Behind the Candelabra (Steven Soderbergh, 2013)

It is far too early in the year to tell, but I would not be surprised if, for the second year in a row, two Soderbergh films make my best-of list. I don't buy the retirement from film talk for a second, but if this at least closes a chapter on the director's work, it does so with aplomb. The most conventional of Soderbergh's late work is also a dazzling display of what makes him unique, his off-kilter focus on the intricacies of relationships and process that breaks even a turbulent romance down into analytical deconstruction, complete with ever-inventive framings and a great rapport with his actors. Indeed, Douglas and Damon get out early with the male performances to beat this year, Douglas so un-self-conscious in embracing Liberace's pathological vanity and Damon gradually turning infatuation and gee-whiz wonder at his lover's opulence into a coke-addled, paranoid form of Stockholm Syndrome. Despite my love for Soderbergh (and for Douglas, who continues to be one of our finest and most daring leading men), I was on the fence for a TV biopic, but even that is transformed into something original and exciting by this alchemical filmmaker.

Check out my full review at Movie Mezzanine.

Promised Land (Gus Van Sant, 2012)

All I gotta say is, when I get around to Elephant this year, it better undo a lot of the damage of Van Sant's last decade. I still haven't seen his largely ignored 2011 effort Restless, but it cannot possibly be worse than Promised Land, a smug liberal tract about going green financed in part by oil. For a brief time, it almost works, setting up the arrogant, manipulative natural gas company rep with an equally officious and pushy environmentalist, until a twist derails its vague hints of intelligence to set up a truly embarrassing, back-patting speech that may be the worst monologue of last year. Heinous.

My full review is up now at Movie Mezzanine.

Ocean's Twelve (Steven Soderbergh, 2004)

Ocean's Twelve is one of my favorite Steven Soderbergh films and the best reflexive takedown of the sequel ever made. It jovially begins as a shameless retread of Ocean's Eleven before spiraling out of control by exaggerating every aspect that made that film a success until the result is a bewildering mess and a giddy commentary on the lazy self-satisfaction of most sequels. Somehow, the in-joke-heavy, pally nature of the acting among Hollywood's A-list does not lapse into pure smugness, perhaps because as much fun as the film has in deconstructing overdone studio mechanics, it also invites the audience to have fun with the cast, provided the viewer can let go of the desire for any kind of fulfillment from the plot. Ocean's Eleven sublimated all of Soderbergh's aesthetic tics into an unexpected crowd pleaser; its first sequel let all the new fans know what they were in for.

My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.

Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011)

For about 45-50 minutes, Contagion had me ready to run home, duct-tape the seals of my house and never come into contact with a human being again. Steven Soderbergh's detached, "so this is how the world ends" direction and and crisp, clinical cinematography effectively built fear through a steady profession of paranoia escalating from backdoor, classified whispers over vague data to full-on societal panic. Soderbergh's classical style makes even his transcontinental montage intelligible, and his experiments with asynchronous sound and image separates the aesthetic from the action even more, giving it a paradoxically compelling flatness that reminded me of the purportedly meek delivery Jonathan Edwards gave to the fiery words of his "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," a mild intellectual remove that only makes the impact that much more powerful.

Then, cracks started to form. Contagion boasts the largest, most geographically disconnected cast of any of his films since Traffic, a film that shares more than a few stylistic and structural traits with Contagion and even seems the thematic inverse of this movie. But like Traffic, Contagion spreads itself too thin, across too many people and too many locations without being reliant upon any of them. The emotional distance of such incessant cross-cutting gives way to a belated, almost arbitrary stab at sentimentality that burdens Soderbergh's film with calculated schmaltz that clashes garishly with the studious, medical examiner feel of the rest of the movie. Funnily enough, this is the rare film that actually suffers for its attempts at humanity.

Steven Spielberg: Saving Private Ryan

Saving Private Ryan is the most troublesome film in Steven Spielberg's filmography. It, far more than the contested Schindler's List, Amistad or even the tonally inconsistent The Color Purple, is the best evidence for Spielberg's supposed unsuitability for drama. Those films counterbalance Spielberg's worrisome moments of misplaced sentimentality with glimpses of an actual understanding of the gravity of the situation. The understated tilt up from the infamous shower scene in Schindler's List to show the consequences of actual gas chambers works as a response to both accusations that the director was exploiting a world travesty and his supposed lack of subtlety. Saving Private Ryan lacks such a moment. No, that's not right; it does contain such moments, but they feel artificial and forced, feeling like the work of a man who threw them in desperately at the last minute instead of finding organic depth.

In essence, Saving Private Ryan is the Holy Bible of war movies, in the sense that it contains so many contradictory, half-baked themes and morals that it can be used to justify practically any outlook. As such, I cannot say that it is a bad movie, per se; in fact, some moments display an almost overwhelming sense of form. But it is a schizophrenic movie, filled with competing influences of other war films. That indeed is the problem: for a supposedly realistic document, this is a film founded on other films instead of history.

True Grit (2010)

Mine eyes have seen the glory. The Coen brothers, smartass, shaggy-dog moralists, have stripped away even the bluff of their cynicism for their most straightforward, un-ironic film. Somehow, they ended up making one of their most meditative. Their update of True Grit continues their heightened commitment to moral reckoning of late, but the evocative (and deeply misunderstood) rumination of No Country for Old Men has given way to a message that is destined to be even more overlooked, precisely because it is hidden in plain sight, uncovered by the removal of irony.

Just as the filmmaking duo put Cormac McCarthy's anti-thriller on the screen with remarkable fealty, they adapt Charles Portis' novel faithfully, more faithfully than the 1969 film starring John Wayne. Portis' book is a light read, enjoyable but sprinkled with contradictions it never addresses. In sticking to the letter of the novel, the Coens transpose those issues and undermine them without turning the material against itself.

A revenge story, True Grit opens with an aural framing device as a middle-aged Mattie Ross remembers her father's death, the image filtering into clarity from a haze like an old but vivid memory being tapped. As the image sharpens, we see a man, Mattie's father, lying in a heap at the foot of his home as his murderer, a hired hand named Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), rides away. The young Mattie (Hailee Steinfeld) heads to town to retrieve her father's body and setlle his affairs, and from the onset she comes across as shrewd beyond her 14 years. A trader uses her dad's demise as an excuse to make a quick buck, but she manages to sell back the final items her father bought from the man as well as some extra material of dubious ownership in a way that weakens the man as much as his malaria.

But her hardness carries a darker edge. Tracking the sheriff to inquire about Chaney's location, she witnesses a hanging and is unmoved by the sight of three men dropping until their necks snap. When the sheriff tells her that Chaney is out of his jurisdiction and that the U.S. Marshals will have to deal with him now, Mattie asks which Marshal she could hire. Of the ones mentioned, she settles on Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), whom the sheriff pointedly does not describe as the best man for the job but the meanest. Her drive impresses the washed-up drunk, as well as a Texas Ranger, LaBoeuf a.k.a. "La Beef" (Matt Damon), who pursues Chaney for the murder of a state senator back in his home state. Mattie insists that Chaney be hanged for killing her father and not some mere senator, a sly political statement but also one that reveals the myopic fury of her thirst for revenge.

