Steven Spielberg: Catch Me if You Can

The brilliant opening credits of Catch Me if You Can encapsulate the spirit and tenor of the film to follow with magnificent conciseness. Animated with the use of rubber stamps (an ingenious technique that only further ties the credits to the content of the actual movie), Olivier Kuntzel's and Florence Deygas' title design renders Spielberg's most delicate film into a brief summary of plot and direction. The credits have a tremendous flow and momentum to them, the words forming in elegant typography, lines always continuing until they form the next credit. The animation has the same unceasing inertia, with the frame shifting horizontally and vertically as the stamped silhouette of Frank William Abagnale, Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio) evades FBI Agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks). Buoyed by John Williams' own '60s throwback, a light but still dramatic score, these first minutes are so memorable that I recalled them instantly after not seeing the film in years, while so much of the actual story had faded.

Watching Catch Me if You Can again, however, made me wonder how I'd let it sink in my estimation. It's an undeniably light work, perhaps Spielberg's lightest since The Sugarland Express, his first theatrical film. But it's also the first of his movies since then to truly work as a comedy, to still operate on the formal, large scale of his typical work but also generate character-driven, intimate humor woefully absent in, say, 1941. So delicate is Spielberg's craft here, so unlike his typical populist stylist of overwhelming spectacle, that it can be easy to miss that the film, like The Sugarland Express, is actually a drama. In fact, it may be the most elegant summary of some of Spielberg's pet themes of childhood innocence and distanced parenthood. That it is so funny only reveals frustratingly unexplored depths to Spielberg's storytelling capacity.

J. Edgar (Clint Eastwood, 2011)

J. Edgar is a film about a legend who cared only for respect, made by a man who seems to care only for awards. Clint Eastwood, the most shameless Oscar-baiter currently working, has nothing to say about J. Edgar Hoover, infamous founder of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, nor does he even try to tell his deflated narrative well. This is painting-by-numbers biopic, not even its limp "twist" subverting its schematic use of flashbacks and theme-articulating moments in twilight years. Judging from the mixed reception J. Edgar received, however, Eastwood's increasingly stale approach might finally be rubbing critics the wrong way.

Written by Dustin Lance Black, J. Edgar lacks the passion the writer brought to his script for Milk. One can understand his more ambiguous feelings toward Hoover, but Black finds himself caught between sympathy for the man and clearly critical thoughts on his seedier tactics, and his own mixed thoughts inform the film's presentation of its protagonist. If you think Hoover's brand of "keeping us safe" justice is something this country could use again, you'll be disappointed by its depictions of Hoover's egomaniacal shadow takeover of government. If you see Hoover as the precursor to Patriot Act politics of paranoia and fear, you'll hate its attempts to make an unpleasant man sympathetic. But don't make the mistake of thinking this lack of extremes means that Hoover emerges a rounded, complex human being. Instead, he serves as a repository for lazy screenwriting summaries of character, and Eastwood, famously lazy when it comes to fixing the drafts he's given, does nothing to alleviate the hollow revelations of J. Edgar's character.

Inception

In Christopher Nolan's previous non-Batman film, The Prestige, Robert Angier says at one point that man's "reach exceeds his imagination" in response to Nikola Tesla's bitter contention that our grasp exceeds our nerve. Tesla, a genius buried for decades in the history books by the inventors who stole from him and led lives of great fame, fell in the estimation of his peers due to his eccentric beliefs about scientific possibility. He proposed ideas that people could not bring themselves to contemplate, and soon he went from being one of the most notable engineers of his day to a footnote to be dug up by the faithful. To him, man's problem was not that science went too far but that it did not go far enough, and the primitive superstition and ignorance of the world hindered us as a species.

