For my money, easily, effortlessly, the best thriller/action movie of the summer, the year, probably the decade. It is a little flabbier than the first installment but it is trying to do a lot more, so that can perhaps be forgiven. A few lines uttered by David Strathairn are clunkers, but very few. And the feel-good ending spoils the introspective, dark feel of the movie. But apart for that, I can’t think of a thing this movie does wrong.
The cinematography conveys a sense of place as we move from Turin to Paris to Tangiers to Madrid and then to New York. There are nice moments of tranquility within the mayhem, beautifully captured by a shot of a finger idly stroking a coffee cup, or Bourne alone in his thoughts, nursing bruised and bloodied fists. There is a great juxtaposition of flashbacks as Bourne recalls being waterboarded, immediately followed by an underwater scene from early in the second installment. Two scenes from the second installment of the trilogy are reinserted into this movie seamlessly. Paul Greengrass cuts it all together superbly.
The action sequences are simply unmatched. The word ‘taut’ is overused, but here it applies in spades. A long scene near the beginning in London’s Waterloo station sets a new standard for action choreography (and is another illustration of Gio’s observation that the cellphone has become the one indispensable item in a thriller). But there are at least three other fine action sequences that had me chewing on my fingernails.
In Joan Allen, David Strathairn, Albert Finney, Julia Stiles and, above all, Matt Damon, the movie has real professionals, adding a level of seriousness and self-consciousness to all the performances. And, to the extent that this trilogy has a message, it is about the cost of violence, and the remorse and pain that Bourne feels — and Damon conveys this mostly silently, through facial expression — for the damage he has done. I’m gushing, but if you like action movies, this one is in a class of its own.
I might argue the Tangiers sequence could have benefited from some tigheter editing, but otherwise I agree with Chris on all fronts. Nail biting entertainment of the highest order.
i loved this film, but WHY NO EXPLOSIONS???? you know, i feel seriously let down when nothing explodes. well, okay, some things do explode here, but i mean, what about a BIG BIG BANG BANG. that would have been COOL!
luckily there was a cool car chase to make up for the lack of a cool explosion.
the choreographed sequence with bourne and the terrified journalist at the beginning is magnificent. very beautiful. and the chase in morocco made me jump up and down on my seat. the funny thing is that you have no sense whatsoever of where the participants are in connection to one another. they are all moving in their own tight spaces, blindly. well, except for jason bourne, who’s fearless and jumps like a frog.
and, chris, you are also right about the accumulation of grief that shows on matt damon’s face. it’s really beautiful and moving in many ways.
i saw this with my mom and i couldn’t help seeing it through her weary european eyes, in part. the trope of deadly and vicious CIA branch has lately moved from the reign of conspiracy-bent political thrillers to the front page of the daily paper, so the poignancy of baddies like strathairn and the CIA chief acquires a strong political edge.
yet, you are still meant to believe in another america, the america of joan allen, congressional hearings, justice, and arrests. when allen tells strathairn to get himself a good lawyer, and when you subsequently see him being carted away by the cops, it is not meant to be pollyannish or bitterly funny: it’s meant to be the triumph of what we are all about, the rule of law, a world governed by procedures, checks and balances, a world resting on a bedrock of governmental goodness.
but the latest gonzales’ hearings (and all the dirty, crazy saga that surrounds them) make all of this so thin. arrests? please. no one is getting arrested for offing american citizens who were deemed “security threats.”
i mention my mom because at some point she leaned towards me and said, “i believe this is the way things are, not just a fiction.” this is of course accurate, but, ignorant as per force she is of american malfeasance (the italian papers don’t cover our dirty wars), she couldn’t have known it. italians are so damn cynical. there is nothing, and i mean nothing i can tell her about the scandals of american politics that leads her to raise an eyebrow. she comes from a real-politikal world in which dirt is synonymous with politics.
and yet, paradoxically, that world is much more benign than this world, the world in which joan allen and her warning to strathairn makes sense and is not laughable.
americans love telling themselves that we are, at bottom, sound, and good, and strong in our commitment to justice. a darker ending to this movie would, i agree with chris, have been more fitting.