Jeff Bridges, who received his "sorry we didn't get this to you sooner" Oscar earlier in the year for his performance in Crazy Heart, is still so alive and visceral that the joy of seeing him at last rewarded -- even with something as meaningless as an Academy Award -- is tempered by the fact that it symbolizes an atonement rather than a recognition that he still does magnificent work. I joked with friends that, as much as I've come to admire John Wayne, Bridges represented a significant upgrade. Yet it is in his desire to move away from Wayne's performance that Bridges does one of his few "acting" jobs, where you can actually catch him at the tricks he normally pulls off without ever trying. Bridges' take on Cogburn is nearly unintelligible, not only from his intoxicated mumble but in the not-all-there look in his one good eye. Wayne may not have been half the actor Bridges is, but he oozed charisma, and Bridges tries his damnedest to make the audience root for him while still undermining his own charm at every turn. It's a taxing job, but one he pulls off, as ever, brilliantly.

As much as Bridges' Cogburn is a murderous scoundrel, Mattie's support for him mirror's the audience's own, and she becomes the voice of the revenge-movie crowd. Cogburn instantly proves himself a lout, his slurred growl generating a host of laughs in the courtroom but also revealing a man who can casually kill a man under protection of the law. Mattie delights in his sadism, looking impressed when, stalking some bandits who might lead them to Chaney, Cogburn plans to plug one in the back with a rifle slug as a grim warning shot to the other gang members. Rooster is Western lawlessness, charismatic enough that he wins over the crowd, and Mattie, but so disgusting that whatever romanticism might have resided in the old, fat man's belly got vomited up during one of his many drinking spells. And still Mattie adores him, her loyalty only faltering when his alcoholism interferes with his violence. She literally cheers the spectacle of LaBoeuf and Cogburn killing others but, as with all action audiences inured to atrocity against humans, at last manages to spare emotion for the brief abuse of an animal.

The Coens never force this point, never turn True Grit into the explicit anti-Western styling of Dead Man. Playing it straight, they allow us to identify with Mattie -- a simple matter given the magnetic pull Steinfeld exerts on the audience -- and never pull the rug out from under us. Like an old Roadrunner cartoon, they simply wait for us to look down and realize we've run with Mattie right off a cliff, and that by looking down we suddenly let gravity kick back in. That they filter the voice of a primarily male audience through a young girl is but another facet of the subtlety with which they give the viewers enough rope to hang themselves.

That commitment to straight Western storytelling peppered with implication extends to the film's racial commentary: at the hanging Mattie attends at the start of the film, three man stand on the gallows. The middle sobs and begs for forgiveness for minutes, another does not repent but gets his say, but the Native American sentenced to die has a bag thrown over his head immediately, silencing him before he can orate. Cogburn never uses any slurs, but when he viciously kicks two Choctaw children off a trading post porch, Bridges puts the racism of John Wayne's West on display as clearly as it can be seen back in town where every black character is a servant to whom even Mattie lightly condescends. (I found it incredibly interesting that the audience burst into its loudest laughter at this child abuse.)

Roger Deakins' cinematography stresses earthen tones, highlighting the sickly yellow of fire and the brown of wooden structures. Deakins' immaculate deep focus certainly does not recall Robert Altman's hazy McCabe & Mrs. Miller, but the color palette sure does. The Coens tell a more straightforward Western than Altman did, but both movies undercut the sense of individuality of the West and the moral code of law by starkly showing the true results of revenge and duels, where people end up dead and not a whole lot else can be said on the matter. Furthermore, both do not actually occur in the classic West -- McCabe is up in the Pacific Northwest, True Grit back in the novel's setting of Arkansas -- allowing for chilling snow flurries that only emphasize the cold remove of all the surrounding space.

I've learned not to underestimate the Coen brothers, who have made their fourth film in a row that breaks ranks from the previous entries even as they all share a loose thematic core. The comedy in the screenplay leans more toward the outright aburdist farce of Burn After Reading than the glacial chuckles of spiritual and existential doubt in A Serious Man. They hinder Damon with a lisp after an accident leaves La Boeuf's tongue half-severed, sabotaging every dramatic moment the actor gets with the mild comedy of his thick pronunciation. The usual odd touches litter the cast, from a kindly but screwy dentist-cum-mountain man Cogburn and Mattie encounter to a gibbering loon who rides with Tom's posse. But even these broad types play into the directors' statements on the aborrent bloodlust of the Old West: that gentle and amicable dentist casually mentions how much he'd like it if Cogburn could kill a man for him. This is a society that would rather see any innocent man hanged than a guilty one go free, if not to ensure that all culpable shall face punishment then to simply ensure some entertainment to break up the monotony. I laughed as much during True Grit as I have the Coens' finest comedies, but as with A Serious Man, those chuckles occasionally caught in the throat.

With respect to spoilers, all I will say about the ending of True Grit is that it elevates the Coens' penchant for anticlimactic endings into a direct commentary on the subject matter at hand. While the endings to other films may be frustratingly oblique and the Coens' joke on us, their carefully structuring here only reinforces the notion that revenge does not bring true satisfaction. The Mattie Ross who speaks to the audience in the framing device is a spinster, and the Coens use her aged voice to communicate from that start that, however this story plays out, it will not bring true closure; if it did, she would not feel the need to keep sharing it at age 40. The novel (and especially the 1969 film) support the quest for vengeance, but the Coens deconstruct that bloodlust by giving it to the audience, just as Quentin Tarantino savaged lingering fantasies of Jewish revenge by reveling in it for Inglourious Basterds. True Grit may be the most instantly enjoyable film the Coen brothers have made since, well, the last movie they made with Jeff Bridges, but hidden in that digestible entertainment is a devastating critique of most of the people lining up to see it.

Hereafter

If the word "ponderous" did not exist, one would invent it to describe Hereafter. "Ponderous" is such a great word: one cannot say it would communicating its meaning merely through diction. It forces one's register lower, forcing the short "o" sound out in booming baritone like the blast of a great war horn echoing around a mountain. It's such a noble word, in fact, that while anyone should be able to write it down, only the most refined and eloquent of British-accented speakers should be allowed to say it aloud.

If it seems I have lost track of the review before it has even started, that is because merely thinking about the word "ponderous" has given me more joy and provoked more thought than anything in the total of Hereafter's two and a half hours. If there is anything positive to be found in the movie's plodding, half-baked, hollow treatises on the possibility of life after death, it is that Clint Eastwood's lifeless direction may finally swing people around to my side. Perhaps America's most coddled filmmaker has at last pushed his luck too far.

It takes balls to open a film that has nothing to do with any real life tragedy with the real life tragedy of the Indian Ocean tsunami, and the shamelessness of the opening segment sets a low bar the film never manages to clear. Focusing on Marie (Cécile de France), a French television journalist on holiday, the sequence plays out in clumsily animated CGI that leads to a choreographed setpiece that appears to want to excite more than terrify. As the water carries Marie and everything else in its unstoppable crush, we get cheap glimpses of cars crashing into people and power lines falling into the water and zapping nearby souls. Worse still, the POV shots of the camera moving through the water feel like a flume ride at Disneyland, and they're about as spiritually rewarding. Worse still, Marie drowns and spends a few moments legally dead, during which time she crosses over to the other side and sees the stereotypical bright light. The digital effects here are distracting, if more cleverly done than the cheap wash of water previously seen, and the tease of the afterlife does nothing to spark curiosity, much less wonder. Eastwood is clearly out of his element here, but no other film has more sorely tested the idea whether he has any directorial element at all.