Angier's modified quote gets at something else, an idea that could stand for Nolan's ethos as a filmmaker. For the magician, Tesla's genius proves that the world is so complicated and full of potential that what sets us back is an inability to process the grand complexity of the universe. With six prior films, Nolan, the most ambitious mainstream filmmaker of his day, has pursued this idea through art. Where other A-list blockbuster filmmakers content themselves to churn out stale, formulated pictures that push just enough buttons to earn a big opening weekend (which is all that matter anymore), Nolan has ideas. To be fair, thus far his reach has indeed exceeded his grasp: The Prestige was a visual tour-de-force and an atmospheric delight, but I've yet to determine whether I find it a convincing examination of obsessive rivalry or simply a top-notch con job, a question I seek to answer for myself soon when I re-examine the film. Batman Begins, while an improvement over the previous franchise films, spent far too much time with its exposition and shot itself in the foot at the end by undermining Nolan's attempt to add semi-realistic verisimilitude to the franchise with a microwave gun and a shocking level of collateral damage. Even The Dark Knight, easily the finest and most ambitious Hollywood epic since the final Lord of the Rings film, lost itself in its politics, conjuring numerous allusions to the War on Terror but leaving a question in everyone's mind whether it was really condemning Bush's policies or supporting them (both sides must omit certain sections of the film to support their points of view.) Despite his drive and his desire to do something will all the money entrusted to him, Nolan has always typically retained his most incisive work for his more intimate films, not capturing the same verve with his blockbusters.

Until now.


Inception will not convert those opposed to Nolan's style, and, despite the raving of the Rotten Tomatoes users over the effrontery necessary to dislike one of the director's films, this does not make them Philistines nor trolls. I sympathize with the complaint registered that a director as literal and detail-obsessed as Nolan is not the ideal candidate for making a movie about dreams. Indeed, for all of the film's twists and turns that lead dream worlds to crumble and distort, Inception only fleetingly taps into an oneiric mood, and the film never takes on an ephemeral tone even in the sustained build-up of the last hour.

Instead, Nolan does essentially what he did with the Batman films: he takes a subject that is inherently fantastical and roots it in a straightforward, crisp aesthetic of semi-realism. While this stylistic choice does not reflect the true nature of dreams, it allows Nolan to take the heist film to a new realm. With Inception, Nolan steps out of the shadow of his biggest aesthetic influence, Michael Mann, to make a heist thriller without boundaries, one that extends to the realm of science fiction and, more surprisingly, the first convincing romantic story of Nolan's career.

Wasting no time attempting to ease the audience into the film, Nolan opens with Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), an Extractor, attempting to steal information from a businessman's mind on behalf of a rival corporation. Just as the audience gets a handle on which scenario is a dream and which is reality, the director kicks the chair out from under us, revealing the initial dream to be a dream within a dream and the supposed reality merely the first layer of a dream. Yeah, it's gonna be that kind of movie. Once everyone wakes up for real, we know that the mission has been bungled though the nature and purpose of that mission remains just out of reach. Dom viciously berates one of the members of his team, the "architect" Nash, for slipping up in designing the target's dream world, thus giving the man the opportunity to deduce that he was dreaming and wake himself. The businessman, Saito (Ken Watanabe), reveals then that he was actually testing Dom and his crew and that, save for the architect whose failure will get all their names on the rival company's hit list, he admires their work.

Saito then gives them a new job, one that could clear everyone's name and allow the exiled Dom to return to the United States. Just as the other company hired the Extractors to steal information from Saito, so too does the man want the team to infiltrate another rival, the son of a dying energy tycoon, not to steal an idea but implant one. Dom's crew say that such an act, the titular inception, cannot be done, that the brain can always trace the root of an idea and it will know that it received a planted suggestion from an outside source. Cobb, however, believes he can pull it off, and he sets out to replace his lost architect and plan a heist that makes the complexities of the Ocean's movies look as difficult as stealing a piggy bank.

One of Nolan's key flaws as a director is that neither he nor his frequent editor, Lee Smith, have the instincts to know when to cut a scene or produce a neatly flowing document. The Dark Knight's editing left some scenes so unresolved that the film screeches to a halt in two or three places. Here, however, the scattershot editing works in the film's favor. As Dom tells Ariadne (Ellen Page), the gifted college grad student he hires as the new architect, dreams have no concrete beginning or end; we suddenly find ourselves in the middle of a situation, never thinking about how we got there. Thus, Nolan's habit of simply dropping into shots works to the film's benefit, helping the jumping narrative blend dream with reality even more convincingly.

Likewise, Nolan's clunky, expository dialogue, which makes up most of the script's lines, does not bog down the film but provide a much needed anchor as the director takes us into deeper and deeper layers of the subconscious. Dom's point man, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), is always explaining, but that's his job: he does the research, calculates the times, and synchronizes the layers of the dream, so he must carefully go over the details. Ariadne needs vivid descriptions of places to recreate them in the minds of others. Even Eames (Tom Hardy), a forger whose talents of fake identity in the real world allow him to actually take the appearance and voice of others in dreams, needs to know the character of his impersonations. On a psychological level, the further these characters travel, the more even they cannot suss out what is imagined and what is real, and their thick dialogue becomes their only tether back to sanity.