(and chris, the best action movie of the decade is casino royale, which gets top points just in virtue of a) the opening sequence and b) the scene in which daniel craig has to resuscitate himself following direction transmitted by london. can’t beat that, mate.)
Matt Damon was pretty funny on Jon Stewart this week. He claimed to have a read a line in a review of the movie that said of Paul Greengrass “will someone please get this fucking guy a steadicam.” And he said that any sequel would be titled “The Bourne Redundancy.”
Speaking of cars with defibrillators in the glove compartment, have you noticed that Bourne always drives crappy little cars during the chase scenes(the old-fashioned mini in the first one, a Russian taxi in the second, and a police cruiser in the third) while his assailants drive BMWs and Audis? It is the anti-Bond. VW is doing a big promotion of its SUV around this Bourne film, but the real lesson is that in the hands a decent driver, any piece of shit will do.
I’m with all in trumpeting the film, and with Chris in lionizing it–I think this is the best action film I’ve seen since Hardboiled.
As I was watching I got caught up in trying to figure out how Greengrass’ style works, particularly its relation between the cut/editing and the shot/composition. It doesn’t seem overreaching to say that Greengrass is reconstructing how we approach action cinema, resistant to a classical style of longer- or single-take fights, less (invested in the shot than in the cut. And yet I also quickly locked onto, as comparator, John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate — the echoes of the paranoid plots, with their respective brainwashed assassins, made me start thinking: how are these two films different? And by looking at the differences, what might we untangle about Greengrass’ approach to action films, or to the politics of Bourne?
I’m noodling here–this really interested me while and since watching, so if you’ll permit, a few quick thoughts, replete with POTENTIAL SPOILERS for both films. I’m really trying to simply start fleshing out some incoherent thoughts; I think this might be worth working on/writing further, and I’m curious what you all think of the ideas:
–TECHNIQUE: Many arguments/analyses in film studies draw a line between the emphasis on the frame of a given shot, however long it lasts, and the work/function of editing between shots. At that level of technique, these films seem vastly different.
Frankenheimer fills the frame with information and seems to build suspense through the shot. He favors wide and long views, all inside the frame carefully composed; there’s less editing, there are fewer close-ups. (I need to rewatch the movie to confirm some of these ideas. And to confound them.)
I’m thinking of the news conference with the Red-baiting Senator, where we see a beautiful proliferation of cameras and secondary images on screens around the central speaker. Or, most memorable, the long-take where we see the brainwashing occur: first we see all the captured soldiers seated on a stage while the fancy Chinese brainwasher, in a flowery British accent, describes to his audience of military and political figures what’s happening. Then in one take the camera pans away from the soldiers and back again, and the stage has changed — they are now seated between a certain archetypal set of small-town suburbanites, women in pillbox hats sipping tea. (One of the men stands up and shoots another, in the middle of the tea — another nice echo of Bourne. More on that in a moment.) Frankenheimer, whose Burt Lancaster film The Train has been touted as the progenitor of the modern action film, is less concerned with frenetic pacing, ‘though the film does pick up considerable speed, particularly in its conclusion (which DOES rely on more careful cross-cutting and editing to build suspense). He seems concerned with dread; that dread and suspense is played out both in what we know (that the characters don’t) and HOW we know. The long-shot approach to action seems to emphasize a way of watching which…. hmmm…. I might argue echoes the view of psychology and mind AND politics in the film: an emphasis on hermeneutics, on the lies of the surface which must be carefully and thoroughly examined and probed for what lies underneath.
In Bourne, there is still the distance between the surface information and some truth underneath. We have Bourne’s ostensible central quest, we have the incessant lies which Chris astutely noted above. But it struck me as funny how often the utterance and untangling of lies is done so patly, so quickly — as if NO ONE believes in the surface. Pam Landy gives Bourne the code 4/15/71, but even she notes that it’s a pretty simplistic code and will be broken momentarily. Information may be buried, covered up, but there is no emphasis on getting to the ‘truth’ or on the master narrative.
