Posted 2004-08-02
In the second half of the Graham Greene-Carol Reed classic “The Third Man” (1949), the blundering, well-meaning American Joseph Cotten finally confronts his dazzling friend Orson Welles, who has been selling watered-down penicillin to hospitals in postwar Vienna. High up in an enormous Ferris wheel, Cotten asks Welles if he has ever faced one of his victims. Welles responds:
Victims? Don’t be melodramatic. Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to eat my money—or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spend?
Welles’s remarks have an insidious brilliance, and, whatever else the Ferris-wheel scene means, it has always figured for me as a mischievous little allegory of the moviegoer’s relation to death onscreen. In movies, and particularly in thrillers, people get blown away very easily, and sometimes by the dozen; most of them are nameless hoods, and, usually, their deaths mean nothing to us. The appeal of the thriller genre—it’s hardly a secret—is essentially amoral. By that I don’t mean that we are complicit in mayhem, only that many of us enjoy watching it artfully staged. When someone dies, the payoff comes not in the form of twenty thousand pounds but in the unnegotiable currency of excitement.
Thrillers produce two kinds of emotion. First comes apprehension—the hunter drawing near, the catastrophe unfolding, the everyday world altered into a sinister landscape of danger. The audience is paralyzed with fear and anticipation. And then comes violence, which releases the tension. The bloodshed may, in the end, only increase our fear, but at least for a time we’re not breathless with anxiety. Relieved, we want the violence to go beyond what’s possible in life—we need that heightening the way an ordinary sedan needs a turbo engine—but not too far beyond it. Even as we require exaggeration, we want to be allowed to believe that the violence is “real.” That is, we don’t wish to be reminded too explicitly of our need. Thrillers enter into a sinful, slightly duplicitous transaction with our desire to be entertained. The greatest thrillers, however, go beyond the transaction and take up the challenge offered by Orson Welles in the Ferris-wheel scene; they make us wonder if the deaths of strangers should somehow matter to us.
Among the big-budget Hollywood thrillers of midsummer, Jonathan Demme’s “The Manchurian Candidate,” pitched for contemporary relevance, is the one that should make us care for its characters most; Paul Greengrass’s “The Bourne Supremacy” has little relevance to anything except its own extraordinary bullet-train virtuosity; and Michael Mann’s “Collateral,” the best of the three, not only is beautifully made but has the largest human significance. As it happens, the chief menace in the movie, a dead-eyed contract killer named Vincent (Tom Cruise), says pretty much the same thing that Welles says to Cotten in “The Third Man.” Vincent shows up in Los Angeles at dusk and expects to leave at dawn. His job: to eliminate five witnesses in an impending federal prosecution of a drug cartel. “Collateral,” written by Stuart Beattie (with much additional shaping by Mann), is about the peculiar bond that develops between this stone killer and a sweet-tempered taxi-driver, one Max Durocher (Jamie Foxx), who gets bullied by Vincent into providing transportation all through the night. The people Vincent kills—minor members of the drug operation who’ve been forced by the feds into coöperating—aren’t meant to be innocent. But Vincent has no connection to them. He doesn’t hate them; he doesn’t feel anything about them at all. It doesn’t take Max long to realize that he, too, may be eliminated before the night is over. Yet he’s more baffled than frightened. He likes peace and quiet—the solitude of his own fantasies as he’s driving around—and he wants to know, Why kill people? Shrugging, Vincent mentions billions of men and women on Earth, billions of stars above it. Who cares if someone dies? He talks in brief spurts connected by dashes. “Darwin,” he says, definitively, by which he means that evolution, a remorseless, amoral process, depends on death. The plot of “Collateral” is just a movieish contrivance, and the violence no more than thuggishly casual and chic—that is, very enjoyable. But “Collateral” picks up some genuine weight as this odd couple carry on their weird, terse dialogue. After a while, Vincent takes on a small measure of Max’s gentleness, and Max, passive and dreamy by nature, learns to seize the moment. If he doesn’t act, how is he going to survive Vincent?
As Vincent, Tom Cruise looks like a gray wolf on the prowl—hair lightened and brushed straight up, a salt-and-pepper beard, a beautifully tailored silver-gray suit. Cruise keeps his gleaming choppers out of sight, doesn’t hog the camera, moves swiftly, and sticks to the character, a bitterly intelligent nihilist who kills nonchalantly, insolently, as if murder were a series of technical problems. The performance is a stunt, of course, but it’s fascinating to hear a major box-office star express his admiration—as Vincent does, listening intently—for a jazz trumpeter who plays a little behind the beat. Cruise has always been a little too much on the beat—a sincerely hardworking but uninteresting actor. His Vincent is something new—a bebop murderer, an improviser who loves danger. As Max, Jamie Foxx slows himself down. His taxi-driver is in hiding—an intelligent, sorrowful man who’s almost too gentle, as if he thought the disorderly world might shape up if only he addressed it calmly, with respect. As the implacable Vincent takes over Max’s life, Jamie Foxx’s discomfort is both painful and funny.