Thankfully, the detailed speech does not extend to Nolan's literal-minded dream state. We learn the "rules" quickly: any pain experienced in dreams is genuinely felt because the brain processes the nerve responses, but those who die simply wake up. In order to pull off the inception, however, the target, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), and the team must be sedated for hours, necessitating a sedative so strong that anyone who dies will not wake up but enter into a limbo state that, due to the temporal state of dreams (which slows exponentially the deeper one ventures), could last decades before dumping a psychologically destroyed person back into the real world where only a few hours have passed. Why any of this is is rightly not explained, because how could one ever provide a sufficient reason?

While the dialogue does gunk up the film in a few places, Nolan counterbalances any potential issue with a rich narrative. Without losing sight of the heist story, the director splits focus to show the dangers of burying into one's mind. Those who enter the dreams of another can manipulate the world, but the subconscious recognizes shifts and projections of people slowly gather around foreign bodies as if white blood cells targeting potential contagions. The more one subdivides the dream state, the more unstable and unpredictable the subconscious becomes.

This is most evident not in Fischer, who has trained himself to withstand Extractors and marshals an army to defend his thoughts, but Dom. Like Michael Mann, Nolan cares for the dichotomy between good guy and bad guy, from the rival magicians in The Prestige to, of course, the fine line that separates Batman from the Joker. But Inception features no villain, nor, to be honest, anyone of heroic action; even Saito bears no animosity for Fischer, and wants only to break up his father's energy empire to prevent a corporate superpower from forming. (In fact, the father issues Fischer confronts in his dreams make for surprisingly touching material.) But lingering feelings of regret and guilt cloud Dom's mind, made corporeal in the dream world in the form of a projection of his wife Mallorie (Marion Cotillard).

Like the vision of the protagonist's wife in Solaris only much, much darker, "Mal" filters in and out of the picture, tormenting Cobb and actively fighting against the team's goals as she becomes his demons. The idea that protagonist and antagonist are merely flip sides of the same person is therefore literalized, with Cobb forced to fight himself in the form of the person he loves more than anything. The fragments of happier times, or seemingly happier times, that Nolan intercuts into the film gradually morph from bewildering shock cuts into devastating snatches of a horrific situation. It's an evolution that relies on direction and acting to sell, and while Nolan cannot match Martin Scorsese, DiCaprio takes the similar unfolding of a doomed, half-imagined free-fall of a relationship that he captured in Shutter Island to another level. Never has DiCaprio given a performance this good; in this film, he plays a man who knows that he's slipping into madness and putting on a brave face anyway. When a Newsweek writer, the same one who wrote about how awkward he thought it was to watch gay actors play straight roles, typed up his latest grab-bag of embarrassing nonsense about how DiCaprio never smiles anymore in his movies (no, seriously), perhaps he was so focused on making an ass out himself yet again not to consider that Dom is doing good not to break down screaming, much less put on a happy face.

Of course, the biggest issue with Nolan's previous attempts to ape Mann on some level is that the Brit cannot effectively work in Mann's milieu. He gets lost when he gets himself in too deep, and "too deep" is where Mann starts. With Inception, Nolan turns to a different, equally precise director for guidance, Stanley Kubrick. Now, as great a director as Mann is, he, and everyone else, is no Kubrick, so if Nolan couldn't match his first hero, he certainly couldn't do so with Stan. Yet Kubrick's style hedges closer to the kind that Nolan has shaped for himself. Like Nolan (and unlike Mann), Kubrick is removed from the action, gazing from afar to collect all the details. Not nearly as detached as the American ex-pat, Nolan is also not as sweeping and holistic, and where Kubrick stood back to survey like a general, Nolan just wants to clear his head enough to get a handle on things. Amazingly, he finally does so with his most twisted, Byzantine film yet. By stepping out of the fracas, he paradoxically manages to travel deeper than ever before into the thick of his gnarled vision and not get lost.

