Fight Club: We got the beats

Our unnamed narrator (Edward Norton) holds a position that could only have emerged in the late 20th century: he’s something called a recall coordinator, which basically means he negotiates the degree to which products have to annoy, maim or kill buyers before the manufacturer actually has to do something about it. It’s a brilliant occupation for the protagonist of a film that’s aged so well that its time is still coming into being. The first rule of Fight Club (1999) is, however macho/obnoxious/show-offy it may seem, don’t underestimate Fight Club.

Off the top, our young Narrator’s already reached an advanced state of yuppie zombification; his insomnia renders everything “a copy of a copy of a copy,” debilitating sleeplessness being an apt response to a world conspiring to keep one simultaneously lulled from disruptive critical thinking and excited by the possibility of perpetual shopping. Then Narrator meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a salesman of soap—"the yardstick of civilization"—and projectionist of family films into which he slips big dicks. He has silly spiky hair, dresses like a trailer park pimp, and waxes anti-establishment philosophy; he’s also handsome and sculpted and wants to get physical with Narrator, prompting what we might deem an ultra-masculine friendship, gay romance, or a solipsism so overpowering as to induce prolonged hallucinations. These guys start their titular club in basements and backstreets and it grows or catches until all over America men are denouncing their identities, pounding the shit out of each other, and waiting for cues to launch spectacular acts of terrorism.

So Fight Club’s trajectory is itself novel: boy meets girl; boy meets boy; boys fight (for fun/self-betterment); second boy steals girl; first boy finds himself; everything goes bananas. The film didn’t initially “perform,” but it established director David Fincher as a masterful, if over-eager, manipulator of industrial light and magic: the walk-in IKEA catalogue, the camera’s vertiginous swoops, the fantasy air collision all feel a little overbearing and Roger Rabbity. But who else could have told this unruly, audacious story with such vigour? In its perverse depiction of mental illness, leading up to its big twist, this adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s eponymous novel is actually an outstanding adaptation of Philip K. Dick, the oft-adapted, rarely apprehended author whose schizophrenia imbued so much of his science fiction. Fight Club suggests that schizophrenia might be the natural result of prolonged exposure to late capitalism. And I almost believe it.

Carlos and the body politic: a conversation with Olivier Assayas

He blows something up and then retires to a quiet room to admire his handsome and chiseled naked figure in a full-length mirror. We see him seduce a colleague by placing a grenade between her teeth. “Weapons,” he explains, “are an extension of my body.” Revolution turns this guy on—or is it simply the promise of spectacular violence undertaken with whatever sort of justification? He committed acts of terror, including murder and hostage-taking, on behalf a people located half a world away from his native Venezuela, and attained a very peculiar and confused sort of celebrity doing so. The celebrity would eclipse the revolutionary until confused celebrity was all that was left. He donned a Che beret. He smoked cigars from Fidel Castro’s personal reserve. He stockpiled weapons, gave orders, made threats and lived all over Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Saddam Hussein was supposed to have been a big fan. “You’ll be hearing my name a lot,” he ensures us, though he’s referring not to his given name of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, but rather to his more austere nom de guerre: Carlos.

Carlos is also the title of Oliver Assayas’ 333-minute bio-pic, made for French television, starring the tireless and valiant Venezuelan-born actor Édgar Ramírez, and is now playing, with two intermissions, in cinemas. It opens today in Toronto at Bell Lightbox. With its focus on action, its frenetic post punk soundtrack, its jump cuts that jump just a few frames forward, as though our storyteller is at once impatient and doesn’t want to miss a thing, the film unfolds over an engaging and surprisingly fleet-footed five hours-plus. Assayas is working in a mode entirely divorced from the complicated familial exchanges, subtle emotional nuance and passages of pastoral tranquility that characterized his previous film, the masterful and heartbreaking Summer Hours. Like its eponymous central character, the flamboyant terrorist who came to prominence in the 1970s and would eventually be dubbed “Carlos the Jackal,” Carlos is a corpulent and muscular work, carefully tracking the evolution, or rather devolution, of the mind and body of a figure that is, as Assayas explains below, both utterly singular and representative of certain ideological shifts that erupted in the wake of 1968.

It was my great honour to interview Assayas, whose body of work is so prolific and diverse, and contains a couple of my favourite films of the last 15 years or so. Slim and electric, Assayas is like a wire. We met at a Toronto hotel. He wore a smart little cardigan over a T-shirt emblazoned with the cover art for Sonic Youth’s Goo. He’s 55 and there remains something boyish about him. But his nervous manner of speaking is countered by his confidence and convictions, his volubility countered by the precision of his answers, even when delivered in his second language. A former critic and editor of Cahiers du cinéma, Assayas has no trouble talking about movies. What follows is longer than I’d planned, but if you’ve seen Carlos or know something about Ramírez Sánchez’s life you might find the initial exchanges interesting. If you haven’t seen it or don’t know his story, you might want to scroll down just a little.

Assayas on the set of Carlos

JB: You’re only a few years younger than Carlos, which would have put you in your late teens and early 20s when he first became active. Do you retain memories of him from that period?

Olivier Assayas: The Rue Toullier killings were for me very striking, as they were for any Frenchman at the time, because of their brutality and mystery. No one knew what had really happened or why. It was like lightning striking. It was very close to home in that it occurred in the Latin Quarter, which is where all the universities were, and I was a student at the time. I would walk those streets every day.

JB: Had you formed any opinion at the time about his activities?

