The music of the mechanics of the investigation

A man, recently humiliated for making unsubstantiated accusations against a public figure, is brought to a remote, frozen corner of Northern Sweden, an island of vast manors inhabited by the aging members of an industrial dynasty, some of them one-time Nazis, few of whom talk to each other anymore. The man has been asked by one of the family elders to research his memoir, but the real purpose of the research seems to be to discover what happened to a 16-year-old niece who vanished back in 1966.

As the man gets deeper into his increasingly precarious task (many within the family aren’t nice to him; one even shoots at him) he hires a young woman as an assistant—the same young woman who did an extremely thorough background check on the man for the family elder. Turns out they make a great team: he’s cool but affable, ruggedly handsome in his heavy knits, a sort of old school gumshoe type of investigative reporter, good with legwork and making contacts; she’s withdrawn and socially handicapped, a genius with data processing (she may even have a photographic memory) and swift with acts of necessary roughness, diminutive, with a pale, orphan-child face, multiple piercings and tatts, and, at times, an invincible mohawk. (How does her hair stay so vertical after wearing a motorcycle helmet?) The film they’re in has little time for conventional character development, so our rapid registering of their peculiar, quiet chemistry is important. The characters are embodied by Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, whose performances, defined by such distinct choices in body language, appear effortless, or rather, all about attending to the task at hand. And that’s the sensibility driving The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in a nutshell: telling a story one task at a time; process, procedure, efficiency.

The hiring of director David Fincher for the English-language adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s pulpy, often tawdry international bestseller is inspired. Very few filmmakers could simultaneously manage a production of this scale and bring to it such personal, unfussy finesse. Early scenes snow us with exposition and flashbacks, yet we get everything we need to, and even if we don’t it’s all quite compelling. There’s a great deal of ordinary work up on screen: googling, highlighting documents, scanning photos, thumbing through files, and all of it clips along like the tip-tapping of a crash cymbal. The mystery at the heart of this is genuinely interesting, the resolution pretty satisfying, but what animates The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the music of the mechanics of the investigation itself.

Fincher’s work underwent a seismic breakthrough with 2007’s Zodiac—a mystery that doesn’t even have a resolution!—and this new film takes its cues from that film, as well as 2010’s The Social Network. All these films are on the long side, all of them crammed with plot, all of them hugely dependent on pace, rhythm, dynamics, adrenaline. Dragon Tattoo isn’t the deepest thing Fincher’s made (its serial killer’s gimmicky showmanship mirrors one of the corniest/most shamelessly lurid elements of 1995’s Se7en) by it’s as engrossing as his best work. Even after two-and-a-half exhausting hours, I found myself eager to come back and see what Fincher and his cohorts do with the next installment of the trilogy.

Defiance: saving lives, forest wives and reversing stereotypes in this untold tale of Holocaust survival

The title sounds like some vehicle for Stallone, or maybe the Rock, but Defiance in fact belongs to the new crop of revisionist WWII/Holocuast movies, an epic of resistance, survival and self-determination. It’s based on an astonishing and largely unknown true story, astonishing in part because its portrayal of the abysmal suffering of Europe’s Jews is given fresh dynamic in the shape of Belarusian brothers Tuvia, Zus and Asael Bielski, three handsome boys of durable Jewish peasant stock who lose everything in the German invasion save their lives and dignity. You have to marvel and just how rare it is in movies to find such a characterization of the Jews, not as a mass of helpless victims, but as tough motherfuckers.

Having fled their homes, the Bielskis original plan was, understandably, founded in self-interest. But their encounters with other Jews hiding in the Belarusian woods tugs at their sense of solidarity and purpose. Surrounded by trembling, dirt-smeared faces gnawing on scraps of petrified bread, Zus (Liev Schreiber) wonders: “So many dead. Why not us?” The movie is of course one long answer to this question. Where Zus believes the only viable moral option is to fight as partisans alongside the Russians, Tuvia (Daniel Craig) resolves to stay hidden and build a community where every last Jew, from the able-bodied to the infirm, has some chance at survival, however remote. This theme of aggression versus seclusion is given its boldest dramatization in a sequence that shifts back and forth between a Russian-Partisan ambush on a German convoy and a wedding ceremony held in the forest enclave, both effectively staged and given engaging visual arcs by director and co-scenarist Edward Zwick, who previously helmed such like fare as Glory (1989), Legends of the Fall (94), The Last Samurai (03) and Blood Diamond (06).