Appropriate to Nolan's left-brained vision, the Kubrick influence can be most readily seen in literal form. Nolan takes from the director the setpiece that allowed his character to seemingly walk upside down and float in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nolan uses the old school setup with a few digital touches for a thrilling fight in a hotel hallway as the movement of people in one state alters the gravity of the entire world of another. The long hallway itself could be a vague reference to The Shining, but the execution is all Nolan and the second-most exciting thing he's directed since he flipped a semi.


Nolan has never made a perfect film, and he doesn't start here. Even for a film about dreams, some plot-holes crop of when some aspects of certain dreams don't jive with the rules we've been given. Too, a few expository scenes are simply too weighty with lines, especially one where Page's character, only just introduced to the fold, starts asking extremely personal questions about Dom's life and demanding answers from him that heap on the plot and backstory. But there's something dull about perfection anyway, hermetic and removed. Pauline Kael once wrote, "Great films are rarely perfect films" and, with a few exceptions (Citizen Kane, nearly all the upper tier of Kubrick's filmography), I'd rather watch a film made a few missteps while reaching for something that pull back just to ensure immaculate design of a lesser movie. However much Nolan might fail to meet the goals he sets for himself in most of his movies, he still reaches, goddammit, and that means something these days.

But let us not worry about whether Inception is a masterpiece, for to do so would only fuel a hype machine already barreling out of control. Greatness only comes when a work of art sits in the mind long enough to take full root, and the constant search for modern masterpieces is less important than finding the movies that really grab you. For what it's worth, I would not likely consider Inception a masterpiece, as it has little to say about the human condition, or even the nature of dreams. But it's proof that even the maker of the third-highest grossing film of all time can still go on to make his breakthrough.

A hodgepodge of inspirations as much as the director's other films, Inception jumbles together a variety of genres, philosophies and artistic influences.The complexity of the film's sources may be lost on some, like Patrick Goldstein, who mocked a review, a positive one no less, for referencing both Jung (which is pretty standard in a film about dreams, no?) and the classic French heist film Rififi. Goldstein's rant devolved so quickly into hysterics and a desperate plea for critics to maybe know a little less about their subjects so that they might reflect the common man that I suspect he invited some members of the Rotten Tomatoes community to come to his office so he could pander to them real-time as he was writing. Perhaps if he was not simply trying to drum up page views, he might have put any effort into his piece at all and at least countered the statement with a reminder that Rififi unfolded in near-silence, while Inception uses Nolan's heavy exposition, but then that would be an actually relevant comment on the movie itself, which I suspect Goldstein didn't even see before his screed on the importance of maintaining a consensus and keeping the hype machine chugging.

That is my main concern for the film's future, that people will not examine it -- whether they ultimately like or dislike their findings -- and instead view Inception in the stifling vacuum created by marketing, in which movies suck the money out of our wallets and the synapses of our brains, numbing us to a simple "thumbs up/thumbs down" reaction; everyone blames Siskel & Ebert for this, but at least they backed up their reasoning. Analyzing the twists and turns of Inception may not reward in the same way that readings of the humanist works of an Ozu or a Kiarostami lead to greater understanding of not only the movie but life, but why not have a go at sorting out some of Nolan's dreamscape?

Some fault The Prestige for caring more about fooling the audience than letting the magic infuse the film, a contention I occasionally agree with (thus I am always switching my preference for magician-based films of 2006 between Nolan's more science-centric thriller and The Illusionist, which better captures the intoxication and beguiling charm of being hoodwinked into seeing something wonderful). But The Prestige was not about magic but illusions, standing previously as the director's finest outpouring of his love for legerdemain. Nolan loves to pull a fast one on us, not because he thinks himself superior but because he's got some cheek on him. Not all con jobs are mean-spirited, and the director appeals to our desire to work out that which stymies us. Some, as they do when shown a magic trick, will demand to know the secret but will give up when the magician playfully wags his finger. Others will study the move until they can perform it themselves, and it is those people to whom Nolan caters.