OA: You couldn’t have an opinion because you had no idea who he was. He was from Venezuela. He wasn’t a Palestinian militant. So who was this guy? Why was he shooting French cops? There was no apparent rationale. There was no way of feeling close to whatever the cause was because the cause was unreadable. He was a cop killer. As a teenager, you know, maybe you’re not fond of cops, so you stupidly think it’s kind of cool that he killed three of them.

The real Ilich "Carlos" Ramírez Sánchez

JB: Between that period in the 1970s and your being approached with this project, had you kept track of him?

OA: Only as much as anyone who reads the newspapers. He had been again in the news in France later, when Magdalena Kopp was arrested and with the series of bombings that followed, supposedly done with the intention to set her free, though in reality it was more connected to the ongoing war between France and Syria. But at the time this was all a blur, because it was not established that Carlos was involved in the bombings and it was not widely known that Magdalena Kopp was his wife. There were just these Germans who were arrested in connection with a car bomb. We knew that they were arrested in the parking lot, that there was supposedly weapons in the car, that they tried to escape and to shoot the cops. All of a sudden Carlos sends this menacing message saying those guys are part of my group and I want them free. We didn’t know if it was the real Carlos or what his connection was to these two. Carlos would not say at the time that Magdalena was his wife. No one knew, because if they had she would have been interrogated. They would have never let her go. So I read about these actions, but the reports available rendered them completely blurred, full of contradictions. Carlos was just a bogeyman.


JB: Did this project seem to offer an opportunity to explore and perhaps critique a political ideology?

OA: To me there was a broader arc that concerned the story of a generation, this question of whether or not to be involved in the armed struggle. After 1968, people really believed that revolution was imminent. But the years passed and nothing happened. You had unrest and activism, but ultimately this revolution did not seem like it was coming. That was when militants started asking questions. Maybe they lacked the right approach. Maybe the solution was to take up weapons, as had been done in third world countries, or in Europe in the distant past. In France the conclusion was that no, it wasn’t a good idea. But in other countries, like Germany, Italy or Japan, that was the route they chose. Carlos was just one step ahead. When he was 19 he had a gun in his hand. He was fighting with the Palestinians in Jordan. He was militant and active at a very young age. So in a sense, he went faster and further than anyone else of his generation, but acted in the background of the political mainstream of the time. So I realized how emblematic his story could be of a particular idea that this generation had lingering in their minds. He is, of course, a very unique character with an exceptional fate, but somehow I realized how connected his fate was to the story of his time.

JB: A significant part of Carlos’ story is told through the body of your lead actor, Édgar Ramírez. His is a marathon performance and required a truly exceptional commitment. Did you have to use different tactics with him than you’d used with actors in the past?

OA: Frankly, Édgar was pretty much on his own. His input in this film goes way beyond embodying Carlos. He was a partner in creating this film. He had a vision of Carlos. He understood exactly what was going on. I kind of helped him and we discussed things, but these discussions were not frequent.


JB: Were you aware from the start of just how fundamental the link would be between Carlos’ shifting physicality and his shifting philosophy, between his sense of sexual potency and his desire for violence?

OA: It was always essential. For me, the film, or at least one layer of the film, was, as you say, the story of the body of Carlos. It’s a layer that’s nourished by historical fact. It’s highly relevant that at the end of this story everything falls apart, including his body.

JB: Did it require a great deal of negotiation to find the right ways to photograph Édgar’s body?

OA: Édgar was 100% open to basically anything. He went all the way with every scene, without blinking. Sometimes it was very tough on him.

JB: I understand he underwent therapy afterwards to deal with the trauma of playing Carlos.

OA: I only discovered this when I read the interview he gave for the press notes. I was surprised. But I understood. You know, the one thing that kind of disturbed me when I started working on this film was this question: Was I ready to spend a year and a half of my life with Carlos, who’s basically a very unpleasant character? Do I want to be in touch with the darkness of that character? I did not have any kind of easy answer for that. But meeting Édgar was key to solving the problem because, frankly, he was going to take over Carlos. He was going to lift that burden from my shoulders. I was in a better position because I was able to witness Édgar struggling to make sense of Carlos, to absorb the unpleasantness of the character. I think he did an extraordinary job, but I can understand why it’s been very hard on him. He had to think like and be like Carlos, which involved damaging his own body in the process, for a very long time, much longer than what’s typically demanded of actors.

demonlover

JB: Your earlier work demonlover has certain affinities with Carlos, being an international story and a political thriller, but what I find very interesting is that demonlover is very much characterized by the absence of connective tissue—it’s inherently elliptical—while Carlos is all about the fortifying of connective tissue. Did this aspect of the project excite you? Did it intimidate you?

OA: Basically, I like to do in movies the things I’ve not done before, so the more I feel intimidated, the more stuff I have no idea how to handle, the more exciting it is. That’s what keeps you alive. It puts you in danger. You have to reinvent your ways of approaching scenes, actors, and so on. The thing too is that the connectivity you’re describing is sort of what those times were about. There was this notion of collective action, of connection through ideals. Carlos can only function through organizing a group. Demonlover comes from another age. It tries to grasp at something that was going on 20, 25 years later, a time when people are becoming more involved in their private, imaginary worlds, when ideology and collectivity is replaced by disconnection, when economic logic overwhelms the logic of ideals. Demonlover is about a world where politics are not relevant anymore, where the fluidity of money is more important than any political ideal, where real power is bestowed upon corporations rather than politicians. Which is pretty much what the modern world is about.

JB: The formal structure of Carlos is obviously hugely ambitious. Did you have any models that inspired or encouraged you? Was Steven Soderbergh’s Che useful to you?

