transcendence of the irrational when we open our hearts to another.              This is a quiet, subtle film. I certainly need a second viewing especially for its dense though casual reams of conversation and an obviously textually significant song at the end, untranslated in the present print.

Monday, November 23, 2015

Secret in their Eyes (2015)

“Passion always wins, right?” Uh, no. The point of Secret in their Eyes is rather the mortal cost of passions irrationally pursued.
The plot’s trigger is a young loser’s sudden passion for a blonde beauty that leads to his raping and killing her. It erupts again when he’s taunted by the beautiful lawyer Claire (Nicole Kidman). The killer is freed because he’s a snitch serving the police as an insider in a suspicious mosque. The passionate fear after 9/11 leads to the cops’ suspension of the law, sense and responsibility. 
The second layer of misspent passion is the two characters’ determination to correct that injustice. Ray (Chiwetel Ejiofor) quits the force to work in civilian security — protecting the hapless Mets —  but spends 13 years of evenings checking through files of criminal faces to find that killer. 
The murdered girl’s detective mother Jess (Julia Roberts) seems to share that determination to find the killer. But we ultimately learn she already has him. She has kept him in a shed for those 13 years, preferring thus to give him a life sentence rather than the release of execution. But as Ray points out, she has been serving that life sentence with him, as his restricted jailer.  
Ray’s colleague Bumpy still has the limp caused by his chase of the killer. “What limp?” he asks, wielding his cane, in a comic parallel to Jess and Ray crippling themselves by their obsession.
Ray is paralyzed by another passion, his unexpressed love for his former colleague, now DA, Claire. He left his “great” wife “Because she wasn’t you.” Now, 13 years later, Claire’s husband Ellis reveals he has always known she loved Ray not him. Her “We blew it” refers to the unrealized love between Claire and Ray, as well as their case against the killer.
So some passions lose because they’re not followed up, as Ray failed to ask out Claire because she was engaged. “We understand each other” is her description of her marriage, a pale consolation for a failed ardor. As Ray is played by the black Ejiofor his color provides another reason for his failure to have approached her. Her boss warns the community college grad against presuming to the Harvard whiz, but the racial divide was another unspoken barrier between them. 
But the main losers from passion are the obsessives who can’t let go and can’t modulate their driving forces. Claire rises through the ranks because of her determination. She’s always in control, careful to avoid excess. We see that when she exposes the killer by seeming to release him. Jess and Ray have the discipline of control and the determination to find justice — noble imperatives both — but step over the line into obsession, into the irrationality that diminishes their lives.
The title comes from the source Argentinian film. The opening shot establishes eyes digging for a secret in files and files of mug shots. Ray’s secret is his search, Jess’s her successful vengeance and Claire’s her drive to power. People may advance a very firm image but their essential secret lies in their eyes. And lies and lies and lies.
     All this psychodrama plays against a specific political context. The early scenes occur in the wake of 9/11, when America was driven by fears of Muslim terrorists and the rumour of sleeper cells about to erupt. The later are now, when our remains full of fear. The passion to fight that threat at whatever cost, to the point of destroying the values we are supposedly defending, is the national parallel to the personal passions exposed here as paralyzing and destructive. Mania in pursuit of our values is still mania. As the police boss Morales (an ironic name if there ever was one) and bad cop Siefert betray their office and justice, they embody the nation’s temptation to compromise its essential values for the putative purpose of defending them. Winning that way is really losing.      