Inception is his greatest swindle yet, in the best possible sense: by leaving its imagery on the table, existing outside even the most expository dialogue the film has to offer, the director imparts his vision onto us and entrusts the audience with taking from it what they will. Inception's truncated final shot sent a groan of withheld resolution from the crowd, but the tease only implanted the idea of the film deeper into their minds, and the appreciation pouring out of the crowd as they left the theater reveals that Nolan's trickery is not cruel. It's a sign of respect in a field where no one seems to believe in the maturity of an audience anymore, and the taste of the stereotyped "masses" that Goldstein defends so pathetically might hedge closer to that of the critics' if the mainstream treated them with respect. "You musn't be afraid to dream a bit bigger, darling," Eames says to Arthur as he brandishes a ludicrous weapon during a shootout with hostile subconscious projections, and the line may be as much a challenge to everyone else currently using up hundreds of millions of dollars of studio money to no artistic end as it is a offhand bit of British cheek.

Gangs of New York

Gangs of New York is the epic, self-destructive companion piece to Who Shot Liberty Valance. It posits that one need not have traveled out west to find romantic lawlessness, and that one could not find the answers to a more productive society back east. It is also proof that Martin Scorsese can make masterful work no matter the circumstances. Gangs of New York is his most artistically compromised picture, trimmed down even at its 167-minute length from a reported five-hour cut and commercialized in a futile attempt to make the film into some sort of hit. Yet it remains his most personal, above perhaps his erstwhile passion project, The Last Temptation of Christ, the ultimate paean to Marty's beloved hometown and an exorcism of his hangups.

The impositions placed upon the film by Miramax hindered this vision, yet perhaps they fueled the more bombastic visual choices that serve Scorsese's deconstruction of his career. Besides, the marketing of the film provides for a misdirection Scorsese attempts with the film itself, goading the audience into identifying Amsterdam, the underdog character who enjoys a romance and narrates the picture, played by an actor still known for being a teenage heartthrob (Leonardo DiCaprio), as the protagonist. He is not.

The real crux of the story, and the personification of the choices made by the film's director, is William Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis). He symbolizes the dying New York, at once Liberty Valance and Tom Doniphon. He's a bigot and a ruthless killer, but he has a sense of honor. So do many villains, of course, but Gangs of New York is about the transition in New York's history, not from anomie into civilization but the loss of the "nobility" of violence. Bill is not the symbol standing in the way of progress; he is the last of a dying breed.

Day-Lewis' performance here has been eclipsed by his work in There Will Be Blood, and Daniel Plainview is indeed a testament to the actor's ability to captivate an audience even with a character diametrically opposed to identification or empathy. Yet William Cutting has an emotional complexity that runs deeper even than Day-Lewis' earlier Christy Brown. When he kills the father of DiCaprio's character, Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson), in a street battle at the start, Cutting refuses to allow any of his gang, the Natives, to spoil the body. "He'll cross over whole," Bill declares, despite his vicious hatred of the Irish Catholicism Vallon represents. For Bill, why he's fighting someone is less important than how those enemies conduct themselves. In a quietly piercing scene, Bill confides in the adult Amsterdam, whom Bill accepts without learning his true identity. Draped in an American flag, Bill condenses his power, the power of anyone who holds it, into fear and the ability to manipulate it. He tells the boy about Vallon, what a great man he was; in one skirmish, Amsterdam's father got the best of ol' Bill and nearly killed him, sparing his foe's life only to force him to live with the shame. Bill notes that he cut out one of his own eyes because he could not look at Vallon.

Like the film, Bill is visually outlandish, absurd even. He routinely sports a red coat as if in a Nicholas Ray period piece, complete with pants that manage to be even longer than Day-Lewis' lanky frame can allow. It's the sort of get-up that sticks out even in a period picture: here is a man who doesn't need to care what others think. It's funny, then, that Bill should reflect Scorsese's aesthetic, given the issues he suffered, even as a universally acknowledge master, at Miramax's hand.

Scorsese's direction is without question the loosest in his oeuvre, or at the very least since Mean Streets threw the director far ahead of the minor accomplishments of his first two features. The opening gang fight, set to anachronistic music and even edited as if a submission to MTV, sets the tone for the film's structure as it draws a line in the sand separating those willing to play along in Marty's meticulously recreated sandbox from those expecting a more conventional movie. Yet Scorsese's direction tests the patience even of the loyal: scenes jut about as if someone unleashed a wild chimp into Thelma Schoonmaker's editing suite and the director simply trusted that his longtime collaborator knew what she was doing when he got the results back. Sudden transitions, awkward breaks, unnecessary cutaways in the middle of an action for a reaction shot or something else to break the scene: all of these issues exist in the film, the result of both the trimming and whatever held Scorsese and Schoonmaker's fancy.

