Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1 (2010)

Adam,

By the time Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—Part 1 came out, it was almost irrelevant whether it was “good.”  Too many of the books’ fans seemed more concerned with the exactitude of the adaptation than the quality, and faced with an onslaught of enthusiasm rendering their opinions moot, many critics reacted with a mixture of resignation and condescension.  Quoth Dana Stevens: “this movie’s not for Muggles like me—it’s for the millions and millions of Harry Potter fans who, quibbles aside, will welcome its arrival as a blessed event.  It’s evidence of how happily critic-proof these movies are that even the Warner Bros. logo…was applauded when it appeared on the screen.”  And Anthony Lane with a more curmudgeonly take: “I hate to remind the millions of fans, but didn’t this all begin with a bunch of kids buzzing around on broomsticks?”

All of this seems pretty irresponsible, on both sides.  On the one hand, to ask for nothing more than a rendition of the book misses the point of an adaptation.  On the other hand, refusing to acknowledge or grapple with the thematic content of the movie betrays a rather unflattering elitism.

Because I think there is plenty to take seriously about this movie.  It takes from the book a number of complex ideas—for example, how to grieve someone whose history and legacy are at best ambiguous, as Harry has to learn in the wake of Dumbledore’s death.  Or the series’ continual preoccupation with the trials of growing into adulthood and all its attendant responsibilities, regrets, and romantic confusions.

Plenty have already commented on how surreal and satisfying it has been to watch these young actors grow up in the course of seven-going-on-eight films.  But it’s worth marveling again at how much could have gone wrong in that time and how little actually does.  This film especially places a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of its central three cast members, who in spite of considerable odds (remember that these are kids who at the start had only two professional acting credits between them) pull off the demanding emotional material with grace.

It’s a pretty strong vindication, not only of the actors themselves, but also of a casting process which long ago selected for internal qualities rather than proven skill or experience.  To compare, imagine if, say, Shia LaBoeuf had been cast as Harry Potter instead of Daniel Radcliffe, who manages to always embody an essential decency and dedication in the role, in spite of having spent a decade in the reality-warping spotlight of attention and privilege.  For his part, Rupert Grint, as Ron, succeeds in grounding his character’s jealousy and insecurity in care and concern.  Emma Watson, for me the most problematic of the three actors, doesn’t get Hermione’s highs and lows quite right, but her sustained expression of worry is finally justified by the peril she and the others find themselves in.

The rapport among these three actors—with whom alone we spend long stretches of the movie’s duration—feels real and lived-in, wavering authentically between casual familiarity and the kind of tension that can only arise in friends who have known each other a very long time.  Even a little scene, like the one where Harry and Ron sit together after Ron’s return to the campsite (there’s an amusing bit of business with a fire spell), serves a purpose.  If we didn’t believe Harry, Ron, and Hermione had something to lose in their friendship, we wouldn’t care if they really did lose it.

Some of the smartest decisions this film adaptation makes in general are related to pacing and content.  Conventional wisdom suggests that an adaptation, especially of a book as long and as dense as Harry Potter, ought to be more concerned with cutting than with adding.  But director David Yates, who also helmed movies five and six, understands that given the choice between emotion and plot, emotion must always come first.  So while he does abbreviate or eliminate certain plot details, he also includes a number of scenes which don’t occur in the books, but which emphasize atmosphere and character dynamics.  For example, a melancholy dance between Harry and Hermione soon after Ron abandons their campsite.  Or a clever, wryly-staged little fight scene towards the beginning of movie that takes place in the real world of late-night cafeterias and oblivious waitresses.

As a result of all this, the film as a whole has a strange, shambling rhythm that turns out to be appropriate to the content of the book.  There’s something true about the film’s insight that heroism is often really, really tedious, involving less fighting of bad guys than sitting around and hiding out.  That Deathly Hallows mostly avoids actually being tedious owes a lot to the aesthetic seriousness with which Yates undertook filming.  He makes great use of desolate, rural and post-industrial British landscapes as backdrops for the characters’ anxiety and isolation.

At first glance, this scenic choice in particular seems an odd one for a fantasy blockbuster, but there’s a shrewd, sobering little message tucked inside of it.  As in the aforementioned cafeteria fight scene, Yates is constantly reminding us of what we Muggles come to Harry Potter to escape from, but which all books, all movies—fantasy or otherwise—aim to have at their heart: real life, in all its toil, confusion, failure, and frail hope.