OA: Yes, it was. It’s a completely different film, but it was inspiring in the sense that, first of all, I enjoyed watching this four-and-a-half-hour film. It could have gone on and I would have been game. But in terms of the texture of the film, here is a movie that uses a mythical character—that uses the star power of this character—to deal with some very interesting issues. Che is a case study in guerilla warfare, how it can be used to win a war and lose a war. The first part is triumphant, it’s about how you move from the bush into the villages, how you win over the peasants, how you enter the city, how you negotiate an urban guerilla situation, how you then move onto the capital and eventually win the war. The second part in Bolivia shows you exactly the opposite, how you never convince the peasants, how the terrain can be unfavourable, how the local politicians don’t support your actions, how the enemy has grown stronger because it’s come to understand your tactics, and so on. So it’s really a study in strategy, and this is something very few movies can deal with because it simply requires time. Strategy is about complexities, about small details, about understanding the connection between ideas and reality. The length of the film allowed it to deal with issues that shorter films cannot. Che gave me the conviction that I could shoot for something like that.

JB: Hm. It strikes me that, in a way, Carlos is really Che Part III, in that you’re now looking at what becomes of revolutionary actions after the precedents of Cuba, after Bolivia, and going from Latin America in the ’50s and ’60s and into the Europe of the 1970s.

OA: Absolutely. That’s a very interesting way of looking at it. It’s like that famous phrase about how history repeats itself in the form of a comedy. It’s about how Carlos uses the image of Che at a later historical moment for his own ends. You have Che, who, whatever you think of his ideas, was kind of a hero. He was a theoretician and a revolutionary. He was involved in internationalizing the Cuban Revolution. He was ready to put his life on the line and wound up dying for his ideals. He was also a good writer and left a lot of reflections on his life and times. Carlos, by contrast, is a soldier. He’s not a thinker. He’s a guy who executes missions. He was very aware of his media image and knew it was beneficial to connect it to Che’s image, but it’s somehow pathetic.


JB: Was it always obvious to you how you wanted to end Carlos?

OA: It was pretty clear that the film would end with his arrest. His story really does end where we end it. He’d already been surviving himself for years at that stage. He’s become irrelevant.

JB: Kind of a ghost.

OA: Precisely—he’s a ghost of himself. So once he’s finally arrested, it was like something that just had to happen. He hardly even resists it, and no one will help him out, not even the Sudanese. I think even Carlos knew that this was the end of the movie.

Left, right, and Romy: Le combat dans l'ile

Alain Cavalier’s debut bears little resemblance to the work of his mentor Louis Malle and feels utterly indifferent to the iconoclastic, postmodernist mischief of his contemporaries riding the crest of the nouvelle vague, yet in its own way Le combat dans l’ile (1961) couldn’t be more of its time. Concerning a love triangle between a militant conservative, a left-wing pacifist, and an innocent outsider gradually gaining awareness of her adopted country’s aggressive divisions, the movie uses an old-fashioned narrative device to explore events unfolding during the very moment of its filming. The re-surfacing of Le combat, culminating in Zeitgeist’s new DVD, is a testament to how often genuine universality is best earned through specificity. It’s rather difficult not to draw loose parallels between Cavalier’s portrait of France in 1961 and numerous civil wars being fought today, conflicts sometimes mistaken for being a problem exclusive to the Islamic world.

Clément (Jean-Louis Trintignant), the son of a wealthy industrialist, joins an underground group planning terrorist actions in response to Algerian independence. His Austrian-born wife Anne (Romy Schneider), a former actress, seems content to seek out the fleeting pleasures and numb herself with sleeping pills. She barely raises an eyebrow when her housekeeper finds a bazooka hiding in the closet, but Clément’s physical and emotional abuse proves too much. She leaves him, only to come back on the very night Clément is to use that bazooka. The assassination attempt goes awry and Clément’s forced into hiding. This is really just the beginning of a story riddled with strange twists. Among the many distinguishing qualities of Le combat dans l’ile is its resistance to establishing a single protagonist. As Clément sinks deeper into a marginal political existence Anne moves toward the story’s centre. Yet a third character, Clément’s childhood friend Paul (Henri Serre), becomes increasingly entangled in the couple’s affairs, until he too begins to occupy the narrative core.

Trintignant’s particular, seductive coldness, an unusual quality in a star, one shared by his American contemporary John Cassavetes, allows him to dominate the frame whenever present and then slip away inconspicuously. Schneider has perhaps the most precarious role, the object of desire whose own desires seem neglected by Cavalier’s allegorical scheme, yet her ability to convey Anne’s insistence on chasing romance and living in the moment clouds our doubts about her motives. Serre makes less of an impression, perhaps because Paul’s politics are less defined than Clément’s and his pacifism reads as ultimately ineffectual. Of course, Serre would soon go on to portray one-third of one of cinema’s most memorable ménage à trois in Jules et Jim (62). Working with cinematographer Pierre Lhomme, who would go on to shoot with Bresson, Melville and Jean Eustache, Cavalier makes wonderful use of his central performances, elegantly emphasizing details such as Clément’s ceremonial donning of gloves, while tempering the more dramatic moments with a judicious use of scoring, silence, and dialogue that bleeds from one scene to the next. His was an auspicious start, thought it’s difficult to say how well he followed it up since much of his body of work remains obscure.

Iraq into fragments: The Hurt Locker and the explosive vagaries of heroism

It is an action movie, and we’re accustomed to having the spectacular violence that is the genre’s lure delivered with a more or less clear hierarchy of values. The suspense and catharsis of the set pieces depend on our rooting for one side over another, for one sensibility or approach over another, to generate that extra charge. But among the more peculiar virtues of The Hurt Locker is the lingering ambiguity as to where it assigns greater value within its conflicting codes of conduct.