Jim Emerson recently posted some serious thoughts on Eastwood's supposed legacy as a director that track closely enough to my own that I need not enumerate my issues with him here (or at least, not again). Where I disagree with Emerson is in his claim that, apart from the classicist gloss Eastwood paints over his films, there's nothing in them to make any one seem, on its face, a Clint Eastwood film. That's largely true, but there are a few recurring themes. Chief among them in his modern work is the idea of lost innocence, a realm Steven Spielberg has been plumbing his entire creative life. Eastwood, however, tends to enjoy more critical adulation for his supposed maturity on the subject where Spielberg is too much of a man-child. As it so happens, I recently returned to Sir Steve's Empire of the Sun, a film that depicts the decay of a boy's innocence through separation and atrocity, told almost exclusively though visual means that blur the line between subjective romanticism and objective horror in a way that would not be equaled until Guillermo Del Toro took it to the next step with Pan's Labyrinth. When Eastwood wants to communicate lost innocence, he lets it be known that a child was raped, or killed (or both). I posit the question: which of these approaches sounds less nuanced?

Hereafter, a movie about the possibility of a life after death, must naturally also concern death, and one of the several diverging and converging storylines -- yes, Peter Morgan saw Crash and Babel and apparently thought the network narrative had not sufficiently been snuffed -- involves two adorable, precocious twin brothers. Is one of them abused or killed? Check. Oh, and they also care for a mother who's an alcoholic (and a junkie, because when it rains it destroys beaches in Thailand, killing hundreds of thousands pours). The surviving lad, Marcus, cannot cope with losing his brother, and his numb reaction to being placed in foster care matches up with Marie's distraction back home in Paris.

Then, Eastwood introduces the main arc, that of George Lonegan (Matt Damon), a construction worker who, we learn, has the ability to communicate with the dead. No, really. You'd be forgiven for thinking he was a fraud, for the yes/no questions he asks his clients are of the same sort that charlatans use to lead gullible and vulnerable payers. In fact, when Morgan's script addresses the frauds, it must paint them in the most absurd light possible just to make George's style plausible, calling into question how anyone could be fooled.

George, of course, just wants to leave that side of his life behind him, saying on two occasions that his ability "isn't a gift. It's a curse." He takes night classes on cooking, where he meets nepotism personified, Bryce Dallas Howard, who shows up late to the first lesson because she was playing the Anne Hathaway role in M. Night Shyamalan's remake of The Devil Wears Prada -- the twist is that it's actually the Devil! Howard brings all her halting, overacted anti-charm to the part of Melanie, whose presence is cut mercifully short when she gets close to George and insists he read her when she learns of his powers. I don't want to give away what the reading reveals, but if you've been paying attention so far you can guess when I say "double check."

The problem with network narratives is that it's difficult to transition between storylines without editing arbitrarily, and rarely has this flaw been so evident. Before we spend enough time with anyone to care about their issues and their pain, Eastwood leaps countries and continents to deal with the most tenuously related bullshit. I've often been nonreactive to something meant to be sad in a film, but never have I been so utterly unmoved by the death of a child on-screen. All I could think about was the absurd editing of a van with a large grill braking before striking the poor British lad, who then somehow flipped up and over the grill to smash into the windshield. I couldn't be expected to believe in this film's vision of an afterlife because it doesn't have any care for physics in its life-life.

That laziness is rampant in this picture. Eastwood needs to stop scoring his films. There, the end. John Carpenter has a way with electronic minimalism. Robert Rodriguez has a raucous Latin-rock-jazz flare. Clint Eastwood perennially sounds like he's tuning the instruments for the actual musicians who never arrive. I always hold out hope for the films he scores that the three-note guitar and repeating piano chord will morph into something atmospheric in the vein of Ry Cooder's Paris, Texas score or Neil Young's haunting work on Dead Man, then I remember that those two are accomplished musicians with a deep knowledge of the craft and not some guy on a power trip trying to prove he can do it all. All exposition is handled through dialogue, including a medical diagnosis for George's ability to speak to the dead, and just when you've gotten over the offensiveness of using the tsunami to suck people in, Eastwood chucks in the London Tube bombings for added offensiveness. When Marcus looks for videos on YouTube that talk about death and the afterlife, he first watches a video by a Muslim who speaks of the Qur'an, then Marcus watches another video, this time by an evangelical. If you pay attention to the text of the video description, however, it does not change when Marcus picks another video, so it still talks about the Five Pillars of Islam leading to salvation as a man talks about Jesus. That little moment summed up the entire film for me: no effort whatsoever.

Worst of all is the depiction of the afterlife. It may sound childish and direct to say this, but there is a great charm in the blunt honesty of childish perception. So here it is: I despise this vision of the afterlife. Christopher Hitchens once hilariously described the Judeo-Christian conception of heaven as a "celestial North Korea," in which the supposedly blessed were charged with singing homilies to the "Great Leader" for all eternity. I am reminded of the old stories of Stalinist Russia, in which audiences clapped for hours because the first one who stopped would be sent to the Gulag.

Peter Morgan's vision of a pan-humanist afterlife is even more dull. Voices do not stay with George long because they want to get back to the wonderful existence of the afterlife, yet whenever we catch a glimpse of the world beyond, we see only silhouettes of people standing idly in pure white as if waiting for George to talk to them. They have no real wisdom to impart, because they're trapped in a film that doesn't have anything to say either. They stand in the Elysian Fields waiting for anything interesting to happen. I wonder, then, if they're a reflection of Hereafter's audience.

This is cardboard depth, typified by the emptiness of the character-building traits used to try to make these characters appealing. Marie's experience makes her the one person most worthy of our attention, yet Morgan defines her character in the simplest means, focusing on her reputation as a hard-hitting journalist until suddenly he doesn't, suggesting a breakdown from survivor's guilt until explaining away all the bad things that happened to her as the result of the actions of others. George's quirk is that he loves Charles Dickens, the relevance of which is never shown. I did, however, perk up when Eastwood included a scene of Derek Jacobi, as himself, reading excerpts from Little Dorrit. With Jacobi's classically trained voice and the enduring majesty of Dickens' prose, I had the same look of wonder on my face as Damon and wished I could have listened to that autographed book-on-tape George picked up instead of watching this tired hokum.

And if network narratives diverge on the shakiest of grounds, they fare even worse when everything comes together. A film about death and the afterlife can have no truly explosive dénouement -- I was deeply amused, as ever, by David Edelstein, who wondered aloud if the film might have tried for a big ending by making a metaphysical version of the climax of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, of the characters stepping into a mother ship of death -- but the uneventful finale only underscores the uselessness of what preceded it. Hereafter doesn't have a damn thing to say about death, or life, or life after death, and the maudlin pablum Morgan uses to justify why people might need to believe in an afterlife serves only to throw his fellow atheists under a bus (at which point they would presumably somehow bounce back up into the bus' windshield). Eastwood gets more solid work from Damon, who can make a splash in seemingly anything, and his work with the young, non-professional actors who play the boys stands in sharp contrast to the atrocious job he did with child actors on Gran Torino. But it's all for naught, a decorative flourish on something terrible, like spraying Febreeze on dog shit. Earlier this year, I let Inception off the hook for some of its issues because the ambition and the effervescent cheek of it carried me past the tin-hollow psychology on its questions of reality and surreality.

The problem with Hereafter is that, for its weighty idea, there's no ambition on any level of the project. Not in the tack script, not in Eastwood's workmanlike direction, not even in the performances. It's as if everyone realized halfway through that this picture had no point and went right into CYA mode. The result is a rumination on mortality that makes The Five People You Meet in Heaven look sophisticated and genuine. If nothing else, its lack of narrative cohesion, two-dimensional characters, shameless attempts to elicit an emotional response and clueless depiction of the afterlife proved one thing: Clint Eastwood totally could have directed the finale of LOST.