Friday, November 13, 2015

The Headless Woman

Writer/director Lucretia Martel’s The Headless Woman follows a woman through a state of ambivalent agency, in which every privilege effectively diminishes her. The psychology also examines Argentina’s class structure. It’s a world where a privileged white professional can kill a peasant child as if he were a dog. The woman is headless because she’s mindless, living in suspension from reality and integrity. 
The film opens on a scene of four urchins and a dog playing by a desolate road. One may well be the boy Veronica — possibly — kills when she hits at least a dog in a highway collision. The bumps suggest more than one body hit the road. In the second scene the privileged characters have taken their more privileged children to a swimming pool, which has been complicated by the addition of dangerous sea turtles. Their only danger is exotica. The contrast between the two groups of boys provides an explicit political context to the examination of the hollow power of a privileged woman. 
The film is difficult to watch and to penetrate because Martel forces us into Veronica’s frame of mind. She drifts through her scenes without focus or attention to others. Her traumatic collision intensifies her alienation and self-concern. Many shots are dark, many veiled, many in soft focus, with a soundtrack that similarly suggests the fading in and out of incidental, disparate noises. A welder’s loud and bright blast by the shower jolts us as much as her.  Her post-collision fog is counteracted by the car radio playing Nina Mouskouri’s Soleil Soleil.  
When she visits her bedridden mother we see an extended version of Veronica. She’s aware of the presence of the dead but can’t remember her family’s names and her grandchildren. 
Despite her social status, affluence and professional career as a dentist, our heroine proves remarkably powerless. Her brother owns and runs the clinic and covers for her when she can’t work. Her adultery with her husband’s cousin seems more of a passive drift than passion. Though her husband deflects her sense that she may have killed someone, the men in her life — instinctively, without open collusion — cover for her, to save her from responsibility. Her brother takes away the hospital records that would have implicated her in the accident. Her husband has her seriously dented car fixed. Even her hotel reservation is disappeared. As the men erase her involvement in the incident they also erase her will, responsibility and character. Their aid diminishes her. So, too, everyone cuts “Veronica” down to “Vero,” an echo of “truth.”
The dog Veronica kills is paralleled by the dead deer her husband brings back for the servants to skin and to harvest. Both demonstrate the family’s power over life, death and the lower classes. Her perfunctory offers to the urchin serving her show a weak nod at social responsibility. The repeated references to a pool excavated behind the vet’s and the canal plugged by the corpses suggest a nature replicated to be controlled by man, as Vero is. She becomes water when she erupts into tears while showering, fully dressed. When she’s consoled by the handy welder she remains the helpless lady.
When we first see Veronica she’s complimented for her new blond hairdo. We’re meeting a posed Vero, the real version of which we won’t see till she returns to her dark normalcy at the end, having safely put her traumatic accident behind her. In one shot she wears her blonde hair pinned back in a precise allusion to the pose Kim Novak’s Madeleine wears in Vertigo, when she’s arranged by one man to seduce another man to cover for the first one’s murder of his wife. As Madeleine’s hair is supposed to present her as the reincarnation of the famed Carlotta, the allusion here suggests Veronica is a front, not in control of her life but arranged to serve her men. Her elegance, station and putative power are a fatal flaw. 

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Spectre

The estimable British director Sam Mendes stands Spectre on two narrative frames. In the first and last battle two huge old edifices are spectacularly blown up. The image evokes the recent destructions ISIS has wrought on ancient emblems of civilization, intent upon destroying the past.
But the second frame rejects the political reading of the film in favour of the psychological. In the pre-title sequence James Bond (Daniel Craig) steps out of a Day of the Dead skeleton suit, then even more surprisingly steps out of a seduction, to pursue his license to kill. The last scene plays out another return from the dead when Bond drives off in the resurrected Aston Martin that Q had rebuilt from from its last surviving gene, the steering wheel. In another resurrection dear old M (Judi Dench) on a tape from beyond the grave dispatches Bond to kill her killer. Though the new British intelligence head is bent upon ending the license to kill, temporarily abetted by the current M (Ralph Fiennes), Bond pursues his mission to the end.
No, almost to the end. On the last bridge Bond stops short of killing his arch-enemy Blovelt (meister creep Christoph Walz). In order to start a new life with Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux), whose father Bond promised to protect her, Bond holds his fire, tosses his gun into the Thames and walks away from his role as legitimate angel of death. He steps away from death in favour of love and life.
The plot centers on Bond’s psyche more than on global politics. In fact, the danger of corrupt surveillance also has a psychological dimension, the assault on the private self. The villain Blovelt, who has caused all Bond’s pain, is the son of the man who saved young orphan James. Out of jealousy Blovelt killed his father and devoted his life to building a global evil to thwart his heroic step-brother. 
As the film probes Bond’s subconscious, in two dramatic sequences Bond plunges into dark depths to save himself.The plunge is an emblem of introspection, digging into the subconscious. In the spirit of openness and exposure, here the lovers’ first sex scene cuts to a long train on an open desert, in contrast to the famous tunnel cut in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest
So the film is a valedictory to the old James Bond. This Bond saves civilization from an international conspiracy that reaches into the highest office in British intelligence. But his key victory is over his personal demons. He uncovers his supposedly dead Shadow, Blovelt, and abandons his liberty to cause death, however righteous his cause. SPECTRE is not just the name of the evil enemy but a reminder that both central figures, Bond and Blovelt, are ghosts out of a past life.
      What saves Bond is — spoiler alert — the love of a good woman. She’s not the first, but she is the first he saves from Blovelt, which suggests she embodies a romantic future quite different from his past.  Her name is a live giveaway: Madeleine Swann alludes to the madeleines that trigger Proust’s memories in his classic Swann’s Way. Here she triggers the release of the hardened, suppressed killer into a man of love. The Proust allusion keeps Swann from providing a swan song. She signifies rebirth. There may be more James Bond films ahead, but this psychodrama articulates Daniel Craig’s departure.   