The setting is US-occupied Baghdad. The central characters are Explosive Ordinance Disposal techs, a small team of men with strict lines of protocol geared toward the dismantling of Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs, which have been responsible for half of all US casualties in Iraq. It opens with a scene in which likable, professional, quietly heroic men, exuding solidarity, do their jobs with precision and conviction. By the scene’s ending, the most heroic of them dies. Another man comes to take his place and everything about him seems designed to prompt our disdain. Compared to the dead hero this replacement seems reckless, cocky, unsupportive of the others. In short, he acts like a cowboy, an anachronism from an era of war narratives in which machismo is flamboyantly prized. We wait for his comeuppance. We keep on waiting.

Written and produced by Mark Boal, who was himself in a Baghdad bomb squad back in 2004, and who’s credited with the story for In the Valley of Elah, and directed by Kathryn Bigelow, whose films, such as Point Break, have shown an affinity for rites of masculinity and furious rushes of adrenaline, The Hurt Locker is at once imminently recognizable in its genre tropes, character types and emphasis on cultivating tension, and truly odd in its structural looseness and inconclusive morality. Like some shotgun wedding between Don Siegel and Claire Denis. Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) swaggers into the movie without making any great effort to ingratiate himself to anybody, and in the thick of a palpably fraught assignment tosses off his protective gear and even his headset. He feels inhibited not only by the items designed to save his life—helmets are for pussies—but by the burden of having to actually communicate with conscientious colleagues Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), who each have only a handful of weeks to go and are eager to end their tour in one piece.

Surely this arrogant lone wolf has no place in a serious story about getting through war alive, yet he gradually becomes emblematic of something primordial, a way of being that exists beyond shifting attitudes toward heroism or political correctness. He’s the existential man of action, trusting honed instinct above all and rewarded for his faith with the fact of his survival and an impressive number of trophies kept under his bed, pieces from every bomb that could have killed him kept reverentially in a cardboard box. We can argue with a character like James but we can’t argue with his results, and we all know that there are people like him who, despite our misgivings, have saved lives. Renner’s performance radiates exactly the sort of inarticulate confidence that drives someone like James, as well as the inner desperation that arises from the understanding that you might only ever feel alive, might only ever feel that your existence has any meaning, when forced to make a life-or-death decision in a matter of seconds.

Bigelow is clearly right at home in this sort of movie, a creative problem solver and an apt pupil of the best, most thrilling and most coherent action sequences of the 1970s heyday. A few scenes are overcooked, such as the one where Eldridge flips out while playing a video game and talking with a well-meaning army shrink, but most are lean and vivid. Her use of handheld camerawork is tightly focused and nerve rattling, with special attention always paid to the geometry of gazes shared by the central characters and the many onlookers, often casually dressed Iraqis who may or may not be complicit in the planting of the IEDs at hand. They are unknowable, and no apology is made for this.


Where Iraq in Fragments, arguably the most insightful movie about the conflict thus far, was founded in a multiplicity of perspectives, The Hurt Locker generates strength through narrow singularity. It protagonists do not pretend to understand their elusive enemy nor the general citizenry of the country they’re occupying, and I think they can be forgiven for placing far greater priority on the more pressing concerns of effectively executing their specialized task. And in this sense the characters are very much like their director. Bigelow has made a truly extraordinary movie by putting all she’s got into depicting the urgency of each moment with as much compelling intensity and complexity as possible, and wisely leaving the figuring out what to make of it all to the rest of us.

Adoration: Atom Egoyan's patchy puzzle of truths, lies, theatre and technology

Stories fold in upon stories in Adoration. How their contradictions speak to one another forms the backbone of the film. High schooler Simon (Devon Bostick) tells one to his class about how his father nearly succeeded in blowing up an aircraft with his pregnant mother onboard. We see the story play out in flashback, but is the fact that the Israeli airport’s lit like a moody upscale nightclub a splinter in the scene’s verity or merely an expression of some production designer’s caprices rubbing elbows with budget constraints? A woman shrouded in a beaded Islamic veil lurks in a wintry Toronto suburb, complimenting Simon’s bigoted tow-truck driving uncle Tom (Scott Speedman) on his nativity scene while inserting a baldly provocative statement about Jews into the already uncomfortable conversation. Is anything about her visit genuine? Is it some sort of theatre designed to elicit a violent response from Tom? Is she a particularly insistent tommyknocker clinging to Speedman after The Strangers?

Atom Egoyan’s latest finds the writer/director still immersed in the search for where the truth lies, still viewing families with a dissecting eye, still questioning our largely passive acceptance of ever-more invasive technologies, and, rather wearingly, still feeling obligated to plot his stories with a leaden dramaturgical hand. (In a sense Egoyan’s concerns mirror those of Michael Haneke, with the precarious advent of a certain sentimentality that urges resolutions Haneke wouldn’t even sniff at.) A crisp sense of artifice allowed Egoyan’s insistence on coincidence and the unlikely interconnectivity of characters and events to function relatively fluidly in his earliest features. But recent attempts at ostensibly more accessible stories with newly broader, more “globalized” casts of disparate characters—I’d vote for Ararat (2002) as the nadir, though Where the Truth Lies (05) makes a strong contestant—have mangled otherwise potentially interesting movies into overwrought tapestries, contributions to that self-important trend exemplified by Crash (04), Babel (06) and Crossing Over (09).