Green Zone

From an opening sequence set during the initial bombing of Baghdad through a climactic final chase, Green Zone proves up and down that Paul Greengrass is still the director par excellence of shakycam action. Hot on the heels of the critical success of The Hurt Locker, Green Zone will almost certainly find itself judged by comparison to Kathryn Bigelow’s feature, aesthetically, narratively and thematically. It’s unfair, because the two can cleanly co-exist as counterpoints for each other: Green Zone serves as the political answer to The Hurt Locker’s humanism.

Like Bigelow, Greengrass has the ability to give each brief shot just enough duration to give the audience some semblance of spatial relations while jumping around to maintain a sense of disorientation. Gunshots and explosions break and scramble in the heavy digital grain, particularly in the many night shots, spreading so wide that one could almost mistake the atmosphere over Iraq as being made of gunpowder and shrapnel. The sounds and visuals crash together so violently you wonder how anyone could stay sane in this safe version of combat, to say nothing of the real thing.

Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) knows how to keep his head, though. He leads a unit searching for weapons of mass destruction, and we meet him as he and his team fight through a resistant sector to reach a reported chemical weapons facility. After taking casualties, the unit takes a warehouse, where they find nothing, their third straight piece of bad intelligence. When he voices this in a meeting, his superiors assure him that the intel is good, despite nothing but evidence to the contrary.

From that moment, any question whether the film would play its politics close to its chest goes out the window. Green Zone is all about rubbing America’s nose in its mistake, an approach both interesting and wearisome. “Interesting” because America is long overdue for a public shaming for our arrogance and jingoism, and the notion that this should come from the guy who capitalized on flag-waving, tragedy-appropriating attitudes with United 93 makes the prospect all the richer. “Wearisome” because it frames much of its politics as shocking twists, seemingly under the delusion that its secrets are still unknown. Green Zone’s ultimate reveal is that there were no WMD in Iraq, and I imagine that even the spoiler criers feel no need to protest me now.

Some of the script’s bluntness has a Fulleresque, no-bullshit quality to it, made better when delivered by the superb cast. I knew Greg Kinnear would be playing an officious executive before I even learned his character’s name or found out that he represented the Pentagon, but, credit where credit is due, he is just such a magnificent prick. He speaks most of the best lines of the film, and I suspect that they are the best lines precisely because he says them. Kinnear’s Clark Poundstone manages to spin everything and shut down any attempt to endanger the party line. He leads reporters like Wall Street Journal writer Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan) on wild goose chases and stymies Miller’s quest to get to the bottom of the bad intelligence reports. Poundstone advises Miller to avoid CIA Baghdad chief Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson); “He’s been in the Middle East a long time,” Poundstone says, “He’s got a lot of preconceived notions.” For Poundstone and the administration he represents, practical experience and firsthand knowledge are not only unimportant, they can be a liability to furthering a political agenda. Miller gets a chilling line across to Poundstone in the end when he confronts the official about all the lies and asks, “What’s going to happen the next time we need somebody to trust us?” Occasionally, someone makes a less expansive political point that is no less astute, such as the angry reaction of the Iraqi informant, “Freddy” (Khalid Abdalla), at the excavation of a town square in the search for bombs; Freddy curtly tears down the illogic of such an exercise, asking the Americans how the Iraqi army or some insurgents could have buried weapons or chemical agents without the townspeople seeing it.

Sadly, lines like these rub up against chunks of dialogue so obvious and emphasized that they break the often-compelling blend of fact and fiction. Miller finds himself between Brown and Poundstone and remarks, “I thought were were all on the same side” and Brown responds, “Don’t be naïve.” As if this wasn’t clear enough, Poundstone appears in the next scene, denies Miller’s request for transfer under Brown’s command and tells the solider that he “chose the wrong side.” And, frankly, every scene set entirely in the POV of Iraqi Ba’athist officials -- led by General Al-Rawi (Yigal Naor), who seeks to make a deal with the Americans to keep the Iraqi army together to help the U.S. maintain order -- with the exception of the cold open only rehashes points made by the American characters. Setting the film entirely in the American perspective may seem a narcissistic gesture, but it would heighten the suspense by maintaining confusion -- when Freddy first comes to tell Miller about the Ba’athist meeting, we know he is telling the truth because we just saw the meeting occur, thus eliminating the suspense of knowing whether the troops would drive into a trap -- and would avoid the repetitive pontificating of the Iraqi generals, most of whom don’t have anything approaching Iraq’s best interests at heart. Freddy, too, oversteps the boundary between endearing and grating when left to give a monologue, preachy and overstuffed affairs that they are. I wanted to roll my eyes during his lengthy speeches, though perhaps that was a result of the camera movement.

This is all the more bewildering given the skill with which Greengrass conveys the film’s politics through those overwhelming images. Colliding shots of crowds swarming Humvees that subtly exaggerate the size and furor of the indignant populace, barren warehouses meant to store WMD that emphasize the failure of intelligence reports through the cavernous emptiness, an American couple casually posing for photographs in front of tanks in the green zone as Baghdad lies in rubble around them; with such suggestive shots, Greengrass doesn’t need to back them up with clunky, polemical dialogue. His visual placement borders on the ingenious with a pair of shots of a detention center where prisoners are kept without stated purpose. On the fence that surrounds the facility, a placard reads that the assigned unit is “honor bound to defend freedom,” a bitterly ironic sight gag that recalls the looming “Peace is Our Profession” billboard that overlooks the air force base in Dr. Strangelove. Inside the makeshift prison, guards hang a Confederate flag, a symbol of the opposite of American patriotism, of hate and spite. Why the director still cannot use a tripod at any time remains a mystery, but his visceral style has few peers, if any. Only shots of crying children and a needless montage of scanning newspaper articles stick out as sore thumbs in Greengrass’ superb visual presentation of the film’s confrontational politics.

Those politics are so fearlessly spoken, however, that I found my more reserved initial reaction to the film has softened. The Hurt Locker had its political messages, yes, but they were so subtly combined into its character drama that discussions of its politics have only just begun in earnest after numerous appraisers mistook it for an apolitical war movie. Though made long before Bigelow’s film hit theaters and garnered its reaction, Green Zone wants to leave no room for misinterpretation. The Iraq War was a mistake, no, it was a premeditated crime that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and thousands of Americans, destroyed our national credibility and ruined the world economy.

If Green Zone at times loses track of its otherwise taut structure to air its grievances, that is only because there are too many grievances to list. The film wisely implicates journalists for their complicity in the war, for being so enthused about receiving information from the government that would drive up readership that they never bothered to vet the intelligence. That’s right, the so-called liberal mainstream media are as responsible as the politicians who capitalized on panic, and Greengrass drives home the point when Freddy appears at the end of a climactic confrontation to throw a curveball before flatly telling Miller, the liberal do-good soldier who wants to expose the truth in order to help Iraq, “It is not up to you to determine what happens in this country.” Is it any wonder, then, that the most outrageous and sickening moment of the film is the airing of George Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech?

Invictus

Let us not waste time declaring that Clint Eastwood's latest film is "a sports movie that isn't really about sports." No sports movie is really about sports, save for ESPN documentaries: even underdog stories, the most common type of film to involve sports and the one that focuses most heavily on the game in question, use sports to comment upon an individual or team learning dedication and humanity through the game and linking characters to the world through the thrill they get from playing.