Before I close out, this is where I should probably address the trend, originated by this movie, of splitting the adaptations of franchise books into multiple parts.  (This is also where I should note that the benefactors of our Film Crate neglected to own a copy of Deathly Hallows, Part 2–what gives, benefactors?)  Like pretty much all trends, this one is necessarily neither good nor bad, but depends on how it’s applied.  I would argue that Deathly Hallows justifies its being broken into two parts.  While it is clearly a precursor to more action-packed things, the fact that it doesn’t have to rush to get to the “good stuff” frees it to focus on emotional beats.  The more cynical explanation—that the adaptation was bifurcated to maximize box office returns—is belied by the care and attention paid, not just to set decor and special effects, but to character and narrative.

I give it: 25 Eberts.

Love,

Victoria

2. Raising Arizona (1987)

Victoria,

My apologies for the late review!  As you are well aware, starting grad school has pretty drastically changed our reading/writing/film viewing habits.  Luckily, a movie as idiosyncratic as Raising Arizona leaves an indelible enough of an impression that, though we viewed it together an embarrassingly long time ago, I should still be able to say something about it.

Let me focus in on the humor and the way it works in the film.  As you discuss in your review, this movie is funny, but in something of an unusual way.  Rather than relying strictly on pratfalls, jokes, or quirk (though these are, of course, present), the Coens source the bulk of their comedy in the language itself.  You rightly indicated that there is something aspirational about the way these characters speak, and suggest the Coens are trying to do something with the concept of class in Reagan America.  I don’t disagree.  Going a step further, though, I think the Coens are trying to suggest something even more basic: people are funny.

This of course sounds redundant.  A good comedy film couldn’t work without people, without actors, writers, etc.  There is more going on here, though.  By sourcing the humor of the film in things like diction, elocution, and word choice, the Coens are drawing upon an idea that they return to again and again across the span of their oeuvre.  This idea is that people, as they are, in any situation, in any social environment, with any set of desires or motivations, are a peculiar species worthy of befuddlement and (gentle) ridicule.  There is something comedic about the fact that people are the way they are, that they make seemingly unconscious choices about language and dialect.  As an example, I point you to a line of dialogue H.I. speaks early in the film: “There’s what’s right and there’s what’s right and never the twain shall meet.”

This is naturally a funny line of dialogue. Let’s look at why, though.  H.I.’s getting turned around trying to make a linguistic distinction between right and wrong, and he’s doing it by misquoting the opening line from a Rudyard Kipling poem, of all things.  The original line reads, “Oh East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”  H.I. is drawing on murky cultural knowledge, then, in his mistake.  Furthermore, he’s saying this to attempt to justify a particular action (a particularly unjustifiable one for most people - stealing a baby).  These factors coalescing, this line becomes a profoundly human thing: H.I. is misspeaking (only possible if one can speak in the first place), he’s drawing on his cultural background (only possible if one is a part of a culture/society in the first place), and he’s trying to reason his way into bad behavior (a uniquely human activity).  He’s speaking this, I’ll add, with a goofy, quasi-Southern low-class accent that feels anachronistic and exactly right at the same time.  These kinds of lines are all over the film, and even though they aren’t always as overtly funny as this one, their ubiquity suggests that H.I. isn’t some kind of linguistic Vitruvian Man; everyone is like this.

The Coen’s achieve this by heightening the dialogue just enough.  It was enough to bother some critics at the time (Ebert, writing in 1987, says, “I have a problem with movies where everybody talks as if they were reading out of an old novel about a bunch of would-be colorful characters”), but it’s this silly subtlety that is the point.  If it were completely over the top, it would be caricature.  Because it feels like window dressing to the narrative, it becomes satire.

Satire, not of any particular institution or idea, but of human beings ourselves.

Love,

Adam

1. Raising Arizona (1987)

Adam,

It’s tempting—for a movie as good, as funny, as singular as Raising Arizona—to write a review that consists of little more than a greatest hits summary of moments from the film.  I could, for example, express admiration for the many delightfully off-kilter line readings (my personal MVP: Holly Hunter’s sobbing outburst, “I LOVE HIM SO-O MU-U-UCH…!”).  I could also rehash the jewel of condensed exposition that is the movie’s opening sequence.  I could note how sharply and succinctly the movie uses dialogue to sketch out characters like Hi’s odious foreman Glen, who damns himself with lines like, “Me and Dot went in to adopt on account a’ somethin’ went wrong with my semen.”

