Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Posted on December 15, 2011 at 6:26 pm

There are spy stories with glamor and chases and explosions and answers. And there are spy stories like this one, murky, gritty, grubby, complicated. The brilliant BBC miniseries version of the the book by John le Carre opened with the grim-looking Russian matryoshka nested dolls, a perfect image for this Cold War era story of a traitor at the heart of British intelligence. The original miniseries, with Alec Guinness as the exiled spy called back in to find the mole was known for being both superbly made and almost impenetrable. I watched it four times before I felt confident that I had some idea of what was going on. And now it has been remade in a fraction of the running time. Its production design is brilliantly done and there are moments of extraordinary power and artistry but it is even harder to follow. Yes, the difficulty is part of the point. While one of the reasons we love movies and indeed stories of all kinds is that they make sense of a complicated and ambiguous world, and you can even make sense by pointing out the complicated and ambiguous nature of things, this movie does not have the time or the scope to tell this story effectively and suffers by comparison with the superior earlier version.

Gary Oldman plays the Guinness role of the ironically named George Smiley. He is a spy who was once close to “Control” (John Hurt), the head of British Intelligence, officially known as MI6 but referred to by everyone as “the Circus.” Smiley was pushed out of the Circus, which is why when one of their agents is double-crossed, shot, captured, and tortured, that someone in the top levels is giving secrets to the Soviets, Smiley is the only senior spy who is not a suspect, and thus the only one who can investigate. Control tells him it is one of five men, and he assigns code names to them based on the old nursery rhyme: tinker, tailor, soldier, poorman, and beggarman. Smiley is helped by a young agent named Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch) and a rogue agent named Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy), as well as a visit to a retired MI6 head of research (Kathy Burke in the film’s best performance).

But nothing is as straightforward as that paragraph suggests. Everything is codes within codes and what is not said or shown is more important than what is. The atmosphere is the most important character in the film. The production design by Maria Djurkovic powerfully evokes the era as Britain adjusts to post-WWII economic struggles and its rapidly shrinking role in international affairs with its dingy institutional spaces and ironically child-like vocabulary. The scenes set at an office Christmas party are dead-on and deadly, the mirthless drinking and sad little decorations. The contrast between the smallness of that world and the enormity of the end-of-the-world issues in those early days of WMDs is conveyed better by a hand-lettered sign in a grimy office than by the the big reveal about who has been providing secrets instead of gathering them.

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The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby

Posted on October 27, 2011 at 10:51 am

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Not rated
Date Released to Theaters:	October 27, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	1591141222

Documentaries made by adult children about their fathers have become a significant new genre. My Architect is the story of Louis Kahn by the son he never publicly acknowledged. In Tell Them Who You Are, filmmaker Mark Wexler trains his camera on his cinematographer father, Haskell. And in “Five Wives, Three Secretaries, and Me,” Tessa Blake uses her million dollar trust fund to make a movie about her multiply-married father, Texas oilman Thomas Walter Blake, Jr. All of these films, in their way, are about secrets. But this film, about the head of the CIA, is about family secrets and national security secrets, too. Can a man whose job is keeping secrets share enough of himself to be a good father? Does a man who loves secrets even want to be? “I’m not sure he ever loved anyone, and I never heard him say anything heartfelt,” says his son, Carl.

Part family story, with insightful comments from the woman who was wife to the movie’s subject and is mother to the movie’s director and part “Fog of War”-style exploration of America’s role in post-WII international affairs with a Who’s Who of Cold War policy-makers, this is a riveting and important film that does not rest too heavily on the connection between its subject’s personal emptiness and the moral failures Colby would come to regret. He kept so many secrets he lost touch with the reasons. Its elegiac tone concluding in Colby’s mysterious death — alone — in a boating accident, ties together the sense of personal, professional, and national loss.

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Documentary Movies -- format Spies

Johnny English Reborn

Posted on October 20, 2011 at 6:43 pm

The first Johnny English spy spoof came out in 2003. The spy parts were not exciting enough and the comedy parts were not funny enough to make material that has been done by everyone from James Coburn and Dean Martin to Mike Meyers and Jackie Chan seem fresh. And yet, he’s back — the movie no one much liked has a sequel no one asked for. There’s just one reason: people who do not speak English loved it. The original made a ton of money in countries where audiences could enjoy the pratfalls and ignore everything else. And so, passing through quickly on its way to being dubbed for international release, we have “Johnny English Reborn.”

Rowan Atkinson is best in small doses. Even at under two hours, this goes on much too long as it appears to go down a check-list of spy movie clichés, only to deploy jokes that are almost as well-worn. There is one great Parkour chase scene and a couple of genuinely funny moments but it drags on with Atkinson doing the same shtick over and over — the disconnect between his assessment of his capability (high) and his actual capability (low). And lots of crotch hits.