Yet this seeming clumsiness allows the director to break entirely from the tropes that bind the genre. Scorsese worked within them for his superb The Age of Innocence but gave the characters an emotional resonance so many of these pictures chase but never obtain. Gangs, however, belongs firmly with his gangster pictures. Indeed, he casts all of the characters, be they actual gang members, policemen, whores or politicians, as gangsters. The women seduce and take from the men, who take from others to cover their losses, before giving their cut to corrupt coppers and bosses like Bill, who use the money to pocket politicians. It's far too tangled a web to be called a "vicious cycle."

Scorsese films these characters with the same passion he afforded to his earlier films, the ones that mixed character with aesthetic to make everything more visceral, more felt. He lost himself in the jumble of The Departed, but here Marty manages to convey the states of mind of both lead characters. He charts both Amsterdam's rash bravery and the loathing he feels for himself and his self-doubt as well as Bill's sadness at the "rising of the tide" that will wash away everything Bill values. The two characters (and moods) play off each other, Bill's nobility and paternal treatment of Amsterdam compounds the boy's feelings of guilt for not avenging his father, and when Amsterdam finally does make his move, in a craven attempt to get the jump on the Butcher, Bill's feelings toward the changing world are confirmed: Amsterdam is not an evil man, and certainly not a villain in the same way that Bill isn't, but he represents the shift of gangsterism from something done out in the open with a set of rules to a world governed by backstabbing, literal and figurative.

Because Scorsese somehow taps into two mindsets at once through his disjointed style, everything is magnified. The sets, painstakingly crafted in Rome, are massive and establishing -- it's a telling contrast of convictions that George Lucas, upon visiting his old friend during production, remarked, "Sets like that can be done with computers now." Like the sets, the jargon is so accurate that even the characters seem to have no idea what the idioms mean and need many translated. The story is Shakespearean, and Monk McGinn (Brendan Gleeson), a big Irish mercenary who once fought for Vallon, even says so when he sees Amsterdam save Bill from assassination. Later, Amsterdam kills the crooked cop Jack (John C. Reilly, the best of the supporting cast) in a scene that recalls Hamlet stabbing Polonius through the arras. Too, the curtain that Jack yanks down in his death throes reveals a comically outsized cross, at once a reminder of the guilt that drives Amsterdam to avenge his father and Scorsese's pointed jab at himself for redirecting the Catholicism in his films squarely on the guilt that he's still exploring in this film.

The film's amplified visuals reach their apex with the climax, a thunderous vision of the Draft Riots that grows so huge that even an elephant roams the street at one point. Gangs of New York, which halted post-production for a time in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, is about not fighting wars that are not yours to fight. Amsterdam spins his wheels for most of the film because his subconscious recognizes that Bill's conflict with the Vallons ended with his father's death, yet he presses on because he feels the need for vengeance. Many of the Irish immigrants who arrive in America are the first to be conscripted in the new draft, and Scorsese overlaps a scene of a batch of soldiers being shipped off on one of the same boats that brings home a hold full of coffins with every docking with an Irish ballad that mourns the state of the immigrants, forced to flee starvation only to find themselves forced into someone else's war. Ironically, the one war worth fighting, the war to preserve the union, is met with indifference, then aggression from the New Yorkers who see themselves as their own entity. Thus, the greatest city in the Union is reduced to what might look no different than a bombed Confederate city, to be rebuilt as a part of the Union through the same backhanded procedures that returned the South to the fold. Scorsese isn't asking us to keep quiet and accept violence against us, but he also asks that we stop and think before fighting, and as such Gangs of New York becomes not only a companion to John Ford but Bruce Springsteen, specifically his own post-9/11 triumph, The Rising.

In the slaughter and smoky haze of the riots, Amsterdam and Bill settle their score. This is the last chance Bill will have to die "a true American," and he takes it, killed honorably by Amsterdam rather than face the world he sees on the horizon, even through the massive cloud kicked up by the shelling. Note that, at the end of the film, Bill, not Amsterdam, rests in the grave next to Vallon's, and as Scorsese suddenly jumps through history to the present (well, just before it, as he leaves the World Trade Center intact), we see time forgetting the men who helped shape the city, and the fact that the movie is about those who created and not destroyed is why the Towers remain. "The appearance of the law must be upheld," Boss Tweed (Jim Broadbent) told Bill early in the film, "especially when it's being broken." That dishonesty stuck in Bill's craw, and he later tells Tweed, "You can build your filthy world without me." Thus, he wouldn't feel so bad about being covered up by the vines, forgotten by the world he laid the foundation for -- as the tagline reminds us, "America was born in the streets -- and we shouldn't pity him either, not simply because of his violent acts but because obscurity is far nobler than cheap veneration.