The good news is that Adoration is a major improvement on its immediate predecessors. Its metaphors are intelligent, labyrinthine and generative. And its creakier conceits are made somewhat more palatable through the sheer conviction of its better actors, namely Arsinée Khanjian, charged with embodying the movie’s most absurd protagonist, a loopy Lebanese-Canadian drama teacher who seems implausibly oblivious to how her audacious actions affect the rest of the world. Khanjian, eerily beautiful and a fixture in Egoyan’s films since Next of Kin (84), remains a beguiling, mysterious presence. She’s the best thing in Adoration, which provides her biggest role in an Egoyan film so far this millennium. If Speedman and Bostick fare less well it may simply be that you need to have married Egoyan to really grasp the vibe. The former seems deeply committed if confused about how to balance Tom’s burbling, inarticulate rage with his ability to adopt new perspectives. The latter may simply lack the preternatural understanding and emotional range required to pull off a truly difficult role—if it can be pulled off at all. And it’s not his fault that he looks like a catalogue model. He’s got a huge weight to carry here, and it’s a relief to see him do something neutral once in a while, like eat cereal.

Simon’s story sparks a highly emotional debate between students and faculty alike, putting his teacher and co-conspirator Sabine (Khanjian) in hot water and allowing Egoyan to explore the film’s thematic threads of the radical religious devotion and the limits of multiculturalism through a multiplicity of images. Egoyan refrains from excessive explicit editorializing with regards to Simon’s dependence on devices to contextualize his experiences, probably because the images say more than enough on their own. Simon interviews his dying grandfather with a video camera between them. He debates with others about his father’s supposed attempts at terrorism through the filter of videoconferencing, every speaker contained in their own little box glowing on the computer screen. Technology, especially screens within screens, grants Adoration the very sense of interconnectivity that some of the characters’ face-to-face encounters strain to convey. When Sabine’s car gets towed by Tom—she knows who he is; he has no idea who she is—we can hear the rusty wheels of dramatic irony churning away, though the payoff is that it does lead to one of the oddest impromptu diner lunch dates in recent memory, affectionately set in the now-closed and much-missed Canary Restaurant.

Out of the Cold, but far from out of the game: John le Carré's A Most Wanted Man

The titular figure of John le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man is as diminutive and weary-looking as the multitude of parties wanting him are immense and powerful. His name is Issa, a vagabond with “a look of winter,” a half-Russian, half-Chechen in his early 20s. He appears right there in the novel’s wonderful first line, emaciated and brooding, an unsanctioned tourist stalking Hamburg in a black overcoat that renders him only frailer and more conspicuous. He’s, by my measure at least, a rather hysterically devout Muslim, though his humourless, righteous, half-crazed demeanour may be partly the result of illness, perhaps partly of torture, not to mention the dark, grueling journey stowed somewhere in the belly of the ship that brought him to this not altogether friendly German port. There’s also the implication that Issa might be a terrorist. Whatever the case, his presence trips alarms all over. He means many things to many people, and he promises to prove useful in many ways, some of which the reader won’t likely be able to imagine before reaching this superb thriller’s final chapter.

In interviews le Carré has said that as a young man he invested institutions with the qualities he’d have liked to find in parents. It’s a rich observation, not only for what it tells us about le Carré—the institution he refers to being British intelligence, for whom he was once a bonafide spook—nor just the latent desire for authorities to whom we may submit, but for what it says about the persistent nature of patriarchy: in whichever form it takes, it seems ever the foil of the more worrisome heroes of fiction. And in le Carré’s milieu, there’s always reason to worry.

No less than three of the central characters in A Most Wanted Man, the three we can come closest to calling heroes, perform vital actions dictated by a troubling paternal legacy. Issa is the unhappy beneficiary of a tremendous sum left to him by a dead father he loathes. Brue, the affable, 60-year-old Scottish proprietor of a Hamburg bank, finds himself obliged to aid Issa due to the compromising legacy of his own father, whose business of financial management, both in its legitimate and crooked forms, Brue has carried on in his perfunctory fashion. Annabel, the young, idealistic, but very smart and more than capable activist lawyer who takes Issa’s case, struggles with the fact that for all her overt, deep-seated rebellion, she too has taken on the same vocation as her father, perhaps as a method of somehow doing good through the very same means her father used to do ill. These uneasy relationships to their respective dads is just about all these three really have in common, but, in le Carré’s inspired stratagem, it’s enough to tether their fates together.

Some claim the end of the Cold War left certain writers in limbo, le Carré most of all, seeing how the author of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold practically made the tangled web of Cold War intelligence his personal literary domain. But the novels that sprung up in the wake of what Francis Fukuyama zealously called the end of history followed their natural patterns, with le Carré turning his attention to multinational corporations, for one, in The Constant Gardener. That the war on terror should now loom over A Most Wanted Man comes as no surprise, and le Carré responds to its new world order with considerable vigor and insight, recognizing how the West’s current bogeyman might be seen as even more ubiquitous and unpredictable than the communists were, thus granting intelligence agencies tacit license to be still more ruthless. In a blackly humorous bit of anti-terror double-think, le Carré has one intelligence official explain to another how a terror suspect is that much more likely to be a jihadi for the very fact that he does not behave like a jihadi. And in a nice tip of the hat to his past work, le Carré sets this new tale in the same country that once marked the Cold War’s ideological frontier, and in the very city that was once home to Mohamed Atta.