Raising Arizona’s premise suggests a movie that will be weird and frantic—funny, yes, but little more than that.  How else to describe it but as a star-crossed love story/crime caper/comedy of errors, in which a Hawaiian shirt-wearing serial stick-up artist called Hi McDunnough (Nicolas Cage) falls in love with a stern-but-vulnerable cop named Ed (Holly Hunter) and tries to start a family.  Complications arise in the various forms of: infertility, a mismanaged baby heist, a pair of fugitive jailbirds, and a sinister biker/bounty hunter.  It’s a grab bag of plot elements, and in the hands of pretty much anyone other than the Coens, a formula for unfocused chaos.

The Coens themselves, notoriously coy about interpreting their own work, have resisted talking about Raising Arizona as much more than an exercise in comedic storytelling.  But these are filmmakers who have proven themselves time and again to be exceptionally wise about genre—about its expectations and possibilities.  It’s pretty much guaranteed that there will be more going on.

Tucked away amid Raising Arizona’s manic set pieces and baroque dialogue is a sweet, melancholy little parable about inequality—about why, in Hi’s words, “some should have so many while others should have so few.”  It’s a weighty topic for any film, especially (one might assume) a broad comedy in which somebody gets blown up by a hand grenade.  But it’s a unique privilege of comedy to be able to observe the absurdity at the root of tragic situations without having the responsibility to locate a solution—knowing, even, that there may be no solutions.

Indeed, some of the funniest moments in the movie double as pointed social critique.  For example, there is Hi’s justification for his recidivist tendencies: “I tried to stand up and fly straight, but it wasn’t easy with that sumbitch Reagan in the White House.  I dunno, they say he’s a decent man.  So maybe his advisers are confused.”  There is a simultaneous naiveté and wisdom in that statement which carries throughout the film.  I also love Hi’s stilted explanation of adoption agency politics: “Well, this whole thing is just who knows who—then over here, you have favoritism.”  As circular as that sounds, it really is a pretty accurate summary of how society works.  How it is, though, that some people can work the system to their advantage will always remain a mystery to those people who cannot.

Given this context, even the speech (whimsical and highly stylized as it may be) conveys something purposeful about the characters.  The mannered language characters like Hi, Gale, and Evelle use isn’t just aesthetic; it’s aspirational, as if these characters had tried to lift some of the fancier-sounding phrases straight out of the Bible or evening news.  It’s a kind of linguistic analog to the lovingly tended decorations the McDunnoughs use to beautify their modest trailer home.  Or to the pomade Gale and Evelle studiously comb into their hair after breaking out of prison, their state-issued overalls still caked with mud and sewage.

Nathan Arizona—already established in his spacious house with his $500 camel coats and amusingly prim-looking hausfrau of a wife—is not so concerned with appearing grander than he is and so cultivates a folksier image.  His signature phrase: “Watch yer butt (or my name ain’t Nathan Arizona)!”  The twist, we discover, is that his name is not Nathan Arizona after all, but Nathan Huffhines.  His reason for the name change: “Would you buy furniture at a store called Unpainted Huffhines?”  The implication being that somewhere in his past, he too was just another schmo trying to make reality fit his created image.

Two contrasting visions of domesticity:

above, the McDunnough home; below, the Arizonas'.

The Coens understand the dual nature of inequality: that it is, on the one hand, an inescapable facet of life perpetrated through the randomness of luck, and on the other hand, a social problem that can be ameliorated or exacerbated by human actions.  On the one hand, one of the terrible things about inequality is that those who enjoy success don’t deserve it less than other people.  If Nathan Arizona were a thoroughly loathsome individual it would be easier to begrudge him his good fortune.  And though he may be a blowhard, he also turns out to be an essentially decent and forgiving man, full of genuine affection for his family.  When you take “deserves” out of the equation, it’s basically inexplicable why some people ascend to wealth, power, and personal happiness while others can never seem to catch a break.

On the other hand, the movie points out, social institutions do a lot to restrict opportunity.  One man, born Nathan Huffhines, successfully recreates himself as Nathan Arizona, founds a furniture empire, and spawns a dynasty of darling, blond little überkinder.  Another man is turned away by an adoption agency due to his criminal past, in spite of his sincere desire to turn over a new leaf.  Reinvention, supposed to be the bedrock of American life, becomes just another unevenly distributed privilege.

But as devoted as the movie is to critiquing American society, it does so not without compassion.  Unlike so many other more patronizing takedowns of the American dream, Raising Arizona doesn’t make the mistake of condemning the dream as shallow or materialistic.  Rather, the movie acknowledges the simple dignity and profound satisfaction of settling down with the one you love and raising a family in comfort and stability.  Hi’s closing speech, a lovely and achingly hopeful recounting of a literal dream, points to the sad truth that, while all people may yearn for love and acceptance, not all people can or ever will find it.