Someone has certainly watched a great many spy movies and so the settings replicate Bond staples like the snowy retreat, the men’s room, the secret headquarters, and the ashram. But like the first one, most of the action isn’t exciting and most of the jokes are not funny. Perhaps the dubbed version is better.

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Killer Elite

Posted on September 22, 2011 at 6:11 pm

Like this year’s “The Devil’s Double,” this film would be much more satisfying and believable if it was not so self-serving in favor of the people telling the story. The oddest part is that the fight scenes are brutally, authentic while the non-fight scenes are laughably ridiculous. While it says it is “based on a true story,” the book that inspired it is labeled as a work of fiction and has been discredited by family members of those involved.

It opens in 1980, with the world in unrest and an oil crisis. Danny (Jason Statham), ex-special forces, works various dangerous jobs with his long-time ally Hunter (Robert De Niro) until he decides to leave it all behind and have a new, peaceful life in Australia. But he gets pulled back in when Hunter is kidnapped by a sheik who wants Danny to hunt down and kill the men from British forces who killed his three sons in an armed conflict in Oman. But Danny can’t just kill them. The sheik wants taped confessions from each and then Danny has to make each death look like an accident (which of course makes it impossible, 30 years later, to say that the accidental deaths were not really homicides). Danny gets the band back together, with, of course, one newbie just to act as a wild card, and goes after the sheik’s three targets.

But in this nasty, brutish world, everyone’s a bad guy; it’s just a question of degree. While Danny and his group are going after the guys who killed the sheik’s sons, the guys who think those guys were the good guys go after Danny. And while all of that is going on, the desiccated old men sitting around in expensively furnished board rooms are moving them all around like chess pieces, with even less regard for whether they get knocked off the board. These are the “feather men” (because of their light touch) who like some third-rate Batman villain actually leave their calling card to let the men who do the actual killing know that they’ve been there. Just to make sure we get the point, the old guys in suits actually say things like, “What we did there was questionable,” “We all know our people went too far,” and “We’re businessmen and bankers now. We can leave no trace of our activities.” Meanwhile, the guys who kill people (as opposed to ordering other people to do it) say things like, “Killing is easy. Living with it is the hard part.” So we know they have feelings, get it?

Statham is always a pleasure to watch and De Niro is superb as the man who has given his life to adrenaline and rough justice but is loyal to his friend and his family. The fight scenes are not the usual choreographed carnage but believably rough and exhausting. There are some nice shifts of allegiance back and forth and some good points to be made about how behind the killing is profits from oil. But the whole premise becomes increasingly ludicrous until it falls apart.

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The Debt

Posted on August 30, 2011 at 6:04 pm

A+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Adult
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for some violence and language
Profanity:	Some strong and offensive language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking, drugs
Violence/ Scariness:	Characters in peril, injured, and killed, some graphic images, references to Holocaust atrocities
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	August 31, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	December 6, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B003Y5H4Y8

Stories are linear. Part of what gives them their power is that we jettison the details that are distracting or unimportant. But real life is messy. That may not be as compelling, but is honest. As we are told in “The Man Who Shots Liberty Valance,” “When the truth becomes legend, print the legend.” And sometimes the legend becomes the truth.

That is the story of “The Debt.” It begins in 1997, when a woman is celebrating the publication of her book, which tells the story of her parents’ daring capture of a Nazi war criminal named Vogel in East Germany three decades before. Her parents, now divorced, are Rachel Singer (Helen Mirren) and Stephan Gold (Tom Wilkenson). Rachel still has a scar on her cheek from the prisoner’s attack on her when he tried to escape. She shot him to keep him from getting away.

Then we go back to the 1960’s, when Rachel (Jessica Chastain) passes through the Berlin Wall on her first assignment as a Mossad agent. The man they are looking for was responsible for atrocities that were a grotesque version of medical experiments during the war. Now he is a gynecologist under the name Bernhardt (the Danish actor Jesper Christensen), and Rachel is assigned to visit him as a patient, posing as the wife of another agent, David Peretz (Sam Worthington), under the direction of their leader, Stephan (Marton Csokas). The first time through, we saw the story they told. Now we see what really happened, and then we will see how the three of them, in their 60’s, finish the story.

It is a tense thriller with some action and a lot of suspense, especially the war of nerves as Bernhardt and the three young agents are stuck in a grimy apartment for days, essentially prisoners of each other. The young agents are rattled by Vogel’s coolness and manipulation. And then, decades later, their story starts to unravel and they have to finish what they started.

The movie works very well as a thriller that benefits from some ambitious aspirations and superb performances from Christensen, Wilkenson, and Mirren. But it spins out of control in the last 20 minutes, sacrificing story for action and losing much of its gritty momentum.

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