(And, yes, I think this even includes the big reveal at the end: finding Hirsch/Finney, Bourne discovers that his own prior/alternate ego made the choice to be Jason Bourne. While it does provide some satisfying ‘closure’ for audiences, it is not the removal of screens for the clarity of the origin. Instead, it’s almost as if we suddenly realize that the screens we’ve been seeking to see behind ARE the meaning behind, as well; Bourne is Webb is Bourne, and while he has been manipulated and controlled, he is not contaminated by some external system–he is inside the system, and that is what corrupts. More on these views of self and self-knowledge and politics in a minute.)
So, as a matter of form/technique, rather than imagining the viewer outside the action absorbing and interpreting through the carefully-composed vision, where we see the whole picture and must see through/past it, we are thrown into the cut. We become–and here I nod up to the points many have raised about Greengrass’ fluency–immersed in movement, becoming aware of time and space by piecing together the fragments of shots. And while Greengrass gives us plenty of information to make a more cohesive vision of the ‘whole’ setting, I think there is also a demand on the viewers, that the cuts are too numerous, the setting often too confused, to be fully determined. As Gio noted about the Tangiers sequence, we are like Nikki and Desh and Bourne trying to figure out where we (and others) are in the surrounding confusion. I also think that is why, in the Waterloo sequence, we are constantly seeing the command center, as Landy and the Strathairn character and their lackeys all piece together and try to make sense of what is going on — we know more than them, see more, but we are engaged in the same process of suturing fragments together into a coherent world-view.
NOW, SO WHAT? Hmmm. I wonder if here we could begin to shift toward politics. In the cold-war thriller Candidate, the political thrust of the film seems to be subversion from within. Our ostensible concern is to develop tools for interpreting what lies behind the surface reality, to see the corruption of the external evil; the film on its surface seems to enact the kind of paranoid anxiety about the communist threat Americans faced. The film’s technique reinforces an interpretive strategy which plays into such political ideology. But the brilliance of Candidate is that it turns the subversion inside out when Angela Lansbury first reveals to her brainwashed-assassin son (and us) that she is a Communist mole. The anti-Communist is the vehicle for Communist brainwashing; worse yet, she’s Mom, and in a viciously-funny parody of Oedipal revelation she gives her son a mouth-to-mouth kiss to seal his final command.
Surfaces are all we have to go on to make sense — we’re invited, compelled even to try and make sense, to find the relevant information in a shot, to see through/past/beyond what we’re given and see what’s behind. But the blackly-funny critique of both this film’s form and its content are that such knowledge does not free us, does not reveal the enemy, does not (really) end. We’re all subject to origins and systems of meaning which govern our actions. (When Laurence Harvey ‘breaks’ his orders, he shoots his stepfather instead of the rival candidate–which makes one stop and wonder, given the Oedipal thrust of that kiss,if he is actually following orders, but of a different nature.) The film’s form seems director-driven; the careful compositions of shot and editing seem to give viewers agency to seek out and interpret, but it is (ahem) a card game, a shill which keeps us seeking, seeming to be in some kind of control, but we’re not. There is a dream of ‘knowing’ the enemy’s true manipulations, of knowing what the actions on screen really signify, but what’s revealed is our lack of knowledge, our inability to know.
Bourne, on the other hand, seems throughout its three-film run to foreground and assume–and enact–that lack of agency. Bourne has been wholly-determined by forces beyond his control, and he knows it; when pushed into a corner, his body becomes almost pure machine, requiring no conscious thought at all. The technique of the film, its immersive shooting/editing style, seems to lock us, too, into making sense as we go, or even after the fact–we don’t carefully (and authoritatively) examine all of the information, we cobble it together on the run. Is this a new style but playing a similar function, like Frankeheimer’s directorial control manipulating us to recognize the inability to escape manipulation?