Invictus, adapted from John Carlin's book Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Changed a Nation by Anthony Peckham, is not only an underdog sports movie but a sports film about national pride and unity, a sort of racially tinged iteration of Miracle. I must confess that I'm never at odds with the critical consensus more than when the new Clint Eastwood movie makes its way into theaters (which is often, since the director, almost an octogenarian, is one of the most prolific mainstream filmmakers working today): even without any formal knowledge of visual compositions, I recognize his formidable skill with a camera, but I find the scripts he turns into movies often cinematically conservative, self-serving awards bait (how funny it is, that the man revered for his iconoclast image is the most Oscar-baiting director of the decade). And while a critic must clear his or her mind of expectations the second the lights come down, I couldn't help but worry that this would be yet another play for gold when I first sat down.

It's an opinion that isn't entirely unjustified. Set in South Africa in the lead-up to the 1995 World Cup, Invictus is often on-the-nose about the racial politics sweeping the nation in the wake of the end of apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman), and the inspirational music cues are practically retch-inducing. Happily, most of the moments where it does overplay its hand were all placed in the film's trailer, softening their eye-rolling impact. What Eastwood does here, what he's failed to do in his last few ventures, is use his camerawork and his skilled hand at coaching actors into making the larger social statements of Invictus secondary to our emotional response to the story. Unlike, say, Precious, which shamelessly manipulates our emotions and licks its lips over the various trials its characters face, Invictus makes the audience a part of the story by using its technical elements to place us in the crowds of spectators in and out of rugby stadiums, cheering alongside fans and gazing admirably on Mandela in his idealistic political actions. Here is a racial drama that does not invite us to gawk at the stratification between races (though there are revealing shots of the slums that Africans must inhabit in their own country) nor serves as a simple piece of feel-good fluff that always seems to be geared toward narcissistic white people.

The comparison between Mandela, the first black president of a country that broils with racial tensions in the wake of massive social upheaval, and Barack Obama is facile and distracting. Yes, Obama too inherited a financially and socially unstable country and his race, background and well-spoken presentation essentially cemented his iconography before he assumed office, but Eastwood is not a director concerned with politics; when his films make statements, they usually omit the politics for more social concerns -- his most political works of the decade, Changeling and Flags of Our Fathers, are among his weakest.

A better comparison piece to Invictus would be, naturally, Eastwood's last film, Gran Torino, a film I enjoyed albeit for all the wrong reasons, gawking at its false self-confidence like a rubbernecker at the American Idol tryouts. That film also dealt with racism, but it fell into the trap of the typical racial drama by pinning grand societal statements onto a handful of characters who could not shoulder the burden, not least of which because with the exception of Eastwood himself, the acting in that film was downright embarrassing. Invictus isn't the first sports film to deal with race (does anyone remember the Titans?), but it effectively flips the race movie on its head by using the personal stories of Mandela and rugby captain Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon) to feed into a larger social context.

Mandela knows little of rugby, and he even hates Francois' rugby team, the Springboks, a lingering symbol of South Africa' apartheid past -- he mentions to his adviser that, in prison, he and the other inmates use to cheer for any team but the Springboks to irritate the Afrikaner guards -- but he recognizes that whites, most of whom are every bit as indigenous as the Africans at this point, need to retain some symbol of their own past.

Freeman gives one of his finest performances as Mandela; he and Eastwood present the man as an inspirational and earnest idealist, but also a shrewd politician. He understands that hobbies as innocuous as sports link people more than speeches or social legislation, so he decides to, without forcing more black players onto the Springboks or changing their logo or colors, gently reshape the rugby team into the symbol of the Rainbow Nation. In his conversations with others, he can guide them into positions of inferiority, such as when he meets Francois and has the rugby captain sit facing the sun. Freeman's a naturally charismatic actor, but he imbues Mandela's cult of personality with incredible aplomb; however idealized this portrait may be, you believe that this man emerged from a 30-year prison sentence ready to forgive and lead. Eastwood and Peckham temper this mythic image with descriptions of his troubled personal life that are perhaps too forward where Freeman's acting and Eastwood's visuals could have communicated them without words, but these humanizing bits also help us understand why he might be so eager to think of the entire country as his family, Christlike behavior that it is.

Along with Quentin Tarantino and David Cronenberg, Eastwood is America's foremost cinematic moralist, even if all three of them are practitioners of occasionally extreme violence. As a moralist, he is neither as incisive and intuitive as Cronenberg nor as viscerally entertaining as Tarantino, but he trumps the both of them in his ability to make the characters emotions are own. At his best, such as Letters From Iwo Jima, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Unforgiven and the parts of Million Dollar Baby that didn't slip into mawkishness, Eastwood makes his characters' pain and doubts our own. His sound crew, headed by long-time Eastwood collaborators Bud Asman and Alan Robert Murray, creates perhaps the most immersive crowd ambiance I've ever heard, perfectly capturing the overwhelming roar of a packed stadium and perfectly complementing Eastwood's exciting direction on the rugby field. We are mercifully spared the fine details of rugby save for a basic lesson about passing and a description of the World Cup bracket, and part of the fun of the time Eastwood spends on the green is figuring out the game as the film progresses (it's really not hard to pick up the basics). Off the field, he gives us fascinating glimpses not merely into Mandela's life but Pienaar's; Damon must recite some of the film's more questionable dialogue, the sort of platitudes that no rugby captain should be making, but Eastwood does such a fine job of presenting Francois as an intelligent, considerate person and Damon buries the loftier aspects of the prose in plain-spoken terms that allow us to root for the Springboks without feeling morally obligated to champion them simply for what they symbolize.

The first hour's pacing can be leaden at times, and, as usual, digital effects are the director's Achilles' heel, but Invictus stands as one of Eastwood's finest works of the decade, appealing even to this skeptic. His camerawork here is as gorgeous as ever and none too sly in places: at the start of the film, Mandela's bodyguard requests more men to protect the president, only for a handful of white officials to show up and report for duty. Eastwood places the black, inexperienced bodyguards on the more dominant right, but they look bewildered and somewhat frightened by the Afrikaners on the left, whose professional stoicism belies an equal confusion and discomfort. This shot, and others like it, don't play up racism for murky laughs as did the racial tension in Gran Torino, and it shows the director's gift for subtlety even in a comic situation.

Sorting through the various genres and storylines of Eastwood's directed filmography reveals a few noteworthy parallels (such as his odd fascination with abusive and ruined childhoods), but the primary link between his best works is his affinity for deconstruction. Unforgiven and Gran Torino sought to re-evaluate his iconic Man With No Name and Dirty Harry images, respectively; Flags of Our Fathers is about the deconstruction of a single photograph. Even when his films do not succeed entirely -- and I'm afraid I'd argue that most of his films these past ten years have not -- Eastwood has a remarkable ability to, in contrast to Tarantino and Cronenberg, delve so deep into his characters that he can lose himself in considering their motivations instead of making their statements through the action. Invictus, for all its flaws, shows him doing what he somehow managed to pull off in Letters From Iwo Jima: spending the time to learn about these characters even as monumental events happen all around them. When Mandela sends the Springboks to the black areas of the city with TV cameras, Eastwood comments upon all the other feel-good race movies out there: as Mandela views the footage of the Afrikaners jovially teaching fundamentals to the poor black youths who used to hate them, we might as well be watching the director's monitor while filming any number of Oscar-bait pictures. Eastwood, through Mandela, knows that such an oversimplified image can still win over large swaths of people who don't feel like looking any deeper, and this subtle jab at the film's primary audience proves that the old man's still got some fire in him.

Ocean's Eleven

The original Ocean's Eleven was the first of the Rat Pack films, a star vehicle meant to turn its stars into even bigger ones. Steven Soderbergh, indie darling that he is, found something appealing about that. Hot off the heels of his two most mainstream films to date, Erin Brokovich and Traffic, the director of sex, lies & videotape and Schizopolis went for the whole hog, creating what would become the star vehicle franchise of the decade. Whatever became of the sequels, though, Ocean's Eleven still holds up as a deliriously fun, completely self-aware heist comedy, a sleek but engaging trawl through the Las Vegas underworld, which is just as unremittingly glitzy as the surface level.