As Hi muses: "This whole dream, was it wishful thinking?  Was I just fleeing reality like I know I'm liable to do?  But me and Ed, we can be good too.  And it seemed real.  It seemed like us and it seemed like, well, our home.  If not Arizona, then a land not too far away.  Where all parents are strong and wise and capable, and all children are happy and beloved.  I don't know.  Maybe it was Utah."

Of course, after all that, count on the Coens to end on a punchline.  “Maybe it was Utah” indeed.

Awaiting your response (or my name ain’t…),

Victoria (with love)

2. The Lego Movie (2014)

Adam,

I should preface my review by saying upfront that The Lego Movie was my favorite cinema release from the first half of this year.  Its qualifications being: it’s hilarious.  It wouldn’t have to be more than that, but as you showed, there’s a lot going on beneath the surface.

The Lego Movie belongs to a small, but eclectic category of American animated films whose style and content most radically challenge the idea that animation ought to remain the province of children.  In the same category with Lego, I would include titles likeThe Fantastic Mr. Fox, Rango, and Beowulf, all films that, differences in quality aside, offer the kinds of complexity and weirdness not to be found in the average animated entertainment.  As a point of comparison, even the most sophisticated Pixar products resist stepping too far outside the conventions of stylistic polish and narrative linearity.  Instead, films like Lego feature dense and textured worlds, strong and idiosyncratic directorial voices, intertextuality, meta-narrative, and rueful acknowledgements of the grown-up reality just outside the carefully positioned or digitally generated frame.

This isn’t to say that The Lego Movie wants to put away childish things entirely.  It’s much too fun and too silly for that.  But it manages to balance the grown-up and the childlike mostly with remarkable grace.  A big part of the movie’s premise involves the recognition that, with every modern architecture set or life-size model of Conan O’Brien, Lego culture is increasingly geared toward adults, or adult-minded children.  As the dad played by Will Ferrell explains, Lego isn’t a toy, it’s “a highly sophisticated inter-locking brick system.”  

"The box for this one said 'Ages 8 to 14!'" "That's a suggestion.  They have to put that on there."

The Lego Movie seems to be as interested in taking something intended for kids (animation) and imbuing it with adult savvy as it is in taking something that has been co-opted by the adult world (Lego) and renewing its sense of innocence and play.  Maybe that’s another reason your citing of post-modernism as an influence is so astute.  One of the insights of post-modernism—that most jargon-filled, theory-laden, and therefore seemingly the most un-kid-friendly of isms—was that maybe the most innovative thing art could do was simply to recapture a childlike freedom from established ways of thinking.

The Lego Movie is partly about the inevitability of growing up and partly about the vehicles that can return us, if only temporarily and if only in spirit, to the fun of youth.  One of these is, of course, nostalgia for our own youths.  The Lego Movie is filled with details bound to bring a smile of recognition to any adults who remember playing with Legos however many years ago: the broken chin piece on Benny the space guy’s helmet, the various Minifigure costumes and references to different Lego series, even the smudges and scratches on the Lego figures.  The other way we can get back to a carefree, childlike state of mind, the movie points out, is through the eyes of actual children.  The real climax of the movie occurs, not inside the Lego world at all, but at the moment that Will Ferrell’s emotionally detached dad finally loosens up enough to appreciate his son’s creativity.

The Lego Movie still has some of the weaknesses in plotting and theme that tend to afflict all feature-length comedies.  Some critics, like A.O. Scott, found that the film’s message about unleashing creativity was undermined by its adherence to narrative convention.  And while I think Scott is selling Lego short—how many conventionally plotted films involve a reality-bending third-act conceit?—it’s true that the film never quite resolves the tension it establishes between creativity and order.

On the one hand, we are encouraged to see Emmet’s reflexive trust of structures, systems, and routines as inherently suspect—at best only thinly masking his actual loneliness and desire for acceptance, and at worst enabling the nefarious schemes of President Business.  On the other hand, the movie also points out that defining creativity as necessarily disordered and individualistic is itself a kind of uncreativeness (see: Batman’s pathological inability to conceptualize building anything not bat-themed).  

"Great idea.  A Bat spaceship."

It feels a bit like an inconsistency, then, that the Big Heroic Climax involves reaffirming the supreme importance of imagination, rather than seeking out a balance between imagination and organization.  (This is where I should probably note that you yourself belong to the Follow the Instructions school of Lego building, whereas I go the stick-motley-pieces-together route—both approaches have their upsides.)