I don’t think so. There are these intriguing reversals. Bourne, despite his lack of self-knowledge, his seemingly uncontrollable/fixed position subject to the rules of his creator, is the only truly-powerful agent in all three films, always evading every attempt to KNOW him. And the final revelation is, in some ways (as I noted above), a rebuttal of an external control — Bourne’s origin is in complicity with the system, which DOES make him the machine he is, but not (simply) through an external control. And the idealistic, even utopian message of the film’s many concluding moments is that we are not fully bound in or controlled by these systems which we have joined into: Landy can fax information out; Bourne can choose not to shoot. And the final shot, of him swimming off into dim light, suggests a final rejection of the paranoid model governing “intelligence” work — don’t try to see past surfaces to a true origin or depth; recognize how we are ‘inside’ the systems we manufacture.
Or, and obviously I’m swimming about myself trying to get my ideas straight, I think that Candidate bleakly illustrates, deconstructs, and performs a paranoid model of self and of world politics. While critical of such paranoia, the film’s technique relies upon the models of seeing & knowing which govern paranoia. Bourne in technique and narrative outcome resists–perhaps even refutes–that entrapment in paranoia. It is incessantly skeptical of a model of self or of knowledge which imagines some ‘interior’ or origin divorced from (and simply acted upon by) the world of space, time, and political struggle. But it also utopically imagines that self-knowledge is system-knowledge, that struggling to figure out our place in the world can lead to a recognition of how we are complicit in the actions we take without wholly determining us as nothing but those actions. Its political undercurrents seem to me a break from the Cold War-busting work of Candidate, a break which is also manifested in and performed through its technical differences as an action film.
Okay. Sorry: if anyone has the patience to sort through, and has any ideas about how I’m wrong confused fucked-up … or maybe possibly have something worth pursuing further, I’d love some comments.
mike, does your good lady wife have any idea about the size of screens at northfield’s southgate theater (it re-opened recently so it will have to be recent information). this new bourne film is playing there and it would be nice not to have to drive a long way.
however, i cannot trust the opinions of people who think the new casino royale is the best action film of the decade.
Well…. she lived there about fifteen years ago, so I doubt she will be of much help. Sorry. I think at the time Carletonians (Carlies? Carls?) had no access to a movie theater, so they employed their slave minions at St. Olaf to act out various films. (St. Olaf students are like the aphids to Carlies’ ants, as I understand it.)
can’t she activate some alumni network to find this out. hurry! there’s a show coming up soon.
the people who we bought the house from said they went to st. olaf’s and referred to themselves as “townies”. can you do that if your school is also an expensive private school (if not as expensive as the other one in town)?
Paul Greengrass spits on townies.
Arnab, the Muller Monster Screen looks to be big enough for you.
Mike, I think Owen Gleiberman addresses many of the ideas you are wrestling with in his review of Bourne 3.0.
If Reynolds’ post had been half as long and a quarter as smart, I would have responded yesterday, but as it is, I have been pondering it ever since. Brilliant as usual. Just a few random thoughts. The distinction between technique in cold war thrillers and Bourne works for another film as well. I have not watched ‘Manchurian Candidate’ for a long time, but I recently watched ‘Parallax View’ again, and it is full of long, wide shots that simply present information and make the viewer sift through it rather than home in on whatever it the director is directing our attention towards. For example the early shots of the Space Needle and all the later scenes of the convention/warehouse area taken from the walkways above. And interestingly, ‘Ronin’, a much more recent post-Cold War Frankenheimer movie that I like a great deal, is much closer to Bourne than Candidate in the use of close up shots and rapid cutting: the car chases, the coffee cup introduction of Jean Reno and Robert de Niro, bullet extraction and imagery of toy samurai soldiers. So, is it the style of the director or the geopolitical climate that determines the cinematography? Obviously a stupid question based on a sample of four movies.