As pessimistic as le Carré can be toward institutions, he remains, like his most notable forbearer Graham Greene, a true believer in individuals. Issa may be to the end a bit of a headache, an enigmatic centerpiece and all-purpose pawn too fanatical for the author to bother peering very deeply into, but le Carré is more than generous in his texturing of both Annabel, who for all her altruistic illusions is not condescended to, and Brue, who seems to be the character closest in spirit—as well as in age—to the author. “A lonely rich man in late life, still looking for the dignity of love” is how Annabel describes Brue, and the description is genuinely tender. It also starts to allude to the fundamental weaknesses of such essentially ordinary characters in the face of unfathomable power—for all our better intentions and beliefs, when our back’s against the wall, most of us simply do what we’re told. The world of A Most Wanted Man, controlled by the ostensibly diplomatic interests of at least three governments, each having very big fists, is not a forgiving one. It is harsh, and it thinks nothing of consuming lives to forward its goals. Which is to say that, Cold War be damned, this is still the world of spy fiction. “Don’t go soft on me,” one German operative warns another, “there’s no room for it in this operation.” “ Tell me one where there was,” slyly counters the other. There is, of course, no response to be had for that. And that, I’m guessing, is why we keep reading.

The world upside-down: Zizek's Violence

Through countless cinematic detours in his enormous body of critical theory he has become one of the sharpest, most engaged writers on movies we have, so maybe it’s no accident that the theoretical tool he employs with relentless perfectionism is the very same tool most often used by the crack screenwriter: the good old-fashioned reversal. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek writes both dynamically and profusely, and he’s never met an assumption he didn’t feel the urge to overturn, a paradox he didn’t desire to give a thorough workout. He isn’t a shrewd contrarian so much as an intellectual showman—and I say this with the deepest admiration. The “Elvis of critical theory” tag he’s been given is not unearned.

Far too playful with Marx to convincingly be labeled a staunch Marxist, Zizek’s philosophy remains grounded in Lacanian psychoanalysis—and this should itself impart upon his audience an emphasis on process rather than tidy results. With Zizek we are always on the couch, always left dazzled and maybe perplexed when our session has expired. To turn to his work for hard conclusions will inevitably frustrate, but more importantly will blind you to what he really places on the table, which is a feast of thoughtful, sometimes audacious stimulation, blending flavours well known, even vulgar in their appeal, with others that are exotic and in other settings would be intimidating. At the end, knowing hunger will return, you find yourself at the very least fortified, pleasured, and well fed.

That’s certainly the case with Violence (Picador, $15.50). In his contribution to the ‘Big Ideas/Small Books’ series, Zizek breaks his subject into three categories: subjective violence, such as crime and terror, the most visible form and one whose fascination we’re urged to resist; objective violence, which is symbolic and based in language; and systemic violence, the form addressed most enthusiastically, which lies in social structures and is the least visible and most dangerous. Zizek’s dissection of systemic violence starts coolly, drawing attention to such familiar phenomena as pleas for charitable donations that thrive on “fake urgency,” before building up to the hypocrisies of billionaires who claim to “give back,” in effect contributing funds to agencies attempting to alleviate a humanitarian crisis that in part was exacerbated by these same billionaires. Not to mention the hypocrisies of we who are outraged by the torture of individuals while virtually ignoring the overwhelming humanitarian crises of entire nations, ie: the Congo.

But things get more interesting once the groundwork’s disposed of—or, in some cases, trampled over in the heat of Zizek's spastic mental prowess. In examining terror, Zizek usefully distinguishes between “authentic fundamentalists,” like the Amish or Tibetan Buddhists, who convey “an absence of resentment and envy” and a “deep indifference toward the non-believers’ way of life,” with “so-called Christian and Muslim fundamentalists” who “in fighting the sinful Other” are merely fighting their own temptation. He later makes an intriguing parallel distinction between ideological governments who ostensibly offer sweeping freedoms while tacitly condemning the use of these freedoms and oppressive governments who tacitly encourage the bending of rules, leading to one of the most memorably succinct twists of common assumption in Violence: “totalitarian regimes are by definition regimes of mercy: they tolerate violations of the law, since, in the way they frame social life, violating the law, bribing, and cheating are conditions of survival.”

Among the most substantial stances taken in Violence concerns Israel and Palestine, two nations who, Zizek argues, should recognize how a diasporic existence is essential to their identity rather than fruitlessly claim rights to a holy land. Intriguingly, he calls for the renunciation of political control of Jerusalem, making it a neutral zone, an “extra-state place of religious worship” that would ultimately have a liberating effect for both parties. And I mean it as no slight to the gravity of this proposal when I compliment Zizek on his ability to move fluidly in just a page or two from this to a parallel proposal that US Congress officially change the name of French fries to Muhammad fries.

It is among Zizek’s strengths that irreverence and the utmost seriousness are never rendered mutually exclusive, just as culture high and low are employed with equal relish. There are citations from Walter Benjamin, George Orwell and Elton John. There are analogies that unexpectedly unite the themes of M. Night Shyamalan's widely panned The Village with Alfonso Caurón's Children of Men. And let me stress this: the guy gets mileage from movies like no social commentator I’ve ever heard of. He discusses the unspoken sub-cultural order explored in A Few Good Men as a pretty brilliant lead-in to his insights into hazing rituals, the homophobic dualities of military life, and the abuses of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib: “in being submitted to humiliating tortures, Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture.” And he offers a striking reading of Taxi Driver that illuminates the essentially inwardly directed violence of Travis Bickle.