I want to reemphasize the point that, despite my quibbles, I do think this is a really, really good film.  What The Lego Movie excels at above all is being funny, and that is by no means a small feat.  Just consider the number of lame slapstick gags, tepid one-liners, and ever more outrageous scenarios America has to endure per annum, and The Lego Movie looks like even more of a gem. 

Finally, it seems wrong to close out our discussion of this movie without a nod to some of the specific bits you and I found most charming.  Liam Neeson, for example, puts in one of his most delightful performances ever, vocal or otherwise, as Good Cop/Bad Cop.  

I also want to single out Morgan Freeman, whose Vitruvius manages to be both the quintessential Morgan Freeman performance and the quintessential take-off of a Morgan Freeman performance.  Everyone in the cast, really, shows an energy, commitment, and deftness not always present in the voice acting for animated features (usually the rule is: the bigger and more star-studded the cast, the more indifferent the individual performances).  I also think I could, if I wanted to, spend pages and pages expositing on why I get so much joy out of hearing Batman refer to the Millennium Falcon crew as “bon vivants.”  But for the sake of everyone, I’ll refrain.  Instead, I leave you with everyone's jam:

Love,

Victoria

1. The Lego Movie (2014)

Victoria,

My apologies for the delay in getting this review out.  Due to moving, we’re a bit backlogged.  Fear not, however, new posts are coming!  And, per Daniel Dawson’s request, we’re moving out of the box to review one of my favorite movies so far this year, The Lego Movie.

When I first heard a Lego movie was in the works, I had two thoughts: A. This will undoubtedly be terrible, and B. I don’t care.  Let this be a cautionary tale for pre-judging a work of art based on concept or title, though, because despite external appearances The Lego Movie is the smartest thing to hit your local Redbox in quite some time.  Masquerading as a children’s film, directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have crafted what is, in my opinion, the quintessential postmodern film.

Let me make my case, lest any fans of the The Matrix reading this choke in disgust.  Postmodernity is, at its heart, a philosophy interested in examining the ways people tell stories to and about themselves.  One of the central ideas in postmodernity is that humans buy into meta-narratives, overarching stories that tell people who they are, what they are about, and where they are going.  Postmodernity often emphasizes that there are multiple cultural narratives, but that these fit under the umbrella of larger, more totalizing meta-narratives.  Postmodernists also point out that multiple cultural narratives, and meta-narratives, can coexist alongside each other.  For a real world example of all this, I would point to the traditional work narrative most Americans have.  Typically it looks something like this: high school->college->job->retirement.  This coincides with the narratives people accept about certain professions, such as, say, a doctor, which looks something like this: college->med school->residency->practice->retirement.  This fits into the narrative of the American Dream (work hard, make money, have a family), as well as other political (democracy) and economic (capitalism) narratives that many people implicitly accept.

The Lego Movie demonstrates these ideas perfectly.  Emmett, our hero, begins the film as an instruction-following drone.  He has accepted without hesitation the narrative that has been given to him (by Lord Business, it turns out), and lives each day so that it follows along step by step towards its eventual conclusion.  He soon learns that his world, “Bricksburg,” coincides with many others, such as “The Old West” and “Middle Zealand.”  Each of these worlds contains its own set of narratives for its citizens to follow.  All of these worlds, he also discovers, are under the direction of Lord Business, who creates the narratives these people follow.  In the terms of postmodernism, each world functions as a different cultural narrative under the umbrella of the over-arching meta-narrative of Lord Business’ plans.  Plans, it turns out, for the end of these worlds.

This is where things get really interesting.  Another important aspect of postmodernity is that these narratives and meta-narratives should be open to critique.  These narratives could, after all, end in ways people wouldn’t suspect, and might not actually want.  In the movie, this is represented in “Taco Tuesday.”  The denizens of Bricksburg work diligently so that they can enjoy a taco-filled day in the middle of the week.  Little do they know that what they are actually doing is working towards “TAKOS Tuesday,” the day Lord Business sprays the world with crazy glue, effectively ending all Lego life.  Only by joining up with people aware of the existence of these narratives is Emmett able to eventually foil Lord Business’ plan.  Through Emmett’s story, the movie emphasizes the importance of criticizing, and possibly even working outside of or against, the narratives people are constantly asked to tacitly accept.

Pause for a moment and remember that this story is taking place inside a trademarked brand-logo of a film.  Product placement was developed decades ago to quietly convince people to buy something by inserting it into various film scenes.  After all, who wouldn’t want to eat Cheerios cereal if you knew that this was the brand Superman preferred?  The Lego Movie was ostensibly developed primarily to sell Legos.  This fits a certain consumer narrative: watch movie about toys->buy more toys.  That the film bluntly encourages the questioning of these sorts of narratives is a stroke of genius on the parts of the filmmakers (and insanely good luck - how in the world did they pitch this to Warner Bros.?)

