Body of Lies: Grade B

B
Body of Lies (2008)
Russell Crowe; Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Strong. Director Ridley Scott.

This CIA spy thriller set in the middle east delivers the action and suspense we expect from Ridley Scott. DiCaprio is a field agent who has a lead to a big, bad Arab terrorist lynchpin that the CIA has not been able to find or identify. To get to this bad guy, DiCaprio must maintain the trust of the head of Jordanian intelligence, well played by Strong. However, DiCaprio’s CIA boss in Langley (Crowe) keeps meddling in the plan, disrupting the operation whenever he tries to “help,” causing breach of trust with the spymaster in Amman.

DiCaprio meets an attractive girl there, which is as good as stamping “hostage” across her forehead. There are suitable fiery explosions that blow out whole buildings, aerial surveillance drones, machine gun battles, frantic chases through crowded markets, and so on. Locations seemed real because of the lighting and city scenes, and were attractive. Sound engineering was particularly detailed. I appreciate hearing brass shell casings hit the ground. However, it was not convincing for DiCaprio and Crowe to have instantaneous, secure, and perfectly clear conversations across half the world on their cell phones (no doubt they were “special” phones) nor that CIA staff could sit omnisciently in a video paneled room counting every whisker on DiCaprio’s chin. Acting by DiCaprio was mature and convincing, and Crowe really shone as the southern-drawling, dumb-as-a-fox CIA spymaster. The movie was intellectually engaging and suitably kinetic but not thematically serious. It is just an adventure for the sake of adventure, though well-done for its genre.

Traitor: Grade B

B
Traitor (2008)
Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, Saïd Taghmaoui, Jeff Daniels; Co-Writer & Director Jeffrey Nachmanoff.

You’ll need motion-sickness medication to watch this movie. The camera swoops, spins, tracks and zooms dizzyingly in every scene. Fast pans move from one close up shot to another so quickly you can hardly tell what you’re looking at and if you try to follow the motion your eyes will cross. The movements are completely gratuitous, seriously detracting from the film. When it is not swooping around, the camera is hand held, jumping and jittering wildly with the action but incomprehensibly, shot from no consistent point of view. This syntax of camera-as-character is common in television, but usually done more intelligently. But all is not lost, for in the last 1/3 of the film they apparently changed personnel and the movie settles down to a much more enjoyable, professional looking work. You just have to make it through the first hour.

And you should try, for this is basically a good movie. Don Cheadle is a deep undercover agent for the US Government, penetrating a terrorist organization based in Yemen. His undercover status is not revealed for the first 45 minutes, (although I guessed it right away -- he is Don Cheadle, after all), so we first get to know him as an explosives dealer who also instructs his customers in making bombs and suicide vests. Taghmaoui is the militant Islamic extremist who Cheadle befriends. To earn his bones, Cheadle must blow up an American embassy in Europe, which causes him a crisis of conscience, and we learn that his character really is a devout Muslim, not just an undercover pretender. Acting is consistently superb throughout. The dialog is intelligent and the story is engaging. However, sets, scenes and costumes are so self-consciously overdone that they are unconvincing. It is courageous of Cheadle to put his career at risk by playing an Islamic terrorist but he plays it extremely well, so much so that we can understand the point of view of the anti-American Islamic extremists. Despite its flaws, good acting and a good story make the move worth seeing.

Rendition: Grade A

A
Rendition (2007)
Omar Metwally, Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Moa Khouas, Zineb Oukach, Yigal Naor, Meryl Streep, Peter Sarsgaard, Alan Arkin. Director Gavin Hood.

This didactic movie describes the U.S. government practice of “rendition,” in which captured terrorist suspects can be transferred, without judicial process, to a prison outside the U.S. to be tortured. As the president and the secretary of state have repeatedly said, “America doesn’t do torture.” This movie shows how that may be literally true. CIA agent Gyllenhaal merely observes torture conducted by an Egyptian ally (Naor). An Egyptian man living in America (Metwally) has been captured, hooded and “rendered” to Egypt for torture on orders from hard-boiled CIA boss Streep. His wife, Witherspoon, appeals to her senator (Arkin) via his aide (Sarsgaard) for intervention but gets the “classified secrets” stonewall. In a completely separate story, a young Egyptian man (Khouas) becomes a suicide bomber when his brother is captured and tortured by Egyptian police.

The film is well-researched, well-made, and very well-acted, especially by Metwally and Naor. Streep speaks her acid lines with perfection. Sarsgaard gives a nuanced performance. Gyllenhaal’s character is under-written, so there’s not much for him to do, but his silent head nods are as good acting as you’ll see anywhere. Reese Witherspoon gives an amazing dramatic performance. Directing is deft, cinematography fully convincing, and the music is outstanding. It’s a first class movie all around, except…

There are two problems. One is that the time sequencing of the two stories is so chopped up that it is very close to being incomprehensible. It took me an hour to realize there were two separate stories, and until the three-quarters mark to realize that most of what I had seen had been flashback. The ending scenes don’t make a lot of sense unless you have been taking notes on a yellow pad. Two stories were not needed. The main rendition story would have been more than enough. Whether this was botched editing or poor planning from the beginning, the disjoint timeline torpedoes both stories.