Sunday, November 8, 2015

Suffragette

When Maud Watts, barred from her husband’s rooms, charges in to give her little son a birthday present, her gift is a silly little toy elephant. The gift is a cheap trinket, pathetically wrapped. That’s all she can afford. So it expresses not just her love but how her circumstances have so direly restricted her emotional and material life. 
The mingy elephant resonates further. It’s exotic, from another world, scarcely more remote than the posh family life of the department store mannequins that captivated her before the suffragettes smashed the windows. 
The context discovers a further irony. Maud finds that her husband has given their son away to adoption. His new parents are there, promising their version of the mannequins’ life.  Maud’s last words to her son are her name. She begs him to remember it and t someday to come to find her. The elephant embodies her appeal to his memory. This unwitting aptness of the gift attests to the power of her intuition, as she gradually engages with the movement and resists the temptation to turn narc. 
This recreation of the early days of Britain’s suffragette movement abounds in scenes of such misery, pathos, and thwarted but resilient spirit. It’s a very touching film with a lasting political pertinence.
The film’s subject is not just the early days of the women’s movement but the harshness of the patriarchal establishment that refused to surrender any of its power. In that way it speaks for the suppressed and silenced of any kind,any class, in any culture. 
The harsh laundry manager who sexually abuses one girl — and by implication similarly violated Maud when she came to work there as a child — is on the same continuum as the dogged police inspector determined to make the women respect the unrespectable law. As Maud brands the former with her iron, she seems to arouse an unarticulated respect in the copper.
Like any serious historical film, this is about the time it was made as well as the period in which it is set. Why else tell that story now? 
We’re in the third wave of feminism in the West, but the battle is far from won. Women have the vote but they are still far from equal. Glass ceilings and walls and lead-box silencers persist. Hence too the horrible stories of women harassed and violated by their colleagues in the fire department and the army and even by the famed RCMP. 
Canada’s new prime minister Justin Trudeau is still asked to explain why he appointed a cabinet with half its members women. Even such a customarily wise columnist as Andrew Coyne trotted out in advance the old concern that women could only be appointed with a compromise in merit. He was suitably impressed by the appointments once made, but he remains diminished by that initial knee-jerk concern. An Alberta MLA finds there is no provision for her unprecedented situation, her imminent maternity leave.  
So you’ve come a long way baby. But frankly we — men and our systemic authority — have a lot further yet to go.
The film is current in an additional sense. End titles record how recently various countries gave their women the vote. Qatar has just done that and Saudi Arabia has promised it. But much of the world does not extend even our inadequate recognition of women’s due equality. London’s brutal attack on women demonstrators here recall the scenes from the Arab Spring Egypt and Iran. Around the world rape is a military strategy.
       In the current cultural war between radical Islam and Western civilization, women’s rights are a crucial battleground. The abuse of women in Muslim countries seems like a time machine flashback to our earlier, shameful days. But with time machines it’s sometimes hard to know if the gear is forward or reverse. The London violence and repressive patriarchal laws here could be a flash forward to Europe under the threatened Caliphate. Time, as usual, will tell.