Alas, after a couple of hundred pages of stimulating riffing, Violence does finally have to draw to an end. Of sorts. Things get muddy. Zizek has us reject “false anti-violence” and endorses “emancipatory violence.” He writes how “to chastise violence outright… is a mystification which collaborates in rendering invisible the fundamental forms of social violence.” Okay. But equally mystifying is his appropriation of the central conceit of José Saramago’s visionary novel Seeing, in which a government in thrown into panic over an epidemic of blank votes submitted in a federal election. Zizek clearly sees Saramago as a Marx brother, and his admiring assessment of Seeing leads to Violence’s final, enigmatic statement: “Sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do.” I’m mystified because casting a blank ballot is actually far from “doing nothing.” I’m mystified by Zizek’s peculiar and rather hazy conditional sanctioning of violence—we really need to get clearer on this “emancipatory violence” thing, no? But I’m also mystified by how such a bracingly curt, even puzzling finale can still leave me kinda satisfied, re-engaged in certain political arguments, and mentally invigorated in general. Perhaps it’s better for us to look at any single book by Zizek as just another edition in an ongoing grappling with irreducible ideas, and enjoy the ride.

Sympathy for the dumbbell

There are times when you’ve got to wonder if this young century that no longer feels young anymore, more specifically the eight years that have followed that famously fraudulent 2000 presidential election, hasn’t been some sort of prolonged bad dream from which America and all the rest of us are about to wake from with one wicked-ass hangover. George Walker Bush will soon be making his departure from the White House, the last stretch of what has proven to be one very long and wearying walk indeed. Some may argue that a preemptive strike on summarizing his presidency is unlawful, but such temperance has no firm place in the dictates of movies, and certainly not the movies of Oliver Stone, whose W. arrives in theatres just in time to greet the appointment of a new American president—though the film might be best viewed as a melancholy parting gift for the outgoing one.

Stone and Bush—could one ask for a more delightful contrast of names?—are exact contemporaries. They attended Yale at the same time, though apparently never met on the student party circuit. But Stone has never shied from identification with the great demons of recent history regardless of their political stripes, thus his portraits of both Nixon and Castro have been strangely tender in their way. As W. gets underway we find Bush (Josh Brolin, who when wearing a cowboy hat bears a striking resemblance to Billy Bob Thornton) circling the oval office, pivoting round an axis in precise opposition to Stone’s camera, as though the two are in a formal dance or are a pair of boxers sizing each other up. And all the while our supporting characters sit in heated discussion over how to characterize their nation’s nebulous post-9/11 enemy, settling, finally, on “axis of evil.” It’s a rousing opener, introducing our protagonist just when his confidence is at the highest it’ll ever be, setting us up for the stumbling ascension to power that led up to this moment and, we presume, the terrible downfall to follow. Curiously, over the next two hours, we’ll witness a great deal more of the former than the latter.

Written by Stanley Weiser, who co-scripted Stone’s Wall Street, W. needs to be viewed more as portraiture than polemic, even if it seems at times to want to be both. This character study is founded above all in Bush’s contentious, approval-seeking relationship with his father (James Cromwell), whose own presidency and its misadventures in foreign policy now look to us like an exercise in centrist moderation in comparison. Having succeeded as a frat boy and failed miserably as a student and labourer, we hear Bush Jr. berated by his dad for hi-jinx and aimlessness, ordered to stop behaving like a Kennedy and respect the family name. Bush Jr. will never fully heal from these wounds, exacerbated by his suspicion that brother Jeb’s the unspoken favourite. It is these wounds that’ll slowly give him the gumption to go into politics and later still become so embroiled in Iraq, convinced of his mission to finish the job dad abandoned back in 1991.

The familial grievances offer Weiser and Stone a classical, dramaturgically sound framework to build on, and they’ve tailored the chorus of advisory voices so as to heighten the sense of their protagonist as tragic fool: Richard Dryfuss as Cheney, condescending, shamelessly savouring the word “empire” like a fat lizard; Thandie Newton doing a fun, blood-curdling Condoleezza Rice; Scott Glen as a glinty-eyed if perhaps not sufficiently callous Rumsfeld; Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell, the defeated, lonesome voice of reason and morality; Toby Jones as Karl Rove, seen here as nothing less than a Satanic puppet master. Each has their moment to carry the torch of flamboyant disgrace, though none rise above the level of strict support for Brolin, whose performance here is virtually flawless, all the more effective and troubling for being somehow perfectly sympathetic, as amiable a good ol’ boy as we always suspected Bush must have been before he was granted fearsome powers. When Rove questions his strut, Bush replies, “In Texas we call that walkin’,” and it’s clear that the man might have seemed refreshing when the peril of his incompetence was still abstract and distant. W. is more than allegory and Brolin finally too complex in his characterization to seem merely a product of a flawed system, though in the end his confusion alone seems the absolute measure of his character.

Given all this, all these factors begging to add up to something, how strange that W. seems to be lacking a last act. This absence of resolution is perhaps fitting given the absence of exit strategy that’s so hounded the occupation of Iraq. Yet however eloquent this structural parallel between reality and art, you couldn’t be blamed for desiring more when the credits suddenly appear, be it the long, draining road to the present or our sad hero’s final surrender to the knowledge of his true historical role as widely loathed blunderer on the world’s greatest and more consequential stage. Stone would seem up for at least one of these jobs, and spends much of the film building up to it with a welcome lack of directorly affectation, save a few oddball close-ups of belt buckles or ladies’ shoes smooshing corn cobs and a regrettable, entirely redundant dream sequence offering only one more confrontation with poppy. How Stone and Weiser came to decide on their abbreviated ending is ambiguous, but I suppose we at least can give them credit for leaving the final judgment on their subject up to us.