It’s worth noting that questioning these narratives doesn’t necessarily mean you have to reject them.  After all, what did we do after watching The Lego Movie back in February?  Go out and buy Legos.

The movie works post-modernly in a variety of other cool ways too, such as by nesting the Lego story in a real-world story, and by following along the tried-and-true epic hero story trajectory (only to subvert it by having the hero-producing prophecy be made up).  I’ll leave the playing out of this theory up to you, though, as we think about this upon subsequent viewings.  I definitely want to watch this again.  A movie this smart - and, I should mention, this funny - deserves it.

Love,

Adam

2. The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

Adam,

I am so sick of Jason Bourne and his increasingly indistinguishable line of The Bourne Nouns.  At this point, I would much rather watch one of our suggested additions to the franchise: The Bourne Congeniality (in which Jason Bourne enters a beauty pageant), or The Bourne Adjacency (in which Jason Bourne stands next to things).

Watching these movies now has revealed fissures and weak points that went mostly unnoticed at the time of their release, I suspect, amid critics’ joy at having movies to review that didn’t contain exploding robots.  The wait time between theatrical releases probably also went a long way towards smoothing over flaws that were accentuated by the super-condensed time frame in which we watched all three movies.  Furthermore, that The Bourne Ultimatum is a better-than-catastrophic third entry in a franchise undoubtedly endeared it to audiences and boosted it up to a rarified category along with precious few other films.

But what does work about this movie?  The action sequences, for one.  But after two movies’ worth of the stuff, it seems almost beside the point to comment on how skillfully they were staged—millions of dollars went into all those stunt doubles and parkour consultants.  If those scenes weren’t good maybe then they’d be worth discussing.  Honestly, the only one that, for me, rises above a sturdy but ultimately uninspiring competence is the one you mentioned, where Bourne has to maneuver both himself and a hapless journalist out of trouble.  That scene demonstrates exceptional creativity within restraints and finishes on a powerfully unexpected note.

Parkour!

As you discussed, Ultimatum also carries on the Bourne movies’ willingness to point out the bureaucratic origins of wide-reaching government mischief—timely then in the context of the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, etc., and perceptive now given current scandals with the NSA.  Like you, though, I wish the movie didn’t mistake pointing out a problem with having real insight into it.

Ultimately, though, a movie—especially a blockbuster affair like this one—doesn’t need to have deep thoughts about current affairs or much-better-than-competent action scenes to be successful.  What’s really missing for me in this film is the emotional content.  Two movies ago, The Bourne Identity managed to elicit pity and tenderness for a character whose physical dominance would normally raise him above such vulnerability.  Bourne’s terror, confusion, and moral turmoil felt real.  Even as he was punching his way out of danger he conveyed a cornered animal desperation that gave the first movie its emotional and ideological center.

The succeeding Bourne movies haven’t really done much to develop that tone.  The more people Bourne dispatches, the more ably he evades CIA capture, the more times he pulls a BECAUSE I’M RIGHT BEHIND YOU-style gambit, the harder it is to remember the origins of the character.  The sequels could have gotten around that problem by consciously reinventing aspects of Jason Bourne, the way Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade realized it couldn’t keep rehashing its main character’s romantic appeal and pivoted to explore his emotional neediness through the foil of his father.  Each Bourne sequel just tries to double down on making us feel sorry for Bourne without really lingering on the specific feelings involved, depending on flashbacks as a kind of shortcut to emotional resonance.  Again and again in this film we’re told that Bourne sacrificed everything to the Treadstone program, but what did he sacrifice that he really seems to miss?

Parkour!

If it sounds like I’m being rough on Ultimatum, as well as Supremacy, it’s not because I dislike action or mainstream or franchise films.  I’ve already mentioned Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as an example of a successful franchise entry, and in fact, the Indiana Jones series serves nicely as a case study to compare with the Bourne series.  Both series feature rugged-yet-sensitive male protagonists, both enmesh their heroes in the shadowy dealings of international politics, both express bitter resignation at the chicanery and short-sightedness of government officials, both take place across a variety of exotic locales, and both contain their fair share of ludicrous plot elements.

So what is it that makes Jones superior to Bourne?

I would suggest three things: a lack of embarrassment about the conventions that go along with genre and serialization, a healthy sense of absurdity, and most important of all, good writing.