Thursday, November 5, 2015

Bridge of Spies

Worried but smiling, Mary Donovan sees her husband off on his secret mission to East Berlin: “Can’t you give me something to go on? I don’t even care if it’s not true.” As the stay at home, perky wife, Mary doesn’t have much role in the action — but that line strikes to the heart of Stephen Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies. As insurance lawyer James Donovan learns when he’s introduced to the web of lies woven by the Russian, American and East German governments, everyone indulges each other’s fictions.
When Donovan negotiates the exchange of Russian spy Rudolf Abel for the U2 pilot Gary Powers and a hapless American economics student taken prisoner in East Berlin, he finds layer upon layer of fiction. All the agents lie and hide. Actors are presented as Abel’s family. The lawyer Vogel proves a rare bird, elusive in flight and of ambiguous power and role when finally spotted. Nobody is who they seem to be. 
The CIA enlists Donovan as negotiator because the swap is too touchy for governments to negotiate. Only Donovan refuses to lie. Mary doesn’t believe his cover — the company sending him to Europe for clients — but even to assuage her fears all he says is “I’m doing this for us.” They go through the marmalade game to buttress her confidence. 
The Communists don’t believe his true story, that he’s not an American agent. In the plague of duplicity in both houses, only Donovan tells the truth. He confounds the US agents when he escapes their script to insist the American student be included in the swap. Because that one man stuck to his values, to the American principles of justice, the fictions worked out to a happy ending.  
The metaphor extends even further. When Donovan defends the Russian spy, when he enforces the Americans’ guarantee of justice, he offends all America. Vigilante citizens shoot up Donovan’s home. A cop turns against him, preferring to persecute rather than to protect him. The lawyers and judge want to present just the appearance of a fair trial — precisely what we disdain in the Russian autocracy. Donovan is totally invested in the moral principles of US justice, which the other lawyers, the judge and the embittered frightened citizens are all too willing to scuttle. Only by appealing to the judge’s self-interest does Donovan manage to avoid his client’s death sentence. The Golden Rule fails Donovan: Shouldn’t we treat their spies as we would want them to treat ours? He wins by foreseeing the possibility of using Abel for an exchange the next time Russia catches an American spy. Pragmatism trumps principle. 
Add Tom Hanks’s James Donovan to the pantheon of American righteousness, the rugged individual who stands up against the world for his principles. He ranks with Henry Fonda’s Lincoln, James Stewart’s Messieurs Smith and Deeds, Gary Cooper’s Sergeant York and Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch. They all embody what the Russian spy Abel admires as “the standing man,” a character so strong of will and ideals that he stands by them whatever the cost and challenge. After the swap Donovan appears standing still solid — but dwarfed by the machinery of the bridge that looms black and impersonal over him. When he finally collapses on his bed at home, exhausted, he’s still in that standing pose, though splayed out horizontal.   
Obviously the film is about the 1957 episode in the Cold War. The period is richly realized, down to the films on the West Berlin marquee: Billy Wilder’s satire of Coca Cola colonialism in Berlin, One Two Three (1961), Kubrick’s film (script by blacklisted Dalton Trumbo) about the freedom fighting Roman slave, Spartacus (1960), and the parable of an alien-threatened (Commie?) community, Village of the Damned. (1960). The film dates cohere with the dates of Powers’ capture and release. 
The political chill of the Cold War permeates the West, as we see in the school kids’ oath of allegiance and Duck and Cover drill, and in the sniffly cold that starts with Abel, overwhelms Donovan when a German gang steals his Saks Fifth Avenue overcoat, and passes on to the CIA agent. The white hanky signifies the characters’ surrender to the era’s paranoia, cruelty and abandonment of American values.
That’s what makes this film about now as much as then. The film addresses the current threat, America abandoning its values in their supposed defence against a monster enemy, whether their Communism or our current bogey, radical Islam.  “There’s no book of rules,” the CIA agent tells Donovan, attempting to violate the client-lawyer relationship. There is, Donovan reminds him — the constitution. 
Of course, the Supreme Court is split down the middle on what the constitution was intended to advance. But the principles of freedom, justice, protection of the individual, should guard against the system’s corrupt pragmatism. That’s the gist of Donovan’s terse but resonant address to the Supreme Court. His appeal fails on the familiar 5-4 count. Bridge of Spies reminds us all of what distinguished America and made her a beacon for humanity worldwide. It also warns us how easy it is to abandon those values in the name of defending them. (Hello Republican candidates.)
The film’s excellence lies equally in its message and in the subtlety of its presentation. Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance are brilliant in the interiority of their expression. Both feel and express more than they say. 
On the train home Donovan shows a flicker of disturbance when he sees American teenagers playfully leaping over backyard high wire fences. He’s remembering the young people shot dead trying to leap the Berlin Wall? He’s remembering his close call when he was threatened and robbed by the East Berliners? He sees the spectre of the fascist society in America? We’re reminded that however great our social and political differences, we and our enemies are equally tempted to abandon our values for expediency. That’s when we indulge our own fictions, which is even more dangerous than indulging each other's.