Body of Lies

Sir Ridley Scott is looking to take the John Le Carré style of spy fiction into the 21st century in his new film “Body of Lies,” an adaptation of David Ignatius’ thriller, and the results are hit and miss. We follow CIA field agent Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) as he works with contacts to find Al-Saleem, a high-ranking terrorist orchestrating a number of bombings in Europe. Calling the shots all the way back in Langley, Virginia is Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe), a fat desk jockey who’s always planning ahead of his agents without letting them in on the secrets.

As one would expect, the two are polar opposites. Hoffman does not care about the potential casualties of the mission, nor does he seem to understand Middle Eastern diplomacy, despite being in charge of the Middle East division. Ferris, on the other hand, is an kindler soul; he treats his contacts with respect, cares for whatever partner the locals assign him, and feels a growing sense of disillusionment with his job, at which he is nevertheless brilliant.

The film constantly cuts between locations, ranging from Iraq to Langley to Jordan, where the bulk of the plot unfolds. As Ferris sets up surveillance, we get constant bird’s eye views from circling spy planes. If the images they produce are at all realistic, then it’s only a matter of time before the United States find anyone it’s looking for. Then again, as the film reminds us several times, this technology relies on the ability to link with other technology, and that terrorists can effectively disappear by returning to the Stone Age, so to speak. They remove batteries from cell phones, destroy computers, communicate face to face; in a futuristic war, they are holding their own by running to the past.

In an attempt to lure Al-Saleem to communicating by phone (and thus exposing his position), Ferris dreams up a bold scheme: create a fake terrorist to steal Al-Saleem’s thunder, making him jealous enough to come out of hiding. Along the way, Ferris joins forces with Jordanian intelligence, run by a suave chief named Hani Salaam. Played marvelously by Mark Strong, Hani is a constant in the spy genre: the partying, drinking quasi-socialite who never loses focus of his command. When he meets Ferris, he takes an instant shine to the young man, but warns the American never to lie to him, which seems an odd request in the spy field.

So far so good, right? Well, nothing mucks things up faster than a poorly thought-out romance, and the one on display in “Body of Lies” is the most inexplicable in a long time. Ferris, who remains focused on his job even as he doubts its worth, strikes up a relationship with an Arabic nurse named Aisha. Of course, their love can never be because they can’t have a meaningful conversation while Ferris is in covert ops, and Aisha will be ostracized by the community for a relationship with an “infidel.” It’s nothing but a plot device to lead to a hamstrung ending so implausible it hurts the realism of the film’s visuals.

No director is more qualified to make this film than Ridley Scott. His “Black Hawk Down” stands as one of the two great films about modern warfare (the other being “Three Kings”) and, once the director’s cut re-inserted the plot of the movie, “Kingdom of Heaven” was a brilliant dissection of Christian/Muslim relations, both past and present. But this is an action film posing as a study of our enemies, though it does have a few genuine moments of clarity that fit neatly into the story. Others are clumsily inserted, such as Hani telling Ferris out of nowhere that torture is ineffective. Ferris comes off like a mix of Jason Bourne and James Bond; he takes Bourne’s freshness and disillusionment and Bond’s apparent godlike invincibility and ability to always make time for some ridiculous skirt-chasing and tries to mesh them like a child trying to force a rectangular block into a circular hole. Ultimately, the film’s visual realism and great performances from its leads make it a fun watch, but the mounting ridiculousness will ensure it a place on Scott’s second-tier of “dumb but fun” films alongside “Gladiator” and “American Gangster.”

Incidentally, a new track from Guns ‘N Roses is played over the credits. It sounds like a gravelly woman crooning over some electronic-funk, white soul track with a splash of Middle Eastern feel. It’s kind of good, but the elements don’t mesh that well. Come to think of it, it’s a solid aural metaphor for the film itself.