Didactic, sure, but not completely dumb: Traitor engages with the enemy

The brief prelude is set in Sudan, 1978, and conveys an essential bit of exposition: a child witnesses his father get blown to bits in a car bombing. As the camera holds on the child’s shocked face we transit to present-day Yemen, where the story proper begins and that child is now a man named Samir Horn (co-producer Don Cheadle) who, in a bold bit of dramatic irony, is now selling explosives to Islamic terrorists. What’s interesting in this is that Samir’s childhood trauma is actually mentioned in later scenes, which calls into question whether or not we needed to actually see the event, arguably one more spectacular and emotionally fraught moment in a movie stuffed with them. But like a lot of thrillers, Traitor is very much about seeming, the sort of film in which what we see and what we’re told demand to be distinguished, both for the sake of tension and to deepen our understanding of it’s message, because, make no mistake, Traitor is also very much a message-laden film.

The term “didactic” is almost always used as a pejorative, and needn’t always be the case. Like Hotel Rwanda, another film that found Cheadle portraying an African-born protagonist in a desperate, topical situation, Traitor, helmed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff, is decidedly mainstream, its approach to storytelling and directorial style being well-crafted boilerplate. But it’s also the sort of film, like Hotel Rwanda, that wouldn’t mean much if it didn’t have the capacity to reach the largest possible audience. Based on a story by Steve Martin—yep, that Steve Martin—it’s told largely from the perspective of Samir, a devout Muslim with extensive military experience and expertise in explosives, who gradually joins up with Islamic terrorists. He’s not the first terrorist to be ostensibly empathized in movies, but he is the most identifiable, embodied in a beloved, charismatic Hollywood actor.

Samir has a parallel character in G-man Roy Clayton (Guy Pearce), a noble Southerner whose daddy was a minister, who majored in Islamic studies and who can quote the Koran at the drop of a hat. More capable than his fellow feds because of his understanding of the enemy, he’s at once Samir’s nemesis and ally. He’s also crucial to ramming home Traitor’s appeals for greater tolerance in times of crisis, with dialogue about how ineffective racial profiling is or overwrought lines like “Seems every religion has more than one face.” Clayton’s role as explicator for fundamentalist Islam’s seeming psychopathology is compromised by the fact that Samir, through no fault of the superb Cheadle, of whom we can only blame for being so likable, never fully convinces as a man who truly believes that the slaughter of innocent people—okay, “infidels”—is a admirable way to advance the cause of his people. But Traitor, as sly in certain respects as it is unsubtle, finds its ways of dealing with this problem, and by the time we become distracted by such contradictions Nachmanoff has shifting into high gear genre dynamics, stacking up reversals and building suspense sufficiently to keep us engaged. In any case it held my interest long enough for me to appreciate its particular ideological stance, even while it’s getting shoved down my throat.

Taxi to the dumb side

Harold and Kumar let it all hang out. (Especially Kumar.) Theirs is a proud cinema of no shame, where people can feel free to kick back, light a blunt, speak their mind, be themselves. Before we reach the end of the opening credits of Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay Kumar’s already enjoyed a bout of explosive diarrhea and splooged all over his own face. This guy clearly has nothing to hide, and thus earns our trust from the get-go.

So what’s with Homeland Security getting so uppity about Kumar trying to light up in an airplane toilet? These post-9/11 homeboys need to chill. Unfortunately the outfit who nailed our boys on their flight from Jersey to Amsterdam are fronted by a drooling moron racist pitbull who gets his buzz on from wiping his dirty bunghole with the Fifth Amendment—and boy, is that bunghole dirty! But perhaps he can be forgiven for his neglectful hygiene, as he’s in such a tizzy over breaking what’s looking to be the first case of an Al Qaeda-North Korea super-collaboration to murder hysterical American tourists.

One look at Harold’s funny-shaped eyes and Kumar’s chestnut flesh was all it took to send these hapless heroes to Guantanamo Bay, where their worst homophobic fears are embodied in the monstrous white guards who waste no time in getting the newbies down on their knees for their first taste of their new diet of cockmeat sandwich. Fortunately fate intervenes in the form of real-live insane terrorists who like to bite. As promised, Harold and Kumar escape, hitch a ride with some decorative Cubans to Miami, drop in on a party full of pants-free zombies and begin their real adventure through the American South, where they try to enlist the aid of some asshole who’s marrying Kumar’s high school sweetheart yet also has a most helpful direct line to President Bush.

The big theme of Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay is that you can’t always judge a book by its cover. It’s a solid theme, conducive to much excitement and endless reversals. Not long after being mistaken for potential terrorists on account of their race, Harold and Kumar later find that they too are guilty of lazy prejudice. They presume that some ruddy-faced Alabama deer killer is an inbred redneck loony. Well, okay so he actually is an inbred redneck loony—but at least he feeds them and smokes them up… In any case, all in not always what it appears, right? Especially when it comes to the movie itself. Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay may look like a wild comedy with some political teeth to it, but—a ha!—turns out it’s really just dumb. Real dumb. Okay, with a few inspired little surprises that help wash down the pervading dearth of anything actually funny or clever happening.

The ostensibly lovable John Cho and Kal Penn, stars of the 2004 prequel, return from their journey to White Castle for this second go-round of juvenile sex jokes, garish sentimentality and faux stereotype-smashing. They’re joined by a pair of impossibly insipid white girls to pang for and a bizarre guest appearance from the rather stiff but admirably committed Neil Patrick “Doogie” Harris, here playing himself and willfully undertaking one of the most impressive feats of auto-character assassination on record, gobbling psychedelics and branding a prostitute’s ass. Harold and Kumar also have a run-in with the KKK and even George W. himself, who provides the movie’s highlight. (I mentioned the surprises: turns out both Bush and the Klan love metal. Who knew?)