We are even led into this shimmering criminal world by a refined gentleman. Danny Ocean (George Clooney), a thief who got sloppy after his wife left him, is released from prison on parole which he wastes no time violating. Ocean travels to Los Angeles to find his old partner Rusty (Brad Pitt), now laying low and fleecing clueless celebrities of their money by teaching them poker -- nothing else in the whole movie is as funny as Topher Grace triumphantly laying down his hand and declaring "All. Reds." to the whistling awe of his equally moronic buddies. Ocean looks somewhat deflated by his time in prison, and he's simply too dapper to make you think of him as a thief, which makes it all the more surprising when he announces his intention to rob the vault containing the money of three casinos, the three casinos: the Bellagio, The Mirage and the MGM Grand.

Rusty and Danny know that the heist will be the biggest in history, and they need to lock down the best damn crew in the world. Somehow, perhaps through sheer charm, they convince nine men -- demolitions experts, confidence men, bank-rollers, electronic wizards, and one very small, very talented Chinese acrobat -- to participate in this suicidal venture. The payoff? A cool $160 million, which judging by the continuing spiral of the U.S. dollar might be enough to buy a Pepsi ten years from now. The heist is particularly dangerous because robbing these casinos means indirectly robbing their owner, Tony Benedict (Andy Garcia), a ruthless businessman who sees any attempt to cheat his casinos as a personal attack. Soon, we learn that Ocean wants to rob this man not for the massive payout but because Benedict "stole" his ex-wife, Tess (Julia Roberts, here pretty much in name only).

You may hate this film's sense of self-assured cool, but there's no denying that Soderbergh clearly understands the "Vegas movie" and he shoots Ocean's Eleven accordingly. His camera never seems to stop, mounting a blitzkrieg of Michael Mann-like technical details, witty banter, swanky five-star hotel rooms, casino backrooms filled with walls of surveillance monitors, and the mad jungle of the casino floor, a hive of desperate gamblers swarming to and fro losing their children's college funds.

It's the sort of surreal world that's stranger than fiction, befitting the over-the-top personae of the characters who seek to shake it up. Scott Caan and Casey Affleck play two Mormon man-children with intense sibling rivalry that explodes often making for great distractions in the casino but equally annoying outbursts among the crew. Bernie Mac slides headlong into the wearisome role of the Angry Black Man, but the idea that Mac's character is the one playing that card, combined with Mac's innate ability to make the most tepid and hackneyed material in the world sound as funny as a Bill Hicks rant, takes the sting out of that egregiously overused stereotype. My personal favorite of the 11 has to be Matt Damon's Linus Caldwell, a crack pickpocket who becomes the tail for whatever mark he assigned. Linus always finds himself in the middle of the minor but openly acknowledged power struggle between Danny and Rusty: like the child enduring his parents' messy divorce, Linus must field the feelings of distrust one has for the other, even as neither Danny nor Rusty gives poor Linus an ounce of important information. Damon is one of the most underrated actors working (along with his admittedly less talented buddy, Ben Affleck), and his portrayal of Linus as equal parts clueless dope and capable member of the team is the only aspect of the franchise that remains interesting through all three films.
Ocean's Eleven is meticulous, far too meticulous for such an implausible scenario; Danny and Rusty's plan for the heist makes The Joker's schemes in The Dark Knight seem about as complicated as finishing a half-solved Sudoku puzzle. Yet somehow Soderbergh makes it work, and there's actually a bit of fun in seeing the film a second time and looking out for all the barely noticeable setups for the ultimate payoff. For all its sidelining details, Ocean's Eleven maintains a constant level of fun that makes revisiting it a nice, relaxing experience rather than a tedious exercise in dramatic setup leading to an unsatisfying conclusion (that film has already been made, and it's called The Usual Suspects).

In my review of The Girlfriend Experience I mentioned how I often got bored at some stage. Even for a film as upbeat as Ocean's Eleven, that's true; this film moves as such a brisk pace that whenever it slows, even for a moment, it feels like the entire plot comes to a standstill (I believe this is called relativistic momentum, but looking at the precariousness of my current grade in Physics II I am unwilling to comment at this time). Nevertheless, Ocean's Eleven is a hip, finger-snapping salute to the city that defines American artifice. Compared to its glossy sequels, this often comes alive, especially when Soderbergh inserts brief shots of hand-held camera movement that act as adrenaline shocks just as you're thinking that the film is settling into too comfortable a groove, a groove that the sequels wore out until they cut clean through the vinyl. My biggest single complaint with the film is Julia Roberts' inability to do anything other than stand around in a few scenes; she would receive a bigger part in the next film, which sounds great on paper until you get to the matter of her playing a character who at one point poses as Julia Roberts, a failed gag that tried to go meta and nearly brought down cinema with it. But in all the places that its sequels created a noxious cloud of smug, Ocean's Eleven is bouncy and fun, and if there's something wrong with that I don't want to be right.

The Bourne Ultimatum

Ladies and gentlemen, I submit to you the perfect action movie. I do not mean to say it is the "best" action movie, but every aspect of its structure allows for the most kinetic action on the planet. What the hell is going in on the fistfights? Who knows, but I bet it hurts. Why do we care about Bourne's story now that we learned his real name? Because there are people in this world who still need a good punching. In this film series, Bourne's identity was just a MacGuffin anyway.

Even Bourne doesn’t seem to care about his past, at least beyond figuring out enough to know who he needs to punch next. Damon is a torrent of rage hidden behind an impassive veneer; we have seen him weather everything the CIA has thrown at him so far, but now he is simply ferocious. Greengrass' direction will always divide viewers, but I thought it worked in the last film and it's necessary here. Every shot, every line of dialogue, every chase, every punch will keep you on the edge of your seat. I don't count more than three relatively calm conversations, though I can't trust my senses after sitting through this barrage.

The conversations are the only weak parts of the movie, because it gives us a chance to breathe. The camera seems to be as riled up as we are, because it cannot stay still in these long conversations. When the dialogue is punchy, Greengrass can keep the shots relatively stable and keep editing before any shakiness becomes apparent. But these longform exchanges display all the weakness inherent in the shaky style. Thankfully, even these scenes don't provide us with more exposition than we need, and the sheer panic in the voices of the normally composed CIA heads Noah Vosen (David Strathairn), Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) and director Ezra Kramer (Scott Glenn) conveys what a fearsome, unstoppable force Bourne has become.

Allen continues to shine as the conflicted Landy. Her final scene in Supremacy actually occurs late in the timeline of this film, and that may seem grossly unnecessary but it's interesting to see what leads her to the decision to tell Bourne his name and to genuinely reach out to him (as opposed to all the traps attempting to lure him into an easy kill). Julia Stiles never stood out in the series even though she appears in all five films, but her work is a bit more substantive this time around. Like Landy, Nicky discovers that the real enemies are the CIA bosses and Bourne protects her when she divulges information about the upgraded Treadstone, Blackbriar.

Strathairn isn't as good a villain as the first two deputy directors, but anyone would look weak compared to Chris Cooper and Brian Cox. Actually, his acting isn't even the problem; he just has far less a personal stake in the action than Cooper and Cox's characters. Gilroy's scripts brings him into the story enough to make him interesting by the end, but the bad guy I found myself drawn to this time was the doctor who brainwashed and conditioned Bourne to prepare him for his missions. Albert Finney plays Dr. Hirsch as an indifferent, clinical physician who barely reacts when Bourne finds him because he's been expecting this day for years.