Other scenes in Defiance however, ones that require greater reflection, tend to be more ham-fisted. Some are entirely unnecessary, like the dumb-ass scene where Bella (Iben Hjejle) asks Zus why the women don’t get guns. Zus simply assures her that the men will protect her, and this chauvinist brush-off, rather than leading to further discussion, touches Bella so deeply that she lets Zus cop a feel. (Does that mean she's Zus' "forest wife?" Lots of the fellows take forest wives, like participants in some prototype for a Pacific Northwest commune. It might have been interesting to learn more about the postwar fates of these forest marriages.) 

With its overused and overly instructive James Newton Howard score, its declamatory, overstated dialogue—which awkwardly avoids contractions as a way of reminding us that the characters aren’t actually supposed to be speaking English—Defiance sort of plods along, very respectful and workmanlike for the most, yet at heart there remains this iconoclastic appendix to the Holocaust narrative that’s worth knowing, not to mention yet another superbly rich performance from Craig, who swings convincingly between that steely gaze that exudes Bond know-how and a sense of desperation and terrible doubt as to what to do with all these people shriveling up from hunger and despair.

The Birth of the Cold

Peering out from below a broad, heavy brow, he has the pale face of a man thoroughly eaten up inside. The London he moves in looks damp, grey and bone-chilling. He wears his trench coat tucked up around him like a blanket, and puts away half a bottle of whiskey a day. He has no friends and speaks as little as he can get away with. He takes a menial clerical job at the library for the Candahar Institute for Psychical Research, where he works alongside a pretty, confident young woman. She explains to him what lycanthropy means in a weirdly sexy way that suggests he might just be some sort of werewolf, and she likes the idea. What matters, perhaps, is that he is so clearly someone other than he claims to be. It may just be the starkest romance in movies, and it really works.

But I’m jumping ahead. The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1965) actually begins with Alec Leamas (Richard Burton) stalking Checkpoint Charlie, waiting for a man to cross over on a bicycle. A tense piano, Satie-esque, plays over the barbed wire, flood lights and brick. Things won’t go well. The photography is black and white, and this Berlin seems to have forgotten about things like trees—this is one Cold War movie that looks irredeemably cold. Leamas will soon be back in London, where he visits Control (Cyril Cusack) and takes a new assignment that will keep him “out in the cold,” pretending to defect in a ploy to turn one German intelligence agent against another. The brief period of work at the library was only meant as a fleeting ruse, but Leamas’ unexpected connection with Nan (Claire Bloom), who, in a tidy bit of dramatic irony, is a card-carrying communist, will complicate that. We know how these things go. It’s a spy movie, and thus perpetually mired in the forbidding causality that comes with the milieu: everything complicates everything. Everyone is a pawn of some sort.

John le Carré’s third novel, released two years previously, was a sensation, de-glamorizing the world of intelligence just as Bond was cashing in at the box office, yet so brimming with intrigue, brutality and human frailty, courting our appetite for dirty little secrets, that no one bothered to notice how wildly bleak it was. At least until they saw Martin Ritt’s movie of it, which failed to startle in the same way, though it earned Oscar nods. But The Spy Who Came In From the Cold is now available in a deluxe two-disc edition from Criterion. I just saw it for the first time, and what can I say? I’m startled. Ritt, who also made Hud (63), Hombre (67) and Norma Rae (79), may not have a reputation as a master stylist, or even a master of anything in particular, but here, in collaboration with cinematographer Oswald Morris, production designer Tambi Larsen and editor Anthony Harvey in particular, he produced something of marvelous texture and specificity. It’s transfixing.

Burton, whose Leamas now reads as part of the formula that gave birth to Daniel Craig’s Bond, may brood to excess for some—including, reportedly, Ritt—yet the character’s near-suicidal desperation, his immersion in his soul-crushing vocation, lies at the very heart of the story. And morose as Burton is, the overall gloom is greatly tempered by Bloom, so charming and smart, whose every nuance is so exactingly turned. She’s the sole woman in the movie, as well as the sole outsider to Leamas’ world, and she’s nearly its only source of warmth. Yet Oskar Werner, just a few years after Jules and Jim (62), plays Fiedler, a Jew in German intelligence with a massive grudge, and also possesses a certain air of inner life and excitement. And he also connects in his way with Leamas. Cusack, too, is wonderful, vampiric in his stillness, and so very English. So the cast inhabits rather than simply populates this world.

Ritt’s method of taking it all in includes a great deal of god’s eye views to heighten the alienation, balanced by two-shots that constantly emphasize the coded negotiations taking place in smallish rooms. The camera prowls, always. Lamps hang from chains in one location, from thorny antler-like mounts in another, all dangling with portent. There are beautifully timed fades to black, like the one near the start where Leamas sits with un-sipped tea in hand in Control’s office. Near the end there is a superb, ambiguously menacing exchange of gazes between Leamas and the ex-Nazi Mundt, and its after this exchange that we begin to understand how the whole narrative builds to a point of proving Nan’s ideological distinctions meaningless just as it completes Leamas’ moral perdition.