Indiana Jones never forgot its original inspirations—1930s and ‘40s boys’ adventure tales, particularly the kind found in pulp magazines—and joyfully recreated the tone and imagery of those sources, in the process transcending them.  The series’s comfort with serialization meant
that it was willing to mix up its own formula before it got stale.  The Bourne movies, especially the Greengrass features, seem so intent on trading out the pulpier aspects of the Ludlum novels for Serious Political Commentary that they lose out at both.  At their lowest, the Bourne movies contain none of the fun of a spy romp and none of the charge or heft of a political thriller.  Furthermore, the sequels’ dogged adherence to a single plot thread—who is Jason Bourne?—long after that device ceased to have emotional significance can make for a grueling slog indeed.

That self-seriousness also sets Bourne a fair distance apart from Indiana Jones, which always remembered that its chief mission was to entertain.  To that end, the Indiana Jones movies embraced preposterousness, nurtured chaos, and cherished irony.  Bourne follows the trend of mid-2000s blockbusters for whom darkness, edginess, and solemnity were the highest virtues, sometimes at the expense of nuance, character, and dialogue.

Which brings me to my last point.  “It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage.”  There is not a single line that good in the entire Bourne franchise.

Reflecting back on both sets of movies, and looking back at the other blockbusters that have followed since then, what becomes apparent is that we are really just looking at a predictable pattern of seesawing trends.  This generation of audiences may be moving away from the style of Bourne and back towards jokiness (see: the Marvel movies, especially Iron Man, The Avengers, and the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy).  Of course, Indiana Jones is an uncommonly great example of blockbuster moviemaking of any style, and none of the contemporary blockbusters I just named (Guardians of the Galaxy excepted) even approaches it in terms of originality, tone, character, iconography, or writing.

I guess what I want to point out is that there are drawbacks to any style or genre.  The fact that overcoming those drawbacks to achieve greatness is so hard necessarily means that most movies will not be great.

The Bourne Ultimatum is a good, not great, movie.  Not an embarrassing thing to be, by any stretch.  What we as audiences have to do, though, is hold out for the great ones.

Parkour!

Love,
Victoria

Update

A few quick things I want to mention as Victoria finishes up her The Bourne Ultimatum review:

1. I want to thank all of you that have been regularly reading the blog.  Victoria and I have had a lot of fun writing it so far, and we have enjoyed getting your feedback too.

2. I will be posting a picture of the box very soon.  For those of you wondering, there are 276 films in the crate.  So far we've watched 5.  The earliest is 1928, the latest 2013, and  three of them are foreign language films - 2 Italian, 1 French.  

3. We are no longer an engaged couple - we got married!  Instead of a soon-to-be married couple romantically reviewing films together, we are a husband/wife movie-blogging team!

1. The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

Victoria,

Well, as we’ve discussed, franchise fatigue is a thing, and I’ve got it bad for the Bourne series.  Not that The Bourne Ultimatum is a bad film at all - I think it’s probably the strongest in the series after the first film (beating out The Bourne Supremacy, which we’ve discussed, and The Bourne Legacy, which we’ll pretend doesn’t exist).  In order to be a good film reviewer, I’ll shelve my boredom with watching Matt Damon glower and try to give you my honest opinion about the film.

The fact of the matter is that, though The Bourne Ultimatum has its problems (which I’ll get to), it does a lot of things right.  The action sequences are rarely plodding, and most often manage to impress with the cleverness of their staging.  The sequence early on, in which Bourne attempts to guide a dimwitted journalist through a crowd and away from CIA assassins is particularly well done.  Greengrass opens up the action in this film, moving it out of narrow European streets and into wide-open spaces filled with numerous moving parts.  This proves exceptionally compelling.  These scenes make it easier for me to buy into the conceit that Damon is a super-spy than anything in either of the prior two films, simply because we see him managing large amounts of information  - people, targets, trains, traffic, etc. - and adapting to multiple changes in real time.

Ideologically this film attempts to progress some of the anti-bureaucracy sentiments of the first two films, and this time presents an intelligence agency that not only is clunky and inept, but that is malevolent too.  Watching all of the phone-tapping and record-stealing going on in this movie, it’s hard not to think about recent revelations concerning the NSA and data collection.  Privacy being something we are at least nominally still thinking about as a culture makes this movie a little spookier than it probably was upon its release in 2007.  David Strathairn’s heart-healthy omelet-eating Deputy Director is an effective villain in that he, given the power to have his agents shoot first and ask questions later, is so far removed from the actual action that he has no qualms taking out anyone, including civilians, that might get in his way.  Greengrass is trying to make a Hanna Arendt-esque “banality of evil” point with Strathairn’s character, asking the audience to think seriously about what happens when nebbish office-dwellers are given unmonitored power over the health and well being of others.  Not good things, it turns out.  Even those concerned with their cholesterol will kill if given the chance.