Extra-cinematic criticism is inevitable for this politically and morally sensitive story. The message is clear: the U.S. does not obey its own or international laws, tortures people, and lies about it. Lip service is given to the countervailing argument that we should thank the government for protecting us from terrorists by whatever means prudent. It would have been a better movie if Metwally’s character had been more ambiguous, not an innocent victim of an inhuman, racist, immoral government. It is a “Shame on you, America” message, and though very well made, its political point is bound to alienate many.

The Bourne Ultimatum: Grade C

C

The Bourne Ultimatum
Matt Damon, Julia Stiles, David Strathairn, Joan Allen. Director Paul Greengrass.

This third of the Bourne series is actually a Superman movie. Damon doesn’t have the cape and tights (our loss) but otherwise is invulnerable. He drives a car off a building to the concrete below and just hops out (none of the cars in this movie has airbags). He is shot in the leg, limping badly, but still manages to jump from a moving train and outrun the Russian police. He has no trouble beating up 3 or 5 big muscular guys at once. If someone has the drop on him with a gun, he just takes the gun. He does leap tall buildings in a single bound, but can he fly? We’re not sure. We see him jumping 20 foot alleys on rooftops, but we never see how he gets from Turin to Madrid to New York in a single afternoon. Stiles has some minor powers, such as taking a full force bad guy elbow in the face that knocks her across the room but does not damage her cute nose. The evil CIA has omniscient powers, as you would expect, such as being able to control all the CCTV cameras in London from their offices in Virginia, being able to read the handwritten papers on someone’s desk in another country, by technology unknown. The story is literally incredible, an unintentionally humorous parody of the paranoid chase thriller. None of it makes any sense and none of the characters is realistically drawn or motivated. Acting is uniformly wooden, to put it kindly. On the upside, the chases are mostly on foot, unlike other such films that depend on vehicular action.

There are some virtues. One fistfight scene is edited into second and subsecond disconnected segments, giving it a good-looking martial arts grace. I think that is a cinematic innovation for a western fight scene. The filming locations are compelling, with big colors and big sound (especially around 20 Hz where you can feel it in your belly), including all the slamming metallic door sounds you could hope for. Note to sound designer: it has been a very long time since any computer emitted a little tone with each letter appearing on the screen. I analyzed several long chase scenes into cuts lasting an average of 2 seconds with a standard deviation of 1 second. These incredibly short cuts combined with shaky hand-held cameras make a dizzying experience, a strain to watch. Nevertheless, I think editing a 2 hour movie into thousands of disconnected 2 second scenes also counts a cinematic innovation, although to what end I cannot say. Three Days of the Condor (1975) is the same movie at the languid pace of a pre-computer, pre-internet, pre-video game, pre-cell phone, pre-GPS world, yet holds vastly more tension.

The Good Shepherd: Grade B

B

The Good Shepherd (2006)

Robert DeNiro, Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, Alec Baldwin, Billy Crudup, William Hurt, Timothy Hutton, Michael Gambon, Joe Pesci, John Turturro. Director Robert DeNiro.

It seems like DeNiro wanted to create a “Godfather” epic here, using the founding and development of the CIA instead of the Mafia in America (Francis Coppola produced). But it doesn’t work. What made the Godfather stick together was the Corleone family. Here the family of early CIA agent Damon is only sketched. He drifts into spy work from his network at Yale, and his father was a spy with the OSS, but we never see him choose that career with passion. There is a faint suggestion that Damon needs to compensate for his father’s failure but that is very faint. I might have imagined it. Damon is forced to marry Jolie but the passionless marriage does not survive his six years abroad. His mixed-up son gets involved with a woman with questionable security so Damon is torn between protectiveness, permissiveness, and duty.

The movie is episodic, with numerous mini-stories of deception, paranoia and backstabbing, but there is no momentum. The Godfather was also episodic but the themes of building the crime empire, ensuring family loyalty, and going legitimate, were overarching. There is nothing like that here. It is just “one damn thing after another.” The long (160 minute) run time would have been tolerable if there had been a thread to follow. The acting is adequate, the music good, and individual episodes, written Le Carre style, are directed with a real sense of cloak and dagger, but it is all unconnected. Annoying cliche green filters are overdone. Damon is completely unexpressive, almost catatonic throughout. In Godfather III, Pacino was catatonic but conveyed seething menace. Here Damon has no interiority. It would be great to see a Godfather-like epic moving through the cold war, but this isn’t it.