Of the three films, Ultimatum veers the closest to reflecting Bond (which by then had enjoyed a magnificent revival, mainly thanks to taking a page or two from this franchise) with its roaming tour through some of the world's most beautiful cities. The foot-chase through Tangier itself is an acknowledged lift from The Living Daylights. But the cast and crew didn't travel to Tangier, New York, Berlin, Madrid and London (some locations double as other cities like Moscow and Turin) to get paid to go on vacation. Take that Tangier scene: in The Living Daylights, Bond's run across the rooftops highlights the expansiveness of the scene. It wants you to know the trouble the producers went through to take you here. The Ultimatum version could have been anywhere. Bourne doesn't care where he is, and the action is visceral and personal. The only reason it's in Tangier is because it's more likely that he would be able to leap off roofs into apartments, run through them, jump through windows in adjacent complexes. Greengrass makes the action personal, which makes you a part of it even when its editing style bewilders.

Simply put, this is the best action film of the decade. It lacks the spectacle of the Pirates of the Caribbean, and it's certainly not as fun as the first film of that franchise. Yet it knows how to keep you hooked with a style that roots you to the back of your seat. The first film's plot informed the action, and the second worked vice-versa. Here, the two are one and the same. What I see in this trilogy now that I watch them back-to-back is the only trilogy I can think of that gets better with each installment. Star Wars slipped with Return of the Jedi, Army of Darkness, though still excellent, didn't match the quality of what came before. Even Lord of the Rings, the best narrative trilogy ever made (thematic trilogies such as Three Colors and Bergman's Faith trilogy are superior), stumbled with its rampant aside in the last act The Two Towers which added a brand new subplot that didn't work, not because it deviated from the source material but because it repeated themes established in the first film and ruined an interesting character (Faramir).

Bourne, however, is an action trilogy that delivers with all of its installments. Whatever major changes it may have made to the source material, the result is one of the most exciting franchises of all time. Its breakneck pacing and ability to make you care for this mysterious hero with only a scant moment of pause here and there gives it an edge no one else can touch. So please stop trying, Mr. Bond.

The Bourne Supremacy

A friend of mine commented on my review of The Bourne Identity that he would never watch the films because the sequels follow not the plots of Ludlum's books but stretch out the first book to fit the framework of the whole franchise. That might explain why plot takes a backseat in both of the sequels. Now, I can appreciate his feelings and of many other fans who might feel they lost the chance to ever see the books they enjoy on the big screen, especially a series as lauded as Ludlum's, so I hope he isn't too offended when I say that, from the bottom of my heart, I don't care. I don't care that Tony Gilroy decided to stick with the first book for three whole films, and I imagine I won't care when I finally read the books, no matter how much I love them. Why? Because with these sequels, Doug Liman, Paul Greengrass and Tony Gilroy made the best action films of the decade.

Greengrass takes over the director's chair for Liman, who still stayed on as a producer, to controversial results. Greengrass of course is the fellow to thank -- or blame, as many of us would -- for the rise of hand-held camera usage in major Hollywood films. His style of constant movement and breakneck editing makes even scenes of dialogue or a man packing a bag as visceral as a shootout. Greengrass' style spawned a wave of imitators, some of which benefited from this style (Collateral) but mostly detract and annoy (Public Enemies, Quantum of Solace).

The problem is that no one has Greengrass' knack for using this technique. His editing creates a disorienting, visceral experience, but he knows to give us at least some clue of what's going on. His restlessness comes with a vague hint of restraint, and his most interesting shots contain not action but dialogue, for he loves to quick-zoom on his actors' faces, better to read their buried emotions. I was also taken with a tracking shot through a subway that was so stable I pegged it as a Steadicam shot, only for the frame to bounce ever so slightly, signifying as a regular hand-held shot like all the rest.

Greengrass is perfectly suited for the task of filming Jason Bourne's ongoing adventure to recover his identity and memories, as The Bourne Supremacy takes some dark turns that push our hero to the edge. Still hiding from the CIA two years after the events of the last film, Bourne enjoys a bit of happiness with girlfriend Marie. They both are ready to run at any moment, but the CIA has relaxed the pressure enough for them to get a bit complacent. That, of course, is when the strike come, and Marie is tragically murdered as she and Bourne attempt to get out of a crowded village in India.

So now, Bourne turns from the hunted to the hunter. He still evades capture, but his thirst for revenge drives him to take the fight to the agents who will not leave him in peace. In the first film, Bourne was always surprised when he instinctively drew upon his fighting prowess, and that held him back somewhat. Here, he knows that intelligence agencies turned him into a killing machine, and his fighting is significantly more brutal. Greengrass photographs these vicious fistfights in such a way that every punch feels as though it breaks bones and ruptures organs.

The car chases are better, too. The biggest action piece of the film concerns a chase through the streets of Moscow, as exciting and confusing a sequence as you could ever hope to see. While I can certainly buy MI6 outfitting James Bond's Aston-Martin and BMW's with heavy armor (I mean, wouldn't you start there before trying to make it invisible?), but I never really bought his fancy little speedsters taking all the crashes and bullets and rockets they did. But Bourne commandeers boxy Euro cars, the kind that look as though they can take some punishment. And Lord knows Bourne's antics put them to the test more thoroughly than the best crash ratings.

While the story means far less here than in the first by virtue of stretching out the final act of a single book, The Bourne Supremacy is no less intriguing thanks to its actors. Brian Cox and Joan Allen deepen the levels of distrust and secrecy even within a single organization, as Allen's Landy attempts to sort out the bureaucratic mess left in the wake of Treadstone's failure. Abbot spends all of his efforts laying the blame for any loose ends on Bourne's feet and further raises Landy's ire against the agent when he pins the deaths of some of her agents on him as well. Allen is marvelous as the initially ruthless boss who begins to uncover the truth and doubt the necessity to find and stop Bourne.

Damon only improves upon the role he excelled at in the first film. He's got movie star looks, but also a plainness that allows him to fade into a crowd in any part of the world. Bourne only has about three facial expressions -- blank, tense and furious -- but Damon captures the torrent of emotions flowing underneath and presents a character who works as a three-dimensional study, not just some cartoonish, indestructible spy. Performances like this add to Greengrass' impeccable use of shaky cam (if only he was the sole person using the technique, because he embarrasses everyone else) to make a pulse-pounding thriller that lacks Identity's story but improves upon it in every other way.

The Bourne Identity

Though published throughout the '80s, Robert Ludlum's Bourne franchise came to the big screen at the exact right time. When The Bourne Identity premiered in 2002, the spy genre was all but dead: the Tom Clancy adaptation The Sum of All Fears, not one of his more spy-centric novels, did well enough at the box office but felt stale and pre-packaged, and the Bond series had reached the nadir of its self-parody with The World is Not Enough (2000) and Die Another Day (2002). Even the spy piss-take Austin Powers mustered up a gag-inducing sequel to pad out its already-thin franchise into a trilogy; as if the genre needed a parody at that point anyway.

The Bourne series changed all that. The first franchise of the post-9/11 era, Bourne saw through the glitz and glamor of Bond franchises and the like and crafted a gripping, brutal series that favored realism over gadget and sex-filled fantasy. Jason Bourne does not chase people down in Aston Martins outfitted with machine guns and invisibility cloaks; heck, in this film, he's the one being chased. This is a world of "real" cars, of Minis and Peugeots and Ford's European models. The only gadgets at his disposal are items he rigs himself.