My problems with this film are two-fold.  First, related to my prior comment, though Greengrass points out a particular kind of evil, he doesn’t go any farther than simply noticing it.  We are encouraged to think about mundane atrocities, but are not invited, it seems, to think about where this comes from, or why.  What is the problem with Strathairn’s character, for example?  Should we be frustrated with particular policies that enable a person like him, or should we be upset with bureaucracy in general?  The movie leaves the question too vague to be satisfying.

My second problem stems from the first film.  My big issue with The Bourne Identity was that it left unexplained the awakening of Bourne’s conscience.  This film attempts to answer this question, albeit with all the grace of a tip-toeing gorilla.  Bourne chose to be evil from the beginning, we discover, he wasn’t forced to be bad (or, at least, not directly forced) by some nefarious government program.  Bourne’s conscience is supposed to be an enigma to us, a miracle of humanity that managed to blossom despite the best efforts of Albert Finney and Co. to keep it in check.  While I have zero problem accepting that people are something of a mixed bag, containing the will to do evil as well as good, I think that, in the interest of a functional narrative, something more believable than spotting a target’s kid should have been presented somewhere within these film’s collective runtime.

All this being said, I’ve enjoyed watching these films with you, and look forward to watching something that doesn’t involve either Matt Damon or shaky-cam next.

Love,

Adam

2. The Bourne Supremacy (2004)

Victoria,

You touch on some worthwhile points in your review that I want to be sure to address in mine.  Before I get to that, though, I want to let you know that much of what I’m going to talk about is going to center on the difference between what I think Greengrass is trying to do, and what the movie actually is.  This might seem a bit unfair at first blush, but I don’t think so, because this movie fails the first test every single sequel in the history of filmdom has to pass: this film fails to justify its existence over and against its first episode (granted, most of Hollywood doesn’t play by this rule, but it should - it’s the one thing good sequels, like The Godfather Part II or The Empire Strikes Back or, heck, even Spiderman 2, have in common).  There isn’t really a good reason for The Bourne Supremacy to exist, narratively speaking, and so I can’t really qualify it as a “good” film per se, or talk substantively about the ideas that are actually present in the film.  I can talk about what I suspect Greengrass wanted to do, though, because if he had accomplished it, the film would’ve had enough muster to legitimate itself.

What I suspect Greengrass wanted to do in The Bourne Supremacy was to treat seriously the idea that violence, something that is commonplace and typically taken for granted in film (especially American film), has consequence in the lives of individuals.  I base this argument partially on the rest of Greengrass’ oeuvre, which has, in one way or another, dealt more transparently with this idea.  I think particularly about the scene at the conclusion of Captain Phillips, in which Tom Hanks’ character suffers physical shock from the violence and terror that has occurred around him over the course of the film.  This scene is powerful because it shows something film typically doesn’t - a character dealing with the aftermath of what is, in the grand scheme of film history, relatively minor violence.

There is a somewhat similar scene in the conclusion of Bourne 2.  Here, Damon’s Bourne apologizes for the assassination of a Russian politician and his wife to their orphaned daughter.  We watch her grieve over the deaths of characters that are, in light of the entire narrative of the Bourne films, more-or-less insignificant.  We, the viewers, are supposed to think seriously about the cost of death and carnage, and perhaps even the effect of our fetishization of it in film.

The problem is we don’t.  Instead, we think back to the obnoxiously long car chase we just endured, or the fist-fight in the chic European apartment, or the snipering of Marie, a character we do in fact care about but find it hard to believe Bourne does.  This is what happens when you situate an emotionally-potent scene in an otherwise standard-operation action film, which is ultimately what Bourne 2 is.  Greengrass thinks, I think, that the “shaky cam” changes this, and I see why he would think so.  The camera movements, particularly in the action scenes, are designed to make the viewer feel as if they are physically a part of what is happening on-screen.  The cinematography is definitely effective, but it doesn’t quite take the viewer where Greengrass intends.  The result is a movie that, as you point out, is nice to look at, but doesn’t, in execution, have anything new or interesting to say, especially when compared to its originating counterpart.

Hopefully “Bourne 3: Bourne Again, Again” succeeds where this one doesn’t.

Love,

Adam