The Miami of Mann’s emblematic eighties TV series, “Miami Vice,” was candied and luminously white, a city oozing luxury, pleasure, and corruption; his Los Angeles is both exuberantly colorful—an ethnic wonderland—and noirishly menacing. “Collateral” was photographed from dusk to dawn, much of it with digital cameras that “see” into the darkness better than film. Shot by shot, scene by scene, Mann, whose recent work includes “Heat” and “The Insider,” may be the best director in Hollywood. I don’t mean that he’s the greatest artist. He lacks such qualities as the tormented humanism of Scorsese, the generous showmanship and warmth of Spielberg, the moral curiosity of the Clint Eastwood who directed “Unforgiven” and “Mystic River.” But Mann has become a master builder of sequences, the opposite of the contemporary action directors who produce a brutally meaningless whirl of movement. Methodical and precise, he analyzes a scene into minute components—a door closing, an arm thrust out—and gathers the fragments into seamless units; he wants you to live inside the physical event, not just experience the sensation of it. “Collateral” comes off like clockwork, but it’s a clock that breathes—great actors like Mark Ruffalo, Javier Bardem, and Barry Shabaka Henley have sustained, intricate moments in the pauses between the violent acts. Initially, I was puzzled by a long, quiet scene right at the beginning of the movie between Jamie Foxx’s taxi-driver and a passenger, a stylishly dressed federal prosecutor played by Jada Pinkett Smith. Beattie and Mann stop to explore the class differences between the two and the attorney’s slow acceptance of the cabbie as a man. But this lingering episode pays off at the end. “Collateral” is a thriller about a feral man who can’t persuade himself not to kill people. Jamie Foxx and Jada Pinkett Smith, making their connection, give him—and us—a reason to care about survival.
Fast, faster, and fastest—that’s the way the cutting rate goes in “The Bourne Supremacy.” The director, Paul Greengrass, jumps ahead within scenes, then jumps again. Greengrass is like a man breathing so fast that he never draws much oxygen into his lungs. Putting it mildly, this style of shallow, panting composition isn’t the way I’d like movies to go, but, of its kind, “The Bourne Supremacy” is incredibly skilled—much more exciting than its predecessor, “The Bourne Identity” (2002). The sequel, written by Tony Gilroy, from a Robert Ludlum novel, covers a lot of ground—Goa, Naples, Berlin, Moscow, and, when I blinked, perhaps Madagascar and Sardinia, too. Greengrass arranges pursuits and escapes that fly like arrows. He tears up staid old Moscow in a car chase and turns routine C.I.A. procedural stuff—people looking at computer screens and barking code names and other gibberish at each other—into nerve-racking contests of will. “The Bourne Supremacy” is stripped down for action, and its hero—the survivor of a botched operation who suffers from amnesia—has no identity beyond his superlative physical skills and a vague sense of guilt. Harried, chased, both hunted and hunter, Matt Damon is cut off from the C.I.A. and from himself. He’s a superhero reduced to pure reflex, at home only when he’s on the lam. Yet, by means of his isolation and his stoicism, he becomes almost a romantic figure. There is, of course, an enormously successful franchise in the making here. But one does begin to wonder: How many movies can be squeezed out of a hero doomed always to wander? Wagner composed “The Flying Dutchman” only once.
Once upon a time, when John Kennedy was President and the War was Cold, a spate of brilliantly entertaining movies was generated by the fear of Communism and nuclear conflict—“Fail-Safe,” “Seven Days in May,” “Dr. Strangelove,” and John Frankenheimer’s “The Manchurian Candidate.” This last, dating from 1962, and adapted by George Axelrod from the 1959 Richard Condon novel, was in some ways the most unsettling of the four. The basic premise—that the Communists would try to take over by getting a Joe McCarthy-type anti-Communist into the White House—turned paranoia into satire that, in the end, cut both ways, attacking both the far left and the far right. The movie’s style—authoritative voice-over narration at the beginning, sombre black-and-white cinematography—was at times uncannily reminiscent of the public-spirited features produced during the Second World War and immediately after. Yet all this sobriety was undermined by some of the strangest scenes and words ever to appear in a mainstream Hollywood movie: a brainwashing episode in which American soldiers were convinced by their Chinese and Russian captors that they were being addressed by floral-hatted members of a New Jersey garden club; bits of unaccountable neo-Dada dialogue like “Are you Arabic? Let me put it another way. Are you married?” It was as if Lenny Bruce had mated with the Office of War Information.
The most depressing thing about the Jonathan Demme remake is that there isn’t a joke in it anywhere. The first version was acidulous and brazenly absurd; this one is doggedly, wretchedly earnest. The Communists have been replaced by a shadowy big company reminiscent of Halliburton or the Carlyle Group, a change that turns satire of paranoia back into just plain paranoia. Brainwashing has been replaced by an implanted computer chip, which turns a creepy psychological threat into sci-fi banality. The bad memories of the hero (Denzel Washington) are accompanied by the conventional horror-film frights of painted faces, spooky doctors, and smoky, distorted cinematography; Meryl Streep, in the old Angela Lansbury role, is entertainingly bitchy, but making her up to resemble Hillary Clinton doesn’t mean anything in particular. The movie is overwrought and unfocussed, and, for all the talk in the press about its relevance to the fears of the moment, “The Manchurian Candidate” isn’t likely to make contact with what most people are actually feeling—which is the palpable sensation that any of us might be reduced to “dots,” as Orson Welles put it, killed without remorse. 
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