Is the cutting technique in Bourne an indication of the kind of politics? It seems to me that the Greengrass is much more interested in psychology than politics. The short shots and rapid cutting in the action scenes mirror the fragmentary shards of memory in the flashbacks. They are all incomplete, because Bourne’s personality is a bundle of disconnected memories, out of order, some real some imagined. This is clearer in the first installment when Bourne becomes aware of his training, but every time he discovers that he can fight or speak a foreign language (the park bench in Zurich) he is drawing on some forgotten memory, and the rapid cutting of his response (pick up a pen or a book or a telephone to fight) is like a memory clicking into place. But these remain unconnected fragments, instincts more than understanding. The long and wide shot of Bourne – who he is, where he came from, how he became like this – is elusive, and that is what he is searching for in the last installment. Everything about Bourne is incomplete, fragmentary, and the cutting reflects that.
I wonder about agency and choice. We have touched on this before in discussions of ‘Syriana’ and ‘Munich.’ Does the movie tell us that David Webb initially chose to be Jason Bourne? That is the memory that Finney evokes near the end, but much earlier in the movie we see from flashbacks that this moment followed waterboarding, 52 hours without sleep, and Webb sitting, head bowed, in front of Finney saying “I can’t do this.†He chooses – and [SPOILER] choice means being willing to shoot someone he does not know – , but only as a result of torture. And Bourne is an agent, but over the course of three movies, his realm of choice is only really the personal: his own life, that of Nikki. He cannot even save Marie. It is true that he gives documents to Pamela Lundy that bring down Scott Glenn and David Strathairn, but that was the part of the movie that seemed false to me, to be discordant with the rest of the trilogy. It seemed to be a feel-good, tacked on ending. The ending of the first installment fits better: Bourne finds Marie (he succeeds in personal terms) but we see Brian Cox in front of a senate oversight committee lying about Treadstone and selling Blackbriar. It will go on. The machinery of torture and assassination cannot be stopped by Bourne or Lundy or us.
Couple quick responses:
–to Jeff: yeah, Gleiberman much more precisely gets at the notion of immersion I was trying to suss out, but he also ignores some of the substance of that technique, in fact closing with a comment that there isn’t much substance. But I cannot help but see political dimensions suffusing this film; we have all the machinery and ideology of the war on terror but no actual terrorists? (And that’s true in all 3 films, right, all post-9/11 ‘spy thrillers’?) That alone opens interesting relations to our geopolitical context.
–Chris, lots of good reactions, and I need to think more, but a couple quick comments:
a) Parallax is another great example. It interests me, though, that in Candidate and Parallax the indoctrination procedures are visible, are optical — seeing something shapes your mind. And, as I tried to untangle, the films also promise–or hold out the false promise–that really smart seeing/interpretation can see THROUGH the lies and deceptions and uncover the truth. Of course, in the proper paranoid fashion, there is no way to escape the corruption, and in Parallax in particular one is inexorably drawn into and made part of the system you’re trying to expose.
But seeing is NOT an inexorable form of control and knowledge in the Bourne movies. In fact, it’s always fascinating that Bourne dons none of the cheesy face-changing masks of the Mission: Impossible films, and will when he needs to bluntly show up and stare at the camera. As I noted, all that information, all those fragments of video footage and computer screens in the “control” room amount to jackshit — they eventually need to send people outside, to get bodies on the ground.
–And it seems like bodies are the vehicle for controlling the mind. Bourne’s torture sequences are about breaking down the mental through the physical; then, once ‘controlled,’ he is almost pure body, his mind shuts off and he simply does. So maybe the technical shift we’re untangling reflects this shift in psychological understanding. Not just a shift from theatrical to cinematic ‘vision’, but a shift from the centrality of the gaze (in cinema) to sensations — the Bourne movies are about physicality, and trying to give you a sense of that physicality through technique.
–Psychology: well, it might be a shift in thinking about psychology. You’re right: Bourne’s psych is central, and it is elusively fragmented. Whereas the model for both Candidate and Parallax is far more Freudian in its central structures.