Perhaps the greatest shift that The Bourne Identity brings is that it actually engages as a spy mystery. Spy films had grown so bloated that they were either lame comedies or over-the-top action spectacles. The very first shot, like some homage to Sunset Boulevard, shows a man face down in the ocean, presumably dead. A fishing crew recovers his body and a doctor removes bullets and a strange device, and he also discovers some strange documents. The man awakens but has no memory of who he is or what his odd personal effects mean.

The mystery of Bourne's identity, especially when taken in context with the series' sequels, amounts to little more than a MacGuffin. Here, however, it forms the basis of a solid plot, one from which the action flows naturally without ever seeming like the script was built around big stunts. In fact, you could hardly call the action pieces of this film "big": Bourne fights like an actual person, using his martial arts and weapon knowledge to quickly and brutally dispatch opponents. He doesn't need to strap a henchman to a rocket or feed them to sharks to kill somebody. The car chases of the film come the closest to a grand scale sequence, but Liman stresses tension and suspense over action, to great effect. The only moment that ever stands as too over the top comes when Bourne must shoot his way out of a hotel and basically jumps from the highest floor on top of the body of a man he killed, somehow aims and shoots another hitman right between the eyes on the way down, and survives the fall. In an otherwise straightforward film, this is a bit much.

Nevertheless, Bourne's story is filled with perfectly cast, interesting characters who add just as much intrigue as the lead. Marie (Franka Potente), an American citizen who's been backpacking around Europe for years, finds herself caught up in the mess when Bourne offers her some serious cash to drive him out of Paris. Yes, there is an inevitable romance, but it feels plausible, a result of Bourne's kindness and his frequent attempts to get her out of harm's way. Potente, the star of Run Lola Run, knows a thing or two about being on the run for an entire movie, and she has an excellent moment when Jason sends her into a hotel to get his guest records -- he can't as he is presumed dead -- and lays out a complicated plan to sneak through and steal the files, only for Marie to walk out two minutes later with the info, calming stating that she simply asked for them.

Meanwhile, the C.I.A. and Treadstone characters all have a suitable level of sinister intrigue. Treadstone director Conklin (Chris Cooper) reveals early on that Bourne works for the C.I.A., but he doesn't let this spoil the mystery over what went wrong with the trained assassin. You believe Cooper when he sends out other killers (played by Nicky Naude and Clive Owen, who offers up some simple but poignant lines at the end) to terminate Bourne simply because he's a stain on the department's sterling record. His direct superior, Ward Abbot (Brian Cox), has been kept in the dark about Bourne's failure, so he too must sift through the jumbled lies to sort out just who's head will go on the chopping block.

Paul Greengrass would take over the sequels and infuse them with his shaky cam style of shooting (more on that in later reviews), but Liman, previously known for indie fare like Swingers and Go, does a grand job with the fast-paced action. His more traditional approach allows for disorienting chases and fights and calm, stately shots of people conversing or characters silently moving.

So, The Bourne Identity has all the ingredients for a great action thriller: it's contained enough to ratchet up the suspense, but visceral enough to maintain the adrenaline. It proved that Matt Damon, heretofore known for his roles as troubled young men, proves to be an able and bankable action heavyweight, and he's a sight more intimidating than Bond ever was. Despite a few glaring problems -- the aforementioned "flight" down the stairs and that final scene which is just too cute to fit in with the rest of the movie -- this is an engaging ride that wonderfully sets up the best action trilogy ever made.

The Departed

Martin Scorsese's The Departed is a curious case: in the director's repertoire of masterpieces, classics and just plain good movies, it ranks, narratively and structurally, as one of his weakest. Yet it is also one of his most vibrant and engaging, to the point that I find myself itching to revisit it more than any of his top-tier films, and I adore all of them. In condensing parts of all three of the Infernal Affairs trilogy in one film (though the main focus is only upon the first in the series), the movie becomes bloated and spends no time really analyzing its characters, but Scorsese manages to turn it into an epic tragedy that mostly overcomes its glaring flaws.

Normally, Scorsese's films follow a protagonist so closely that we end up viewing the entire narrative through the character's often demented point of view. This time, however, he charts the paths of two characters, which forces Scorsese to take a more objective approach. He watches the two moles, Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), with rapt curiosity rather than total empathetic involvement, and it's a testament to his mastery of the craft that his camera work does not suffer at all for this drastic shift in style.

Moving outside New York and the Italian scene -- it would have been redundant after GoodFellas so completely charted the Italian mafia -- The Departed instead looks at Boston crime and the influence of the Irish mafia. "I never wanted to be a product of my environment," explains mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) as images of civil turbulence from the '60s flash before our eyes, "I wanted my environment to be a product of me." Costello has taken over the city's crime after driving out black gangs and Italian mafiosos, and the police can't touch him.

He takes young Colin under his wing, and when the lad gets old enough he enrolls in the Police Academy to set himself up as a mole in the department. Meanwhile, Billy joins the force in an attempt to distance himself from his crime-ridden family, only for Capt. Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Sgt. Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) to recruit him to use those ties to infiltrate Costello's organization. They give Costigan enough jail time to make him look legit, then send him back to his family to let him get to work.

Naturally, a film concerning moles primarily concerns identity. The deeper Billy gets into Costello's racket, the more he slowly comes undone under the pressure. When he angrily demands the cops come and bust Costello for any one of the dozens of felonies he's witnessed, Dignam threatens to simply erase his police file and make him just another gangster, and you can see the desperation in DiCaprio's outraged face. Colin begins to dream of a free life when he enters into a relationship with psychiatrist Madolyn Madden (Vera Farmiga), but he's clearly as trapped in Costello's web as Billy. His inability to let people in on his true identity manifests itself when he refuses to let Madolyn display pictures from her childhood when she moves in with him; they only serve to remind him of what he can never have.

There's also a strange paternal bond between Frank and each of the moles. Billy's father and uncle met their demises either directly or indirectly through Costello's actions, and so he places his trust in Bill even when he knows he shouldn't. His relative warmth toward the boy make him more than just the Virgil leading Bill through hell. His bond with Colin is of course even closer, considering he's been nurturing the boy from his adolescence. When Colin contacts Frank, he even calls him Pop so the other cops don't get suspicious.

Scorsese said the film's madcap ending is meant to be a metaphor for the war on terror, which actually makes sense -- surprising, given the over-the-top insanity of the last 20 minutes. The line between cop and criminal disappears in this film when one's identity is muddled, and that could reflect the approval of torture and other atrocities in the name of battling our enemies. The zero-sum bloodbath that closes the film demonstrates that blurring the line to fight the bad guys will destroy us even if we do somehow triumph over the villain.

That final shot, of a rat scurrying across the window, is pathetically obvious, but it's not nearly as bad as some people claim. I've heard people say it ruins the film for them, which baffles me. Still, it shows the cliché in William Monahan's script, which Scorsese successfully underplayed until that moment. Moments like that, combined with the cast's dodgy grasp of the difficult Boston accent and some terrible scenery-chewing from Nicholson, keep The Departed out of the director's upper echelon of work, yet I find myself delighted and completely absorbed by this film.

Where Scorsese's crime dramas are always intimate, tracking one man's ever-unsuccessful attempts to escape the hell of his existence, this dares to be more epic. It brims with the director's signature energy, which was missing in The Aviator and Gangs of New York, though the latter is a better film than this. If nothing else, The Departed demonstrates that, even when working with an under-developed script that reads like a loving Scorsese parody, he can still make something better than most directors could ever hope to craft.