A highlight among Criterion’s supplements is a new interview with le Carré. He speaks very engagingly and has an endearingly refined way with gossip, stories about screenwriter Paul Dehn, who, matching le Carré’s own background as a British agent, was once a professional assassin; about various affairs between the collaborators and Liz Taylor's lurking in the background; about Ritt’s difficulties with Burton and how their antagonism might have been unconsciously nurtured by both of them so as to turn up the tension in the film. Le Carré also critiques the film quite soberly, and interestingly, believes that if anything it was too faithful to the source material. For myself, I couldn't help but wonder what it would have been like had the film started with Leamas taking his job at the library so that we initially knew nothing more about him than Nan does, and made our discoveries roughly in step with hers.

Quantum of Solace: 007 breaks still further from the past, bonds with a new audience

Careening from car chase to interrogation-gone-horribly-awry, from a foot chase across the crumbling rooftops of Siena, while a horse race collapses into bloody chaos in the streets, to a perilous rope-dangling punch-up amidst scaffolding and broken glass, Quantum of Solace, picking up where Casino Royale left off, making it the first James Bond movie to benefit from continuum, hits the ground running, leaving you as breathless as this sentence. It has a vague, dumb-sounding name—taken, ornery Bondaholics note, directly from Ian Fleming—but is the antithesis of the flabby action spectacle that plagues so many multi-million dollar event movies. The second outing for this renovated, revitalized Bond, beautifully embodied in the battered physique and wounded near-menace of Daniel Craig, is the shortest, sharpest, and most devastating entry in the long-running franchise. The tale, courtesy of Paul Haggis and Bond veterans Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, that turns on cold-blooded comeuppance and the looming threat of impenetrable powers working to horde the world’s dwindling resources, is indeed very bleak Bond—but who ever told you bleak can’t be thrilling?

Casino Royale sought a Bond with psychological nuance, or rather, one with any recognizable psychology whatsoever, and Quantum of Solace follows up on the promise. Which doesn’t mean that the film is ponderousness or explanatory, on the contrary, Craig’s Bond is cagey as befits a killer superspy, his internal turmoil not entirely obscure to the camera—there’s a scene where a friend dies in his arms—but hardly an open book either. That he’s consumed by wrathful grief over the death of his lover Vesper Lynd is all you really need to know about the previous film and it’s in any case made abundantly clear in the telegraphic dialogue sequences. The revenge theme is actually doubled with the introduction of Camille (Olga Kurylenko), easily among the most developed Bond girls, whose determination to kill a Bolivian general planning a coup d’etat supported by the CIA and an international organization disguising itself as an environmentalist group nicely dovetails into Bond’s agenda. That this agenda is as driven by personal motives as professional duty is essential to the drama, and the balance between the two is as ambiguous to us as it is to Bond’s superior, M, played with minimalist flair and spooky containment by Judy Dench. She’ll have to cut him lose once things get too unruly for MI6 to sanction, but you sense that she’s always rooting for him with the same troubling faith in vigilante justice that Commissioner Gordon holds with regards to the Dark Knight.

Quantum of Solace was directed by Marc Forster, whose filmography includes Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland, Stranger Than Fiction and The Kite Runner, none of which allude to an artist with a hidden urges to blow shit up. Yet I’d venture to say that this is the best thing Forster’s done, a project that utilizes his sensitivity to theme and tension and annexes his tendency toward bathos and emotional kitsch. It is a common complaint of critics, myself included, that most modern filmmakers can’t piece together a comprehensible action sequence, but the frenzy of close-ups, wide shots and collisions that cascade throughout Quantum of Solace remind us of the oppositional argument, that such action in real life is hardly tidy and easy to follow, that instincts overrule thought, that movies don’t always have to give us privileged points of view, that we too can get excited and unnerved by the wild blur of action escalating to a climax. There’s a kind of adrenalized poetry in this, and few can do it with the zest shown here by Forster, cutters Matt Chesse and Richard Pearson, and Dan Bradley, whose fights were incorporated into the similarly dizzying braid of imagery in the Bourne films.

Looking over the reviews thus far, I see a lot of gripes about straying from tradition: What about the gadgets and car fetish? What about the bon vivant Bond who never sweats? What about the silly villains and their pets? What about the zany candy coloured sets? What about the casual misogyny? Well, sorry, those days are gone. And there is no Santa. You’d think with the Bond closing in on nearly two-dozen films we’d welcome an overhaul. Admittedly, I’m no Bondophile, but perhaps the cult can content themselves with the massive back catalogue while the rest of us are entertained, provoked and shaken awake by this bold new direction.