But all of the films imagine an original point: the scene of indoctrination and torture. So even as they seem to manifest different understandings of how to recover that primal scene, or how it impacts the protagonist, they all still seem to be grounded in a model of subjectivity which assumes the significance of trauma.
–Now, let me go out on a limb. Was Bourne’s memory of the washboarding and the torture real? His flashbacks are true? That is where a certain paranoia comes in handy; when even a phone conversation about when the crew will arrive is subject to three or more interpretations, is not taken for granted, if NO communication is not coded and if coding is endlessly, easily unscrambled…. why should we believe that it is the scenes of torture that are real? I find it fairly interesting to examine the ambiguity suggested in that final revelation: are the memories of torture screens meant to protect Jason Bourne from himself? And so, at film’s end, he remains under the surface of the water, refusing to come back out. Water imagery is constant in this chapter, and its last shot seems to suggest a resonant metaphorical weight rather than precise ‘past’/truth referent.
But maybe I’m reaching.
–The machinery can’t be stopped, but unlike the earlier films, there is a sense that you are not controlled by that machinery. Parallax ends with the hero investigative reporter killed and assumed to be a lone gunman — he is fully inside the narrative. The Bourne movies do suggest some of the same paranoid/conspiratorial sense of deep-cover government machinations, but their vision of ideology and its control seem much more flexible. Even another assassin can choose not to shoot Bourne, up on that roof. A sense of agency is available in these films.
I haven’t touched on Ronin, and I need to think more about that…
i do not appreciate how this discussion has moved away from finding me an appropriate large screen on which to watch this film.
I found you a large screen damnit! See #9.
#9 #9 #9
I’m married to a Carleton graduate. Her information is twenty years out of date, but she says that the movie theater in Northfield only showed pornographic films when she was in college. However, it was on a large screen.
i don’t think arnab wants a large screen, jeff. he just wants the attention.
there there, barnie.
Chris, my lurking Carleton-grad wife now wonders what your wife’s name is and when she was there. (Kris graduated in ’91.)
She also says “poopily doopily.” It’s weird how she refuses to write her own comments, but I guess I’ll have to pass on everything she says. Now she says “Arnab’s a wanker.” I pass it all on, without editing.
The name is Susan Clayton, but I’m afraid she predates Kris by about seven years. She claims to have spent most of her time at Carleton in the underground passageways, protected from the harsh cold, but vulnerable to CHUD or the monster from The Host.
simon would like me to tell you that he graduated from the london school of boys in the mid-thirties, and if there is anything at all you want to know about it he’ll he happy to answer (through me of course).
i’m relieved to learn that kris is not married to both mike and chris. but i’m confused as to why mike didn’t know chris’ wife’s name–did this never come up when you were colleagues?
but the conversation is once again slipping away from me.
I remembered “Susan”. But Chris and I never actually interacted in person at Oberlin. I posted messages on his door, and he on mine. This was in the days before the internets.
watched this too recently. i agree: best action film in a long, long time. but best since hard-boiled? come on. i’d take the sheer exhilaration of tsui hark’s time and tide over this any day. mike and chris’s exchange is interesting, but i’m not sure i understand it all. mike, please summarize your points.
i have to disagree about some of the comments about casting though. i thought straithairn and allen’s characters, and the way they’re played, didn’t fit in the film at all. there is no ambivalence to either. the uneasiness of chris cooper and brian cox in the earlier films fit better with the series’ overall tone. stiles is more interesting–her blankness mirroring bourne’s in an interesting way.
Interesting that you would reference ‘Hardboiled’ because I just watched a new two-DVD edition. It holds up very well indeed. I still prefer ‘The Killer’ and the first ‘A Better Tomorrow’ overall, for the way they develop themes of friendship, loyalty and regret, but the tea house and hospital action sequences in ‘Hardboiled’ are just unmatched 15 years on.
chris, have you seen time and tide?
I thought so; I systematically rented everything by Tsui Hark a year or two ago. But now I’m not sure. I just put it in my Netflix queue, and Netflix is saying it isn’t even available yet (despite being a 2000 film). So I’m confused.